The Drift Wars

by James, Brett

  — — —

  “This is an extraordinary assignment,” Colonel Chiang San said to the ninety-six marines packed into the briefing room and to the four naval officers tuned in by video from their ship’s bridge. “We’re not just pushing the battle further into the Drift,” he continued, “but shooting out the other side.”

  The colonel traced a pointer over a projected map behind him. “Over the past several months, we’ve beaten the Riel back to the very edge of the Drift, allowing us to send probes though the far boundary and to catch our first glimpse of their universe. Unsurprisingly, the first thing we found was this.” Three orange dots appeared just past the Drift boundary: Riel bases. “The welcoming committee,” Chiang San said with a smile.

  “These bases are massive—twenty times larger than anything we’ve run into before. A direct attack would be useless. But what, we asked ourselves, are they protecting? It has to be something pretty important, so we started poking around. And yesterday we found ourselves a pretty good clue.”

  A grapefruit-size sphere appeared behind the bases.

  “A probe at this location logged a flood of radio signals, spanning the entire bandwidth. In our experience, the Riel military—like our own—is frugal with its communications. No easier way to make yourself a target than with a bunch of radio transmissions. But civilians are different. The one place in our own universe where you’ll find this level of radio usage is in the Livable Territories. And that, my friends,” the colonel said, pointing at the sphere, “makes it a sure bet that there’s a Riel homeworld around here somewhere.”

  A murmur spread among the men, a chain reaction starting from the back. The Colonel cleared his throat, silencing the room.

  “It’s just a hunch, so don’t get your hopes up,” he continued. “We don’t know anything past what I just told you. There is no way to communicate through the Drift boundary, so the probe came back the moment it made this discovery—better to return with a little intel than to risk not returning at all. However, based on what we do know, the source is somewhere in this area.”

  The projection zoomed in on a sphere, revealing thousands of stars inside.

  “It’s a much bigger area than it looks,” Chiang San continued. “And it looks pretty big. It’s a lot of ground to cover, gentlemen—too much for probes alone. Which is why we’re sending you.

  “You’ll be the first men in history to cross into the Riel universe. And, once you’re there, you’ll be completely cut off. You’ll be self-contained, which means specialized training and a lot of it. You’ll learn to triangulate radio signals, to perform spectral analysis on light, and a bunch of other crap that I can barely pronounce.

  “You men are the cream of the crop, with a combined experience of a thousand battles. But you are not a combat force, not this time. You are a survey team. Your mission is to locate the homeworld, to catalog its defenses, and—by far the most important—to bring this information back.

  “This will be tedious, low-brow work for fighting men like yourselves. It will take weeks or months, during which you’ll be trapped on your ship with little to do. Nevertheless, you must remain vigilant at all times—if you are caught, you’ll die. That far into space, we’ll never even find your bodies.”

  — — —

  The ship’s oxygen generators had been breached, and the bacteria inside were dead from exposure, but the reserve tanks were full. With only Peter left to breathe it, the air would last months. And he had plenty of food, though it would be feeder-tube only—there wasn’t an intact compartment in the ship, no room that could hold air or heat, and that meant he was stuck inside his combat suit for the duration.

  Peter filled up his air tanks and went to assess the rest of the damage. The probes were all destroyed. The ship’s bridge had disintegrated without a trace, taking with it both the four pilots and the ship’s computer. The Riel knew exactly where to strike—the computer held the homeworld survey, the chart of their solar system, everything. Weeks of work, more than enough to plan an attack, all gone.

  Gone except for what Peter remembered. He might not know much, but Command knew even less. They weren’t even sure there was a homeworld.

  He had to get back and tell them. And that meant getting the ship online—somehow—and flying it back to the Drift.

  — — —

  It was two weeks of training before the team embarked for the Riel universe. Their ship, specially procured for this mission, was twice the size of a regular transport, but the extra room was filled with equipment, leaving the men tightly packed. What really bothered Peter, though, was the lack of windows; he had hoped to finally see the Drift boundary for himself.

  In preparation for the crossing, the main cabin floor was cleared, and the men were strapped down flat, feet-first. The ship was tossed by violent waves of radiation, then slammed against something hard. An invisible force passed through cabin, crushing Peter on all sides as if he were being forced through a narrow pipe.

  The hull screeched like it was being shoved through steel nails. The man lying next to Peter stretched and distorted, then grew as transparent as colored glass. The ship’s walls sputtered and disappeared; Peter was alone, naked, the orange boundary hurling past like lava. It was terrifying and it was calming. He tried to close his eyes and realized they were already shut.

  Suddenly the noise stopped and the ship was back. They were through.

  Peter was too sore to move. His face and body were coated with a white crust, the salt frost of his own dried sweat. The ship’s furnace kicked on, blasting hot air, and the men coughed to life.

  There were no fatalities. One man had a broken leg and most had lacerations. Some suffered stranger ills—aches and stiffnesses that never went away—but, overall, they came through better than expected.

