by Kent, Steven
Warshaw and I chatted about the overall mission. Franks listened in while keeping one eye on the viewport and the other on a telemetry readout. If another ship approached, Franks would notice it before anyone else.
“Doesn’t matter where you go, it always looks the same out here,” I said.
Franks disagreed. “Spoken like a Marine,” he said.
This took Warshaw and me by surprise. “Not all the same?” he asked.
“Of course not,” said Franks. “We’re in the Norma Arm, the stars are more closely clustered here.”
Warshaw laughed, and said, “It doesn’t look any different.”
“No, it wouldn’t to you,” said Franks.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Warshaw asked.
“You’re an engineer. You spend your time in the belly of the ship taking equipment apart and making sure it works right. What do stars matter to an engineer. You’re too busy with your seals and readouts to care about space.”
“Get specked.”
I turned to the viewport and looked over at the other battleships flying beside us. Their bulbous forms showed in full silhouette against the bright backdrop of stars. In most situations, ships of this make vanished into the darkness of space, their charcoal-colored hulls offering nearly perfect camouflage. Against the Norma stars, however, the ships stood out like crows flying across a morning sky.
“What makes you think the dry docks are still in use?” Warshaw asked.
“Where would you go if you were going to build a fleet?” Franks answered the question with a question.
“It’s a long way from Earth . . . hard to protect,” Warshaw said.
“Who are they protecting it from, the aliens? The aliens go after planets, not satellites,” Franks said. Then he looked down at his holographic display, and added, “Gentlemen, and in your case, Harris, I use the term loosely, we have arrived.”
I looked out through the viewport and saw nothing other than open space.
“Have you ever been to the dry docks?” I asked Warshaw.
“No, have you?” He sounded confident that I had not.
“I’ve been there,” I said. I would have said more, but something about the way Franks knelt over his display distracted me. He brought up a floating holographic display of the dry docks.
“I’m getting a reading from the dry docks facility,” Franks said. “There’s some kind of activity going on around it.” He flipped a switch that brought up a shoebox-sized virtual representation of the bridge.
“Sound general quarters,” Franks told his virtual bridge, sounding calm, like a clone who was bred for command.
“Have they spotted us?” asked Warshaw. He walked over to get a closer look.
“Look at this. Look, here, and here,” he said, pointing at the display. “See these three ships here, they’re moored outside the dry docks,” Franks said. “That means they are operational. At the very least, they have been out for a test flight.”
He turned back to his virtual bridge, and said, “Bring all weapons systems online. Relay all orders to B2 and B3.” For lack of better names, we currently referred to the captured battleships as B1, B2, and B3.
“Do we even know if they are capital ships?” Warshaw leaned over the monitor. “Maybe they’re just cargo.”
I once thought all sailors were alike, the same way Warshaw or Franks probably believed all Marines were alike. Watching these two clones operate, I now saw vast differences.
Franks, who had spent his career in navigation and weapons, had an intuitive understanding of tactics and situations. Warshaw, the more decorated and experienced of the two, had worked his way up in Engineering. He could keep a ship running; but when it came to commanding a ship, he was out of his depth.
I half expected Warshaw to argue or try to take control of the situation, but he didn’t. “Do you think they pose a threat?” he asked.
“Better safe than sorry,” Franks answered, without looking up from the display. “If they are building the new fleet out here, then those are going to be ships from that fleet.”
“They could have come from the Norma Central Fleet,” Warshaw suggested.
Franks shook his head. “The Norma Central Fleet is a thousand light-years away.”
I started to say something but stopped myself as I realized that I no longer had a part in the conversation.
“How far to the dry docks?” Warshaw asked.
“We’re still about 1.5 million miles out.”
“Think they know we sounded general quarters?”
I wanted to ask if they even knew we were here.
“They know. They went on high alert, too,” Franks said. “This is our chance to get a closer look at those ships. Who knows when we will get another shot like this.”
I didn’t like the odds. We had three ships, and so did they, but our ships were sixty years old. They had brand-new equipment. I pointed this out.
Warshaw took up the cause. “We can’t risk a fight. Until we pick up more equipment, these ships are all we have.”
“Now they’re sounding general quarters,” Franks added. He seemed more fascinated by this turn of events than bothered by it.
“That’s enough, Franks. Get us out of here,” Warshaw repeated.
“We’re safe. Hell, for all we know, they might not have crews on those ships,” Franks said. Then, to the helm, he added, “Set speed to fifty thousand.” At fifty-thousand miles per hour, it would take us thirty hours to reach the dry docks.
This seemed to calm Warshaw slightly. He asked, “What if they do have men aboard?”
“Doesn’t seem likely,” Franks argued.
“Who would have sounded general quarters?” Warshaw asked.
