Courageous

by Jack Campbell

  Commander Lommand’s face appeared. Captain of the Titan. Young for his position, but Geary had already learned that Lommand tended to make up for lack of experience with initiative and enthusiasm. Now Lommand appeared slightly regretful. “My apologies for breaking in, Captain Geary, but I was told Captain Tyrosian was tied up in this meeting with you, and I thought she’d want to know immediately that the two Mobile Mining Units on Titan are loaded on heavy-lift shuttles and ready to launch.”

  Geary glanced at Tyrosian, who was unsuccessfully trying to look as if she weren’t surprised to hear the news. “Mobile Mining Units?” Geary asked. “Can those help?”

  “They can if the equipment at the Syndic mining facilities can’t be used,” Lommand stated innocently. “It seemed a good idea to have them ready in case that happened.”

  “Yes,” Tyrosian interjected just as if she had ordered Lommand to do that. “There’s a risk in deploying them, because the two on Titan are all we have left in the fleet, but the MMUs can locate, analyze, and load the Syndic stockpiles of the trace elements we need.”

  “What’s the flight time?” Geary demanded, scanning his controls for the right ones to give him the information.

  Commander Lommand answered immediately. “Thirty-one minutes if we launch now.”

  Colonel Carabali was checking something herself. “We can’t risk having critical equipment down here while the Syndic systems are still operating and capable of executing some Trojan horse action. Carrying out a safe shutdown of the Syndic gear will take approximately…twenty minutes.”

  Geary nodded. “What about everything else needed to use the Syndic gear? Should we employ these, uh, MMUs instead?”

  “Sir, it’d take at least a couple of hours to go through the Syndic systems and scrub them clean, then maybe another half a day or more to bring them up in a controlled fashion—”

  “How quickly can the MMUs start operating once they’re on the surface?” Geary asked the engineers.

  “Immediately, sir,” Commander Lommand responded. “Start-up is carried out on board the shuttles. Once the shuttles land, the Moo-Moos roll off the ramp and start grazing.”

  Nice. One more little thing that Geary had to depend upon hearing about from his subordinates. Fortunately, one of those subordinates was Commander Lommand. Geary was about to order Lommand to launch his shuttles from Titan when he caught himself and faced Captain Tyrosian, Lommand’s immediate superior. Commander Lommand had jumped the chain of command again, but this time at least he’d done it in a way that looked legitimate by pretending he was updating Tyrosian. “Captain Tyrosian, have Titan launch those shuttles, and get them to that facility. I want them working when they hit the surface. Commander Lommand, thank you for the status update. Colonel Carabali, have your system geeks shut down everything the Syndics left working. I want it all off when Titan’s shuttles get there.”

  “Yes, sir,” Carabali replied, smiling thinly. “Do you want us to proceed with scrubbing the systems for sabotage?”

  “Not unless it’s needed for the safety of your troops. I don’t intend powering up those systems while we’re there, and as soon as we leave, we’re going to flatten every piece of equipment in the facility.”

  Carabali’s smile widened. “Yes, sir.”

  As the Marine’s image vanished, Captain Tyrosian gave Geary a confident look, as if this was a plan she’d developed. “I’ve ordered Titan to launch her shuttles, sir.”

  “Thank you.” At least Tyrosian had thought on her feet and reacted properly when Lommand broke into the conference. “Good work. Let’s get those rocks and get out of here.”

  The windows vanished, leaving just the system display floating in front of Geary. He watched the symbols marking his fleet racing past the moon holding the Syndic mining facility, looping around the gas giant to come past the moon again, then ran some quick calculations to see if he would have to slow the fleet even more due to the delays on the surface.

  It looked okay at this point. Not great, and with way too small a margin of error left, but if the mobile mining gear could do the job quickly, he wouldn’t have to burn off further fuel cells braking the fleet’s velocity more.

  Geary leaned back, noticing Captain Desjani trying not to look curious. “The Syndics left the equipment running at the mining facility,” he explained to her.

