by Trevor Wyatt
Flynn felt the blood drain from his face as he was drawn to the reality of their present predicament.
We can’t go on fighting this war, he thought. But can we afford not to?
He had always been a solitary man, unmarried and without kids. But now, he felt that to be a blessing. The end to which the Terran Union and the Armada were headed wasn’t an end he would want his family to exist in.
Jeryl
A few hours later, he and Ashley went over the Wolf Offensive in his private office off CNC. It was smaller than his old office aboard the original The Seeker, even though the electronics were superior. There was more computing power in this one chamber than there were in the entirety of the old ship, but it wasn’t as comfortable.
“Details of the plan,” Jeryl told her, sending the file to her tablet. “There are 395 ships in the fleet. According to Flynn we’re going to be leading a smaller flotilla of twenty-two ships ranging in size from dreadnoughts to small cruisers and one-man fighters.”
“Are all the flotillas going to be broken up like that?”
“Depending on how many of equal size can be put together from the complement of ships, yes,” said Jeryl. “Some will have more or less of a given weight class, of course. No more than one dreadnought, ever, but anywhere from seven to twelve fighters. Ours has eight, for example.”
Ashley wrinkled up her nose. Jeryl almost smiled but he caught himself; he had always found that expression adorable, but he knew better than to say it. This wasn’t the time or place for him to do such a thing.
“Eight isn’t very many,” she said.
“That’s true, but figure that out of the 396 in the entire fleet, you’ll have well over a hundred. And it’s my understanding that this isn’t the only fleet.”
She nodded, staring at the data on her tablet.
“How are the repairs going?” asked Jeryl.
“Well enough,” she said with a small smile. “That engineer I was talking to told me it would be ready on his timeline. Then you came over and destroyed all the resistance!”
Jeryl grinned. “What can I say? Straight from the top.”
“Nothing like cutting through bureaucracy,” said Ashley. “Anyway, everything’s on schedule, and none of the crew will mind getting extra sleep period or a little more shore leave.”
She shrugged. “As long as those damned inertial dampers are fixed, I don’t care.”
“And the resequencer,” Jeryl said. “The coffee on this tub is bad enough without it tasting like soapy water like it does now.”
He clicked his tongue.
“Anyway, so look.” He sent the attack plan to the room’s main screen. “The main thrust of the Wolf plan will be toward Beta Hydrae, which Terran Command believes is the nexus of Sonali control within this Sector.”
She made an interested noise as Jeryl continue.
“Now, you can see here that Beta Hyrdae is a double-star system. The larger component is a blue star about two and a half times the size of our sun.”
“Hot,” she said.
“Very. And it’s also a variable, α2 CVn variable. Lots of metals on its surface layers, uneven temperature distribution across the photosphere, that sort of thing.”
“A place to avoid,” she acknowledged. “The Sonali can’t be from there, can they? I mean, a variable, it’ll flood that system with all sorts of radiation at intervals.” She looks at her tablet.
“They’ve established a series of underground and shielded shelters for a sizable population,” Jeryl said.
He expanded the view.
“There are five planets, as you can see here. The third one out from the primary is the one we’re interested in, Beta Hydrae III. No one’s given it a proper name yet. Intelligence says that the place has some sort of religious significance for the Sonali.”
Her look was blank. “Like what?”
“No one knows for sure. Something like how the Star of Bethlehem was for Christians.”
She nodded in understanding.
Jeryl continued, “Anyway, some mythological nonsense. The Union believe if they can wipe it out, it’ll ruin Sonali morale.”
The nose-wrinkling again. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe.”
“Well, Command thinks it’s worth committing a hell of a lot of resources to do.”
“We’ve been fighting those bastards for a while now,” she said. “Do we have a clear idea yet of the exact volume of space the Sonali control?”
“Intelligence says their territory is roughly half the size of Union space. Our colonies are far-flung, but the Sonali’s are closer together and more developed than ours.”
“What exactly is the point of this mission, Jeryl?” she asked as she read the specifics on her tablet.
Jeryl took a pause.
“The main assault will come from the main force,” said Jeryl in measured tones. “We expect heavy Sonali resistance. Our job is to take a small contingent of ships through a more circuitous approach. Come at them from another direction while they’re busy holding off our main fleet. And then bombard their infrastructure on the planet and destroy their ability to use their infrastructure on conducting war in the future.”
There was a pause.
She studied her tablet.
“I don’t know,” she said again after a few moments. “I know we’re anxious to strike a decisive blow, but this...capturing or destroying Beta Hydrae III? The Sonali are fanatics, Jeryl. Half the deal with this war is that they see us as heathens, unbelievers. If we crap in their manger, they could really get pissed off. It could be like stepping on a nest of fire ants.”
“I agree; but look, Ash—this could be our last chance. You know as well as I do what the scuttlebutt is; we’re sucking wind in this war. It isn’t going well. This attack is probably the only thing humanity can do.”
