The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach)

by John Lumpkin

  USS Valley Forge, 11 Leonis Minoris

  Valley Forge was a destroyer of the Lexington class, suited for operations independent of large fleets. As such, her crew had developed a “lone wolf” swagger relative to other crews in the Space Force, and certain institutional knowledge about how to get along with outsiders had atrophied. Thus the impending arrival of a flag officer – from the Army, no less – forced a hurried review of the regs and a series of inquiries about that officer’s preferences on the soon-to-depart Vincennes, his former home for overseeing the resistance on distant Kuan Yin. But the bosun’s whistle had been located and practiced with, and a detail of starboys was summoned to render honors.

  So it was something of an anticlimax when Brigadier General Rev Grogan launched himself too strongly from Valley Forge’s jumper into the shuttlebay, flying past the salutes with only a quick motion to his forehead to return them. Apparently, he had forgotten about the ferrous strip embedded in the floor, or he didn’t care to bother with simulating Earthside normality. As he passed, Captain Grace Mallett quickly launched herself beside him, maneuvering through freefall with the agility of an old spacehand. As they pulled through the hatch to the ship’s main shaft, Mallett reached behind herself to give a surreptitious “come on!” wave to Lieutenant (j.g.) Erin Quintana and the other two officers who had attended Grogan’s arrival.

  They had expected Grogan to go to his quarters, so the section of the ship’s central shaft connecting the shuttlebay to that area had been cleared. But Grogan said “Briefing room,” and the entourage instead flew into the forward section of the ship, forcing several surprised astronauts to flatten themselves against the shaft’s concave wall while they passed.

  Once they reached the briefing room and were seated, a half-dozen other ships’ officers in work uniforms hurried in, summoned from various tasks to meet the general.

  Erin looked at him closely. Rev Grogan had deep blue eyes set in a weathered, spare face. His brown hair was cut even shorter than the regs required for space, and his thin lips were pressed together in a perpetual small frown. He wore the “tower of power” – Special Forces, Ranger and Spaceborne tabs on his left shoulder.

  The man who wouldn’t save Mom and Dad, Erin thought.

  “Captain,” Grogan began, “what are you going to do about those three Chinese destroyers that are now one week away?”

  Mallett cleared her throat. “For the moment, sir, we’re going to see if our arrival in the system spooks them into turning away.”

  “Why would they? Captain Dominguez on Vincennes said even with Valley Forge present, the simulations put our chance of victory over the Chinese force at less than thirty percent.”

  “That’s true,” Mallett said. “But we think they don’t know what else we’ve got through keyhole in Golf Juliet Eleven-Nineteen –”

  “—which is nothing but a remass tanker –”

  “—so they may fear an ambush from the other side once they get close. They’re still decelerating toward us, but they’ve increased thrust, so they’ll stop more than a hundred thousand klicks away,” the captain finished.

  “And when they decide to come after us anyway?”

  “We’ll exit this system through the keyhole and hit them if they are stupid enough to follow us through.”

  The general leaned forward, his eyes narrowing. “That doesn’t do me any good, Captain Mallett. I urgently need to reestablish direct contact with my forces on Kuan Yin. Being on the other side of the keyhole denies me that. Vincennes will have to stay.”

  Mallett shook her head. “I can assure you that won’t happen. She fought in our first attempt to retake Kuan Yin and hasn’t been home since. She’s beyond the point where she’s losing effectiveness as a fighting ship, and she needs the kind of maintenance you can only get at a big station. She’s going home. But we won’t need her, if we’re defending the keyhole from the other side.”

  “Then I’ll have to insist more ships from the Spruance task force come here to protect you.”

  That won’t happen, either, Erin thought. Spruance and her consorts were one system upstream, more than a week’s travel time distant. Admiral Vega’s force had been borrowed from, and borrowed from again, and was now down to a dozen fighting craft. He wouldn’t split up that meager force to support a mission that many in Space Force believed would amount to nothing: coordinating with what was left of the 9th Infantry Division, the Army unit that had been overrun when China took over the American colony on Kuan Yin after the war started.

  The room was silent for a moment. Everyone was aware of Grogan and Mallett’s disparity in rank, and Grogan knew he was arguing not with another person, but with Space Force, its policies and decisions already made on Earth. He’s trying to win us over, Erin realized. He needs us to believe in the mission.

  He would not get such loyalty from her, not ever.

  Mallett said, “In the meantime, here’s the best I can do. If those destroyers approach, Valley Forge can engage with our entire load of missiles at extreme range. We’re a strong standoff-range fighter, and we might be able to disable them at that distance. If we can’t, I will be compelled to withdraw through the keyhole, General.”

  Grogan nodded, said nothing.

  An alert chime issued through everyone’s handheld save that of Grogan, who had not yet logged into the ship’s network. The voice of the on-duty sensor tech in CIC followed.

  “Warning, warning. Multiple military-grade drive flares detected around Kuan Yin.”

  Captain Mallett thumbed her handheld. “Interplanetary trajectory?”

