by Marko Kloos
“Kendra is at socaball practice. Amelia is still in bed. I’m being merciful because tomorrow isn’t a school day, and because she volunteered to help me this afternoon with the food for the spouse association meeting.”
“That’s still a thing?”
“It’s never not a thing,” Mairi said. “I must have baked a thousand cakes and hand pies for the association over the years.”
After the last six months, the screen in front of Dunstan was like a window into another world, a normal one where people didn’t have to wear vacsuits, didn’t have to memorize the exact location of the nearest escape pod hatch. He was disappointed that he wouldn’t be able to see his daughter’s faces, but he was glad they were busy with a regular life, unaware of the new hazards that had appeared out here between the planets.
“Two weeks’ leave, and then three months of shore duty,” he said. “And I have no idea what I’m getting after that. All I know is that it won’t be this old girl. She’ll be in the breakdown yard by then.”
“It would be nice if they doubled up on your shore duty time after socking you with a surprise double deployment,” his wife said. She was cutting up strawberries while she talked on the vidcom, her hands trimming the little green leaves and stems with a paring knife seemingly on autopilot.
“It would be nice. But you know it won’t happen in this lifetime.”
“I know. Because the navy treats its people almost as well as it does its ships.” Mairi flicked another strawberry stem into the garbage without having to aim.
“Only because they can sell the ships for scrap when they’re done with them,” Dunstan said with a smile.
He checked the time on the bulkhead display in his cabin. The countdown to docking was close to the point where he needed to be present in the AIC again.
“I have to go and make sure we dock without putting any more dents into the hull,” he said. “Not that it matters much at this point. I’ll let you know what’s going on once we’re on Rhodia One and get our orders for surface transport.”
“Okay. I’m glad that you’re at least overhead already. And not that I’m happy your ship got damaged. But it’s good to know they won’t be able to refuel it and send you right back out like they did last time. Love you.”
“Love you, too. See you very soon.” He blew a kiss at the screen and swiped his hand to make the projection disappear.
Dunstan got up from the edge of his bunk and straightened out his uniform overalls. His shipboard bag was strapped down on top of the mattress, packed and ready to go. Once they docked, he’d retrieve his bag and leave through the main collar, and then he’d never see these bulkheads again. He’d served on many ships, but this goodbye felt more poignant somehow. Minotaur had carried all of them into battle and back home faithfully despite her age and the neglect the fleet had shown her, and now the navy would reward her by having her torn apart with plasma cutters.
He opened the door of his cabin and stepped out into the passageway, then took a left turn to walk to the AIC. On the way, crew members made way as he passed through, and he spread around a few words of upbeat encouragement. They’d been in a genuine battle now, not just a brief trading of shots with a pirate corvette. They had fought a far more powerful warship and gotten in a blow or two without taking casualties. Even if the Gretian cruiser had a green crew and no missiles in her magazines, it was a statistically unlikely outcome. It made everyone on his crew stand a bit taller.
The AIC staff looked as busy and alert as ever, but Dunstan knew that this was the part of a cruise when errors were most likely to creep in. With their home planet spread out underneath and the space station just in front, everyone was halfway home in their heads already. He sat down on his command couch and observed the choreography of the procedures ballet for a little while, all the parts of the command machine working together to get the ship to her docking ring as precisely and safely as possible. Rhodia One was as busy as ever, but Dunstan saw mostly merchant traffic, and precious few warships. The navy had started the war with two hundred ships and ended it with 1,300. Now they were back down to two hundred, and almost half of that number were not ready for deployment for various reasons. The rest had to carry the workload of patrolling all Rhodian space and safeguarding the transit lanes as they moved through the navy’s sphere of control. It had been enough until recently, when the pirates had started to become more numerous and far more violent seemingly overnight. Now the fleet was stretched to the breaking point and maybe already beyond. The Gretian cruiser was still out there, and its simple presence in Rhodian space had already cost the fleet a destroyed cruiser and a damaged frigate that was beyond repair. And now Home Fleet was short four more ships, tied up on a search-and-destroy mission.
