That made it a handy cover story.
><><
The shuttle set down on a roughly potato-shaped hunk of nondescript matter, nine kilometers long by five-and-a-fraction at its widest. Like most of these smallish rocks, it had no name beyond its ID number.
“Good landing, Kamilla.” Wu turned her head. Raised her voice to be heard in the adjoining compartment. “Suit-up, people. I want us all outside and working within the half-hour.”
Her four subordinates groaned in the expected, even time-honored manner.
Holding back a grin, Wu wished she could join in. Nobody loved being encased in environmental suits for hours on end—not even a crew of third- and fourth-generation rock-pushers. But this part of their mission was as old and familiar to the five as the differing microgravity levels they experienced from one asteroid to the next.
Twenty-four minutes later, the last figure emerged from the shuttle airlock.
Three unloaded gear while the other two pinpointed the partially hollowed-out rock’s center of mass and calculated exactly how much acceleration stress the obscure asteroid could tolerate without fracturing. In contrast to the safe and leisurely pace required in civilian operations, if this rock was ever forced from its normal orbit it must move with every bit of delta-V it could endure.
><><
“Targeting and nav. computers positioned and operational, Major.”
“Very good, Vineeta.” Edwina Wu tongued in a different suit frequency. “Stacie?”
“One second, Eddie. Okay. Yeah, that’s good. How ‘bout on your end, Kami?”
The Major waited patiently as the onetime couple traded data points. No matter what she’d told Bence, she was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly the two interacted mere days after things came apart between them.
“That’s it,’ Stacie Inouye said and redirected his signal exclusively to his CO. “Two more hidden thruster arrays positioned, Eddie.”
“That all of them?”
“Affirmative. Fifteen extra-high-performance pods in all. Ready to fire. They’ll be able to steer this rock whichever direction we want. And move it pretty damn fast, comparatively speaking.”
“Outstanding.” Wu shifted frequencies again. “Bence?”
“Receiver set-up complete, Major. I’ll have it hooked into everything else inside the hour. Then all we’ll need is the proper signal from HQ and the fucking Earthside SOBs are in for a real nasty surprise!”
“Right.”
“Problem on your end, Skipper?”
Wu took a deep breath before replying. “Negative.” She cued up the general frequency. “Okay, people, let’s wrap this up! Vineeta, supervise full integration of all equipment. Everybody else assist. I want everybody back in the shuttle and ready for liftoff in sixty minutes, tops. HQ wants this section buttoned up fast, so this time we have to hit a couple more of these tourist hot spots before heading back to the Callisto. But I also want the job done right—understood?”
The other acknowledged Wu’s orders and got busy.
For a long dry moment, the Major stood motionless on that barren rock, lost in thought. Even the most routine assignments had unexpected problems—it was simply the way of things in the military and in space. And this mission was anything but routine—no matter how many times they and the other teams mounted them.
But so far everything was progressing without a hitch.
It just felt wrong . . .
><><
Major Wu retook the co-pilot’s seat. “Internal gravity engaged. Everything else secured? Good. Ready for liftoff, Pilot.”
They rose effortlessly on ten-percent thruster power. The shuttle executed a leisurely turn. Having oriented them toward their next target’s projected location, Kamilla Dubinski hesitated. ”We doing the right thing here, Major?”
“Maybe.” Wu sighed. “Could be nothing will ever come of it. Maybe we’ll never have to pull the trigger, so to speak?”
Dubinski looked doubtful. “Major, we’re turning these rocks into weapons. When have people had any weapon available and not eventually used it on somebody?”
Major Wu frowned, called up a predictably dull shipboard environmental diagnostic. “Don’t ask me, Lieutenant. I’m no historian. Just another lowly jarhead, doing as she’s told.”
><><
“Reorientation from deceleration burn complete,” Dubinski reported. “Last objective of the day, dead ahead. I’ll guide us in, nice and slow on maneuvering thrusters.”
Wu nodded, studied the sensor readouts. “Little smaller than the last and even less regular shaped. Rotation speed is kind of high, too. Think you can find a place to set us down?”
