It took sixteen hours for us to get terra firma. Once there, we were marshaled in Selk City as a full battalion. Nine hundred spacers, most of them younger than twenty-two. Some of the veterans had learned to hide their fear. Many of the young spacers smelled of sweat and raw nerves.
We were to be deployed in three groups to FOBs across the Kundun district, where the Alliance had been on the move since the war began. Our task was to seek out the enemy and eliminate them.
We saw very little of the city. Just a few of the industrial buildings on the outskirts, which were all brutalist mid-century monstrosities from well before the Mars-Titan War. The main supply route out of the spaceport was sheltered underground until we were out into the badlands.
This part of Titan really caught our attention. Desolation, ruination, deprivation. That’s how Hydecker put it. He had an aristocratic education, and was known as something of a foxhole poet. He’d even studied literature before the war, including Burns, Yeats, Plath, Robinson, and Poe. His favorite was the Alan Seeger poem “I Have A Rendezvous with Death”. A fitting poem for a spacer.
The battalion broke up and loaded onto waves of vertical takeoff and landing shuttlecraft as we diverged out across the barren dune seas of equatorial Titan. The one I was in took our company on a long, dull flight to a ramshackle little forward operating base far out on the edge of the district. Fifteen of us were crammed in the back, shivering in the stale stuffy air of a passenger cabin made for ten.
I managed to find a corner and ignored the freeze-dried blood on the floor. I could feel the steel bars of the bucket seat pressing into my back even in my EVA suit. I couldn't tell if that was causing the tingling in my legs, or if it was just the coldness of our surroundings. Either way I was glad to have that corner.
Sleep came easily enough. So did the nightmares. It was my turn to call cadence. There was a formation. The drill instructor looked deep into my soul, commanding me to sing a song to keep the basic training company in step. Nothing came to mind. The drill instructor started screaming, “left, left, left right!” Over and over again, until his face began to melt. What remained was the demon inside my soul. The demon that took flight and came clawing up from hell after me, his talons skinning me alive…
Sometime later, I was shaken awake by Hydecker. “Hey,” he said on a direct-line channel. “Look at that.” I turned and looked out the window next to me, and saw the FOB. Distant rocky hills stretched across the horizon, with rippling nitrogen sands surrounding the base for over a kilometer on all sides. It would almost have been scenic if I wasn’t acutely aware of the rifle I had slung to my suit.
Hydecker leaned toward me and spoke into a direct link. “I read about this place once. They say the sand here isn’t really sand, not like back on Mars. The sand here is more like fat grains of ice dust, made from little moons and comets that Saturn smashed up with its gravity in the ancient past. It’s kinda like how the sand on Earth is made from ground-up stuff that got weathered smooth by the oceans.”
I nodded again, but wasn’t really listening. Our destination had just come into sight on the horizon.
Forward Operating Base Diamond Dog was a kilometer-square complex of bunkers either hacked into the volcanic rock of the northwestern Shangri-La, or squatting above it in clumps of modular armored boxes.
It was all surmounted by a thick laminar bubble, the kind invented for use during the old Titan Civil Wars, with a minefield on the surroundings and autocannons laying defilading fire on all the approaches. The apex of the dome held up a watchtower with mounted missile launcher turrets. I figured the Armada would be crazy to mount a frontal assault on the FOB. Not with anything less than a full division.
The C.O. was a Major named Dijkstra, who had a Van Dyke mustache and goatee that my squadmates and I thought was pretty funny for a combat arms commander. I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d lost two brothers and a sister during the civil wars fought on Titan. Three siblings out of seven, all of whom served the ICA at one time or another. In fact his whole family were soldiers, since before the Mars-Titan War.
Dijkstra was a local, and a member of the Proventura sect. That meant the facial hair was a religious statement, not a rebellion against grooming standards. His combat record more than proved his loyalty. He’d received virtually every medal there was for courageous and meritorious service during the last Titan Civil War, and had the scars to prove he’d earned them. His personal beliefs mattered little next to that.
