by Bobby Adair
“So, no ship.”
“No.”
"Too bad," says Parker, "maybe with some ships like that shooting the Trog cruisers out of the sky, you could give earth enough hope to try and fight again. Without your ship, what have you got—me? My crew? A network of insurgents? That’s not enough.”
“What if we could find a way to give you hope?” I ask. “You and all the people of earth?”
“Real hope?” she asks. “Or propaganda?”
“Real,” I say. “I don’t want anyone to risk their lives for something I don’t think will work.”
“Maybe,” she says. “I don’t know what would be enough, but I suppose if you could pull something off, something big enough that the people of earth could look up and think they had a real chance, then yeah, maybe hope would be enough to make them want to get back in the war.”
“If everybody thinks they’re going to die anyway,” I say. “If they think they’re seeing the last of the humans, then why not fight? What have you got to lose?”
“What have you got to lose?” Parker laughs. “You might want to work on something more inspirational than that.”
Chapter 10
“Don’t be so glum,” Phil tells me.
We’re in the cramped hold of the stealth scout, slowly making our escape. Brice is leaning against the wall again, sleeping, or pretending to—again. Phil and Nicky are sitting across from me. I feel like I’m on stage. “I’m just thinking.”
“You thought it was going to be easy,” says Phil.
“No.” Maybe. I don’t know. Phil might be right. At least a little bit.
“You had to know the first earth humans you came across weren’t going to drop everything and join up, right?”
“Phil, are you trying to make me feel worse about this?”
“I want to make sure we’re both being realistic.”
“I’m realistic, Phil. Okay?”
“It’s not the end. You know that, right?”
“Others might respond differently. There have to be cadres of revolutionaries all over earth, just waiting for a chance to strike. They’re the people we need to find.”
“Phil, you’re patronizing me now. I know you’d prefer to take this setback as proof we’re wasting our time on this effort and we should head out to the colonies instead.”
“I do prefer that,” says Phil. “But we’ve settled this question. Now we’re making the best of it.”
“Yippee,” says Brice, not bothering to open his eyes, or even fake the enthusiasm.
I say, “Don’t you start, Brice. You and I talked about this, too. You and I don’t have a choice. We are what we are.”
“You shouldn’t ever listen to me,” he says. “I’m too jaded to have valid opinions.”
I groan. “You guys piss me off, sometimes.”
Brice goes back to pretending he's asleep.
Phil looks away and loses himself in his thoughts.
I let it all lie for a bit, but it won’t leave my mind. Without a plan, I’m lost. “I don’t like pinning all of our hopes on Blair.”
“It’s all we have at the moment,” says Phil. “Besides, she’s not just looking for traitors in the MSS. She’s working to secure the intel on all the seditious groups on earth they’re tracking. Those are the people who’ll join up for another war.”
“And if Blair produces nothing?” I ask.
“We could always land in Omaha or something,” chuckles Brice, “and ask anyone who passes by if they want to join the revolution.”
“Why are you being such an asshole?” I ask.
Brice finally goes to the trouble to open his eyes and join us. “I thought everyone was past speculating on the nature of my being.”
“You inspire us to explore,” I say.
“That makes me feel good.”
“I doubt it.”
“You should,” says Brice.
“You two were made for each other,” says Phil.
“He doesn’t appreciate my tactical genius,” replies Brice.
“That’s because he doesn’t like it when people outshine him,” says Phil.
“How did this turn into you two against me?” I ask.
“I thought we were talking about my tactical genius,” taunts Brice.
“My god,” I shout. “Do you have something you need to say? Or do you need to get something off your chest?”
“Just the answer to your problems,” says Brice.
“The answer?” I ask.
“You know, the big plan to make this whole revolution work.”
The sparring stops. I’m ready to listen. “Tell me.”
“That battle station we passed on the way in,” says Brice, “the one we did the fly-by on.”
“Yeah?” I prompt.
Brice nods at Nicky and Phil. “They said there was just one clan of Grays running the show there, right?
Phil confirms with a nod.
“A weak clan,” says Brice. “How many Grays were there on the station? A dozen? Two dozen?”
“Something like that,” says Phil.
“And Trogs?” asks Brice. “A few thousand?”
“Probably not that many,” says Phil.
“And how many humans?” asks Brice.
“We’re not sure,” answers Phil.
“Doesn’t matter anyway,” replies Brice. “The thing we’re all missing here is that we can win this war if we change tactics and use the Grays’ weaknesses against them. We saw it on the Potato, and we saw the answer out in 61 Cygni. Trogs are slaves. They live by an honor code that keeps them in chains as much as anything else. We keep acting like we need to kill 6,000 Grays or seventy thousand Trogs. We don’t. We just need to kill a few dozen Grays on that one battle station.”
“Not exactly,” says Phil.
"Not to win the war," says Brice, "but if we commando in and take out the Gray leadership on that one station, then we acquire a few thousand Trogs for free, and maybe humans on board see what we'd done, and they join up. Suddenly our little army doubles in size."
“And maybe we can leverage that force into taking out the next smallest clan,” I guess. “That’s what you’re thinking, right?”
