I grew up in Titan’s shadow. My father never went into detail, no matter how drunk he was. As I got older, I noticed the sadness in his eyes when he spoke of the Big T. The weight that he carried seemed nearly unbearable. Only my mother was allowed to share that weight. She was the only one who saw him cry.
That is until the day I left for basic combat training. It was early, and my bags were packed. I was waiting for the autocab to pull up outside. I found my father at the kitchen table. He hadn't slept. Dad never slept very well anyway. His hands shook. I knelt in front of him and put my hands on his to steady him. He looked up with tears in his eyes. “You're sure?” he asked.
Dad reached for his cane with his right hand and stood up on it, grabbing me by the shoulder with his left hand. He squeezed with every ounce of pressure possible as if to imprint his message on me.
“There are a few things I want you to remember,” he said. “Titan is not worth dying for, son. Don’t try to be a hero; heroes come home in pieces or in body bags.”
I could see the emotion in his eyes. It was more than I’d seen from him in my whole life. I didn’t dare interrupt, even to try and reassure him. So he went on. “Integrity is everything, Alex. Never lie for anyone, to anyone, about anyone… And understand that no matter what, we will always love you.”
He smiled, eyes wet. “You're already a brave man for taking this risk. You never have anything to prove, least of all to me. I'm so proud to be your father,” he said, choking back tears. “Thank you for being my son.”
It would take a year for me to begin to understand what he was trying to tell me. Eight months later, the Alliance crossed the Rubicon. Two months after that, my unit was deployed to Titan.
I arrived at Fort Acevedo for deployment on 13 May. The whiskey from the night before was competing with my nerves to see which could make me vomit. Turns out, they both won. After I finished my turn puking into a trashcan, my squad leader smacked me on the back and laughed. “Don't worry,” he said. “Puking is good for you. Builds character. Plus, you won't drown in your own vomit if it's all out.”
I felt my face going pale. “Why would I drown in my own vomit, Sergeant Rivera?”
He chuckled. “You wouldn't be the first. Hell, if the big ships take a hit out there in the void, all that’d be left of us would be stardust. Along with your hopes of a biological human touching your dick one day.”
I laughed at that as we loaded into the ships. Rivera had mastered the art of mercilessly roasting new spacers while making them feel a part of the group years before I enlisted. That was how spacers bonded. An NCO that roasted you meant they were paying attention to you. That showed that they cared, which made me feel less alone. Like I was going to be alright and it was all going to work out.
Sergeant Rivera was in charge of second squad and had served two tours on Titan during the latter years of the Draconist Wars. He was quiet, but supposedly he knew how to kill a man with a chow hall knife. The dull ones used for butter, that is. The Sergeant would have been scary if he wasn’t inspiring.
He never squared with the rear echelon support types. They never got enough food and kit to the front for his grunts, even when there was plenty of blood to go around. A pogue’s hands were always too clean. Rivera saw two of his closest friends butchered by the Dracks, so I didn't fault him for a bit of cynicism.
The technicians ran through all necessary SOPs for our flight to Titan in case we woke early and the shit hit the fan. They told us that if the ships carrying us pulled up to a combat situation, the crew would have to consider whether or not to jettison the cargo compartments so that the ships could go into emergency high-G maneuvering. If that happened, we’d be left to decant after the threat was cleared out. If the ships carrying us were destroyed in the engagement, that could turn into a long damn wait.
You could hear the rivets shifting in the compartment, it was so quiet. Nearby someone puked from the stress. A normal enough reaction, under the circumstances. The smell swirling in the embarkation area made me want to see if I could top it. Thankfully, my stomach was empty. The only thing left was stardust.
At last the klaxons blared, alerting our company that it was time to load up for departure. We shuffled en masse toward the cryotube bay, ready to get the show on the road at long last.
We wouldn’t be taking any personal effects with us, of course. Digital collections were fine, since they could be sent along as nothing more than qubits. All I could afford to take with me was a picture of my parents. It was saved in the free folder on my blink drive. Everything else I sent home or sold for credit. I figured that by the time the war was over I’d have plenty of new swag to take home.
We lined up at 1430 and marched to the freezers. I was in. I carried the team’s automatic rifle, with Torvald as my battle buddy and assistant gunner.
Corporal Hydecker, the leader of, was an odd one. He was from Ceres, but his family had paid for him to rehab on Earth to keep him out of a jail cell. Communing with nature in one of the ICA’s reclamation territories helped get rid of the track marks on his arms. He told me once that if he forgot what he'd done, then he deserved what was waiting for him. The only path forward was to remember.
We stripped down in silence and climbed into our tubes, facing the prospect of dying in the vacuum. All the while, the technicians fretted over every detail and the Captain directed them with casual finesse.
Mackenzie, the platoon medic, guided me through the pre-freeze process.
“Hey there, killer. What's your name?”
I floundered. “Um…”
She laughed, the sound taking away my stress. “That's your name? Fucking Spacer Umm?”
As she strapped me in, my face was only a few inches from hers. I just smiled. Mackenzie had that effect on most people. She once explained to me how part of the platoon medic's job was to build relationships with us, so she leaned into the aspects of her personality that made her the most accessible. It didn’t hurt that she was my age and attractive in a kind of tomboyish way.
“Don't worry,” she said. “I already know your name is Santos. And I've got some news for you, Spacer Santos: you're going to be just fine.” She smiled sternly. “Look at me. You're going to be ok. Got it?”
If I’d just looked beyond her smile and into her warm blue eyes that told me everything was going to be alright, I would have seen a young woman who had to worry about the lives of thirty other Spacers. It was the weight of the world on her shoulders. All that responsibility at just twenty-one.
