by Marko Kloos
We’ve only been inside the admin center for two hours, but when we step outside again, the place looks like it has been transplanted onto a different planet. The sky is the color of dirty concrete, and the snow is blowing so densely that I can barely make out the lights on the buildings across the little civic plaza even though they are only fifty meters away. The arctic wind, sharp as a blade, turns the skin of my face numb in just a few moments, and I lower the face shield of my helmet and take a few steps outside. The snow on the ground reaches halfway up the armored shin guards of my battle armor.
“Damn,” Sergeant Fallon says when we’re back inside, ice and snow caking our armor plates despite our merely two-minute sojourn into the weather. “That is some nasty climate out there all of a sudden.”
One of the civvie techs in the entrance vestibule, a burly fellow in smudged blue overalls and a thick thermal jacket, hears her comment and chuckles.
“That? We call that a light dusting. Typical late fall weather.”
Behind us, the announcement system comes to life again. This time it’s not the pleasant artificial female computer voice, but that of the comms tech down in the ops center.
“Sergeants Fallon and Grayson, please report to the OC. Priority tight-beam link from orbit.”
I brush the snow off my armor and stomp my boots on the concrete a few times to knock off the slush.
“Back to work, I guess,” Sergeant Fallon says. “That’s why I hate positions of authority. Everyone always bugs the shit out of you.”
“They popped up on our long-range gear a few minutes ago,” Colonel Campbell says over the voice connection from the Indianapolis. “Three AUs out. They’re right on the ecliptic, heading for us as straight as they can, as far as my sensor guys can tell.”
“Lankies?” I say, dreading the reply.
“Doubtful. Unless they’ve learned to spoof emergency transponder signals bit for bit. Our bogey is squawking an SRA distress signal in sixty-second intervals.”
Sergeant Fallon looks at me.
“I’m out of my field with this space warfare stuff,” she says. “What do we have here? Are we humped?”
“He’s coming our way and sending a distress signal from that far out, he’s not spoiling for a fight, and he isn’t a Lanky,” I say.
“Unless it’s a ruse of some kind,” Colonel Campbell says.
“Has the task force picked him up yet?”
“Doubtful. Nobody there is stirring. Our sensor gear is better than theirs by a lot, and I have snooper buoys out away from the noise. But the way he’s coming in, they’ll hear him before too long. I give it a few hours, depending on how awake their sensor guys are.”
“Any idea what he is?”
“He’s still awfully far away, but from the ELINT signature and the optical profile, I’d say he’s a large deep-space combatant. Heavy cruiser maybe, or one of their big-ass space control cans.”
“Why would one of those come our way with the radio blaring?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“Well, it’s either a ruse to make us look one way while his buddies come from a different bearing, or—”
“He’s really in trouble and looking for help,” I finish.
“If he’s running from something, it’s not one of our guys on his ass,” Colonel Campbell says. “Every fleet unit in this system is in orbit around this rock right now. And if he’s not running from one of ours…”
Nobody finishes his sentence, but it feels like the temperature in the room just dropped by twenty degrees.
“Let’s hope it’s a ruse, and there’s an SRA task force heading our way,” Colonel Campbell concludes dryly. “At least that would give us a fighting chance.”
I spend the next hour on one of the consoles in the ops center. The console is linked to the computer in my battle armor, which is tapping into the data feed from the Indianapolis’s CIC. Sergeant Fallon knows tactical diagrams, but she’s not familiar with translating them four-dimensionally to make sense of things scattered across light-hours of space, so I explain them to her as we look at the feed from Indy’s sensor suite.
“If he’s sending a distress code, and he doesn’t care if we see him coming, maybe he has a legit emergency,” Sergeant Fallon suggests. “Stranger things have happened, right?”