  “Wait one, sir,” came the reply. An officer slaved the briefing room’s screen to the sensor tech’s console, but otherwise no one moved. On the display, little red dots around Kuan Yin grew into long streamers, marking Chinese warships under thrust.

  The lines on General Grogan’s face seemed to deepen. “If they’re sending the fleet after us, there’s no way we can remain in the system.”

  Finally, the sensor tech said, “Negative. The ships appear to be heading toward the Golf-Juliet-Eleven-Thirty-Four keyhole.”

  “They’re withdrawing to Chinese space,” Mallett said. “How many?”

  “I count seventeen ships, sir.”

  “That’s nearly half their force!” Valley Forge’s XO said. “They’re leaving Kuan Yin vulnerable for the first time in a year. That’s why they sent the three destroyers to chase Vincennes off, so we wouldn’t see this. We need to alert Admiral Vega, right now.”

  “What if they are withdrawing to just behind the keyhole, trying to draw one of our fleets too close to the planet and hitting us from two sides?” Erin asked.

  Valley Forge’s intelligence officer shook his head and pointed at the screen. “Some of those markers are battalion transports, and their mass readings show they are running fully loaded. By my count, they’re pulling out two full brigades and one of their aircraft carriers. That’s a huge operation; they could set the same trap but leave the troops on the ground. No way to ever be certain, but that looks like a legitimate long-haul fleet movement.”

  At that, General Grogan leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands together. Ever so briefly, he smiled.

  San José, Republic of Tecolote, Entente

  One by one, a series of seagulls alighted on the black sail of the British submarine, moored in the military section of San José’s port. HMS Hibernia was a mothership, a crewed command vessel that managed hundreds of underwater drones, collectively capable of guarding a whole swath of ocean against incursion. Her sister, Caledonia, was already at sea, her drones probing Han deep defenses off Huashan.

  While Hibernia’s modern and menacing lines were the most visible marker of the new alliance, Neil also recognized subtler evidence of the assistance of Tecolote’s new friends. The great cranes of the port were offloading several brand-new yellow Caterpillar robodiggers from a freighter, and they were easily the most advanced construction vehicles on the island.
They would first be used in building a large base to house allied forces, and then they would be turned over to Tecolote’s government for their own uses.

  Also off the freighter were a series of brown shipping containers, unremarkable except for the extended series of warnings printed on them: no open flames, no exposure to seawater, and for gawd’s sake no dropping the container. Inside was the second shipment of General Vargas’ long-sought artillery rockets, which would see rapid use as he launched his offensive against the rebels in the northern highlands. He had already used up the first batch, wiping out a coastal town that he announced was an enemy stronghold.

  Allied personnel were also coming, but that would take longer. Advance units from the British and Australian armies would be arriving to survey the situation first, as the American presence on Entente was still limited. The Seabees would transfer from Ardoyne within the month.

  So Neil had been busy in the last several weeks, but the work was not terribly challenging: meetings with Tecolote officials, remote conferences with allied officers, and lots of hanging out at the port, inventorying arriving materiel. He hadn’t seen Das in some time, and he had to keep putting off another fishing excursion with Tippy. At last Jessica was trying to arrange a trip down to see him.

  Kitsune was gone, departed on an orbital launch for Rubin Station in Entente’s LEO. That was usually a jumping off point for higher orbits, and commercial stations that hosted ships leaving for other planets. She didn’t say what was next for her, only that she would be in touch again.

  And Irene Gomez – Irene Sato, Neil corrected himself – had vanished. She had not returned to the consulate, and they had not spoken. Paul Layton, the chargé d’affaires, claimed not to know what had happened to her. Not knowing what else to do, Neil had fired off a long, carefully-worded report about her behavior to the NSS counterintelligence and received a form-letter acknowledgement in return.

  His handheld alerted him to a yet another call from Commander Raleigh.

  “Go ahead, sir.”

  “New orders. Get back to the Apache as soon as you can. She’s taking on supplies and will depart orbit in about three days.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’ll be there in twelve hours. Can’t say more, but things are moving. The Brits will be taking the lead in Tecolote for the time being, and Apache is needed elsewhere.”

  Back to the ship. Back to Howell, weighing almost nothing and turning tricks in CIC.

  And back to Jessica.

  United States Space Command, Kitsinger Station, Geosynchronous Earth Orbit

  The auditorium was the largest room in Kitsinger, big enough that it reflected the curve of the station ring in which it was situated, and the seats on each edge were noticeably higher than those in the center. The station’s rotation simulated a significant fraction of Earth’s gravity, and if you didn’t think about it too much, you might persuade yourself that you were in some university lecture hall back on Earth.

  The briefing had not yet started, and the room hummed with the chatter and occasional laughs of the gathering officers of the alliance. The uniforms present varied wildly in color, at least within the muted spectrum of tans, olives, blues, grays and white that militaries preferred to adopt.

  Calling this an alliance is too bold, Donovan thought. A lot of countries, without a lot of history together – or a bad history, like the U.K. and India, or us and Russia. This is a coalition of convenience and self-interest, not friends.

