Orders of Battle (Frontlines) Read online

  PRAISE FOR MARKO KLOOS

  “Frontlines is earnest, optimistic, and fun, even as it deals with subject matter that’s intrinsically grim. It’s a story that strikes the perfect balance between escapism and serious reflection, and it’s the perfect military sci-fi series to escape into for a week or two.”

  —The Verge

  “Powered armor, nuclear warfare, and [a] bit of grand theft auto combine for a thrilling tale of battle in space.”

  —Booklist

  “Marko Kloos’s military science fiction Frontlines series is quickly becoming one of our favorites . . . Kloos is well on his way to becoming one of the genre’s best assets.”

  —io9

  “There is nobody who does [military SF] better than Marko Kloos. His Frontlines series is a worthy successor to such classics as Starship Troopers, The Forever War, and We All Died at Breakaway Station.”

  —George R. R. Martin

  “Military science fiction is tricky because it either intends to lampoon the military industrial complex or paints it in such a way that you must really have to love guns to enjoy the work. Terms of Enlistment walks that fine line by showing a world where the military is one of the few viable options off a shattered Earth and intermixes it with a knowledge of military tactics and weapons that doesn’t turn off the casual reader.”

  —Buzzfeed

  BY MARKO KLOOS

  Frontlines

  Terms of Enlistment

  Lines of Departure

  Angles of Attack

  Chains of Command

  Fields of Fire

  Points of Impact

  Measures of Absolution (A Frontlines Kindle novella)

  “Lucky Thirteen” (A Frontlines Kindle short story)

  The Palladium Wars

  Aftershocks

  Ballistic

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2020 by Marko Kloos

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and 47North are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542019583

  ISBN-10: 1542019583

  Cover design by Mike Heath | Magnus Creative

  For Quinn, who is kind, which is the best way to be.

  I love you.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER 1

  FAREWELLS

  The sky above the cemetery is blue, and sunlight is streaming through the red and orange leaves on the trees. Autumn was always her favorite season, so it seems right and fitting that her funeral is today, joining her forever to the place and time she loved most. It’s the middle of October, and we had our first frost a week ago. Even though the sun is out, it doesn’t have the power anymore to temper the chill of the morning, and I am glad for my civilian jacket and its high-tech layers of thermal insulation. We stand by the grave and listen to the priest deliver the eulogy. When he says the words of the final prayer, I mouth them with him, even though I don’t believe them anymore. But she did, and they gave her comfort when she was in bad places in her life, so I go along because this is for her and not for me.

  When the priest has finished the ceremony, it’s time to say good-bye for good, even though I know the woman we are laying to rest is already gone, reduced to a scoop of ashes in a little stainless steel capsule. We look on as the priest puts the capsule into the cylindrical tube where it will remain for as long as the next of kin have ledger balances to pay for the yearly maintenance fee. Even a proper grave is a ’burber luxury. In the Public Residence Clusters, you get a capsule only if there are relatives who file the request with the death certificate. Even then, the ashes are disposed of and the capsule recycled after a year to make space for someone else. Out here in Liberty Falls, remembrance has no time limit as long as someone pays the bill every year.

  This is the measure of a life, I think. A tube in the ground to hold her capsule, and a little polymer plaque to mark the spot, ten centimeters high and twenty wide. It’s a tiny piece of real estate, but it will be hers until I am no longer around, and I know she wouldn’t care about what happens to her ashes when nobody is left to remember who she was. But for now, it’s there, stark white with golden letters, and the little patch of ground it marks is more than most people with her background get to call their own, in death or before.

  PHOEBE GRAYSON, it simply says. OCTOBER 3, 2067–OCTOBER 13, 2120.

  My mother died just ten days after her fifty-third birthday. She never got to beat the average, not even the modest one for a welfare citizen. Out in the ’burbs, the average life expectancy is almost a hundred. In the PRCs, it’s sixty-seven. We’ve managed to colonize planets a hundred light-years away, using starships that harness the energy of their own miniature suns, but we haven’t managed to eradicate cancer because nobody prioritizes funding to fight a disease that mostly afflicts the population of the PRCs.

  I take some comfort in knowing that Mom would have died half a decade earlier if she hadn’t been out here in Liberty Falls, and that she got to spend that extra time in clean air with access to middle-class health care. She lived most of her life on someone else’s terms, but the last ten years were hers alone. I’m glad she got to spend them in a place like this. Next to me, Halley leans her head against my shoulder, and I wrap an arm around her and pull her closer, drawing comfort from her presence. A dozen people have gathered this morning to say their farewells.

  Chief Kopka is here, along with a handful of friends Mom made in her last decade. I accept their condolences and thank them for coming.

