by Ian Douglas
That was the idea, anyway. Like so much else in military operations, things didn’t develop according to plan. The Qesh were warriors, and they had a certain disdain for scavengers, as we later learned.
The Qesh did not normally back away from a fight.
The Grand Commonwealth Fleet broke orbit a few days later, accelerating out-system on their Plottel Drives until local space was flat enough that they could wrap space around themselves and begin chewing through the light years at something like three and a third per day. A week later, we dropped back into normal space a bit over three astronomical units out from the Bloodstar. Unlike the last time, we didn’t play it sneaky, and made no effort to hide our arrival. We decelerated into Gliese 581’s inner system on our Plottel space drives, broadcasting our intent to talk if we could, to fight if we must.
We’d heard one Qesh, at least, speaking English during our sneak-and-peek. We knew they must understand us.
But there was no reply from the titanic warships clustered around Gliese 581 IV. They were ignoring us—or waiting for us, and it was hard to tell which was more unsettling.
Throughout the transit to Gliese 581 and during most of the final approach, I occupied myself with the usual round of duty and watch standing. There’s no such thing as day or night on board a starship, so although we operate on Starport time, which is Greenwich plus five, roughly half of the ship’s crew and passengers were up and about at any given time. The company Corpsmen stood one in four watches to cover the night shift, their duty primarily that of holding sick call for Marines or naval personnel who hurt themselves or who’d come down with the creeping awfuls.
So things were pretty slow the night Sergeant Leighton came down to sick bay. She was off duty, and I was making up nanosurgical packs and stowing them for the upcoming op, a mindless task handled by the sick bay’s robots that didn’t require much in the way of human attention. “Hey, Doc.”
“Hey, beautiful. What brings you down here?” She didn’t look ill.
“I heard you had the duty, thought I’d stop by.”
She was wearing standard Marine utilities—olive drab skintights, but considerably less revealing than what she’d worn at the Free Fall . . . and not worn at the hotel later. I thought longingly about the tube-racks in the sick bay’s small hospital section, and there was one in the duty room, too, but using one would have been very much contra-regs while on duty. You never knew when the OOD—the officer of the deck—might wander through, and besides, the AI running the sick bay would make a record of everything done or said.
“I’m glad you did,” I told her. “I’ve missed you.”
“Yeah, well . . . it’s been crazy, y’know? Heavy on the training sims.”
The Corpsmen had been going through simulated training sessions as well. As a Marine Recon battalion, the only unit with actual surface time on the Bloodworld, the Black Wizards would be serving as guides for the rest of the Marine invasion force. Bravo Company, once again, would be hitting the city of Salvation, only this time we would be coming down smack in the middle of the ruined spaceport.
“You worried about the landing?” I asked. Hell, I knew I was, and I hadn’t been shot up the way she’d been.
“Nah,” she said. “It’s all pretty soppy.”
Soppy—military slang for standard operating procedure. A planetary invasion was never that, but it was something for which the Marines constantly trained.
But I could tell Joy was anxious about something.
“So what’s nagging you?”
“I’m worried about the Salvationists,” she said. “The Bloodworld colonists. Have you seen the latest briefing download?”
I nodded. “I pulled them off their computer net, remember? And I looked through some of the stuff on the way back.”
“By living on Bloodworld, they think they’re suffering for the sins of the whole Earth. All of Humankind.”
“Not my sins,” I said. “I never signed up for that.”
“Neither did I.”
“It doesn’t make any sense!” I shrugged. “There’s one religion that’s been around since the eighteen hundreds. Among other things, they made a practice out of baptizing people after they’re dead.”
She made a face. “What, they dunked dead bodies?”
I laughed. “No. But they would look up the names of ancestors, and then baptize them by proxy. They thought that baptism was absolutely necessary if someone was going to get into heaven.”
“So the people getting baptized didn’t have a choice.”
“Right . . . though I suppose the people in that sect thought they were doing them a favor. I think some religions are just a little too anxious to help other people, though, and don’t pay attention to their own problems first.”
“I still don’t see why the Salvationists would choose to live in a place like Bloodworld.”
“Religious history is full of examples of people who became hermits living out in the desert, who gave up sex, who used knotted cords to whip themselves bloody, who gave up everything they owned, who castrated themselves, who massacred whole populations, who gave up technology, who blew up buildings full of people, who had themselves crucified, who joined in mass suicides. All in the name of Jesus, or to please God or to get into heaven or to . . . I don’t know. Get other people to stop sinning and join them, I guess.”
“That’s crazy.”
“That’s religion. People who really, really believe can be pretty scary. I’m not saying belief is wrong . . . but you need some real-world common sense, too.”
“You’re Reformed Gardie, like me, aren’t you?”
“My parents were. I’m not sure what I believe.” I thought about it. “I guess what’s important for me is the idea of respecting others. Doesn’t matter how crazy they are, or exactly what they believe. They’ve got the gods-given right to believe what the hell they want. Just so they return the favor.”
She nodded. “The Gardnerian’s Rule. ‘Whatever you send out comes back to you three-fold.’ ”
“So how do you handle that, Marine?”
