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19: Redeployment
Lieutenant Marcus Wade is in the large mess hall of the Dauntless. A heavy cruiser needs to feed a lot of people. He is sitting at the officer table, with a dozen others. Most of them are team leaders, marines. A few of them are Vanguard, like him. Plus a couple of the ship’s officers sitting with them. And Ensign Lila Navarro, who is on her first deployment and likes to tag along.
If there’s one thing Marcus learned to hate during deployments, it’s the chow. He was assured all meals are an optimal mix of nutrients, designed with love for the military by Valor Provisions Inc., but they never fail to taste like boiled chicken to him. He’s poking around at the gruel on his plate and is half-listening to the other junior officers as they exchange theories about the nature of their deployment.
“We kicked the Taurans back, but those were scouts. They’ll return with the heavy guns.”
“Think that’s why we’re here?”
“Why else?”
Their conversation is just background noise. Marcus is distracted. He’s been distracted ever since he received Captain Drake’s message. It bothered him. A lot. Elena Drake seems to be in some kind of trouble. He didn’t think that happened in the corporate world, at least not to that extent. He tried reaching out but got no response. Even if they never deployed together, he hopes she’s OK. Not much else he can do from here, which is frustrating.
“I heard the Taurans are prepping a surprise attack on the Gateway Ring,” says one of the navy officers.
“How is it a surprise if even you heard of it?” retorts one of the Vanguard team leaders to general laughter.
Marcus doesn’t laugh, his mind still on Drake. Not that they’re particularly close. They’re different generations. Renowned Captain Elena Drake, veteran of the Forge peacekeeping operation. Honorably discharged. But she is Vanguard, just like him. Once a Vanguard, always a Vanguard. They support each other. That’s the ethos. Plus, he admires her, has heard the stories. Elena fought bravely in the narrow walkways of the hives on Forge. They were outnumbered, brain-hacked, yet still they fought. Still managed, somehow, against all odds, to turn the tables on the paramilitary factions.
His story is different. The first time he was deployed was during the Tauran War. He wasn’t on the front lines then, didn’t see active combat. He was there, behind the front lines, mostly waiting around. Waiting around, mission-ready, and staying up to date on how the war was going through sitreps. He put boots on the ground exactly twice during the deployment: first time on Echo Point, second time on the alien shipwreck.
The brass called Echo Point a search and rescue mission. Searching they did, but there was no one left to rescue there. The Tauran bastards destroyed the colony, no survivors found. They used some unknown weapon that vaporized all the glass and all the people in the colony, left the city in ruins. Marcus spent a few days walking the deserted streets with his team, first looking for survivors, then looking for clues, then finally being recalled.
The first couple of days were hopeful. They entered buildings, navigated around piles of debris, plaster, and broken furniture calling for survivors as the ships pelted the area with infrared beams. Hope dwindled quickly.
They got new orders: look for clues as to what happened. Dead bodies. Anything out of place. Report back, bring in the geeks to analyze. They spent a few more days looking, unsure what they were even looking for. They dug through piles of dirt, went through semi-collapsed buildings, even dived in the river running next to the city. They couldn’t find anything. After a couple of false positives, Command cancelled the mission. He still wonders what happened to all those people, what kind of weapon could make biologics and glass disappear.
Then there was Derelict A1X-VD2. The ship was disabled and adrift, dark and silent, sleeping among the green gas clouds. During the battle, they hit it with their best stuff, shut it down without blowing it to bits. Marcus and his team were ordered on site.
His team breached, walked through the strange corridors and around dormant bio-machinery. The ship snapped back at them at every turn, with what looked like reflexes. Closing off orifices, spewing corrosive gasses, venting segments into space. It took them a while to figure out how to step around the ship’s equivalent of nerve endings, and they lost a couple of combat engineers while doing it.
They cleared paths for the geeks to come in, take samples, analyze, and reverse-engineer.
All that got classified right quick. He was asked in very clear terms never to talk about what he’d seen there, though to this day he doesn’t really understand what he saw. The Taurans seemed to use a strange meld of artificial and organic. The spaces were wider and taller than on a military ship, which could hint at larger-sized creatures, or it could mean nothing—cruise ships and high-end civilian transports had similarly broad spaces. The tech looked to him as magical as the one on the Dauntless, maybe just in a different incarnation. The mixed-in biological tissue was a novelty, but the thing was in a coma-like slumber by the time he got there. It was hard to tell what purpose anything served. And that wasn’t his job anyway.
All in all, it was the most exciting thing he ever did. Walking those otherworldly corridors, weapons hot, on the lookout for booby traps, was bonkers. Anticlimactic though. As far as he could tell, the ship was not awake. His team did several recon missions aboard, mapping out its interior. The damn thing was huge. Never saw a Tauran though. They got swapped with another team within weeks, translated back to home base soon after. Without ever firing his weapon.
“I bet you know,” Lieutenant Grayson prods him. Grayson is Vanguard too, they graduated STARS together.
He wasn’t paying attention to the conversation.
“Know what?”
“Do they look like giant fucking crabs?”
All eyes on him now.
“Never seen one,” he says.
“Sure you didn’t,” says Grayson. They know he was on the derelict ship, and they know all the info was classified. They’re teasing him.
“I swear,” he says, playing along now, crossing his fingers. He’s had this conversation a million times before.
“Sure you do.”
