by Kali Altsoba
“You think we still have a chance to avoid war?”
“Slim, but not none. The key is to build up now in hope to deter Pyotr. We fight only if we have to. It’s so obvious a child can see it. But the politicians …? Too few are even listening. The public is light-years away from accepting war.”
“It gets worse, Gaétan. RIK is ahead of us in tactical, low-orbit and sub-orbital skycraft. At least in raw numbers. We still have a quality edge in air tek and pilots. AI-pilots that is. They use more human pilots than we do, flying at much lower Gs and machs. Not sure why.”
“Cheaper? Lower-altitude air cover? A parallel in their air tactics to the Kaigun switch to phantoms? They seem to be going overall for quantity over quality in weapons systems.”
“Maybe. But sheer quantity has a quality all its own. They know we’re better, skycraft-to-skycraft, but as anyone who ever stirred a wasp’s nest will tell you, its harder to fight off a whole swarm.”
“We have to get production going, Gaspard, no matter how much foot-dragging the PM and his so-called ‘Peace Faction’ are doing with annual Army-Navy appropriations. If we’re to avoid a war with the Imperium we must look to Pyotr like we’re ready and able to fight one!”
“What can I do to help? Under these budget restraints...”
“I didn’t recommend you to Briand because I thought you’d make an upstanding budget manager. You leave that side of things to MoD, to the minister and me. What we need you to do is more of what you’ve been doing in command your whole career.”
“You mean I should yell at some civy like I do at my troops, like they’re rotten fish?”
“Yes. Break the bureaucratic logjams, Gaspard, all the way up and down our production chains. Hit everyone hard and crash every problem you find even harder.”
“I can do that.”
“I know you can. But I mean real hard. Take the gloves off. Fire any bâtard you have to. Any and all of them. Briand will back you in every case. You have his word, and mine.”
“Anybody? There are a lot of ‘nieces’ and ‘nephews’ holding plum jobs, you know. They have connections and they make pillow talk. OK, they’re not protected by the PM like that idiot Pradip, but they’re still protected. You sure you want me to clear out the bedrooms of power?”
“Sacres merde, oui! I don’t care who they’re fucking, or whose second or third cousin in the cabinet they run to, crying. I’ll back you at the JSC and Briand will do the same at MoD and in the Lok Sabha. We also have people who can speak in the Rajya Sabha, the House of Elders.”
“So, it is as bad as you say.”
“Yes.”
“Well then, I had better...”
“I mean it, Gaspard. Assume we’re already at war. We likely will be inside a year. Push weps production into high gear before our quantitative inferiority leads to qualitative deficiency in combat ability. Make us as strong as you can. Show no mercy and take no prisoners.”
“You’ll get my best, cher ami.”
“I know it. Our first step back to strength and dominance starts now.”
“Good luck with that. We’ve a long way to go.”
“Au revoir, Junior. And good hunting.”
***
LeClerc rejoins five young aides-de-camps in Maçon’s outer office and leads them down the MoD tower, then by shuttle out of Lowestoft-on-Stamos, the “City of Towers,” to the austral elevator. They notice that he smells more than usual of starch and authority and a little like burnt chestnuts. It’s a stiff scent that means he’s mad. It makes his aides hustle even more than usual.
LeClerc and Maçon think there may be war before they can meet again. Burdened with a sense of foreboding that time is running out, they fear that whatever they do it won’t be enough. ‘So what does one do? What one must, only harder. There’s nothing else for it.’
Aides see determination in his stride. Later they’ll understand why he walks faster, looks straighter and more stern and broad-shouldered. He has Maçon’s endorsement to push real reform, a license in his pocket to bull past bureaucratic opposition. That’s his style, in any case.
His thoughts return to worry about hamstringing effects of military weakness on defense policy. And worse, the huge drag on preparedness of a prime minister he regards as too effete and soft-headed to handle the portentous crisis threatening his deeply loved Calmar Union.