  The ship fell back into routine. Nothing was noticeably different about this new universe until Peter made his first EVA. He was assigned to go outside and inspect the hull for damage, but the moment he stepped from the airlock, the thick blanket of stars overwhelmed him. After so many months in the near-empty Drift, he had forgotten what a full sky could look like. And out here, in the pure dark, it felt like the heavens themselves embraced him.

  He let himself float, his duties momentarily forgotten.

  — — —

  Peter finished his assessment of the ruined ship by taking a walk around the hull. The Riel universe had no fewer stars now than when he had first arrived, but his interest had narrowed to one in particular, the homeworld’s sun.

  He stared at the painfully bright dot and then at the statistics scrolling rapidly down the side of his visor. He learned nothing.

  Using his suit’s tracking system, he aligned the emergency solar panel to the distant sun and felt it hum to life. The panel would provide some power—enough to recharge his suit.

  The ship’s power core had been hit during the attack. While the damage looked minimal, Peter had no idea how to restart it or even whether he should. Technically speaking, there wasn’t much difference between a ship’s power core and a missile’s warhead.

  He locked the solar panel in place, connected the power output to the ship, and walked to the back of the hull to inspect the engine. The engine appeared intact, but with the bridge demolished, he had no way to operate it. He queried his suit, which brought up the ship’s manual.

  Since the expedition was self-sufficient, the computer in each man’s suit was loaded with manuals. Peter had step-by-step instructions for any situation imaginable, from mining an asteroid for conductive materials to generating electricity from his own methane emissions.

  Given enough time, Peter thought, I could re-create civilization from scratch.

  Peter found a section titled “Running the Engine’s Self-Diagnostic,” which pointed him to a small contro
l panel on the bottom of the engine housing. The engine was mounted on a fin, leaving just enough room for Peter to slide under it.

  Opening the panel’s cover required a special ten-point screwdriver, but the ship’s toolbox was nowhere to be found. Fortunately, in its unerring completeness, the manual had instructions for making new tools.

  Peter needed both a duplicate of the screw and a metal rod that was thin enough to fit into the cover’s recessed housing. The screw was common but the rod was not. He had never before noticed how much of the ship was made from molded plastic.

  Peter’s search was exasperated by an electrical short in his suit’s heating coils that caused his batteries to run low every couple of hours, which meant he would have to stand at the charging station for thirty minutes at a time.

  He didn’t like having to stand around, not with so much to do. His idle mind obsessed over the odds of success and wondered why he was still striving to complete a mission that had so obviously failed.

  In some ways it was a curse that he had survived the Riel attack. If he had died, he would have just woken up on base as he always did. Maybe he wouldn’t remember any of this—Linda said he didn’t always—but what would that matter?

  The problem was that he had survived. And if he, the version of himself that was here right now, wanted to get back, then he had no choice but to press on.

  His batteries finally charged, Peter was relieved to get back to the search. But it took him half a day and four more charge cycles before he located a metal rod inside the latch of a door.

  Making the screwdriver was straightforward. Peter heated the tip of the rod with an impulsor rifle until it glowed red; then he hammered it into the screw’s head, molding it to shape. He repeated the process a dozen times, until the rod slid all the way in. He bent it for leverage. It didn’t look like much, but Peter was proud of himself. He had never really made anything before.

  “Works like a charm,” he said as he unscrewed the cover, though no one was around to hear.

  The control panel was about an inch square, and its buttons were so small that he had to press them with the screwdriver. Following the manual, he typed in the code to start the self-diagnostics. The indicator light was supposed to glow green if the engine was intact, blink a code in yellow for a known problem, or turn red to indicate a problem that it couldn’t identify. Peter waited two minutes; it remained dark.

  With a sigh he turned to the next step in the manual.

  — — —

  The ship had suffered minor damage from the boundary crossing, requiring a two-hour delay while the crew effected repairs. From there they took a circuitous route, steering well clear of the three enemy bases. It was a boring, weeklong journey capped by disappointment: they detected nothing at the spot where the probe had indicated.

  “Likely it’s just planetary revolution,” one navy pilot said. “If the homeworld has orbited to the far side of their sun, the solar radiation would block all transmissions.”

  The four pilots conferred, deciding to hide nearby and check back at regular intervals. Their plan didn’t sit well with the marines—it might take months for the planet to come back into range—but this part of the mission belonged to the navy, leaving no room for debate. And the marines, having spent five idle weeks parked on a barren planetoid, had run out of patience.

  Boredom in a crowd is far worse than boredom alone. While company helps to pass the time at first, conversation quickly grows stale and the small irritations of others are magnified to intolerability. Peter longed to get outside, to escape the cramped ship and lie under the stars, but the pilots forbade it. Everyone had to remain onboard, they said, in case the ship had to make a fast escape. It was a sound policy but, in practice, inhumane.

  There was no physical interaction between the marines and the navy. The latter remained sealed in their cockpit, communicating only by video. The navy seemed unaffected by their containment, maintaining a callous cheer as the weeks crawled on.