  “You still have a place down here when you’re on leave,” the chief says. “Nothing changes, as far as I am concerned.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “For everything you did for her.”

  “She earned her keep,” the chief replies. “Several times over. Don’t ever think I just took her in as a charity case. She never wanted to have anything handed to her again.”

  “I still owe you. For taking her on in the first place. Letting me get her out of the PRC.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” Chief Kopka says. “Not a damn thing. None of us down here can pay back what we owe you. I know a lot of these ’burbers make the proper mouth noises when they see someone in a Commonwealth Defense Corps uniform these days. But they don’t know what it’s like. I damn well do. So I don’t want to hear about what you think you owe. All right?”

  “All right,” I say. “But let me be grateful anyway. In her stead.”

  “H
ow are you feeling?” Halley asks when the other funeral guests have left, and we are the only two people standing in front of the burial plot. I think about my reply for a moment.

  “Diminished,” I say. “I got most of the grief out the night she died. Now I just feel smaller. Like my world has shrunk down to only you and me.”

  Halley rests her head on my shoulder. We look at the rows and rows of nameplates on the ground, each of them marking two hundred square centimeters. Once upon a time, Earth had enough empty space for people to bury their dead as they were, whole bodies in wooden coffins. But this is the twenty-second century, the world has a hundred billion people living on it, and cremation is mandatory even in a middle-class place out in the mountains. The cemetery is divided into rows of little plots, each holding fifty burial capsules in the area where they would have buried a single person a hundred years ago.

  Mom’s space is almost dead center in the middle of the plot, a temporary last entry in the rows of names. Half the plot is still empty, and I know it will be a while before they fill it up—a few months, maybe a year. Out here, people live longer lives, and the town is almost insignificantly tiny compared to a PRC. In death, she will have neighbors all around her again, just like when she lived in the welfare unit. But the sky overhead will be blue more often, and there are live trees just a few dozen meters away, their leaves rustling in the cool October wind.

  Halley kneels down in front of the rows of names. She runs her hand over Mom’s nameplate, tracing the letters with her fingertips.

  “I’ll miss her,” she says. “I was family to her. Sorry my parents couldn’t be the same to you. I’ll never forgive them for that.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I don’t.”

  Halley slowly shakes her head. “Your mother didn’t have anything. Didn’t come from anywhere special. Didn’t know anyone important. She would have been a nobody to them. But she was nice to me from the moment we first met. And they have the gall to think of themselves as better.”

  “Don’t get angry over that. Not today,” I say.

  Halley stands up again and sticks her hands into the side pockets of her thermal vest. “I’ve never stopped being angry over that, Andrew,” she says. “My world shrank down to just you and me the last time we walked out of their house.”

  She lets out a slow breath, then kisses me on the cheek. “You’re right. This isn’t the time. Sorry.”

  I’d said my last good-bye in person, right before Mom died, when she could still see and hear me through the fog of pain meds. It seems pointless to repeat the sentiment to a grave marker and a cylinder full of ashes. Whoever she was in life is gone now, the molecules that made up her body dispersed in the atmosphere and returned to the cosmos, to be reused in the constant cycle of life. Her consciousness is gone, and there’s nothing in that little stainless tube that can hear or understand me. But it would feel callous to walk away without a final gesture, so I kneel in front of the plot and duplicate what Halley did, running my hand over the nameplate, feeling the edges of the engraved letters with my thumb.

  “See you among the stars,” I say. “I love you.”

  The cemetery is on the outskirts of town, three kilometers from the chief’s place. Halley and I walk back instead of summoning a ride. We’ve both served mostly on spaceships for the last twelve years, and we take advantage of our unlimited access to fresh air and long walks whenever we are on leave down here.

  “I’m glad she got to have a few years in peace,” I say when we approach the transit station on our way back into town. “Without the threat of the Lankies hanging over her head every day.”

  “Four years of peace,” Halley says. “If you don’t count the stragglers we keep killing on Mars.”

  “On my last rotation, I saw three Lankies,” I say. “In six months. In the beginning, we saw more than that in a single patrol. Used to be we’d come back to the barn with the missile launcher empty and nothing left in the drop ship’s ammo cassettes. Now we go weeks without firing a shot.”

  “That’s good, though. Means we’ve wiped most of them out.”

  “Maybe. Or they’ve learned to avoid us. Those tunnels go deep.”

  “Not a single Lanky ship in the solar system in four years,” Halley says. “I want to believe we got almost all of them. And that the few who are left are hiding in terror.”

  “I hope they feel fear,” I reply. “But I’ve never seen one hesitate or run away.”