It was about 1520 when the Captain gave the go ahead to initiate final pre-freeze sequencing. He ran down the checklist, a different tech answering for each item on the list of vital functions:
Vitals tracking protocols?
Check.
Primary deep cryogenic functional processes?
Good to go, Captain.
On it went. but When the walkthrough was done, the Captain nodded at Sergeant Rivera. Go time. My cryogenic survival suit was linked into the pod, and a live readout of my vitals played on a screen to my right. A voice told me to lie back and breathe normally. I obeyed just like we'd been taught in training.
I settled back in the compliant gel-foam with vitals monitoring leads trailing away from my arms and neck, and the barely see-through canopy descended. I took a final survey of the room and saw Mackenzie giving me a thumbs up through the already-frosted-over canopy of her own pod. I returned the gesture. The fuzziness in my head and the weight of my arm made doing so a very peculiar errand.
Then the electronic voice started a countdown: Primary departure cryogenic sequencing startup in ten seconds. I looked up at the canopy above me. It was crisscrossed by a patchwork of digital readouts, each showing a running display of data I could not begin to make sense of. Seven seconds…
I never made it to six.
The next thing I remember was feeling like I’d been run over by a steamroller, with its horn still blaring in my ears as an added insult. It was a strange horn, too, more a steady beeping than anything else. Then I realized that the beeping I was hearing was in fact the steady pulse of an alarm.
A dim electronic voice notified me that it was 0947 hours local time. I was wondering how long I’d been out when I made out another voice. A human one. It took a moment for my sleep-addled brain to decipher the voice’s owner. “Second Squad,” Sergeant Rivera reiterated. “When the techs sign off on your revival, head down the hall to the processing center. We are due to be groundside within twenty hours so the transport boats can break orbit and head back to Mars. Do not make the Fleet wait for you, Spacers.”
I tried opening my eyes and realized they were already open, I just couldn’t see anything yet. I started to mumble about blindness when a third voice interrupted, a calming female tenor with a faint Prometeyan accent. “You’re alright, Spacer Santos. The trip went off without a hitch,” she said, still coming out of her own sleep. I felt a gentle hand at my back, holding me up as I rose to sit upright in the tube. My eyes still couldn’t see anything, but now that I realized that was normal, I was able to take the discomfort in stride.
I slowly became aware that I was sitting upright in my tube, and that it had still been frigid until only very recently. There was no gravity. I tried to steady my breathing and had to hack up a few wads of freezer gel that had made their way into my windpipe. The Prometeyan voice told me to let it all out.
At first my vision came in spots, then a blurry mess of warped colors. The female voice reminded me I hadn’t used my eyes in three months. I tried to respond but hacked up another wad of preservatives, motivating me to give up on speaking until I was given the green light. At least my ears worked just fine.
Eventually my eyes came around enough for me to get a bead on my surroundings. I was in a cubby hole branching off from a long tunnel stretching to either side for much farther than I could see. Cryo pods filled more cubbies along both walls. From where I sat, I could just make out the bottom of a second level above mine. I knew where there were two, there had to be many more.
I looked to my right. The tenor’s owner was Lieutenant Andreyev, my platoon leader. She was a tall, lanky woman with hazel eyes and an angular face that smiled down stoically at me as she spoke. “Welcome back, Spacer Santos.” Her voice bore the analytical detachment that characterizes career officers.
It took a few minutes more for me to get my bearings. When I had, the Lieutenant ran me through a visual acuity test and a bevy of other measurements of how well my senses were coming around. “Where's Doc Mackenzie?” I didn’t want to risk asking if she had survived the long sleep.
Lieutenant Andreyev laughed and put a hand on my shoulder. “Don't you worry, Romeo. Mackenzie is just fine. We woke her up about an hour ago. You’ll see her groundside.”
By 1130 local time, Charlie company was out of the tubes. Most of us were, anyway. Out of a hundred and fifty-five spacers in our pre-deployment strength, we lost seven to cryo screw ups before we even reached Titan. Two went out the hard way as their neurons rebelled against the drugs used to preserve their neurological processes. “Poor bastards baked inside their own brains,” as Sergeant Rivera put it.
Five others had nerve damage from freezer malfunctions. They’d have to go through neuro-surgery to clear up the damage, then eight or nine months of physical therapy. We figured the war would be over by the time they finally made it back to a frontline unit. We figured that was rotten luck for them.
The FLEETCOM technicians issued us fatigue jumpsuits printed with the splotchy tan camo used on Titan, a basic survival kit for the descent, and got us organized for the ride down to the surface.
The alert came at 1330 that we’d begin boarding the shuttles in ten minutes. We breathed a collective sigh of relief. I saw a lot of pale faces around me, and it wasn’t just because of the defrost sickness anymore. This was the last chance any of us had to make peace with our god before officially entering a worldwide combat zone. It shouldn’t be surprising that some of us were nervous.
Others weren’t, though. “I can't wait to kill some of those Alliance sons of bitches!” said Torvald, bragging like young Spacers often do. Tough talk to mask the large fear they all felt. A massive, shit-eating grin was plastered across his face as if it had splattered there. “I'm gonna be a hero!”
He got several smiles and wolfish whistles from the group in return. Hydecker held out a fist for Torvald to bump. “Just be sure to leave some for the rest of us, hero. And try to keep your head down. With that neck of yours, it’ll be a miracle if you don’t get it shot off.”
Everyone laughed. I joined in, but all I could think about was my father's arm shakily attempting a salute as he failed to hold back tears. I didn’t realize at the time that he’d known what was coming.
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