Free Angles of Attack by Marko Kloos Page A

thinking about it, but I’m already kind of a mess as it is,” I say. “There’s a lot riding on this mission.”
    “Tell me about it. I’ve got two girls and a wife down here on our little frozen paradise. If you don’t come back with a road map for all those troops to go home again, we’re about to have a very bad winter, and it’ll be our very last one.”
    “I’ll do my best to see that it won’t be,” I say.
    “I have no doubt that you will. But it’s not entirely up to you, is it?”
    “It’s not even mostly up to me. I’ll just be another little cog in the wheel again.”
    “Well, be a really good cog, then. I almost envy you in a way, you know.”
    “How so?” I laugh. “You want to go in my place?”
    “I would if I had the expertise. Beats having to wait and watch, and not being able to do anything to influence the outcome.”
    “What are you going to do if we don’t come back?” I ask.
    Constable Guest is quiet for a little while. The hum from the electric motor reverberates from the concrete walls, and the fat tires of the ATV whisper on the floor slabs as we trundle through the sparsely lit tunnel at a fast trotting speed.
    “I’ll hole up with my family,” he finally says. “Down here in the tunnels. Stockpile whatever supplies we can, and try to make it stretch. Hoping someone’s going to come and resupply us before all the food runs out. As long as I can keep them alive, there’s always hope.”
    I’ve been to Constable Guest’s office a few times, and I remember the pictures of his daughters he keeps on a shelf behind his desk. His girls are still young, in their early teenage years. He told me that they were born on Earth, but they’ve been here on New Svalbard since before they could form coherent memories of the old home. This is the only world they’ve known, and if we fail to find a way home for all those troops that are consuming the resources of the ice moon just to stay alive, then they’ll never know anything else. They’ll die with their parents, down here in these cheerless tunnels with their bare concrete walls and unpainted laminate steel doors, and the whole town will be buried under ice and forgotten, a very minor footnote in humanity’s short history. It’s a harsh life in the colonies, but it’s their only life, and I feel shame for having contributed to the very likely possibility that these girls and everyone else here will die. I didn’t have any influence on the military’s decision to come here and dump seven thousand extra mouths to feed onto this world, but I can try to help get them out of here again. It’s a much better use for all my training than killing Chinese or Russian marines over yet another untamed piece of rock circling some faraway sun.
    We roll through the semidarkness in silence for a while. Then the tunnel ahead comes to an end. There’s a concrete staircase leading up into a little vestibule, and a heavy security hatch set into the wall beyond. Constable Guest climbs off the ATV, and I follow suit and grab my kit bag.
    He holds out his hand, and I shake it.
    “Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens,” he says.
    “Where did you get that?” I ask.
    “Oh, an old novel that I like. Orcs and elves and high adventure, that sort of thing.”
    “Then let’s make it ‘See you in a few weeks’ instead,” I say.
    “See you in a few weeks, Staff Sergeant Grayson. Thank you for sticking up for us colony roughnecks. And be safe out there.”
    “You, too, Constable Guest.”
    He gets back onto his ATV, nods at me, and drives back the way we came, leaving me in the dimly lit tunnel terminus. I watch as the blinking caution light on the back of his vehicle briefly paints the walls of the tunnel red in steady three-second intervals. Then I shoulder my bag again and walk up the stairs into the basement of the airfield’s main control center.

    The brief lull in the weather isn’t very obvious on the surface.