  “Bastards,” Desjani replied with a frown. “They knew we’d have to assume it was laced with soft and hard booby traps.”

  “Yeah. But Titan has a couple of portable mining things they’re sending down to take care of getting the stockpiles.” Geary looked back to include Rione in the conversation. “The Marines are shutting down the Syndic gear.”

  Rione shook her head. “Odds are the Syndics didn’t have time to plant elaborate booby traps in the systems, but we have no choice but to act as if they did.”

  “They’ve laid traps everywhere we’ve encountered Syndics.” Geary watched the shuttles from Titan arcing down toward the moon, wishing the enemy was a little less devious and his own fleet’s situation a lot less perilous.

  THE voice of the chief petty officer supervising Titan’s Mobile Mining Units seemed startled and awed when he heard Geary. “Sir. It’s an honor to speak with you, sir.”

  Geary tried not to let his unhappiness at the hero worship show in his voice. The sailors in the fleet were more likely than the officers to believe that Geary had been sent by the living stars themselves to save the Alliance, and this fleet in particular. They were also more likely to believe that Geary really was the mythical hero of the past. But he owed them respect for their faith even as he tried his best not to believe in it himself. “Do you have a moment, Chief? To talk about your gear?” Nothing was happening elsewhere, but Geary felt that he had to stay on the bridge until this mess was over, and anyway Geary was curious about the MMUs.

  The view from the chief’s helmet showed one side of the Syndic facility. Big doors giving access to stockpiles of mined and refined minerals had been blown off their hinges by Marines happy to get a head start on wrecking the Syndic installation. The hulking shapes of the two MMUs had crawled on treads across the surface of the moon, crushing or shouldering aside some Syndic safety barriers, and now crouched in front of the accesses.

  “Yes, sir,” the chief replied. “The crews on the Moo-Moos are operating their own cows, and I’m just here if needed.”

  Cows. The nickname made as much sense as any other for a piece of equipment with the official designation of MMU. “I’m not familiar with your gear, Chief. What can you tell me about it?” He’d already tried looking up information in the online library on Dauntless, only to be submerged by a huge mass of documents, none of which seemed to have a single simple, clear diagram or discussion about the capabilities of the MMUs. After unsuccessfully trying to wade through a mass of complex data, Geary had decided to follow his training as a junior officer; when you needed to know something, ask a chief petty officer.

  This particular chief sounded disbelieving that the great Black Jack Geary would really need to be told anything. “The technology hasn’t changed much since…uh…since…”

  “In the last century?” Geary asked dryly. “I didn’t know much about it then, Chief. No need arose in those days for me to worry about it.”

  “Oh, uh, yes, sir. Well, like I said, the tech hasn’t changed much. It’s simple and robust. Everything that’s been tried as a replacement is more complicated, more expensive, breaks more and, uh, you know.”

  “I certainly do, Chief,” Geary agreed, recalling many of the “improvements” to ship systems that had bedeviled him a hundred years ago by creating new problems with equipment that had worked perfectly well before being upgraded into temperamental, buggy pieces of junk. “I’m glad they’ve let you stick with something that works well. What are your cows doing now? Waiting for clearance to enter the facility?”

  “No, sir! They won’t have to go any farther in. The cows are sending in worm
s, sir. Once the worms—”

  “Worms?”

  “Uh, yes, sir.” The view from the chief’s helmet changed, focusing on the front of one of the Moo-Moos and zooming in. What looked like a nest of very fine wires extended out, the wires leading into the storage buildings. “Do you see the leashes, sir? Every one connects to a worm. We call them that because they’re about the size of worms and work the same way. They eat dirt. Or rock.”

  “How do they get through rock?” Geary asked.

  “What amounts to really tiny shock cannon mounted around the front mouth. The worm analyzes the rock structure and sends out vibration pulses that shatter the rock right in front of it. Of course, in this case this stuff has already been mined, so they’re going through stocks of solid metal. The worms eat the dust and move on, constantly doing the same thing. As the dust runs through the inside of the worms, molecular-level sensors analyze the content. Then it goes out the back. Just like a worm, like I said, sir.”