“I’ll manage, Major. Don’t I always?”
Edwina Wu snorted good-naturedly
Not two minutes later, things changed dramatically.
“He’s definitely onto us,” Vineeta noted with icy calm. “Still quite distant, but coming hard.”
“How fast?” Wu demanded.
“Pulling just over 10 G’s acceleration.”
“Son of a Bulgarian!” Inouye spat everybody’s favorite curse. “He must have first-rate compensators. Otherwise he’d be squashed like a bug!”
“Not really,” Bence offered. ‘If you grew up in high-gravity like on Earth, you could take it quite a while.”
“Even we’d tolerate it for brief periods,” Vineeta added. “Be uncomfortable, sure. But wouldn’t do any long-term harm, unless it went on for more than—”
“Anyway,” Bence interrupted, “the SOB has to be an UNH patrol. A smuggler would run away, not toward us—or stay dark and coast like we’ve done whenever possible. And no licensed civilian craft could accelerate like that. The dirt-lover must’ve seen our turnabout burn.”
‘The braking maneuver?” Somebody—the normally unflappable Vineeta, Wu realized with a start—gasped. “But we only fired the engine—“
“Yeah,” Bence agreed bitterly. “Three damn seconds. But that still lights us up good, if you happen to be at the proper angle relative from the sun—”
“And looking in the right direction that particular moment,” Dubinski said.
“That too.” Bence growled. “So much for all this fancy stealth bullshit!”
“Enough cross-talk,” Major Wu ordered. She noticed her pilot frowning. “Lieutenant?”
“Still on thruster-only approach,” Dubinski reminded.
“Yeah, right. Discontinue thrusters and abort landing. We’ll hit that one another day. Fire up main engine, punch it and sustain—full power.”
“So we run?”
“No choice, Kamilla.”
Dubinski nodded. Her hands moved across the touch-screen controls and the fusion drive roared to life. The abrupt change in direction was too much for the shipboard gravity and inertial compensation system to instantly adjust to. As such, the shuttle crew was pressed hard into their chairs for 2.3 uncomfortable, though not close to dangerous seconds.
“Basic vessel configuration confirmed,” Vineeta reported once she got her breath back. “United Nations of Humanity fast patrol; craft. Slightly smaller than us, but at least as fast—even with our souped-up drive.”
“Armament scan?”
“Still too distant for detailed reading, Major. But he’s closing. Another 1,000 klicks nearer and I’ll be able to tell you—”
“Can’t wait.” Wu shook her head. “Ships like that can carry a full range of weapons—anything from short-range plasma cannon to SMART missiles. Bence?”
“Countermeasures ready, Skipper. But any well-financed smuggler might have at least some of our passive stealth shit, not to mention the over-built main drive. Once we show ourselves capable of actually jamming—”
“Our fallback cover’s blown. Yes, understood. But they won’t be able to prove anything—if we get away. And it can’t be helped, okay? We can’t let the SOB get a target lock on us, on the off-chance he’s packing long-range ordinance. Anyway, our plume renders all ‘the
stealth shit,’ as you call it, moot. So do it, Mister.”
“Aye, Skipper. Full-spectrum jamming engaged.”
“Looks like I can just about maintain distance on this guy,” Dubinski said with budding hope. “At least he was a good distance away when he spotted us. If I can just get behind a sizable rock, so he can’t see our exhaust plume for a few moments, I could change direction and go dark. Maybe coast past him unnoticed. Of course that’s assuming—”
“New problem,” Inouye cut in. “Check what I see—sub-port of us.” He recited a set of coordinates. “Second engine plume. I make it even farther away than first contact, but also moving to intercept us. Think they know what we’ve been up to, Eddie?”
“Unknown,” Edwina Wu muttered. “But we’ll know soon enough—if we somehow get out of this alive . . .”
DECEMBER 11, 2504—AFTERMATH.
“Lt. Colonel Ginsberg.” Kristiina Obote said with a grave smile. “Thank you for coming again.”
‘No.” Ginsberg refocused her eyes on the door to Professor Shirakawa’s private office—for the first time in her experience and ominously shut. “Thank you for the head’s up. I came as soon as possible. We all owe him—” Her voice faltered.