“I don’t think that’s likely,” I say, and point out some markers on the plot. “Indy is marking his position every time he broadcasts his signal. See here? That’s Mark One. There’s Two. Three, Four, and Five. You extend the line through these marks, and he’s headed right for us. But if you follow it back and kind of eyeball the way he came…” I finish the arc with my index finger. “That’s the moon with the only SRA colony in the system. Even now, he’s a lot closer to it than he is to us. If it’s just a shipboard emergency, why wouldn’t he go to his own base instead of the enemy base on the other side of the system?”
“I don’t like that line of thought,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“Neither do I. The only thing that makes sense to me is that someone got the jump on the Russian base, and this cruiser got away. If that’s the case, then whatever flushed him our way will follow right behind sooner or later. And with the Alcubierre network offline, our backs are against the wall.”
“Alert the grunts?”
“Not yet. That SRA cruiser is still a long way out. And if he has a Lanky seed ship on his ass, it won’t make a bit of a difference. Might as well die well rested.”
“It’s the Arkhangelsk,” Colonel Campbell says over the encrypted downlink an hour later. “Fleet intel said she was in the system when we transitioned in, and the ELINT signature of the bogey matches. She’s one of their old Kirov-class cans. A little behind on tech these days, but tough ships. Lots of firepower. If he’s playing a trick and cruising for trouble, he’s a pretty even match for the task force.”
“I’d almost wish he’s doing just that,” I say.
“Something else—he’s not moving like he’s running from anything. He’s pulling a quarter-g acceleration. That’s less than what their slowest supply tin cans can make.”
“How long until he gets here?”
“At his current acceleration, it’ll take him eight days just to get to turnaround. Make it three weeks, give or take.”
“Has the task force picked him up yet?”
“Doesn’t look like it. Won’t be long, though,” Colonel Campbell says.
“What are they going to do when they spot him?” Sergeant Fallon asks. She has been following our tactical shoptalk quietly, clearly uncomfortable to be out of her area of expertise.
“Hard to say, with that desk pilot for a task force commander,” Colonel Campbell says. “But seeing how he handled the little mutiny, I’d put some money on him storming off to meet the threat.”
“It’s not like we’re going anywhere,” I say.
“I’m not in charge of your grunts, and I don’t want to be. It would be a little silly to pull rank at this point. But I suggest you get the shop down there prepared for action. SRA ruse or Lankies on that bogey’s tail, chances are someone’s about to disturb the peace pretty soon.”
“Right.” Sergeant Fallon sighs and looks at me. “Keep us posted on the bogey, Colonel. We’ll see what we can come up with down here. In the meantime, let’s hope that the Russian cruiser just had a fusion bottle fail or something. I’m not sure I’m prepared for the other scenarios yet.”
“Will do. Indianapolis Actual out.” The speaker in the comms console chirps the descending two-tone trill of a dropped tight-beam connection.
“Let’s pretend there’s a Lanky ship behind that cruiser coming our way,” Sergeant Fallon says. “With all that combat experience against them, what would you do?”
“Tuck tail and run,” I say. “Except there’s no place to run in this system, and the transition point out of here is closed.” I shrug. “Arm everyone to the teeth, issue every last rocket launcher and tactical nuke in the magazines. Hit ’em when they land an
d make them pay for the place. But if they want it, it’s theirs already.”
“Such defeatism. They teach you that in the fleet?”
She raps me on the back of my armor with her fist.
“Let’s go see the science crew. I want to see if those smart people have any ideas for making the event memorable. If I’m going to die, I want to at least make it into one of those ‘Epic Last Stands in History’ books.”
CHAPTER 23
“Run that by me again,” Dr. Stewart says. “You want me to do what now?”
“We need you to help us figure out how to blow a Lanky seed ship out of space,” Sergeant Fallon says. “It kind of goes without saying that you have a pretty good motivator to find a solution.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the kind of thing more in your ballpark? I thought you soldiers were in charge of coming up with new ways to break things.”
“We’ve tried,” I say. “Once they’re on the ground, we can shoot them, but that’s difficult. Or we can nuke them, which is easier, but we don’t have the elbow room to fling around a lot of kiloton warheads on this moon. And nobody has ever cracked a seed ship.”
