2953-12-10 – Tales from the Service: Homecoming on Metzali
Feast season is upon us once again. We are no strangers to celebrating this most hallowed time of year on a war footing, obviously, but this year, this Cosmic Background embed team is celebrating it farther than ever from our homes and our loved ones. While we wouldn’t miss this experience for all the worlds in the Reach, it is still a difficult time of year to be a war correspondent.
It is no less difficult of course for us than it is for the many hundreds of thousands of military spacers and ground forces personnel here on the Seventh Fleet front. Most of the veterans of the fleet have not been home for five years, and a few were already near the end of a tour when war broke out. These, unfortunately, haven’t been home for longer – some eight to ten years.
Admiral Abarca wanted us to tell all of you out there that he’s trying to fast-track a wave of personnel rotations before the end of the year, so some who’ve been serving for the longest will be going home soon, some to academy tours, some to rear area duty and postings in the fleet formations not on a war footing, and some, if they choose, are going home, their tours of duty complete. While they won’t be getting home before Emmanuel Feast, most of those who are being rotated should be getting the news by that date.
Though it was almost unheralded due to the fact that the attack was of small scale and barely opposed, Fifth Fleet and associated FVDA formations retook the minor outpost on Metzali in the closing days of November. Incarnation forces landed on the world without warning or opposition in 2950, and their forces deported all the civilians who didn’t disappear into the hills to their other holdings on the Coreward Frontier. Fortunately, estimates are that more than two thirds of the small population successfully evaded capture, owing to the relative youth of the colony and the small size of the occuation force. We recieved one account from a trooper who participated in this rather uneventful liberation.
Arthur Klimek sat on the steps of the central colony administration building, his rail carbine across his knees. It was good to be home.
Arthur had been a clerk in that very building before the war. He’d often sat on those very steps on pleasant days, eating his lunch, chatting with the other low-grade admin personnel and watching the trickle of Metzali colonists going into and out of the building, registering births and deaths, updating land holdings records, recording construction submitting survey data, and so on. Life had been good in those days; his salary was good enough even as a young professional just starting out to pay for a row-house in the spaceport town, an aircar, and a prefab cabin on fifty acres in the hills. Land on a new colony was cheap, especially when it was land that had been found to contain no particularly valuable minerals, and he’d hoped to find someone looking to settle down and have kids in a few years.
Then the war had come, and FVDA recruiters had set up their booth in front of those very steps, showing holos of what had happened to Adimari Valis and other worlds that had fallen to Incarnation attack. They’d promised recruits a chance to make a difference, and to come home – if they survived – with stories to tell their grandchildren. Arthur, and many of the other young clerks working for central administration, had signed up.
Metzali had been conquered while Arthur and his unit were still in training. It had been an afterthought on the newsfeeds; the world was small, inconsequential, its population largely taken to the hills or evacuated offworld in the face of a small occupation force. There were bigger crises then, and such tragedies were simply too numerous and too small for the public to worry about.
That had been three years ago. Now, Arthur was home, albeit still in uniform, now a senior sergeant. He was the only native of Metzali in his battalion, and so had been called upon to help with the pre-drop briefing. They’d expected a sharp but brief fight with the garrison, but none had materialized; the spaceport they captured was a ghost town, its infrastructure partially and shallowly adapted as an Incarnation base. The detritus of a hastily abandoned occupation lay everywhere, but there was no sign of serious fighting.
“How’s it feel to be home, Sarge?”
Arthur looked up to see one of his newest squadmates, Private Vandek, picking his way across the littered plaza from the squad’s temporary shelter, an abandoned cafe.
“It’s like a bad dream, Vandek.” Arthur gestured up to the building behind him. “Can you believe I used to work at a desk in there?”
“You? At a desk, sir?” Vandek chuckled. “I can’t picture it.”
Arthur smiled sadly. Three years in uniform and fighting on four different worlds had changed him far more than his world had been changed by the vandalism of its occupiers. “I suppose not. Did new orders come down?”
“Just a minute ago.” Vandek hooked a thumb back toward the storefront where the rest of the squad was waiting. “There’s a transport on the way to pick us up. Word is there’s a fair bit of shooting down at the southeast end of town. Someone in the eight-five-one finally found where the bastards are holed up.”
“I figured they hadn’t gone far.” Arthur stood up, hefting his carbine. 851th independent battalion, one of their sister units, was responsible for clearing most of the southern outskirts; if the bulk of the occupiers were concentrated in one area, it could be a real fight. “We'd better not keep them waiting, then.”