“What do you mean?”
“I wouldn’t care to be the plasma gunner in a squad and have three times my firepower coming back at me! Is that what happened to you on Bloodworld?”
She shrugged. “Things can’t always be taken literally.”
“Right.”
“I know that’s rationalizing. . . .”
“Doesn’t matter. Humans are great at taking strange beliefs and rationalizing them, twisting them around until they can live with them. Look at the Salvationists.”
“You think their living on Bloodworld is a rationalization?”
“I think believing that they’re living there to save us is. I think they didn’t know just how bad the place was—or maybe they went there thinking God would provide a miracle, tame the winds, calm the seismic quakes, plug up the volcanoes, make the air breathable. When that didn’t happen, they had to explain to themselves why things were so bad.”
“They could have come home.”
“Maybe not. Not if their leaders had burned the bridges behind them when they boarded ship at Starport. People in positions of leadership, of power, are the biggest rationalizers of all. They’ll believe anything—or make others believe it—if it helps them keep their power.”
The briefing download Joy had mentioned had included a psychological profile of the Salvationists, based on their Book of Salvation and some of their other writings. Religio-social mania, the briefing called it, with the warning that even the rebels, the Salvationists we’d been helping and who had helped us—could not be trusted. Our operational orders were to establish contact with human colonists where they initiated it, but to avoid them otherwise. The key problem seemed to be that the Salvationists thought that anyone who’d taken nanobots or other high-tech medical g
adgets into their bodies were no longer human.
Working with the demons of hell, the Qesh, was one thing. Apparently, working with humans who were no longer “pure” in Salvationist eyes was quite something else.
“I just want to know if we’re going to have to fight both of them,” Joy said, “the Qesh and the Salvationists.”
“Maybe it won’t come to that,” I said, “if the Qesh back down.”
“Maybe,” she replied. She shook her head. “You have it easy, Doc.”
“How’s that?”
“You just have to heal them. The Marines have to sort them out.”
“Who was it who said, ‘Kill them all, let God sort them out’?”
“A religious fanatic,” Joy said, “like the damned Salvationists.”
Hours later, we decelerated into battlespace to engage the predarian fleet.
Chapter Twenty-Two
We hit them good going in.
We didn’t learn the whole story until later, of course. Even with all of the optical scanners and AI integration, with viewalls and cerebral downloads and in-head displays and all the rest of the technologies that let humans link in to the flood of data moving around them, the ancient darkness we call the fog of war still guaranteed that we would see only a tiny fraction of what was going on. The advanced AIs managing the battle, Admiral Talbot and his command staff and tactical planners . . . maybe they knew what was going on.
But at the time, they didn’t bother telling us.
Admiral Talbot, it turned out, had pulled a sneaky, a tactical coup with which to open the battle.
First of all, he’d divided the fleet. All of the downloads on fleet tactics declare that you should never do such a thing, but he did it.
A diversionary force, designated Force Glacier, continued decelerating in-system, falling past the orbit of Niffelheim and heading directly toward Bloodworld and the Qesh fleet, continuing to broadcast demands to parlay across a range of EM frequencies known to be used by the enemy. That diversionary squadron consisted of eight destroyers and frigates, plus the two largest warships we had, the two system monitors, Sentinel and Europa. These were massive bombardment ships grown out of a pair of small planetoids, semi-mobile fortresses originally launched to keep watch over the dark outer marches of the Sol System. Only recently, however, they’d been uprated with Plottel initiators that turned them into capital ships, which let them keep up with the rest of the fleet. Talbot had sent both of them in manned by skeleton crews, piloted by artificial intelligences copied and downloaded from the heart of the Primary Command AIs.
The balance of the fleet, however, our main force consisting of 266 ships, had re-engaged their Alcubierre Drives and, so far as the Qesh were concerned, disappeared.
The Jackers knew we were there, of course. They must have picked up our drive signatures as soon as we emerged from Alcubierre Drive the first time. But we’d emerged at more than three astronomical units out—and it took light, and the EM signatures of our drives—nearly half an hour to crawl in-system to their receivers. After they picked up our emergence from Alcubierre Drive, some twenty-five minutes after we’d actually done so, they would have been focused on that one small patch of sky where the fleet had first dropped into normal space.
What they didn’t know, what they couldn’t know, is that Talbot had taken the main body in a long, wide swing around the Gliese 581 system, re-emerging into normal space on the far side of the star. It was a dangerous maneuver, since by that time we were well inside the accepted safe limits for Alcubierre travel in the vicinity of something as massive as a star. Gliese 581 was a midget, so far as stars were concerned, with a hair more than three tenths the mass of Sol, but it was enough to gravitationally warp local space, making faster-than-light Alcubierre travel risky at best.
Four of our ships failed to emerge on the far side of the star from Bloodworld—a Brazilian heavy cruiser, the Mato Grosso, the French planetary bombardment vessel Duquesne, and the destroyers Murakumo and Boyevoy. The rest dropped into normal space with the Bloodstar between us and Bloodworld, accelerating hard, while a scattering of battlespace drones kept us apprised of unfolding events close to Bloodworld.