  We’re crossing the green in front of the transit station, and the grass is covered with red and brown leaves from the surrounding trees. Unbidden, a memory bubbles up in my brain—my mother and I, walking this same path eight years ago, just a short while after I had gotten her out of the PRC with the chief’s help. There had been snow on the ground back then, and she had marveled at the clean and unspoiled layer of white on the grass. I thought I had come to terms with her death by now, but the memory makes the grief surge in my chest, gripping my heart and twisting it firmly. In a few weeks, we’ll have the first snowfall of the season in the mountains, and she will not be here to see it.

  I walk over to one of the nearby trees and touch the trunk to feel the rough bark under my palm just like she did when she first saw this place. It’s a luxury that the middle-class people out here take for granted, but the welfare rats in the PRC can live their entire lives without once being able to touch a living tree. Halley pauses a few steps behind me and watches as I run my hand over the trunk.

  “The chief said that nothing changes,” I say. “But I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “You don’t want to come back here anymore now that she’s gone?” Halley asks.

  I turn to look at her. All around us, Liberty Falls is going about its comfortable ’burber business, oblivious of the sudden rift in my personal universe.

  “I don’t know. I mean, I like it here. We’ve been coming down here on leave for years. But I don’t know if I can keep going back to the chief’s place. Everything there is going to remind me of her.”

  I walk toward Halley and listen to the sound of the leaves crunching under the soles of my boots, something that nobody ever hears on a starship or in the middle of a welfare city.

  “And I know that the chief won’t mind if we keep using his place for free. But I feel like we’d overstay our welcome if we did. He doesn’t owe us shelter and food until we retire. Even if it’s only a few weeks every year.”

  Halley blinks into the midday sun and shrugs.

  “So what’s next? Do we find a new place? Or do we spend every leave from now on in some shitty RecFac? Because I have no interest in going down to San Antonio and hanging out with my folks.”

  “I don’t know,” I repeat. “I just feel out of balance right now. Ask me again when our next leave comes up.”

  “We don’t have to decide anything. Not anytime soon. Especially not today,” Halley says.

  We walk down Main Street and toward Chief Kopka’s restaurant, where we spend our time on leave in the little upstairs guest apartment the chief keeps available for us. With our civilian clothes, we no longer stick out on the street among the ’burbers. After four years without a Lanky ship in the solar system, we no longer have to be in uniform when we’re off duty, and we don’t have to carry weapons and light armor with us. At first, the feeling of going unarmed was so disconcerting that I carried my contraband M17 pistol under my civilian clothes for a while, but at some point in the last year or two, I started to leave it behind in my locker. It shouldn’t feel strange to be able to walk around without a weapon, but I’m still not used to it, not after so many years of constant life on the edge of annihilation.

  “Four days of family leave, and two of them are eaten up by travel,” Halley says. “How very generous of the Corps.”

  “We’re just lucky we weren’t on deployment,” I reply. “Takes the better part of a week to get home from Mars.”

  “When are you going back to Podhead University?” she asks.
<
br />   “Transport to Keflavík leaves at 2030 tomorrow from Falmouth. I figure I can take the train down at 1600 and be there with time to spare. What about you?”

  Halley waves her hand dismissively.

  “I can hop on a ride at Burlington anytime between now and tomorrow evening. The squadron isn’t due for deployment for another six months. It’s all just training and maintenance right now. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to having a full pilot roster and all the drop ships I need.”

  “I know what you mean. I request new gear, I get it right away. It’s weird.”

  “We’re turning into a peacetime military,” Halley says. “Not that I’m complaining. Haven’t had to write a next-of-kin letter in a good while.”

  I still have a hard time thinking of ourselves as senior officers, as people who have to write official condolence letters. When we joined the military, the majors and lieutenant colonels were old to our eyes. Now we both wear the oak leaves of field-grade officers. For a short while, I managed to catch up to my wife in rank when they promoted me to major last year, but then Halley made lieutenant colonel and got her own drop-ship squadron. In the old Corps, it took at least sixteen years of service to become a light colonel, but the senior officer shortage and her exceptional service record meant that she got fast-tracked into the rank after only twelve years. At her current trajectory, she’ll probably be a full colonel in another five years and a general in ten. True to form, she’s not excited about that prospect because it will take her out of the cockpit for good.

  “That leaves us with a little more than a day,” Halley says. “What do you want to do?”

  I think about her question. When we are on leave, we usually eat at the chief’s place and spend time in our little guest apartment, but tonight it wouldn’t feel right to carry on with that routine as if nothing had changed.

  “Let’s go out,” I tell her.

  “Out where? You got a place in mind?”

  “Out of town. Away from people. We can pack one of the flexible shelters and take some food along. Go out into the mountains somewhere. Maybe that trail across the river we hiked last spring. The nights aren’t that cold yet.”