  “What are the wires for?”

  “Command and control, and power. A mining worm has to move a lot faster than a real worm and keep doing it, so they need a lot more energy than a real worm-sized object could hold. And we don’t want stray radiation being emitted in a mining environment—you know, because of explosive gases and detonators and stuff—or have our links to the worms blocked by metals or other stuff, so all the communications to and from the worm run through the line.” The chief’s view pivoted and focused on where the lines ran into the building. “In a normal mining operation the worms go out, dig in below the surface, and find the ore or veins of material you need. In this case, we know where the stockpiles are, so right now the worms are tunneling through the stockpiles, identifying what’s in each one, and looking for contamination or nano-bugs.”

  Nano-bugs. Geary knew that much. Tiny devices planted to cause problems in equipment once triggered by heat or pressure. “I thought nano-bugs were outlawed since they were so hard to keep contained.”

  He could see the motion caused by the chief’s shrug. “Yes, sir. But there’s a lot of stuff that’s been outlawed, if you know what I mean, sir.”

  “Yeah, Chief, I do.” Outlawed didn’t mean it wouldn’t be used. Not in the case of the Syndics, and not in the case of the Alliance either, as Geary had been shocked to learn. Century-long wars too easily bred contempt for life and law. “Any problems identified so far?”

  “No, sir. We’re giving the worms time to do a decent sample check, then we’ll send in the moles.”

  “Moles?”

  “Yes, sir. The moles actually go out and dig down to the stuff, load it on board, then bring it back to the cow. The cows have big moles and little moles, depending on how much you want to recover. And we can hook up a monster mole to a cow if we have to, but Titan’s only got one monster mole. It just digs a big hole and feeds the stuff back through a conveyor tube on its ass.” The chief went silent for a moment, then spoke in a slightly choked voice. “Excuse me, sir, the material is expelled through the aft matter-expulsion portal.”

  “I get the idea, Chief.” Geary paused to consider the information, watching as shapes scuttled away from the cows and into the Syndic storage area, each shape trailing its own wire. “Everything looks good, then?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s a mix of big and little moles because we’ve got orders to get this stuff loaded and the cows back on the shuttles as fast as possible.”

  “Right. Thanks, Chief. I appreciate the rundown.” Geary broke the link, blinking to focus his own eyes back on the display showing his fleet. So far, so good, which was the first time in a while he felt like saying that.

  Desjani yawned. “Excuse me, sir.”

  “I feel the same way. At least I got to learn about the cows the engineers are using.”

  “Cows?” Desjani gave Geary a skeptical look.

  “Yeah. Cows with worms and moles.”

  She grinned. “Are you sure you weren’t talking to the cooks about what the fleet is feeding us?”

  Food. How long had he been on the bridge, anyway? Geary’s stomach rumbled.

  Desjani smiled again, dug in one pocket, and offered him a ration bar. “I always carry a few.”

  “Thanks. Remind me to say something about your ability to plan ahead when I write your next evaluation.” Geary took the ration bar, debated whether he should read the label or just guess what it contained, then decided he’d rather not know. That was something else that hadn’t changed in a century. In a misguided attempt to satisfy individual tastes and reflect the diversity of the Alliance member worlds, the ration bars were allegedly formulated to fit the widely varying cuisines of many planets and regions. Instead, the flavors the fleet came up with somehow managed to revolt everyone, regardless of place of origin.

  He opened the wrapper, took a bite, shuddered, then finally glanced at the label. “Forshukyen Solos? What the hell is that?” Geary checked the fine print. “‘A favorite meal on the worlds of the Hokaiden Star System.’ I bet.”

  “Try to avoid the Danaka Yoruk bars,” Desjani advised.

  “They still make those? When they came out, we wanted them to be traded to the Syndics, but—” But we were afraid the Syndics would start a war if we did. That joke was a lot funnier before the Syndics did start a war.