“Your nukes don’t work on them?”
“Not in space. Nukes aren’t all that effective in a vacuum. And those seed ships have hard shells. I’ve never heard of anyone actually cracking the hull on one, and I’ve been in a battle where a whole task force chucked every nuke in the magazines at it. Dozens of megatons, and not a dent in the trim.”
“I see.” Dr. Stewart leans back in her chair and crosses her arms in front of her chest. I can’t tell whether the expression on her face is amusement or incredulity.
We’re in her office in the science department of the admin center. It’s small and messy, just a desk with data tablets and printouts all over it, and a few office chairs that are weighed down with reference material. If a tidy office is a sign of a cluttered mind, then Dr. Stewart’s mind is as squared away as a boot camp recruit’s locker.
“Let me get this sorted out,” she says. “You people have been trying to figure out this problem for over four years. None of your soldier toys do the job, and all those military scientists haven’t come up with a solution in half a decade. And you’re asking me to solve it for you in seven days?”
“Earlier if possible,” Sergeant Fallon says. “So we can prepare the defense before the bad guys are overhead.”
“Once they are, they’ll start landing scouts, and every human settlement they find is going to get nerve-gassed from orbit. Then they’ll tear down our terraformers and set up their own, and two months later the atmosphere’s mostly carbon dioxide,” I say.
“I’ve read all the intel,” Dr. Stewart says. “At least the stuff they let us civvies read. And I have to admit it doesn’t make me overly optimistic.”
Sergeant Fallon smiles curtly. “That’s the understatement of the month. Personally, I don’t give a bucket of warm piss for this place if we have to go up against those things with what we have. My people are Homeworld Defense grunts. They don’t have the training, don’t have the right guns, don’t have the experience. I have two battalions of glorified riot police with popguns.”
“I have a pocketknife,” Dr. Stewart says. “A few containers of hydrochloric acid down in the lab. Two cargo rail guns that can’t be aimed at anything unless you coax someone into just the right spot in orbit. And our constables carry sidearms and stun sticks. Not exactly a mighty arsenal, I’m afraid.”
“What about those rail guns?”
“Those are for lobbing freight containers into orbit. Ship comes with empty cargo pods, they drop them on the moon for recovery, we fill cargo pods up with water, and up into orbit they go with the rail guns. Saves on fuel for orbital lifts. We have two sites, but they’re fixed. And they just generate enough juice to put things in a low orbit with the minimum amount of energy required.”
“Can we juice them up a bit?” Sergeant Fallon asks.
“Some, but there’s no point. They can’t be aimed. They’re just ramps in the ground. And even at full power, they won’t launch things fast enough to give you more energy than fifty gigatons’ worth of nukes. They were designed for putting payloads into orbit, not for use as planetary defense weapons.”
“So there’s not much we can do, and nothing we can do it with,” Sergeant Fallon says.
“That sounds like an accurate assessment.” Dr. Stewart leans back in her chair again and studies the computer screen that’s shoved into a corner of her crowded desk. “I’m not an expert on weaponry. I’m an astrophysicist. But give me a list of your assets, and I’ll see what we can think up down here in Science Country. I need to know what kind of ships we have, and their list of ordnance loadouts, especially anything with nuclear warheads. I also need to know the maximum power output of their fusion reactors, and their acceleration data.”
“We’ll get that to you,” I say. “It’ll be a short list. Right now we have two ships on our side, and one of them is a ratty old freighter.”
Dr. Stewart lets out a little sigh.
“Not much we can do, and nothing to do it with,” she echoes Sergeant Fallon. “Well, let me see if we can add something of value, Sergeant.”
“Seven days,” Sergeant Fallon muses as we walk back to the ops center. “If we don’t come up with a way to knock your aliens out of space in seven days, we’re fucked.”