“OK,” he says. “You got me.” He pauses for dramatic effect, then leans in closer, drops his voice. “I’ll tell you.”
They all get quiet, lean in, still smiling, waiting for the punchline.
“They actually look like giant fucking artichokes. And they smell like this chow here.” He wrinkles his nose and they all burst into laughter.
“Well, my buddy saw one. He swears to it. And it looked like a giant crab,” says Ensign Navarro.
He rolls his eyes at this, decides to join the conversation. He listens to increasingly more outlandish rumors, contributes one or two of his own, even knowing full well they’re bullshit. He laughs with the others at the stupid jokes, but in the back of his mind, he keeps mulling over Drake’s message and its implications. If you make it back before me, tell my family I love them. What kind of trouble did you get yourself into, Captain?
This new deployment is even quieter than his previous one. At least so far. Lots of waiting around on standby. Shifts. Drills. He doesn’t mind it, isn’t particularly eager to fight aliens. The ruins of Echo Point and the sheer otherness of that ship still haunt him. He sometimes dreams of walking the ruins of a city with no glass and no people. He sometimes dreams of walking the corridors of the derelict ship again. The dreams sometimes merge into a surrealistic landscape of a dark city street floating in outer space, bio-machinery covered in dirt.
He hopes the Taurans got the message during round one and they’re gone for good. Quiet is good.
He maintains squad discipline, ensures his team is ready at a moment’s notice, helps with ship duties. He has five Vanguards under his command now. His second-in-command, lanky Chief Petty Officer Peter “Dash” Howard and Petty Officer Second Class Rachel “Pinball” Santos, with her high cheekbones and crooked nose, have been with him since day one, before they earned their nicknames. They were on Echo Point together, and on the derelict ship.
Breaching Specialist Kyle “Backwards” Anders joined them during the disabled alien ship exploration. They needed a demolition expert, and Marcus made the case for bringing in a Vanguard after their assigned combat engineers got themselves killed. Cheery red-haired Anders came aboard.
Petty Officer Third Class Eric Novak joined them after the disabled alien ship exploration, a few weeks before they got out of Sector 36. Built like a brick shithouse, they joked he trained to fight the Taurans in hand-to-hand combat, though he never got the chance to put boots on the ground. He stuck around for their second tour.
For this deployment, his team got rounded out with a sniper, Marksman David Kim. Kim was grave and quiet at first, so they took to calling him “Kimmy.” This opened him up, despite his protests to the new name.
They’re all good operators, cream of the crop. If he does end up having to fight Taurans, this is the team to do it with. But as of now, they’re not fighting. They’re waiting. With nothing else to do outside the daily routine, his mind keeps going back to Elena Drake’s message, trying to derive more meaning out of it. He can’t.
He gets the order at 2000 hours. Prep for FTL, redeployment at the Gateway Ring. Underway at 2100 hours. Moving from the Eureka Base outpost rimward, back towards the jump gate. And, it seems, with some urgency.
“Does that mean we’re translating out?” he asks the ranking officer conveying the order. He wasn’t particularly eager to engage the Taurans, would be good to tell his team they can stand down. Get out of Sector 36 and eat some decent food for a change.
“Negative,” replies the officer. “We’re to maintain condition two.”
This makes little sense. Are the Taurans back? Going for the ring now? That would be bad news. The lab at Eureka Base has a large contingent of scientists, supplemented by security personnel, but the total population is a tiny fraction of that of the Gateway Ring. What if the Taurans use the same weapon they used on Echo Point to vaporize the millions of civilians on the ring?
Or maybe they’re trying to attack the jump gate, which would be even worse news. Cutting off Sector 36 from the rest of the galaxy, leaving them with no support and no retreat.
“Any more details, sir?” Would be good to know what they’re going into.
“Negative, Lieutenant, I’m just running it down the chain.”
“Understood,” he says.
The officer senses his worries, probably shares them. He adds, “Lieutenant, I really don’t know anything more.”
Marcus nods, turns around, goes to gather his team. He has a very bad feeling about this. The Tauran War was fought around Eureka Base and Echo Point, never that deep into the sector.
{Rally on deck now,} he sends them. Howard, Santos, Anders, Novak, and Kim are there by the time he arrives.
“We’re redeploying to the Gateway Ring at 2100 hours.”
They ask him questions. He doesn’t have answers.
“New intel?” asks Santos.
He shakes his head.
“Should we expect combat at the ring?” asks Kim.
“Unknown,” Marcus replies.
“Maybe the Taurans are back?” ventures Anders.
“Unknown,” repeats Marcus. One answer to all of their questions. “We’re to maintain condition two.”
“I guess we’re not translating out,” says Howard.
“Negative.”
“Anything else you know, LT?” They all look at him expectantly.
“Negative,” he says. “I’m just running it down the chain.” Then, dropping the formality, Marcus echoes the officer he just talked to: “I really don’t know anything more.” He wishes he did. They split up, prep for FTL.
At 2100 hours, the heavy cruiser Dauntless turns around ponderously, bearing rimward. So do a few hundred more warships of various shapes and sizes, from other big guns like the Ares and the Excalibur, to countless small corvettes and transports. Their chassis, adorned with bay doors, sensor arrays, and gun ports, glints in the dim light of the neutron star. It’s a slow, precise dance of war machinery. A well-rehearsed choreography. One after the other, they accelerate to FTL, disappear into the viridian night.
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