‘At least Briand’s now in the inner cabinet and Gaétan is running the JSC. Two good men, to start. Maybe things aren’t as bad as they seem? Ah merde, of course they are! Well, as Papa liked to day, ‘il faut en fenir.’ Yes, Papa, I suppose it all simply must be gotten on with.’
LeClerc boards the Lowestoft lift to ascend to his shuttle in high orbit. He’s done dozens of dreary production inspections over the last six months, but he’s urgent to tour the main ACU weapons research facility on Argos. He’s happy to be leaving both twin capital worlds behind for awhile. Lowestoft-on-Stamos most of all. It’s musty and dry, not like verdant and floral Barda.
It’s a government city with an odor of minions and memoranda. Its streets are paved in regulations, its air reeks of unmovable bureaucracy, of inchworms and petty-mindedness, and behind-the-desk arrogance of the power of “No” and “Come back in a month.”
It’s too neat, too sterile. Its endless rows of towers parade over the far horizon. LeClerc thinks they look like cleaning bots leaving their factory gate in perfect lines, heading to maglev cars that must take them off to a lifetime of dusters and polish and pointless repetition. He prefers the heavy, fetid smells of Barda, where you know the Universe hosts life.
“Thirty minutes to the shuttle platform, sir. We’re parked pretty high up today.” He looks down on receding Caspia as he rides a secured MoD skycab up the exterior of the hard tower elevator, still shy of engaging a free cable tether to reach into orbit from the top of the tower anchor. His five young aides are the only other passengers on board.
‘An hour in-system to the L1 bohr-zone to Argos, in front of the dead Caspian moon. What’s it called it again? Doesn’t matter. Jump to the Argos L4 and we’ll be planetside after four more hours down-system. Good, I can sleep before we take the lift to the Argos surface.’
He doesn’t sleep. Insomnia.
Argos
“Hello, my name’s Chan. I’m your guide.” The Argos Weapons Labs hostess is young and remarkably pretty. Correct that, not pretty. She’s beautiful. Make that absolutely stunning. Even the reserved LeClerc takes notice of her beauty as he steps from an ACU ground shuttle.
She has light tan skin, black-on-black hard diamonds for eyes, and a perfect nose over full red lips. A lithe neck leads to tightly curved shoulders. A rich, thick mane of shiny coal-dark hair tumbles all the way down her back, like fresh rain caressing the famed black rock cliffs of Nagoya. She’s wearing a bright red blouse that’s so tight it clearly silhouettes her full, uplifted breasts. It’s tucked sharply into a short black skirt that ends halfway up a finely-turned, athletic, golden thigh. Her whole body curves tautly up and out, pushed in an indefinable yet exquisitely arousing way that only wearing high-heels can achieve, reshaping and posing any woman. Hers are bright red, the same vivid color as her tight blouse and lipstick.
LeClerc harrumphs as he bends slightly to read the name on an ID tag pinned atop her right breast. His brown eyes peer down from beneath oversize grayed eyebrows that badly need trimming, like runaway shrubbery. There’s no title with the name. It simply reads Chan Wèi. His gaze lingers longer than is quite necessary or discreet. On the tag or on its curved natural mount?
“Welcome to Argos Labs! We’ll start with superceramics. I think they’re cool. Oh, pardon the pun!” She actually giggles, briefly hiding red lips with a perfectly manicured hand.
‘She’s funny!’ thinks Ensign Adélaïde Sauvageot. LeClerc’s only naval aide-de-camp is young and something of a natural wonder herself, a comely blonde. But unlike Chan Wèi she’s both unaware of her beauty and unadorned, and not just be
cause she’s wearing a uniform. She’s a year younger and almost as beautiful, but chaste and sweet as a choir girl. She never armors for sexual combat like a Belinda or stoops to conquer like Chan Wèi. Adélaïde has arresting eyes nonetheless, as light hued as her pale blues, always laughing with intelligence from under sylph brows as fine as LeClerc’s are wildly careless and overgrown with lack of time or care or vanity.