“Sir, we are getting a request from Rhodia control,” Lieutenant Mayler said. “They say one of the station’s shuttles just had a near miss with an unidentified ship in low orbit. They claim it didn’t show on the sensors until the last moment. Control is asking all units in the area to link into AEGIS and do a sensor sweep facing planetside.”
Dunstan did a double take.
“That is super odd. Confirm the request, Lieutenant. Link us up with AEGIS and bring up the sensor suite. Helm, bring the bow around to zero by negative one niner, steady on your heading and velocity.”
“Bringing the bow around to zero by negative one niner, steady on heading and velocity, aye,” Boyer confirmed.
“We have a data link to AEGIS,” Mayler said. “Firing up active sensors.”
The other ships in the pattern followed the request as well. Within a minute, a dozen nearby navy units added their own sensor data to the big picture, turning themselves into extended arrays for AEGIS, the planetary strategic defense network. Dunstan checked the class tags on the other ships and saw that Minotaur was the biggest unit in the line. The rest of the navy presence in the immediate area consisted of tugboats, supply ships, tankers, and a few escort corvettes.
And we’re not exactly in prime fighting shape right now, Dunstan thought, trying to suppress a kindling sense of unease. Let’s hope it’s a joyriding civvie in a speed yacht, buzzing shuttles for the fun of it.
They watched the tactical display as the sensors of the combined ad hoc drone fleet swept the space between upper and lower orbit. Three shuttles popped up at various altitudes, all headed for Rhodia One and flashing proper beacons and ID.
“Nothing on active, sir. From us or anyone else,” Mayler said. “Just tagged and scheduled traffic. And a lot of background noise from the surface.”
“I wonder what the shuttle jockey was drinking, then,” Dunstan said. “I don’t need any last-minute scares like that.”
“Ground-to-orbit transport isn’t the most exciting job in the fleet,” Bosworth replied. “If I had to do the same hop twice a day for a year, I’d start looking for stuff to dogfight too.”
On the tactical plot, two new contacts appeared between the sensor picket and the inner atmosphere boundary. They seemed to stand still in the air for a moment. Then they streaked off in different directions, accelerating so quickly they could only be one thing. The AI classified them as hostile instantly, and the shock of surprise that jolted through Dunstan made him react automatically.
“Action stations,” he bellowed.
“Bandit, bandit. Missile launch at 25 degrees by 4, distance 512 kilometers. Accelerating at fifty g.” Mayler had jumped to his station and was reading off the values next to the icon as the action stations alert blared all over the ship. His face showed the same profound disbelief Dunstan felt.
“That’s way inside the ballistic defense belt,” Dunstan said. “Bring the reactor up and set the point defenses to active. Tell the cargo cans on either side of us to keep their distance. And get a trajectory on that ordnance now.”
“One is heading our way, the other . . . sir, they fired the second one at the surface. Time to impact on the second bird is two minutes.”
“Active sear
ch the launch point and scan ahead. Find that launch platform.”
Dunstan looked at the diverging missile trajectories, and cold fear shouldered aside his disbelief. Whoever just launched missiles had fired from inside the planet’s antimissile defense belt, a network of sensors, rail guns, and interceptor missile batteries that orbited Rhodia and extended into the space around the planet for thousands of kilometers. It was meant to protect against ballistic attacks from Gretia like the one that had crippled the energy relays at Hades three years into the war. But these missiles had been carried in and fired at point-blank range, on the wrong side of the defensive ring. What they were witnessing was supposed to be so unlikely as to be statistically irrelevant, but the evidence was in front of them and streaking through the atmosphere at fifty-g acceleration.
“Unannounced planetary defense drill,” Bosworth said. “They’re checking to see if we’re still on our feet ten minutes away from the barn.”
“Afraid not, Lieutenant. Unless the AI has gone completely insane,” Dunstan replied.
“The first bird is changing aspect. Sir . . . it’s not aimed at us.” Mayler looked up from the plot. “It’s aimed at Rhodia One.”