“Could be that Russian cruiser isn’t running from a Lanky ship,” I say, even though I can’t even convince myself of the possibility.
“Could be that I’m not really on some forsaken ball of ice at the ass end of the settled galaxy,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Could be that this is all a bad dream caused by too much shitty soy beer at the NCO club. What do you think?”
“I think if they don’t come up with something really fucking clever in Science Country, we’re fucked,” I concur.
“Never thought I’d kick it out in space. Always figured I’d get my lights turned off in a PRC somewhere. Look around the wrong corner, bam. Not this alien invasion business.”
I have a brief flashback to a hot night five years ago, memories of a rifle in my right hand and an injured Sergeant Fallon hanging off my left side. I still recall the feeling of absolute certainty that we were both just moments away from death as the fléchettes from rioters’ guns whizzed past us with supersonic cracks. I can still feel the blood running down my side, and the way every breath hurt as if someone was driving a knife between my ribs. But the worst of it was the feeling of total abandonment, of being left to die in the middle of a filthy, squalid welfare city, surrounded by people who hated us so much for who we were and what we did that they would have torn us limb from limb with their bare hands.
“If our time is up, at least we’ll be dying in fresh air,” I say. “With rifles in our hands and a hearty ‘fuck you’ on our lips.”
“There are worse ways to go,” Sergeant Fallon agrees. “’Course, I want to explore every other option before we get to the ‘dying in fresh air’ part.”
In the windowless admin building, with the wind blowing the snow around outside in fifty-knot gales, it’s easy for us troopers to fall back into a watch-cycle routine. I spend my watches in the ops center in front of an admin deck, looking at the data from the orbital sensors and the packages the Neural Networks guy on the Indy sends down over encrypted half-millisecond bursts. The Indianapolis has the latest in computers and the very latest in stealth technology, which is the only thing that gives me even a glimmer of hope now. The battered SRA cruiser—if they are indeed damaged and not just pulling a ruse to get into missile range—is creeping closer to New Svalbard with every hour, but even the advanced ELINT gear on the Indy can’t yet see what they’re creeping away from. The fleet units are holding the truce, but their frigate is definitely running an independent search pattern, trying to sniff out the Indy. The Midway and her light cruiser escort are doing slow, predictable laps in orbit, active sensors s
weeping the area in equally predictable patterns. In sheer combat power, the light cruiser alone outmatches Indy, but watching those two relics trying to nail down the location of that brand-new stealth ship is almost embarrassing.
At some point, I look up from the screen to see that I’m the only person left in the ops center. I check my computer’s clock and find that it’s 0230 local time, the middle of the night. I lean back and stretch with a yawn.
Behind me, the door to the ops center opens, and Dr. Stewart steps through it. She looks about as fresh as I feel, and there’s a big, old-fashioned porcelain mug in one of her hands. She has a data pad under the other arm.
“Good evening,” she says when she sees me sitting in the corner. “Or good morning, I guess.”
“Everyone’s gone,” I say. “The ops guys turned in a while ago.”
“Actually, I’m here to see you. Where’s the other sergeant?”
“Master Sergeant Fallon? In her quarters, I guess. That mutiny business will wear you out,” I add, and Dr. Stewart smiles wryly.
“For what it’s worth, the civilian crew really appreciates that you decided to stand with us.”
“It wasn’t right for them to try and grab what they did,” I say. “We’re supposed to be a defense force, not an occupying army.”
“I had my prejudices,” she says. “But you’ve managed to put a dent into them. I’m not used to the idea of soldiers being reflective about the ethics of their jobs. I thought you do what they tell you to do.”
“Generally. Not always. They don’t surgically remove your sense of right and wrong when you show up for boot camp, you know.”
“May I sit down?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say. “Your place.”
She pulls up one of the empty chairs from the console bank next to me and rolls it to where I’m sitting. I make her some room and move my rifle, which was leaning against the desk. She sits down with a sigh and puts coffee mug and data pad on the desk next to my loaner admin deck.