We watched the departing company climb aboard the same VTOLs we’d arrived on to leave for Selk City. We tried not to notice how tired they looked, the dead look in their eyes, nor the shaking of their Captain’s hand as he saluted Major Dijkstra. The smell of vomit lingering in the air seemed to pair well with the bloodstains on their EVA suits. There was no noble victory here. Just broken men pretending everything was alright. Looking back, it seems so obvious. Doesn’t it always, though?
We spent the first week acclimating to life on the FOB. Rocket attacks were spotty, as if the Armada was giving us a break. Waiting for the hammer to fall, I got used to the routines of frontline life. The shitty food, the awful sleeping routines, the constant sitting around and waiting for something to happen, and feeling the fear deep down that if something actually did we’d be sorry we were so impatient for some action.
We were at the bleeding edge of the war, and we knew it. The only problem was, so did Major Dijkstra. At first he’d seemed like a pretty even-keeled frontline officer, but over those early weeks it became clear that he might have been touched by the war in more ways than we could tell just by looking.
This showed itself in the almost religious zeal he held for military life. He liked to make the rounds to check on his flock with one hand resting on the rifle slung across his chest. The hollow look in his eyes as he chatted with us would have been chilling if we weren’t all so impressed by his record. “Are you ready to hear the good word?” was how he always started his daily pep talks-slash-war status update briefings.
He would make an effort to inspect the closeness of a Spacer's shave. Dykstra had a religious exemption to beards, of course. But if you had the slightest stubble and didnt have your exemption paperwork ready, it was an automatic counseling session not for you, but your NCO. Which in turn made your life miserable when that ball rolled downhill. You could tell from his infectious smile that he was just loving it out there.
All of his support staff had been with him for ages. None of them showed the strain of it as clearly as Chief Master Sergeant Federico. He was also a Proventura and another local, having grown up in Kashgar, the nearest large settlement. Like Dijkstra, he’d been fighting in the wars on Titan since he was first old enough enlist, and twenty years in uniform had clearly gotten under his skin.
He used to refer to us junior enlisted as the Lord’s Little Fobbits. I asked Hydecker what that meant, and he explained that fobbit was an old term for someone who avoided combat duty by skulking around the FOB looking for light duty. Neither of us couldn’t be sure if the Lord part referred to God or to Major Dijkstra. Both the Major and his clique seemed to believe that war was a spiritual activity. They treated it like a sacred ritual, the only path to connection with the divine, and thought we too should treat it as such.
Every so often CMS Federico would scream, “Incoming!” and dive for cover. Like good little fobbits, we followed suit. Most of the time, no explosion followed. Then we’d hear the cackling laugh of a man gripped with hopeless sadness, laughing because the ghosts that followed him around thought it was funny.
Another little bit of the creeping shittiness of life there was the food. When there was food, that is. Only one meal was promised every day. By our second month on the FOB, as we all slowly forgot how to be humans, mold and mildew were seen less as health code violations and more like garnishment for increasingly spartan meals. Usually it was just the leftovers thrown into a pot for soup.
We were told that this was because the supply lines were being hampered by constant Armada raids, leaving us grunts with nothing to eat but freeze-dried rations left over from the last war fought on Titan.
Most spacers in my unit put up with it without complaint for the first month. We figured that a certain amount of hardship was to be expected from frontline duty. But by the second month on the FOB, those easy feelings began to strain. People started to grumble, matching the tenor of our stomachs. Extra food was harder to find than nicotine stims or toilet wine. The black market price for a packet of curry made my eyes water. But not as much as the smell it made in the cooking tin. Besides, what else was I going to spend money on?
Major Dijkstra took the supply situation to heart, and expressed his anger in a battalion staff officers’ meeting. We never heard what exactly was said there, but it seemed to have an effect.
I was assigned to Headquarters as a runner on that day. The Master Sergeant needed six bodies to help move the sand table to a new corner of the primary hab unit. Then, in a stroke of interior design bravery, the Lord’s Little Fobbits were told to place the sand table back where it had started, six hours before.
As we were moving rocks and wondering what our disability ratings were going to be, I heard the Battalion Commander bellowing: “A lack of morale is immoral! Immorality breeds not only contempt for the mission but resentment of our sacred duties. Don't they understand what we're doing here? Titan is a sacred battleground fought over for generations. We are a band of brothers, here to leave our mark on this sacred killing field. It's not these spacers’ fault they don't understand. They just need experience.”
