by Bobby Adair
“What’s the estimate on the number of Grays and Trogs?”
“A few hundred Grays on a ship,” guesses Bird. “Nobody knows the exact number they crew with.”
“We’re always pretty busy with other stuff when we board,” I joke. “I never stopped to count.”
Bird politely chuckles and says, “We know each one has a crew of three thousand Trogs, give or take, and a division of Trog marines in the barrack in the rear. They have berths for ten thousand there, just like our cruisers.”
“But they’ve taken huge casualties, right?”
Bird nods. "Back on Iapetus, we gave them a black eye."
“More than that,” I say. “And how many Grays and Trogs are on the moon, or in the battle stations, or on earth running things? Or do you think they’re all staying out in space and letting the MSS run the show?”
“We estimate half their strength is deployed to the moon, the battle stations, and the planet.”
“And they weren’t at full strength to start with, right?” I say. “Because they lost so many troops on Iapetus. What about the battle for the Free Army base?”
"That was mostly a naval engagement," he says. "Not much action on the ground. Which means we weren't in a position to put up much of a fight once they destroyed our fleet and defensive guns.”
“Do you think it’s safe to guess each cruiser still on the line is down to thirty percent on the low side and fifty percent on the high side?”
“I think the range is right,” says Bird.
I venture another guess. “I wonder if that’s why we were able to save ourselves from those six cruisers we encountered. If they didn’t have full bridge crews and weapons targeting crews, it would have made them less effective.”
“You could be right about that,” says Bird. “Which means they aren’t as strong as their numerical advantage in cruisers suggests.”
“And they’ll get weaker the more cruisers they bring online,” I say, “Because they’ll be spreading themselves thinner and thinner.”
“They’ll realize that at some point,” says Bird. “They’ll stop spreading themselves, but that doesn’t mean they won’t stop salvaging.”
“Hell,” I say, “there might be a depot out there now where they’re storing and repairing cruisers they hope to use again after they have the manpower.”
“If that’s true,” says Bird, “that would be one hell of a prize if we were somehow to win this war. We have no shortage of people on earth—”
“No matter how hard the Grays try,” I joke again.
“No matter,” agrees Bird. “We could train up the crews in simulators back on earth. Recruit a new navy, and in a few years, we’d have a large enough fleet to defeat anything the Trogs send our way.”
“Big dreams,” I say. “Humans, suddenly a power in this tiny spiral arm of the Milky Way.”
“Don’t turn cynical on me,” says Bird.
“Sorry, you missed the boat on that advice by about twenty-five years.”
“I suppose so,” agrees Bird. “But I know you see the value of that many cruisers. The derelicts plus the ones we might salvage if we win, that’d put us at well over two hundred. Throw in the Arizona class ships we could build if we had all of earth’s resources, and we’d have a fleet of four or five thousand before the Trogs could hope to get another fleet here.”
It sounds rosy.
“Can you imagine,” he says, “if we had even a thousand Arizona class ships with fully trained, experienced crews, no Trog fleet could stand against that. With the rest, with the technological advances built into ships like the Rusty Turd, then the Trogs wouldn’t be a problem.”
“And neither will the races they’re at war with in the other systems,” I say. “I mean, if those wars aren’t blowouts, then the tech those races have has to be comparable in capabilities to what the Trogs use. Logic says, if we can beat the Trogs, then we should be able to beat the others if they come this way.”
“Now,” says Bird, “doesn’t the optimism feel better?”
I shrug instead. War has a way of beating the optimism out of people no matter how many happy endings they can imagine.
Chapter 60
“What do we know about deployments?” I ask. “Do you have any of those stealthy scout ships or those little surveillance satellites operational?”
“We have one stealth scout left,” says Bird. “We have another we’ve been trying to get back online. We took some risks with them during the battle for Iapetus, and used them for something they were never designed for—as attack platforms. Our squadrons severely damaged nine or ten ships before the Grays figured out a countermeasure.”
“Which was?” I ask.
“They stopped searching with their grav sense and put up Trog lookouts. You know our stealth scouts are black against a black sky, but you can still see them by the stars their silhouettes occlude, or by light reflected from the sun. That’s hard for humans. The one thing we need to remember that we keep forgetting is Trog eye physiology isn’t the same as ours. Trogs have excellent night vision. So what might be hard for a human to see out in the dark of space isn’t necessarily difficult for a Trog to see.”
“So they saw the stealth scouts coming and shot them down?” I ask.
“That’s pretty much the way it went,” he answers. “All was going well at first, then one day we sent them up and lost nearly all of them.”
“That’s brutal.”
Bird nods.
“What about the satellite network?”
“The system is still up,” he says, “over a hundred satellites and signal relay buoys throughout the system, but the signal control center where we received and decrypted the data was destroyed along with the computers that handled the load. Punjari has a team working on salvage and repair, but we have a long way to go.”
“What about retrieving the satellites and buoys and reprogramming them to match whatever hardware we do have and then redeploying when we’re finished?”