For the record, the Qesh opened fire first, sending volleys of relativistic projectiles streaking through our diversionary squadron while they were still minutes out, turning the destroyer Rochambeau and the frigate Gravina into dazzlingly brilliant minor suns as the rounds vaporized first one, then the other, in flaring bursts of kinetic energy. Sentinel took a grazing hit as well, but kept coming in.
At the moment the Rochambeau exploded, the organic crews of both monitors had jettisoned in lifepods; the Commonwealth assault at the Battle of Gliese 581 was initiated by computer AIs.
With the Europa trailing the Sentinel by 10,000 kilometers, the pair swung around Bloodworld and into the midst of the waiting Qesh war fleet. From our electronic vantage point, in Clymer’s squad bay, it appeared that the swarm of red icons representing the enemy ships were closing in around the Sentinel, surrounding her, concentrating fire against her. Both monitors had been constructed in and on kilometer-wide planetoids, and were mostly solid lumps of nickel iron bristling with particle beam turrets and missile launchers. It takes a long time in combat—whole minutes—to smash and burn through that much native shielding.
Sentinel fought back, giving a good impression of a manned ship attempting to maneuver and fight against desperate odds. A Qesh Leviathan was badly damaged and one Titan was destroyed before Sentinel began to come apart in tumbling, semimolten chunks.
Europa entered the hornet’s nest of Qesh fire an instant later. By now almost all of the Qesh warfleet’s attention was focused on the two monitors.
And that was the second part of Talbot’s tactical one-two punch. The largest, most massive vessels in the Earth Commonwealth’s fleet were, from the Jacker perspective, clearly the most dangerous, the biggest, most serious threats. All of their attention was, for a critical few moments, devoted to eliminating those two vessels.
And that’s when the bulk of the Commonwealth fleet arrived, skimming past the star, hurtling through that final fifteen hundredths of an AU into the volume of battlespace around Gliese 581 IV, and slamming the Qesh fleet with kinetic impactors, high-yield nuclear weapons, and particle beams. Both of the monitors were destroyed by then, but the diversion had pulled most of the enemy ships out of position and focused their attention on a relatively small volume of space out beyond Bloodworld’s nightside. Pulses of nuclear light, starcore-hot, flared among the Jacker vessels, and enemy ships began to die.
By that time, however, 1st Battalion was loaded into the Clymer’s compliment of Misty-Ds, strapped in, making the final preparations for trans-atmospheric deployment. We hadn’t seen the close passage of the main body past the mottled red-and-black face of the Bloodstar, hadn’t seen the final approach of the fleet as we came in out of the sun, closing on the Qesh defenders from their rear, our approach masked by the star’s glare. We were receiving tactical feeds, still, through our implants, but those were limited in the amount of data they could provide.
At that point, I imagine things were pretty confusing, even on the bridge of Admiral Talbot’s flagship, the heavy carrier Spirit of Earth. The battle for Gliese 581 had been joined.
And all the Marines on Clymer and the other troop transports could do was prepare to play their small role in that titanic clash of arms.
“Hey, Gunny!” Private Colby called over the platoon net. “What happens if the fleet gets vaped?”
“Then we have a long walk home,” Hancock replied. “Now shut your fly trap and finish your weapons check.”
I could feel the shudder through the bulkheads as our D/MST-22 dropped into atmosphere and tried not to think about Colby’s question. Talbot was breaking another of those fleet tactical rules besides the one that said not to split your fleet in the face of an e
nemy force. If you’re going to invade a planet, make sure you’ve secured the space around it first.
Ideally, the combat vessels would have moved in first and destroyed the enemy fleet or put it to rout, and only then would the transports have come in, sent the Marines down to grab the appropriate real estate, and declared victory. Sometimes, though, the real universe doesn’t work the way the tactical download briefings say it should.
In this case, Talbot wanted to grab the low ground.
Ancient military dictum emphasized the high ground. If you have a defensive position on top of a hill, looking down on an enemy who’s forced to charge uphill to reach you, you’ve got a significant tactical advantage. Crécy, Gettysburg, Dushanbe, Noctis Labyrinthus—all places where the infantry grabbed the high ground and held on. In space combat, space itself is seen as the high ground, with planetary defenders trapped at the bottom of a gravity well. The attackers, literally, can drop crowbars on them from orbit, and the defenders can’t do a damned thing about it.
But long-standing military wisdom eventually had to give way to planetary energy weapons and fusion cannons.
Major General William Craig, commander of One MarDiv, had presented the plan to Talbot. Put a Marine force down on Bloodworld large enough to hold a patch of ground against all comers, and have them grow a planetary defense battery. Do it while the fight to dislodge the Qesh is still raging around the planet, and Bloodworld becomes in effect a very large system monitor, one big enough to take out even Jotuns.
It was that part about holding against all comers that was going to be tricky. The issue that Colby had raised was one that probably every marine in the division was wondering about just then. If the Commonwealth fleet got “vaped”—vaporized—those of us on the surface of Bloodworld would be trapped: stuck on a hostile planet with no way off and no way home.