  “Two men and two women,” one sergeant grumbled. “Probably feels like a party in there.”

  Though the comment was made in jest, the image of it stuck. Morale deteriorated rapidly. Returning from its sixth weekly expedition, with no sign of the Riel homeworld, the ship was in open mutiny. The marines demanded that they go deeper into the Riel universe to search for the planet, but the pilots refused, insisting it would be an unnecessary risk. The marines were getting ready to take a cutting torch to the cockpit door when the proximity alarm sounded.

  Discipline returned instantly. The navy killed the ship’s power to avoid detection, and the marines strapped in for evasive maneuvers.

  A ship was passing at the very limit of their sensor range. Its profile didn’t match anything in the UF’s records, and its transmissions were uncoded. Peter’s team had lucked onto some sort of civilian cruiser, and judging by its weak engine signature, a short-range one.

  — — —

  “Build electrical generators from rocket packs.”

  “Fuse missile to ship’s hull.”

  Peter read aloud from the manual’s list of “alternative ways to propel a disabled spacecraft.” It was a depressing inventory; every option required either something they hadn’t brought or something the Riel had destroyed.

  “Build chemical thruster by mixing oxygen with hydrogen” had promise, until he read the details. Not only would he need several hundred times more oxygen than what was in the tanks, but, with the expected top speed, it would also take several thousand years to reach the Drift boundary.

  His only real hope was to somehow produce enough electricity to fire the ship’s engine. Five minutes would be enough—he could coast the rest of the way—but the emergency solar panel didn’t even have enough amperage to heat the preignition chamber. Most ships, he read, were equipped with backup batteries, but this one was not. In case of power core failure, Command had determined that the men on board could simply stay in their suits while they repaired the ship.

  That was it, Peter realized. Every suit had its own batteries.

  He quickly searched the manual, compiling information about how much power the engine needed and how much each suit could provide. I can do it, he thought, calculating. He needed eighty suits’ worth of batteries, and there had been ninety-six marines on the mission. Most were still out there, floating in the debris. All he had to do was get them back inside.

  — — —

  Stumbling upon the civilian cruiser meant they wouldn’t need most of the equipment that was crowded into the storage bay. They just swung into the ship’s wake and it led them straight to the Riel homeworld.

  Tachyon drives created a blind spot at the back of the ship, but just to be sure, the men remained on alert for the duration of the two-day journey. Marines lived in their combat suits and the navy kept a finger on the ship’s main breaker, ready to cut the power at a moment’s notice. The trip was uneventful until, just as a disk-shaped solar system appeared in the distance, the alarm sounded.

  Peter linked to the bridge’s video feed and watched a hatch open at the back of the Riel cruiser. It released a puff of gas, followed by a few dozen cube-shaped objects. The gas dissipated and the objects just floated there, doing nothing. A moment later, the computer returned its analysis: trash. Disposal was common before a ship entered the gravity of any populated system. They had arrived.

  There was something else to that event, something that didn’t come to the surface until several days later, during a routine spectral analysis of the video. The gas coming out of the ship was rich in oxygen.

  Even though the Riel didn’t breathe, their ships were still pressurized to provide a medium for sound and heat. Because the air’s composition didn’t matter, they generally avoided combustible gases like oxygen. So why was this one different? Further anal
ysis determined that the air inside the cruisership was a near-match for their own.

  The men voiced any number of theories but always came back to one: that whatever was on board that ship, it breathed just as humans do. And that meant they had just discovered the third race.

  — — —

  The technical challenge of gathering the combat suits was nothing compared to the emotional one.

  The bodies hadn’t strayed far, having the same momentum as the ship itself, and in the vacuum of space a feather falls as fast as a cannonball. Peter had no fuel for his rocket pack, so he tethered himself to the ship with a long rope, leaped out, grabbed a body, then pulled himself back in. Soon he was getting one on every try, but it never got easier to manhandle his dead comrades—to rip them from their peaceful orbit only to strip them for spare parts.

  Peter had seen plenty of death, but nothing this depressing. Corpses piled up in the main cabin—he had to keep them on board to know which he had collected—and the ship had become a mortuary.

  The quiet was too much. Peter began to regularly talk aloud. To himself at first but later to Linda.

  He walked her through his work, but that grew boring. So he told her stories from his life on Genesia—stories, he realized, that she already knew. She had read his memory scan. She knew him better than anyone.

  — — —

  The navy held at the edge of the solar system for hours, until they were certain the Riel cruisership was out of sensor range. Then they aimed for the outermost planet in the system—a rock so small and cold that it could barely be called a planet.

  The location was ideal. The Riel homeworld was only five planets away, and in near-perfect orbital alignment. The planetoid didn’t rotate, so they parked the ship in the cover of the dark side and gave the pilots a turn at being bored.

  The marines hauled the equipment into position by rocket pack, the low gravity making everything practically weightless. Their biggest challenge was to keep their speed down, lest they shoot off into space. The men were cheerful, happy to be free of the cramped ship.