"That's an option already discussed. It would be the fastest way to start the process of rebuilding the network, but we haven't been willing to risk a ship to go out and retrieve the hardware."
“What about the stealth scout?” I ask.
“We’ve been keeping it close to Iapetus as part of our early warning network in case the Trogs come back.”
“The Turd II could retrieve the satellites and buoys and redeploy them,” I suggest. “It wouldn’t be a stealthy solution, not by far, yet if we combined the runs with harrying attacks, then the Grays would never be the wiser. They’d likely see us coming in and out of bubble, but think we were scouting around for them.”
“If we’re going to have a chance,” says Bird, “having the intel advantage is necessary.”
“I’ll make a note of it,” I say. “Maybe enough little advantages exist that we can swing the battle our way, you know, enough to make the choice to stay feel less like suicide and more like courage." Changing the subject a tad, I say, "Let's say we can find a way to mount a credible resistance, maybe a guerilla-style campaign, wear the Trogs down, and find a way to get the information back to earth, so the people there see what we're doing. Do you think we can foment a grassroots rebellion?"
"Hard to say," says Bird. "You know what it's like on earth. Nobody's happy with the current system. The MSS has been selling their lies for so long, most people believe things are the way they are, they’re how they should be, and how they’ll always stay.”
“No,” I say a little too forcefully, “I don’t believe that. I can’t believe that. I agree that lots of people are true believers. Many people are too broken to even want to fight back, but most? No. I have to believe the majority will rise up in support if we give them hope.”
“If we give them enough hope,” says Bird, “all of them will revolt. People are followers. If they see the bandwagon rolling in a new direction, they’ll jump on.”
<
br /> “I think you’re right about that. What about the MSS?” I ask.
“The MSS?” Bird is thrown off the scent. “What do you mean?”
“I hate to even suggest it, but what are the chances we can ally with the MSS? The ones who are left just got screwed by the ones who went with the original Grays when they ran off.”
“Or,” says Bird, “they were thrilled with all the promotion opportunities that suddenly appeared.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “But they have to see, don’t they? They’re people, too. They have to know that what just happened to their bosses and the old guard could happen to them. They have to be suffering as much as the rest of the world. If not in terms of hunger, in terms of children lost to the war. There was a reason the Grays opened up the officer ranks to more than just the Koreans. I think they were running out of bodies to stand in front of the railguns. I’ll bet there are a lot of pissed-off mothers in Korea and a lot of angry brothers and sisters.”
“Assuming something like that was even possible,” says Bird, “assuming that bringing the Koreans into a coalition doesn’t alienate us from the rest of the planet, how would we even go about it?”
“Blair,” I say. “She practically grew up in the MSS. She was a mole there her whole life. She knows them, not just how they think and how they’ll react, she knows plenty of them personally.”
“Assuming,” says Brice, “the MSS didn’t purge everyone she ever knew after she defected to our side.”
“We could ask her,” I say.
“And you’d trust her with that,” says Bird, “opening up our flank to the Koreans?”
"I despise the woman," I say. "She's half an idiot when it comes to military matters, but as you've told me, she's a brilliant logistical administrator, and she successfully played the MSS game for years. She has untapped talents there. If we could get the MSS to turn to our side, I think we could make this happen."
"And what about afterward?" asks Bird. "What if we do ally with the MSS, and the people in the SDF and earth all go along with it, and we win? What happens after we expel the Trogs and the Grays? You know the MSS will try to seize power for themselves. We won’t be any better off than we were before.”
“Who says we have to pretend like they won’t be planning to do just that?” I ask. “I don’t have any problem with using them to help us win the war and then annihilating them at our earliest convenience.”
“You’d betray an ally that way?”
“I don’t see the MSS as an ally. But I don’t mind using them as a tool.”
“You think Blair can keep all that hidden?”
“I wouldn’t tell Blair that part. Would you?”
“No,” says Bird. “I don’t think I would either.”
Chapter 61
Bird is standing beside the helmsman’s chair, occupying the only empty floor space in the cramped bridge compartment. My mind full of questions, I linger in the doorway at the back of the bridge. I don’t have a reason to be there, it’s just more entertaining than sitting in the wardroom by myself or lying in my bunk and staring at the curtains.
The journey in from the rendezvous has taken longer than expected, well, longer than I expected. The freighters are slower than the Trog battlewagon I took out there. Bird and I have had long hours to discuss and rethink and second-guess. Now, I need something to keep my hands and feet busy, impossible problems to solve in short timeframes, the emotional intensity of a battle to wake me up from a stupor I feel like the long journey is dragging me into.
And I’m anxious to see my crew.
In more than a year, this is the longest I’ve been away from Silva, and I find I’m missing her. It’s strange to me how attached I’ve become. Though, as Phil pointed out, what I have with Silva is what I’ve always wanted. It makes me wonder sometimes if I’d met her at that MSS social function all those years ago instead of Claire, if I’d be sitting in the grav factory back in Frisco right now, sweating, coaxing symbiotic microbes into place on grav plates, and daydreaming about getting home in time to play catch or go skiing with my kids.