LeClerc grimaces. Chan’s admirably eager to do her job but too forward and much too talkative for the flinty older man’s taste. Precisely how he doesn’t like young men or women to behave in his presence. Besides, being beautiful doesn’t matter a whit to him. There are lots of pretty soldiers under his command. All types, shapes and sizes. Ensign Sauvageot, for instance. He never takes any notice of them, unless they’re messing up their jobs, then he let’s them have it. Or so he tells himself.
General Gaspard François LeClerc is a fine soldier but he’s also still a man, and all men notice curves. Still, he’s far too serious about his professional work and too respectful of soldiers under his command, whatever their gender or orientation, to ever act unprofessionally in that way. Ensign Adélaïde is sure of that. She has tried to get his attention and failed every time. He’s a craggy and difficult boss, but not actually an “old man,” as the other, male aides call him.
On the other hand, LeClerc’s having a real bad day and Ms. Wèi’s bright red blouse is very tight. He shakes her off. ‘Get a grip, she’s barely older than a recent Academy grad.’ The fact that she’s civilian also irritates him on a muggy morning on Argos. It’s a peevish thought. He chides himself as soon as he has it. ‘That’s neither her fault nor fair of me to think.’
“This way, general. Stay between the safety lines please.”
He has a migraine and her sheer perkiness is grating on him. As is the fact that on either side of the slow automatic walkway double bands of brilliant orange neon dim-and-brighten-and-dim, alerting to potential danger from movement by heavy industrial bots servicing the furnaces.
“Past the safety lines are the nitrobon heat shields.” Chan indicates tall shield walls with a sweeping gesture of her slender arm, making the movement as gracefully as a ballet dancer’s bend. She slows to allow the group to take in her artful performance, as much as her information.
“Yes, those twin 10-meter high walls on either side.” She clarifies in response to a slight raising of one of LeClerc’s bushy gray eyebrows, and a sarcastic dip of his forehead toward what are quite obviously shield walls. The long room smells of dark and slippery machine oils and of unseen humming dedication by hundreds of mute repair and monitoring bots.
“You’ll remember from school days that nitrobon is a compound material made from hafnium, nitrogen and carbon. It has the highest known melting point of any shield material, at roughly two-thirds the temperature found at the surface of an average star. And that’s without our added alloy bonding treatment. We can raise that to 1.5 times Class-M surface temperature.”
LeClerc tugs his jacket below his hips. His ACU uniform is pale-blue with pleated, knife-edge creases. A band of service e-ribbons, a miniature career résumé, glows above his left jacket pocket. Just above is the ACU crest, a silver shield embossed with white fleurs-de-lis, crowned with a scroll representing the constitution that frames the Calmar Union. Same as for the cadets.
“Each insulating layer is a few hundred microns thick, but there are 150 layers spaced 100 microns apart. That’s triple nitrobon redundancy between us and the reactor. We make a different kind of heat shield off-planet.”
“What, where and why?” LeClerc asks laconically. His aides recognize migraine terseness.
“Ship’s shields, molded from slurry into supercooling ceramic in a factory at Guelph platform, that’s the big one about 900 klics up the Austral Elevator cable. The one in the south,” she adds needlessly, “not the Boreal Elevator here in the north that you rode to the shuttle.”
It’s common for planets to have more than one elevator. Omski is a heavily industrial and large population world with six. The unkind say that from high orbit it looks like a horned fruit.
“OK, coming up beside them now, sir. Here we are!”
She stops and turns right around quite unexpectedly, at least to judge by the awkward way General LeClerc is forced to halt abruptly to avoid bumping into her full, artfully uplifted breasts. His five aides accordion to a stop right behind him. He grimaces and clenches his fists as the male aide following him most closely instinctively reaches out to avert his own stumble, thus coming perilously close to touching his stiff, cranky boss. Which is never a good idea.