“What’s the population according to our estimates?” she asked.
This part rankles me, thought Jeryl, but I know I need to let her in on it.
“We estimate up to 1 billion Sonali are living in shielded subterranean caves or domed and shielded structures,” he said.
Silence.
“We’ll be bombarding the planet to the point to make it tectonically unstable. No ground troops,” he said. “Intelligence estimates that we can accomplish this through sustained bombardment with ten ships. We have twenty in our flotilla in case some get scrapped along the way.”
“Genocide,” she whispered.
“It’s been done to us by them,” Jeryl said evenly. He had prepared for this. “We’ve done it too. This isn’t the first time.”
“A billion people,” she countered.
“Things are bad out there, Ash.” .
“I don’t want to think they’re that bad that we have to do this,” she said.
“Who the hell does? For the past three years, all Sonali attacks on our territories have come through this route. They’ve all followed this path. It’s as if they make a sort of, I don’t know, a parade pass of Beta Hydrae III on their way to fight. Like they think they’re receiving a blessing or something. Here, look.”
Jeryl called up some more data files, things she hadn’t yet seen. “These are scans from hyper-speed robot probes we’ve sent through that system.”
“What?" she frowned. “Hyper speed what, now?”
“Robot probes. One of our ships drops out of FTL out past the cometary cloud and spits out a probe, then heads out on full drive again, so fast the Sonali don’t know it’s been there. The probe drops sunward at three times light speed. The hyper-drive fries its instruments, of course, because it’s too small for adequate shielding; but before that happens it whips past III so fast it can’t be detected unless you know exactly where to look. And as it passes, it images the bejesus out of the planet. Then it plunges into the star. Poof! Gone, like it never existed.”
“Well, that’s pretty frictionless,” she said in admiration.
“It is that. So, from those
little probes, we know the Sonali have major defenses around III.”
“Fine, but we’re not going to be able to get in like that,” she said. “Looks to me that we’ll have to come in through this nebula, here; the radiation output from its central star will mask our drive signature.”
“That’s exactly right,” Jeryl said. A peculiar look crossed Ashley’s face.
“Jeryl...”
“What?”
“Well, look at the location of that nebula.”
“What about it?”
“Do you not recognize those coordinates?”
He scowled at his tablet, and glanced up at the main screen as if the larger numbers would jog his memory. And then he saw it
“Aw, hell,” he said. “That’s The Mariner Nebula. Goddammit, that’s where we had First Contact with the Sonali.”
“Yes,” she said in a grim tone. She didn’t need to say anything more. It was where the Sonali said they claimed this space and that they didn’t destroy The Mariner.
It was where the war started.
Well, fuck me.
“If we had filed a different report, then 4 billion people might still be alive and we wouldn’t be at war,” said Ashley.
“I’m not going to argue that,” he muttered. She was right. And it wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about that report a thousand times or more over the past few years. When he walked away from the confrontation, it was like Chamberlain appeasing Hitler. He basically gave those blue-skinned bastards carte blanche to make bolder incursions into their space, because they knew they were there, and that they couldn’t outfight them.
The whole thing is my fault.
“Everyone will be annihilated when we destroy that planet, Jeryl,” Ashley said again.
“So what? It’s not as if they haven’t killed enough of us over the past five years.”
“Violence begets violence,” she said.
All he could do was stare at her. Where has this come from? Had he been that preoccupied that he never noticed his wife change before his eyes?
Then Jeryl thought about it. He had changed, too, and he knew it. He was a hell of a lot more cynical than he used to be.
“Look, if you can’t do your job,” he said, trying to cover his confusion.
“I understand my job!” she barked. “And I’ll do it to the best of my ability...but I don’t have to be thrilled that it’s being made worse by more killing.”
Jeryl struggled to find something to say, but before he could, Ashley spoke, “The ship will be battle-ready within the next 10 hours, sir. I’ll see to it.”
Then she turned and left the room.
Marriage and command, he thought. The two don’t mix well.
Jeryl
One thing that took a lot of getting used to in the new fleet—for Jeryl, anyway—was the transformation of the ships and stations into what were essentially space-going cities. This, Jeryl knew, had come about because they wanted to be seen by the Sonali as being every bit as capable as they were at lofting huge starships.
So now, their battle cruisers were almost as big as theirs. Jeryl personally found it rather wasteful of resources but he couldn’t deny that the results were impressive as hell.
Their stations were now impressive fortresses with guns pointing outward. And filled with opportunities to separate you from your money the moment you walk in.
The Union had contracted with a number of corporations to provide services aboard our stations, which were now so big that they dwarfed anything that would ever be conceived five years ago.
Jeryl stood on Edoris Station looking at the Promenade. There were 5,000 people on the station. They were bigger than some of the global cities at the end of World War III, Jeryl noted. Flashy logos and enticing odors met his eyes as he walked along the station’s central promenade. The corporations had dialed back the level of interaction so that the 3D holos were a lot less “in your face” than their civilian versions, but even so none of those things really belonged aboard a space station, as far as Jeryl was concerned.