  He sat between Ramesh and Gardiner Fairchild and buried his eyes in his handheld, hoping no acquaintances would attempt to greet him.

  At one point, Ramesh vaulted over their row of chairs to greet another Indian Space Force officer. He pulled a good-sized white-orange conch shell from his bag and gave it to the officer, who thanked him profusely.

  “Mollusks in space?” Fairchild asked him when retook his seat.

  Ramesh smiled. “Old Indian tradition. When we first put people in orbit, our hyper-rationalistic government at the time refused to allow any personal or religious items to be carried up, on the official grounds it was excess mass that could be used for scientific instruments. It was also an unofficial attempt to promote the state over religion and ethnicity. Our astronaut corps eventually revolted and started transporting small gifts to the long-term residents of our first station. Now, everyone coming up from the surface is supposed to bring something you can’t make up here in a fab unit.”

  Something about Ramesh’s story lightened Donovan’s mood, and he asked him about other gifts he had brought up, but before the wing commander could answer, the first briefer approached the podium.

  “Hello, everyone. I’m Captain Deke Blackburn of the United States Navy, chief of the joint intel cell for the … whatever we’re calling ourselves.” The audience chuckled; many of the officers present were all part of the thrown-together organization that would manage information-sharing and operations between all the newly friendly states; one minor matter still in contention was what to call the body.

  The overhead lights dimmed, giving the room a dusky feel, with many faces colored by whatever was on the handheld in front of them. A map of great Asia appeared on the main screen.

  At first glance, things did not look well for the People’s Republic of China and their allies in the United Republic of Korea. Markers indicating Japanese and American submarines blockaded the Chinese coast; only the Yellow Sea remained firmly in enemy hands. PLA troops were arrayed in the coastal cities as a defense against invasion; others were on the Korean peninsula, ready to react should Japan make another attempt at Pusan. The Korean island of Jeju was noted as occupied by Japanese forces, the only meaningful territory on Earth that had changed hands, and remained so, since the war started.

  To the south, little green, white and saffron flags marked the rough positions of the Indian Army corps. Several were located in the annexed areas of Punjab; others along the passable sections of the Himalayas. Little red flags that marked Chinese units were shown moving to positions across the border. So much of their army is committed, Donovan thought.

  China’s western reaches had fewer forces. Although Beijing worried about another Uighur rebellion, the various ‘Stans were friendly states, and they held the vital rail and Caspian Sea links between China and the neutral Middle Eastern countries, and the wealth of Africa beyond. Mongolia was carefully offering no threat to anyone, leaving the long lumpy boundary between Manchuria and Siberia as the critical front with Russia.

  But as Blackburn described the map, Donovan’s skepticism grew. This presentation isn’t an objective assessment; it’s aimed at building confidence in the coalition. Russia’s army was far smaller than China’s, but the flags marking Russian divisions were as large as those marking Chinese corps. And he knew that the Chinese and Korean navies had run the coastal blockades on multiple occasions, and twice they had concentrated their forces and blown wide gaps in the allied line and sent who-knows-what through. Moreover, India and China were not formally in a shooting war; and China and Korea still had a great space fleet at Venus’ trailing Trojan point, waiting for a chance to retake Earth orbit.

  But even with all that, Donovan couldn’t ignore the reality: The Chinese were running out of ground forces, and most of the units in Manchuria were labeled as reserves. The thought reminded him of the omnipresent, unspoken worry, that one side or the other might try to use nuclear weapons on Earth’s surface if it felt its back was truly pressed against the wall. Two years of war, and it’s suddenly not as unthinkable as it was after the Rock and Delhi and Grozny.

  Blackburn finished, and two flag officers – a U.S. Marine Corps general and a Russian space forces admiral – ascended the podium.

  The general, a buzz-cut two-star named McCormack, said, “The addition of the Russians as co-belligerents in the conflict has freed up a number of assets previously required to ensure supremacy in near-Earth space. We are forming two international combined joint task forces, which we belie
ve will be able to tip the strategic balance in our favor at two critical points of conflict, one within the Solar System, the other beyond.”

  On the screen behind him, the map vanished, and a list of ship hull numbers and unit designations appeared. Why couldn’t they just list the names of the ships? Donovan thought peevishly. The list included Japanese, American, Russian and Iranian vessels.

  “CJTF Nineteen will be composed of thirty-seven combat ships, fourteen combat support craft, and six battalion-sized troop carriers. The flagship will be the Kagoshima, with Admiral Hirayama in command. I will command the Marine forces.”

  “Your Marine units are specialized for combat on non-terran worlds, aren’t they?” Ramesh whispered to Donovan, who grunted ignorance in response. Ramesh bobbed his head and answered his own question. “Yes, they are. They’re going to retake Saturn.”

  “We’re going to retake Saturn,” McCormack said. “This will deny use of the helium-three and deuterium mines there to the enemy and decrease the threat to our supply lines between Earth and Lalande by providing us with an alternate source of those fuels. The trip there is more than three months, so it is a significant commitment of these forces for at least half a year.”

  And even longer for those who will have to be left behind to guard the system, Donovan thought.