That meeting is where Operation Backblast got its start.
It started small. Third platoon went out to recon a ridgeline twelve kilometers out from the wire. We’d been receiving more intense missile fire for the week prior, and company intel deduced that the Armada was using that ridge as a launching point. Third platoon drew the short straw to go track down the bastards lobbing those boomers at us and either scare them off or call in airstrikes to wipe them out.
One standard day after they left, we got a call-in telling us they were in a TIC about two klicks short of the ridge. Major Dijkstra himself volunteered to lead the quick reaction force headed out to retrieve them. My squad was part of the detachment left behind to guard the FOB. I pulled assistant duty at the Field Aid Station that day. That was fine by me. Doc Mackenzie always made sure we had plenty of coffee.
One of those long, cold hours sitting under the harsh lights of the aid station, waiting for news about third platoon, I tried to find out more about her. I went up to her and asked for a cup of coffee.
She cocked her head and smirked at me. “What am I, a fucking barista?”
I grinned back and asked whether she’d expect a good tip.
She laughed, a sound that made me feel very warm indeed. “That depends,” she said. “If you expect good service on the back end of this deal, then you’d better put out some coin.”
I laughed back at her retort and was about to offer another of my own when Torvald rolled over on the cot where I’d sent him to take a power nap and smirked at the both of us. “Wow,” he said, dragging out the syllable. “You two really ought to get a room. One without plasticine curtains for walls, that is. You two are too worried about fucking and not enough about fighting. If you’d put some of that horny energy into killing Alliance pissants, we’d probably have won the goddamn war by now!”
Doc Mackenzie belly laughed at that. I shot Torvald a rude gesture, and he stuck his tongue out at me.
On it went. The three of us sat in the aid station and traded stories of home for hours. It helped ease the tension of our looming first taste of combat. We could hear news of the scrape out on the dune fields coming in through the aid station radio, and did our best not to let it ruin our mood.
After Mackenzie finished her shift and went to catch some sleep before the next, Torvald and I sat and listened to those running situation reports for the next five hours. At about midnight, we heard the low rumble of overhead fast movers and looked up to see attack craft vectoring over the hills to the north to drop their ordnance on the unseen enemy encircling the patrol. I normally had trouble staying awake on idle duty, but the sound and fury of missile barrages kept me awake straight through.
The QRF flight returned another hour later. The twelve birds which had left were now only ten. The survivors had been chewed up by small arms fire and shrapnel from proximity munitions. Torvald and I donned our helmets and ran out to help with the wounded without waiting for orders.
Out of forty-two embarked spacers, nineteen had been injured. Several of them badly. Three came back wrapped in the cold black nylon of body bags. They’d taken a nearly direct hit from a smart mortar. Their squadmates had to spend twenty minutes looking for body parts. Two of them were rookies. Their first tour of duty turned out to be their last. The third was the platoon sergeant of third platoon, a man on his fifth frontline tour of duty. I realized right then that war took no prisoners. That it didn’t care about seniority.
Obviously the big op wasn’t planned to make better food available. But at the time, I suppose we were just a little stir-crazy. Supply lines were chaotic in those days, with the Alliance Armada running interference on virtually every main supply route and space lane between our FOB and Mars.
It got so bad that some days we just didn’t eat. Mackenzie gave us intravenous high calorie supplements to get us through the day. Though her face was gaunt, her smile still lit up the room.
Hungry or not, we were grunts and we could take the suffering. The ability to endure suffering was a trademark of frontline infantry down through the ages. At the end of the day, all that mattered to us was whether or not we’d have the energy to get our revenge on the assholes keeping us hungry. As it turned out, we wouldn’t have to wait too much longer to get that chance.
Our first op was to clear out Alliance strongpoints among the crags and ridgelines of the Caladan Planitia from which they had been harassing our supply lines. We’d move out with plenty of fire support and push in on the Armada where they were holed up in the highlands to the north. Once we found them, we would call in artillery, smash them into bits, then sweep through the area. The Alliance hadn’t been taking prisoners and neither would we. We couldn’t wait to call on Vidar and get our revenge.
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