Owe him what? Our thanks? Our compassion? Our shared guilt?
“How long has he been holed up in there?”
“Since last week. Even before—ever since your first meeting, five months ago—he’s spent more and more time in there. Stewing. Debating with himself if he did the right thing. Yes, Lt. Colonel—even before the actual crisis erupted. And now, he just sits behind that desk. That place—his desk, his office—it’s always been, oh—his security blanket, you might say. We haven’t been able to pry him out of there. Been a struggle, just getting him to eat! As for teaching—well, he has no classes this cycle. Not now. Now he sits there, wearing a stunned-blank expression and watching replays of the same news holo. Over and over—and all the way through, Colonel. I don’t have to say which one, do I?”
“No.” Ginsberg sucked her lower lip for a moment.
The final bombardment.
How many times in the last few days had Ginsberg stared—horrified yet spellbound—at pieces of the visual evidence of their murderous handiwork?
And it was all his idea. Then she shook her head, mentally correcting herself. No, not all. It wasn’t supposed to be like this—not at all like this!
“Did you say—‘all the way through’? The whole—”
“From first impact to last,” Obote confirmed. “Thirty hours, Colonel. He’s on the third or fourth go-round by now.”
Ginsberg’s stomach churned. She suddenly felt the need to justify herself—to justify the whole damned Confederacy military and diplomatic and political power structure.
“It was decided we had to preposition everything. Decided by higher ups—not by me or Huang. But it made sense. Seemed to. The thinking was that if we’d merely told them—simply threatened what we could do, it wouldn’t have worked. With our strategy revealed, they could’ve put up more outposts, assigned more ships. Made it impossible for us to follow through. And none of the disused rocks in our space came close enough—a threat that couldn’t be fulfilled in over six months didn’t amount to much. It had to be the Apollo Group, you see?”
Obote didn’t react or comment.
She merely stood there, seemingly impassive—maintaining an unnervingly blank, unrelenting eye contact.
It made Ginsberg want to squirm. “So they—we went covert. I didn’t know—it was strictly ‘need-to-know’ and I didn’t. Glad I didn’t, now. Trained teams—experienced asteroid-wranglers in civilian life—were to put everything required, concealed but ready to go operational, on selected rocks. We had to equip a whole string of them. Due to their orbits, you see? At any given time most would be too far from the—potential target. Anywhere from inside Mercury to—well, almost as far out as Mars. So if the time came—some would be close enough to constitute a credible threat, you see?”
Awaiting the other woman’s reply, Ginsberg held her breath.
“I know all this,” Obote said. “But just now, I’m more concerned with Barret.”
“Oh, right.” Ginsberg sighed. “No classes this whole cycle?”
“He had a full schedule, in addition to supervising the department. Until the story broke about that ship—the one shot down in UNH space. Then the wreckage was confirmed as one of ours, with a crew of our soldiers—not the common smugglers they’d been looking for.”
“Marines,” Ginsberg corrected automatically. She was Army, after all.
“Whatever. That’s when he passed his classes and other duties to others.”
“I see.”
“Do you? And then, predictably, Earth-gov pounced on the incursion without even knowing what it meant. Cancelled all previous concessions. Even demanded reverting Luna to their control, yet again—”
“They actually jumped three of our shuttles within thirty-six hours,” Ginsberg murmured flatly. “Big anti-smuggling sweep. It was sheer bad timing all around. Two got away—some of those jarheads can really fly. But that’s still sort of classified.”
Obote shrugged. “Shirakawa put everything on hold during the crisis. Kept trying to contact you or Huang or anybody else who might listen—”
The Lt. Colonel nodded. “Things got so crazy, so fast. We issued our threat—the first prepared rocks were just then orbiting close enough. Instead of buckling, they reacted with disbelief and anger—came out shooting, even as they dispatched teams to locate and disable what we had in place.”
“And nobody wanted to hear from the man who put the idea in their heads?” Obote narrowed already almond-shaped eyes. “No input for him—even as you activated all those asteroids?”