That’s the life I yearned for, no matter how much I told myself I needed to fight the Grays for earth’s freedom.
The pilot has the ship skimming over the surface of Iapetus. The equatorial mountain range is on our left. The moon’s relatively flat surface spreads to the horizon on our right. There’s no Saturn in the sky. It’s on the other side of Iapetus at the moment, so only stars and a few of Saturn’s other small moons are above us.
As we close in on the UN base complex, I don’t need to see the airlocks and hangars cut into the face of mile-tall cliffs to know. Off-color debris spreads across the plane below us, reminding me of the steep price the defenders paid to keep their subterranean secret away from the Trogs.
The pilot steers the freighter toward the base of the cliffs, passing most of the debris, finally turning into a ravine a half-mile wide, with walls on either side standing so tall I can’t see the sky. The freighter slows as it slips into the chasm. As the walls close in on our sides, I see on the floor the scatter of stone and steel, blasted and broken. It’s a mini-version of the destruction we saw out on the plain. It tells me what I’m going to see at the end of this ravine.
Way up on one of the walls, I spot something that doesn’t belong there. It takes a moment for me to understand what it is—a gun emplacement. Only it doesn’t look to have been blasted.
“Is that manned?” I ask.
Bird turns to see me. “Didn’t realize you were there.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to sneak up.”
Bird points up through the wide windows. “Up there, and over there. There, too.”
Even with Bird pointing them out, the other emplacements are difficult to spot.
Bird turns to look at me. “We have a small hangar down here. The Trogs didn’t find it until after they’d already landed troops and took most of the upper levels. They blasted this place, but it didn’t take the pounding from above like the larger hangars did.”
“Everybody gets lazy,” I respond, because I figure I should say something.
“Because of the topography, they couldn’t hit from above.” Bird points at the floor of the canyon. “It looks like a lot of debris out here, but the hangar is in pretty good shape. Most of the equipment we’ve been able to salvage came from this part of the base.”
The farther in we go, the more I see. “Do you really think you can stand against another Trog fleet?”
“No,” says Bird. “This little base we have set up here is functional, there’s no doubt about that. It’s bait. If the Trogs come back, we want them to think this is it, all that remains of us. They’ll beat us here. They’ll destroy this base and take heavy losses doing it. We’re so deep in this canyon our gun positions can’t be hit from above. To attack, the Trogs will have to squeeze one of their big cruisers between the walls. They won’t have any room to maneuver, and our gunners won’t be able to miss. After we destroy enough of their starships trying to come down this canyon, then they’ll have to attack on foot, and we’ll slaughter more of them.”
“They won’t give up,” I tell him. They never do, not until you kill their Gray masters.
“We don’t expect to win here,” says Bird. “The hangar up here and the installation in the mountain behind is functional, but it’s a decoy, and it's bait. This canyon is a meat grinder. None of this is set up for us to win. Our defenses are set up to maximize Trog casualties. Kill and retreat, that's our strategy here.”
I approve.
“When they do take this small complex, they’ll think they’ve won again. That’s the most important role of this place. If the Grays come to realize we’re still using Iapetus for operations, this will be the base they find, not the one we have buried twenty klicks from here.”
“Same trick twice,” I say. “Just like last time. You put up a fight on the surface so they won’t go deep to
root you out.”
“And if they try, we have all the access tunnels wired with explosives. Nobody has the patience to dig through twenty kilometers of rock in the hopes they might discover a cavern full of rebels at the end.”
I hope he’s right about that.
Pointing toward the edge of the cliffs overhead, Bird says, “We have radar stations up top, and others hidden in the debris ring left around Iapetus from the battle. Our largest orbital observation station is in the broken front third of a Trog cruiser. We have a few hundred observers in the posts in orbit, constantly monitoring Saturn and everything in the vicinity. We should have plenty of warning when they come.”
A score of orange flashes sweeps past the windshield, each shimmering blue under hard g acceleration. I feel, as much as see, their boots land on the hull. I’m stepping back into the corridor and pulling up my weapon as Bird starts to laugh.
“Friendlies?” I ask.
“Our soldiers are experienced in tunnel fighting, mostly," says Bird. "Sergeants Brice, Silva, Lenox, and Peterson are teaching my troops what they’ve learned fighting out in the void.”
“You promoted my whole crew?”
“What they’ve learned is invaluable.”
I look up, feeling the bodies moving around on top of the freighter’s steel hull. “They’re practicing an assault on a ship?”
“It worked for you,” says Bird. “More than once, if I recall.”
“Yeah,” I agree. “More than once.”
“The Grays are used to one style of war. As long as they’re vulnerable to guerrilla-style attacks, we should train to take advantage of the weakness.”
I nod. I’m proud of my crew.
Making a turn past a jagged spire of rock, the pilot follows the ravine, and before us, right at the end, I see a familiar rectangular hole cut out of the craggy wall. Inside, it's black, but my grav sense makes out the shape of another freighter, several stealthy scout ships in various states of disrepair, and the Turd II.