“Knock down the smallest domino first,” says Brice. “The next one in line falls easier.”
“It’s not that easy,” says Phil. “They have the moon base. They still have more than sixty cruisers. They have Arizona Class ships now.”
"No," I agree. "It's not that easy, yet Brice's idea might be the key. We might be able to come up with a plan that'll work."
“See?” says Brice. “I told you. Tactical genius.”
I comm up to Chikere. “Turn the ship around. We’re going to be staying in system for a while.”
“How long?” he asks. “I’ve only got fuel for two or three weeks.”
“Maybe all of it,” I tell him. “Send a message to Bird and tell him what we’re up to.”
Chapter 11
It takes us thirteen days to map out the hierarchy of the Gray clans controlling the battle stations while sitting in the cramped all-purpose rear compartment of Chikere’s scout ship. Thirteen days of radioed requests that we return to Iapetus. Thirteen days of worry, orbiting among our enemies.
We watched cruisers come in to refuel, a squadron at a time, all served by tenders up from earth, meeting in geosynchronous orbit high over an empty stretch of water in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. When we were able to sneak in close enough, Phil and Nicky snooped the details of their clan structures.
We finished our mission with dozens of orbits around the moon, learning what we could of troop strengths and deployment, as well as Gray clan organization. According to Phil and Nicky, they guessed Grays, numbering in the thousands, were on the moon, all in one area. The Grays were hiding out in the subterranean structures beneath the densest concentration of railgun batteries, the place where the original Gr
ay conquerors landed all those years ago and started building the massive guns they’d eventually use to subdue the earth.
Nearly as good as the rest of it, Parker managed to get to a radio, a rare find in a Gray-controlled system. Lucky for us, the MSS still depends on them. So they’re around, just not widely used or their existence common knowledge. The upshot, Parker is in. Her people are spreading Phil’s report to all the workers on Rodman station, giving humanity a glimpse into their future.
On the flip side, we also intercepted a radio message from Blair, her second, beamed toward one of the relay satellites for eventual delivery to Bird. She'd already heard about the history document circulating, and she was livid, claiming it could throw off her meticulous plan.
“Every minute we spent there was worth it,” I tell Bird.
After two hours of sitting behind his desk in the bowels of Iapetus’s tunnel system, kicking around ideas for mounting an attack, Bird yawns and stands up to stretch. Phil and I stay in our seats with Nicky standing between us. Brice remains on his feet, leaning against a wall.
“What are you thinking?” I ask.
“It’s not enough,” answers Bird. “I don’t doubt you can find a way in and kill the Grays running Rodman station, but after that, everything falls apart. You don’t know their Trogs will follow you. They might all kill themselves for having failed their masters. Even if they don’t, how effective can they be at fighting? Will they defend the station? How would you get them to another station to mount the next attack?”
“I agree,” I say. “I don’t think one commando raid on one battle station will turn the tide of the war. What I think we get out of it is a template for success. We’ve been fighting this war all wrong since day one. When the Trogs arrived in system, our Grays fought them using the same tactics they’ve always used, only they plugged humans into the cannon-fodder role instead of Trogs. The SDF and MSS fought the war, and lost using Gray tactics. With few exceptions, we’re doing the same. We need to stop fighting their war their way and attack them asymmetrically, pitting our strengths against their weaknesses.”
“Asymmetrically?” asks Bird. “You gonna blow buzzwords up my ass now?”
“Sit down,” I ask. “Please. You’re tired. You’re stressed. This is the first time I’ve seen you this way. What’s going on?”
Bird slumps in his chair and gathers his strength. He says, “We can’t load all the stasis pods onto the cruiser.”
“It’s big enough, isn’t it?” I ask.
“The math doesn’t work out,” says Brice. “Once we calculate the quantity of fuel we need to fly the cruiser out to the nearest colony, it gets pretty simple. For every kilogram of payload, we need to add over a hundred kilograms of hydrogen to power the reactors.”
“What about reactor optimization?” I ask. “Like your engineers did with the Turd II? What about drive array optimization?”
“They’re working with the drive array as best they can,” says Bird, “but without real-world tests, there’s only so much we can do.”
“And you can’t do the tests,” guesses Phil, “because the grav signature emitted from driving a cruiser that size around the solar system might attract attention.”
“That,” agrees Bird, “or a mistake in the calculations might lead to the ship breaking up mid-jump."
“And you’re already loading it with pods,” I recall.
“And it’s the only cruiser we have,” says Bird.
“Waiting for the freighters to haul the load,” says Phil, recounting an earlier conversation we all had, “will take decades.”
“On the reactor optimizations,” says Bird, “again, there’s only so much we can do. We don’t have the human or computational resources here to optimize reactors of that size. Our engineers and physicists have done all their work on reactors that fit in our freighters, and those reactors aren’t much bigger than the one in the Turd II. On the larger reactors, we’re on new ground. We have no way of knowing whether the theory behind any potential change will have catastrophic consequences.”
“What have you been doing, then?” I ask.