LeClerc suddenly smells wonderful womanly things: a hint of expensive perfume, the silk of a red blouse as it rustles against her erect nipples, a sweet promise of painted red lips, a soft caressing of her hand as she touches him gently on his arm, and strong after-midnight musk.
Adélaïde smiles at his obvious discomfort in Chan’s much-too-close presence. She sees that Chan is deliberately signaling we-should-have-sex-tonight to LeClerc with each shift and supple movement of her extraordinary body, and just naturally from every pore of her vixen personality. Adélaïde doesn’t yet think that “it gets there before she does,” as jealous girls used to say at school about any girl they envied and viciously conspired to bring down. She thinks the flirting is not meant seriously, but that its overt sensual and sexual distraction might just be good for her general. ‘He needs to relax. He’s working much too hard. And he’s not sleeping.’
“So effective is nitrobon, you can safely touch the shield wall if you like.” Chan hasn’t moved at all. She seems to revel in LeClerc’s fretting at her physical closeness, a nervousness he tries to conceal behind a sudden but forced expression of open disdain for her chatty manner.
“You’ll feel no heat from the fusion core even though the outer reactor walls are just 30cm from the interior core processes. That’s just 30cm between us and the interior of a star!” She still hasn’t moved. Her body remains just inches from LeClerc’s. He feels her breath, takes in her scents. She looks directly up into his face and smiles. “Go ahead, touch them if you want.”
Adélaïde works real hard to suppress a loud laugh as LeClerc almost blushes, then takes a maladroit step back. Chan’s suggestion is too eager and guileful for him and, well ... suggestive.
Another aide, oblivious to the sex game playing out in front of him, reaches out his hand to the shield wall but pulls it back when he sees the general makes no parallel gesture and frowns instead, which with his eyebrows is really not a good idea. There’s a wave-off and scrunching of more scowling shrubbery brows as he declines Chan’s unwelcome follow-up advice, still without moving, to “just scarecrow past me to get to the reactor.”
In a flashback born of her unbidden metaphor, LeClerc remembers his boyhood spent on the agrarian planet Jocasta, dreaming of wondrous adventures someplace else. Anyplace else. He studied hard then left for Kars Military Academy the day he was accepted, going career military after that with a graduate course at the Army War College on Argos, leading to his commission. He’d been back to Argos only a few times since then, once to give the Commencement Address.
‘My turn.’ He resumes a deliberate, measured pace and listens as Chan Wèi’s staccato, stiletto steps quicken behind him. He’s enjoying imagining how the tightness of her short skirt compels her to take geisha-like steps as his longer strides make her scurry to catch him and take back the lead position. LeClerc’s a serious man, but not above this moment of pettiness.
The shields are impressive, rising to the roof on either side of the broad path the tour takes through the factory. It’s adjunct to Argos Lab’s research and prototype-production role. Adélaïde thinks, ‘The reactor’s huge. Or it’s a serial reactor: dozens or hundreds of mini fusion cores laid out in redundant sequence so that the line’s never without power and bots can shut down and work on independent sections, just like in one of the great battleships.’
Cha
n focuses their attention on an interlocked series of conveyors. LeClerc walks over to a running and clanking metal belt, to steal a long look on the way at the slight indentation of her perfect back where her red blouse tucks snugly into a taut black-skirted waist. His lateral move is a tactical error that allows Chan to recover lead position, and thus her confident dominance.
“We’re coming to ceramics, for insulator and non-conductive armor to replace layered-graphene and liquid-armor wherever conductivity is a problem. Or we use exfoliated-graphene at tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of layers thickness. I think it’s soooo yesterday, all that old liquid-armor.”
“How’s it done? How do you armor-up an armtrak or ATC?” It’s the uncertain aide who almost stumbled earlier. He’s a smart-looking kid in ACU blues as crisp as LeClerc’s.