A few dozen kilometers to their portside, Rhodia One was taking up millions of cubic meters of orbital space. It was a big and valuable target that had been positioned on the inside of the ballistic defense belt for a good reason. The incoming ordnance streaked in from the wrong side, the one direction the defensive planners never expected to have to consider as a vector for incoming fire. Whatever was heading their way, it was unlikely to destroy the station—Minotaur herself wouldn’t have been able to do that trick even with her entire load of antiship missiles—but it could still cause catastrophic damage.
“Active searching the launch area. New contact, designate Zulu-1, bearing 355 degrees by 10. Small ship, high heat signature. They just lit their drive, sir. Distance six hundred ninety kilometers.”
Dunstan opened his mouth to order Mayler to activate the rail guns and get a target bearing but dismissed the idea right away. The missiles and the bogey all had the planetary surface as a backstop. Any slugs that missed would travel through the atmosphere at ten kilometers per second and hit the ground, or whatever got in the way, with enough energy to punch through an arcology’s top fifty levels. And the slugs would never catch the second missile, which was now outracing anything they could have thrown after it.
“Lock up Zulu-1 with the fire control. We have no missiles left, but they don’t know that. Maybe they’ll do something dumb.”
“Target locked,” Mayler said. “They are really hauling ass, sir. Bogey is burning at fifteen g, up and away. And it’s a weak sensor return even at this range. First missile is headed straight for Rhodia One. It’ll cross into our point-defense bubble, but for just a few seconds.”
“The starboard capacitor bank is still down,” Bosworth reminded them. “We won’t be able to engage anything coming up on that side. Helm, turn our bow forty degrees to starboard.”
“Forty degrees starboard on the bow, helm aye.”
The AIC was barely controlled chaos. Nobody had expected to hear another action stations alert on this ship, not at home and ten minutes from docking. It was like waking up to see a burglar in the room and having to go from a sleep state into a full-on fight in the span of a second or two.
“That bogey is going to outrun us. We can barely do four g. There’s nothing in the neighborhood that can catch him,” Mayler said.
“Forget him. Nothing we could do about him even with a healthy drive. He’s on AEGIS—let the fleet track him. Focus on those missiles, please.”
“Missile one will cross our bow and dip into our engagement range in twenty-three seconds. Missile two is headed for the southern continent. Kelpie Peninsula. Time to impact, one minute, ten seconds.”
This is going to be bad, Dunstan thought in dismay. A missile strike on the home world, right underneath the noses of Home Fleet.
“They’re small missiles, sir. AI says they’re 550-millimeter antiship ordnance. But there’s no signature coming from those seeker heads. They fired them dumb, sir. Ballistic.”
“Explains why they felt the need to get so damn close. Point-defense status, report.”
“Portside emitters energized; AI is tracking missile one. Crossing the edge of our engagement envelope in ten seconds,” Mayler replied. “We’ll have less than two seconds for our shot.”
“Then don’t miss,” Dunstan said. “That’s an order.”
The missile streaked across their bow and toward their port side, a hundred kilometers away, continuing its mindless run at Rhodia One. Without active guidance, it wouldn’t be able to dodge point-defense fire, but it also made the warhead impervious to the AI’s electronic warfare attempts.
“The reactor is only at sixty percent,” Bosworth warned.
“Allocate everything to the portside PD emitters.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Three . . . two . . . one. Firing,” Mayler said.
The lights and consoles in the AIC went out without so much as a residual flicker, turning off every screen projection in the room and leaving them all in complete darkness. A moment later, the emergency lighting came on, and the screens came back to life. The sudden lightness Dunstan felt could only mean that the ship’s gravmag unit had stopped.
“Reactor failsafe kicked in,” Bosworth read off his screen. “Power is gone. Sensors are down. Gravmag array is down. No propulsion. Point defense is out.”
“Hells, just read off what’s still working.”