“Playing the odds,” says Bird. “The changes we felt highly confident in were made, but the more pods we load, the less tolerant of the risk I get.” He rubs his eyes with his palms. “I haven’t been sleeping.”
“Sometimes life just deals a crap hand,” I say. “The way I see it, accept your choices. You send the cruiser with what you can load, and let the others wait on the freighters.”
“That’ll take years and years,” says Bird.
“How many pods are we talking about?” I ask.
“Nearly four thousand,” he answers.
“The way I see it,” says Brice, “it’s simple. We postpone the war, or put those four thousand at risk?”
“When hostilities reignite,” says Bird, “Iapetus will be targeted. That’s inevitable. Those four thousand will almost surely die. They'll never even know what happened. Their last memories will be going into the pod and putting their trust in me and my people to save them.”
“We can’t postpone,” I say, “because our window of opportunity won’t stay open that long. The Trogs could set up a new supply depot. They could start sending reinforcements here. If we're going to fight, we need to do it now. Or we give up, and all go to the colonies."
“Exactly,” says Bird, “and abandon all the billions still on earth.”
“That’s the only question we need to answer,” I say. “Are we going to fight or run, that’s it. Once we decide, the rest follows from there.”
“What about the four thousand pods we can’t ship?” asks Brice. “How do you pick who stays and who goes?”
“Most of those going are already loaded,” I guess, glancing at Bird for confirmation.
He gives me a nod and I continue, “There’s little to decide, which is too bad.”
“Too bad?” asks Phil. “How’s that?”
“If we’re going to be stuck with four thousand,” I deduce, “and we’re going back to war, we’d be better served pulling those people from their pods and putting a weapon in their hands. Better yet, if we’d loaded the cruiser in reverse order according to how valuable someone might be to the revolution here... ”
“That’s exactly what I did,” says Bird.
“What?” Phil asks. “You knew from the beginning this was going to happen?”
“The cruiser’s payload was always going to depend on how much weight we could strip out of it,” says Bird. “We hoped we’d be able to lighten it enough. Unfortunately, my engineers guessed early on we wouldn’t be able to transport everyone. There was no way to know how many we'd have left. Within a week of capturing the cruiser, I had a committee of my officers prioritizing the loading queue.”
“So what we have left in the pods,” I ask, “they’re the best soldiers we could hope to get out of the bunch?”
“Not just soldiers,” says Bird. “We have pilots, engineers, medical personnel—backups for any skillset where we’re running a little thin. We even have some of Gustafson’s people in case we need some experienced bugheads like you two.”
“How many?” I ask.
“Eleven,” answers Bird.
“How many more are already loaded?” I ask.
“Nearly forty,” he says. “I’d have to check the records.”
“How many of Gustafson’s bugheads have already gone to the colonies?” I ask.
“The people who’ve already gone,” says Bird, “are enough to continue our efforts out in the colonies. I hate to use the word—everyone still here is expendable. We don’t want to lose any of these people, but that’s the truth of it.”
“We need Gustafson’s people to be taken off the cruiser,” I tell him. “We’ll need every one of them if we’re going to make this war work out for us.”
“What are you thinking?” asks Phil.
“The sticking point in our
plan of going commando into a battle station and taking out the Gray leadership has been that we only have one Phil. You can communicate effectively with the surviving Grays and work out the surrender of their Trogs. In case the Grays all die, you can communicate with the Trogs—”
“You can communicate with Trogs as well as I can, now,” says Phil.
“What I’m getting to,” I tell him, “is we need to bring Gustafson’s bugheads up to speed, putting them with you and Nicky until they can make that connection with the Grays. You and I are no longer the failure points in the plan. We can then launch separate, simultaneous raids on every station and the moon.”
“I like that better than your domino theory,” says Brice, “but our problem is four-fold. The Grays control the battle stations, they control earth through the MSS, they control the moon with its heavy railguns specifically built to blast earth cities into dust, and the have the fleet. Taking control of the battle stations won’t do us any good. First, the Trogs have already proven that our battle stations aren’t powerful enough to stand against a concerted attack by sixty Trog cruisers. Worse still, without help from earth, we won’t be able to resupply the stations. It’d only be a matter of time before they fell. If you could overcome those two problems, the Trogs still control the moon base and there’s nothing to stop them from bombing the earth again, or even the battle stations, until we surrender again.”
“Again,” mutters Bird. “Surrender is getting damned old.”
“We won’t surrender again,” I tell them. “With Gustafson’s bugheads, and another four thousand fighters, we can mount a surprise attack on the battle stations and win. We can bomb the moon base from the battle stations if we have to, and take out the big guns.”
“Lots of people will die,” says Phil.
“Fewer than if the Grays up there start bombing cities on earth again,” I argue. “If we take out those guns, the moon becomes irrelevant. It’ll take years to rebuild.”
“Months,” says Brice.
“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “That takes two of the four pillars of Trog power off the table. If the battle stations fall, and earth realizes for the first time in more than a generation it doesn’t have a gun pointed at its head, there’s nothing to stop it from overthrowing the few Grays and Trogs on the planet.”