But he was older than most of the new blood that had entered the service. They were a different generation, and were used to different things. The military was catering to them, in his opinion, and he found it irksome. Was there really a need for a brothel on board this station? He had passed by one, owned and operated by Trinidec. The girls were pneumatic and hospitable; some of them were even human, as opposed to sexbots. Jeryl didn’t think they belonged there, but it wasn’t his call.
Jeryl had a bit of downtime, when he didn’t have to be in a meeting or reporting to the admiral or overseeing a battle plan. The battle plans were done. Tomorrow they would engage the Sonali. Again. But he couldn’t think about it anymore. He was restless, dissatisfied.
He left his little cramped office and went for a walk through the huge central atrium of the station, which would once had been called a utility core but had been expanded and reshaped into a vast promenade.
It seemed more like a marketplace than a military establishment. Sure, the rank and file of the Armada was happy with the changes that had come down, and it was good to keep them motivated in the face of this war, but even so, Jeryl questioned the wisdom of it all.
He hadn’t spoken to anyone about it, but he had done a lot of thinking. He took a seat next to a babbling fountain in a small pocket park off the main drag. Given Earth’s recent history, he supposed it wasn’t surprising how they ended up as they were.
The corporations were the repositories of vast amounts of money, and during the reconstruction of the planet their surviving officers bought their way via venture capital into seats at the governing table. All the rules were rewritten to allow it, over the strenuous objection of the “old guard.”
So what they had now was a corporate republic, something new under the sun. Five pillars held up the society. The first pillar was the President. The second, the legislative body and the senate. The third pillar was the Armada. Fourth, the institutions: The Diplomatic service, the courts, the universities, the government offices, and the science establishment. And the final pillar of society was upheld by the corporations, each with its own representative to a “Corporate Council” that advised the government. The corporate media was part of this, as well, monitoring the entire system.
As anyone could expect, with that much money and power floating around, several of the corporations had their own standing fleets of mercenaries and “career” soldiers, in essence, private armies that do their masters’ bidding. The corpers had at times been reluctant to put these assets into play during the war with the Sonali. This resulted to some recent talk of nationalizing those private fleets, absorbing them into the actual military, if the corpers didn’t contribute regularly to the war effort. In an effort to pour some oil on that troubled water, the corpers cut a lot of deals with the fleet to install supply outlets and what-not into Armada installations at a far lower rate.
They lost some money up front, as Jeryl understood it, but that was why they now had brand-name fast foods aboard their vessels, and outfits like Trinidec doing hospitality on their station. And Jery hadn’t forgotten about Pooz, the hologram giant, providing holodeck gaming services next to the subdued multi-denominational house of worship.
There was another side of this as well. He pulled out his tablet and tapped into his e-mail program. There was a communication there from MacroCode Stargazers LLC, an offer in fact. How they could possibly know that his current hitch was about up was beyond him, but they must—because the e-mail contains an offer to hire him at a salary that was far greater than what he got as an officer in the Union military.
They wanted to hire “the Avenger,” which was what they called him—the Avenger of The Mariner—to helm their corporate space fleet. These would be state-of-the-art vessels, and he would have total control over battle plans, supply contractors, everything down to the choice of bands at company dances.
All he had to do was resign his commissi
on.
And, may the great spirit of the galaxy help me, he thought.
He was considering it.
That was the third time some corporation had tried to pry him away from the Union. He was under no illusions about it; he was something of a celebrity, and the corpers traded off that sort of thing. There was no doubt that if he were to take the offer, Ashley and he could have a far better quality of life than they currently did. The new The Seeker was a hell of a ship, but it was not really military/exploration any longer. It was all geared toward war.
Like we said ‘fuck you’ to exploring.
He looked around the commercial playground. He knew it had been done to keep the troops happy during the grinding war, but it didn’t seem right to him. He knew from what he had seen of the corper fleets that they were leaner and meaner in some ways than theirs was.
He had seen so many ships destroyed and so many people dying. He had done so much killing himself. Tomorrow, he would see more of it, no doubt. He had had his fill of fighting and death. He saw the statistics, and watched the numbers of dead tick up.
He had become inured to it all. He had to—otherwise he wouldn’t be able to do his job. But after years of it...if the casualties go from 9 to 10 digits of dead people, at what point did it even matter? He felt that he had lost his determination in the face of the endless struggle.
He had accomplished much in the name of the Union. If he could spend his sunset years aboard some sleek corper ship maintaining order in a mining colony or keeping shipping lanes secure, then who would think the less of him?
I would.
Jeryl trashed the offer.
He got up from the bench and joined the flow of people, walking with no destination in mind. He never used to question his place in all of this, this interlocking structure of our culture. He had his assignment, and he carried it out as best as he could.