“Not much, sir. Comms and data links are coming back on right now on reserve power. That’s not going to last long. We have thirty minutes of life support and no gravity. Sending out emergency broadcast right now.”
“Just tell me we got that missile,” Dunstan said.
Mayler looked at the screen that had just now rematerialized in front of his station. In the red glow of the emergency lighting, Dunstan could see the sweat glistening on the lieutenant’s forehead.
“We splashed the first missile, sir. The second one is thirty-five seconds to impact.”
“And not a damn thing we can do about that one,” Dunstan said. “Put out a distress call. And if you’re the praying kind, ask the gods to make sure that bird is going to hit nothing but volcanic rock down there.”
“They’re tracking it with nine different stations. It’ll hit somewhere between the Norfolk-9 and Cumbria-1 arcologies. Twenty-five seconds to impact.”
Standard medium-caliber ship killer, Dunstan thought. Deadly to a frigate, a fart in the wind against a planetary target. Even if it scores a direct hit on an arcology. They should have just fired it at the station as well.
They watched impotently as the missile followed its projected trajectory on the plot. In the last ten seconds, the AI changed the arc a little to adjust for the friction of the warhead as it sliced through the lower layer of the atmosphere. Dunstan didn’t have a visual on the bird, but he knew that the superheated plasma around the shielded warhead would make it look like it was trailing fire.
“Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Impact,” Mayler narrated. “Enemy warhead strike on the planetary surface, two point six kilometers east-southeast of Norfolk-9.”
At least it wasn’t the northern half of the continent, Dunstan thought, and instantly felt shame for his selfishness, thinking about the safety of his own wife and children first.
Twenty seconds of tense silence followed as Mayler tried to get a visual feed from the target area. Then another screen popped up in front of Bosworth’s station, and the comms chatter in the background seemed to increase tenfold. Even in the dim red light of the AIC, Dunstan could tell that his XO had just gone ashen faced.
“Nuclear warhead strike on the planetary surface,” he amended Mayler’s report with a cracking voice. “They confirmed the thermal bloom and radiation spike from orbit. Two point six klicks from Norfolk-9. Estimated at tw
enty kilotons yield.”
There were cries of anger and shouts of disbelief in the AIC. Dunstan felt a sudden weakness that would have made his legs tremble if he hadn’t been strapped down on a gravity couch.
Not even the Gretians had used nukes against civilian targets in the war. All the combatants had followed an unspoken agreement to limit the use of nuclear warheads to space and against valid military objectives, and even then they had been employed very sparingly over the years. Everyone, including the Gretians, had been afraid of the atomic demon slipping its leash, of things going out of control in ways that ended in wholesale nuclear exchanges between planets. He didn’t think much of the Gretians, but Dunstan had always thought that even the most dedicated and fanatical Blackguard wouldn’t launch an atomic warhead at a civilian target. Once nukes started flying, there was a terrible temptation on both sides to follow up with more, to seek easy answers to difficult strategic problems in kilotons and then megatons.
Just twenty kilotons. A small tactical warhead, not a city buster. But that close to an arcology. Gods.
“Flash traffic from fleet command,” Bosworth shouted into the din. “Planetary Defense Condition 1. I repeat, all military units in the Rhodia AO are ordered to Planetary Defense Condition 1.”
The voices died down, and a moment of shocked silence followed. Then Dunstan heard a few sobs. PLADEC-1 was the highest readiness level for the military. It meant that command expected war to be imminent and all but unavoidable. Whatever else it would mean for him and his crew, PLADEC-1 also meant they just had their enlistments extended indefinitely, to serve according to the needs of the navy until the crisis was over. The last time the Rhodian military had gone to PLADEC-1, war had broken out two days later, and Dunstan hadn’t come home again on leave for a year and a half.
“XO, all-ship announcement,” he ordered, then looked up at his rattled executive officer when the open-channel signal didn’t come right away as expected.
“Lieutenant Bosworth.”
Bosworth was so shaken that it took him an uncharacteristically long five-second span before his hands could manage to punch the right data fields.