Ginsberg winced. “I—that is, we—yes.”
“Eleven of them, Colonel?”
“We couldn’t be certain how many they could handle. Even the closest would take almost a month to reach Earth. And Command’s patience was at an end. So—”
“So of course you went into overkill mode. Including sending warships to escort them.”
“Everyone was angry. More of our people killed, Erath reneging yet again.”
“After we were caught in their territory, Colonel.” Obote took a breath. “At least you had the decency to come around at last, try to explain it to poor Barret. That Huang—”
“The Captain was assigned one of the ships we sent—a plasma gunboat. They took a hit early on; she was wounded.” Ginsberg paused, wondering how much more bitter and hardened her colleague would be after the year of inactivity and pain required to re-grow most of a leg.
“And the Professor wasn’t?’
“I didn’t mean that. We all have our scars—physical and otherwise. But at least I have some slight good news this time.”
“Oh?”
Obote didn’t ask and Ginsberg didn’t offer any details.
“Shouldn’t I go in now?”
Obote extended an arm. A fingertip brushed a control on her desk. The door slid open and she lingered there, frowning.
The room beyond was darkened, enhancing the stark and terrible beauty unfolding across one whole side of it. One wall of Professor Shirakawa’s once cheerfully cluttered office had been cleared to bare rock. Now it showed an all-too-vivid and all-too-familiar holographic image.
The shattered remnants of two asteroids—everything from dust and pebbles that would simply, if certainly not harmlessly, burn up in the atmosphere to chunks big enough to reach the surface. It all hurtled silently, remorselessly and yet in some perverse sense elegantly toward the planet and its mostly doomed inhabitants.
Ginsberg noted that the debris field had already met and destroyed the two large solar power stations and the miscellaneous lesser satellites that couldn’t be moved aside in time. Their tangled and crushed remnants merely added a bit more mass to the leisurely tumbling; absolutely deadly jumble now being drawn in by Earth’s gravity. T
hat cancelled out a fraction of the 27% of the original rock-mass that had been blasted out of the planet’s way by the multiple explosions.
“Professor?”
“Yes, Lt. Colonel.” Shirakawa didn’t move, couldn’t take his eyes off the evidence of his guilt. “Come in, please.”
Ginsberg did, reluctantly. She studied Shirakawa’s face and shivered.
He’ll get over it, she tried to convince herself. Accept it. And bounce back. Him and the rest of us. Soon—or someday, at any rate.
“You know what’s called a Hobson’s choice, Lt. Colonel?”
“Where all options are bad ones?”
“That’s right. And you’re left to choose without even knowing which bad option is worse. That’s what we gave them.” Shirakawa stared at the quietly unfolding disaster, the images of a horror drama in real life. “When they knew they couldn’t simply divert the last two. They could’ve done nothing—hunker down and let a pair of dino-killer-size rocks smash down on them. Or they could do as they did—hit them with as many bombs and missiles as possible, hoping that would somehow be less destructive.”
“Did they really have a choice, professor? I mean, given the option of acting desperately or not at all? Human nature—”
“Perhaps, Lt. Colonel. I’ve spent too much time behind this desk or ones like it... With the anti-aging treatments, I realize it’s hard to tell. But I’m old—what used to be unimaginably so. Spent too much time thinking abstractly. Lost touch with, as you say, human nature. Or part of me did. Another part knew all along—”
Shirakawa sighed.
“I really thought—or half-convinced myself that I thought—we could restrain ourselves this time. In the face of something this colossal, this terrible—you know? But it seems—”
In the projection, the forward elements of the debris field now reached the outer atmosphere. A blue-green orb liberally festooned with white clouds and suspended against a jet-black background changed abruptly. Streaky flares of red and orange and then white-hot violence burst across its face.
Soon enough, some of the midsize debris would reach the thicker, denser layers of atmosphere. Many would explode in superheated airbursts. The resulting shockwaves would level towns and cities, flatten forests and transform all, along with the grasslands and fields of grain and eve n the wettest rain forests into vast, if short-lived infernos.
9 Tales From Elsewhere 2 Page 11