  Desjani had the sense not to ask about the way Geary had broken off his sentence. “I think they stopped making those bars a long time ago but are still trying to get rid of the ones they made.” She laughed, the lines worn by years of war easing and her face looking younger than usual.

  Geary grinned back at her, grateful that even with someone who thought him a mythical hero he could complain about the fleet’s food. The familiar banter made him feel less out of place, offering a connection to the people and places he’d once known.

  The trace elements his auxiliaries needed were rapidly flowing into Titan’s cows. Geary studied the movement of his fleet, feeling a headache rising again as he saw how close the timeline was now. Even the smallest delay would require him to waste time and fuel cells in a braking maneuver.

  As if on cue, an alert pulsed on his display tracking the situation on the moon’s surface. Even as Geary was focusing on it, Colonel Carabali’s face appeared again. “The Syndics in the mine shafts are trying to come out. They’re exchanging fire with the Marines guarding the exits from the shafts.”

  The last thing he needed was a ground engagement. Maybe the Syndics had figured that out and were willing to expend some of their people just to slow the Alliance fleet down a little more. Geary took a deep breath, leaning back to think, and his eyes came to rest on the fleet display. Oh, hell. For once this is easy. “Colonel Carabali, prepare to pull your Marines back toward the shuttles. Make sure Titan’s cows remain covered until they’re loaded and their shuttles take off.”

  The Marine colonel frowned slightly. “Cows, sir?”

  “The Moo-Moos.” That sounded ridiculous. “The Mobile Mining Units.”

  “Oh. Yes, sir. Sir, the moment we start pulling my Marines back, the Syndics are going to come out of those holes.”

  “I don’t think so, Colonel. Not with Exemplar and Braveheart throwing hell lances at them. How big a no-fire zone do you need to be comfortable with those ships firing near your Marines?”

  Carabali’s frown deepened. “With all due respect, sir, we prefer to be as far away as possible when the fleet is bombarding an area.”

  Understandable, perhaps, but not too helpful. Geary looked over at Desjani. “How accurate should hell-lance fire from Exemplar and Braveheart be if they start shooting at the Syndics on the surface again? The Marines are worried.”

  Desjani snorted. “With those two ships that close to the targets and at a dead stop relative to them? It’d be impossible under those circumstances for a hell lance to miss a target by any meaningful margin of error, by which I mean something measured in less than a centimeter. Those Marines could be ten meters away from an aim point and be perfectl
y safe.”

  Geary didn’t think he’d personally be willing to stand ten meters from a hell-lance aim point but didn’t say so aloud. “Colonel, how about two hundred meters for a no fire zone between your Marines and the bombardment from the ships?”

  “Could you make it three hundred, sir?”

  Oh, for—Then again, I did order the Marines into the facility in the face of the possibility it was a trap. I owe them one. “All right. Three hundred. Once your closest Marine is three hundred meters away from the mine shafts occupied by the Syndics, Exemplar and Braveheart will open fire on any Syndics trying to leave the shafts.”

  The Marine’s face brightened. “Could you make it a rolling barrage, sir? As my people pull back, the ships can walk their bombardment through the facility behind them, getting a head start on demolishing it and discouraging pursuit.”

  “Excellent suggestion, Colonel. I’ll pass those orders on to Exemplar and Braveheart.” Another message popped up. “The cows have picked up everything we need and are on the way to their shuttles.”

  “I’ll prepare my Marines to fall back toward them.” Carabali’s image saluted and vanished.

  Geary called up the two scout battleships, ensured they understood their orders, and added a requirement to ensure the facility was wrecked except for one small set of rooms and their associated life support. Life wouldn’t be easy for the Syndics left behind until the inhabited world in this system sent ships to lift them off, but since they could easily have been slaughtered to the last individual by the Alliance ships, Geary didn’t think they had any grounds for complaints.

  Things were finally happening again, though at a seemingly glacial pace as the symbols marking Marines and the cows fell back toward their respective shuttles. Used to dealing with velocities measured in tenths of the speed of light, Geary found himself amazed at how long it took something on the surface to go a few hundred meters.