“Dry-docks security could have triggered the alarms.”
“Why sound general quarters on empty ships?” Warshaw asked.
“It could be a bluff,” Franks said. “They might be bluffing to make us think their ships have gone online. We don’t even know if their specking weapons systems are operational. For all we know, those ships are empty shells.”
He looked down at his display and muttered something I could not make out. At that moment, the bridge let us know that two of the three moored ships had launched in our direction.
“What’s their speed?” Franks asked the bridge.
The answer, “Five hundred, sir,” came from the virtual bridge.
“Franks, get us out of here,” Warshaw commanded.
“We might not get another opportunity like this. They’re only sending two ships out, that’s three of us against two of them.”
“They’ll be in firing range in two minutes,” Warshaw said. “Looks to me like they are spoiling for a fight.”
“Here is a chance to see the new class in action. Do you really want to run?” Franks argued. He was right. It was our one chance to gather intelligence by watching those ships in action, but I thought it might be fatal intelligence.
“Take us out of here,” Warshaw growled.
Franks sighed as he gave the order to his virtual bridge. “Contact the other ships. Tell them to broadcast to Mogat space.”
The viewport darkened, the lightning danced, and we traded one space panorama for another.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Earthdate: December 12, A.D. 2516
Location: Mogat Home Planet
Galactic Position: Norma Arm
We broadcasted in a hundred thousand miles above the Mogat home world, roughly half the distance between the Earth and its moon. Before hearing Franks’s little lecture about differences in space, I never paid attention to the textures of the stars. Out there in the Galactic Eye, space looked like black velvet walls studded with millions of Christmas lights. The only direction in which I saw undisturbed darkness was toward the planet below us.
What the Avatari had hoped to do to New Copenhagen and Terraneau, they had already accomplished on this planet. They had captured the planet, saturated it with t
oxic gas, then baked it by expanding the nearby sun. The extinct sun loomed like a shadow orbited by a cinder of a planet.
. . . And when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven, I thought, another little gem from Nietzsche.
“Scan the area,” Franks ordered his virtual bridge.
My eyes adjusted before my mind could accept what they saw. We drifted slowly toward the graveyard, a floating reef of dead ships and debris left in the wake of the U.A. Navy attack on the Mogat Fleet. As my eyes took in the starry surroundings, I began seeing shadows of inert shapes. I saw hulls and wings, whole ships and partial ships outlined in light, floating in place, as sharp and as dead as fish in a jar of formaldehyde.
A voice came from Franks’s console. “The area is clear, sir. It doesn’t look like anyone has been out here in years, sir.”
“Well, General Harris, we have twelve crews and four hundred ships to explore,” Warshaw said as he rose to his feet. “Did you plan to join us?”
“I do,” I said, more aware than ever that I had come on this operation as an observer. This was a job for engineers and technicians. Having a leatherneck along would add nothing to the equation.
“Have you ever been on a wreck before?” I asked Warshaw as we left the observation deck and cut our way across the bridge.
“No. I hear it can get ugly,” he answered.
“It’s pretty grim,” I said, remembering a mission in which I had explored a wreck. There were bodies floating weightless, frozen in the null heat. Once the hull of a ship gets pierced, the air, heat, and pressure flush out of the hole, and the inside of the ship becomes as sterile as the space around it.
“Maybe you know the answer to this. I always wondered, what happens first when your ship gets smashed? Do you freeze, suffocate, or explode?”
“It’s that bad?” Warshaw asked.
He must have thought I was joking or trying to make a point. I wasn’t. That question had remained on my mind since the first time I boarded a Mogat wreck.
“Admiral,” I said, “this tour will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
In my experience, sailors and officers waged wars like gods. They sat on high, out of the line of fire, sending more expendable souls to bleed and die on the battlefields.
But both the officers and the sailors came along for the ride this time. I wondered if Warshaw or Franks had ever seen the aftermath of a space battle. The flash-frozen bodies on these ships would look exactly as they had the moment after the battle. Without oxygen or heat, they did not decay.
We piled into transports, cramming the kettles beyond capacity with 120 men each, plus equipment. Unlike Marines, human crustaceans in their hardened combat armor, engineers wore soft-shells—rubberized suits that were flame-, chemical-, and radiation-retardant, but little else. Far from bulletproof, engineering armor wouldn’t even protect them from an assailant with a mechanical pencil. As little more than an observer on this mission, I was issued soft-shell armor. By the time the transport doors closed, I already knew I hated engineering armor.
Crushed against the back wall of the kettle, I felt a bolt digging into my side. When another man stepped on my foot, I felt it. It didn’t hurt, but I didn’t expect to feel anything.
The visors on the soft-shelled armor showed the names and ranks of the men around me. Instead of night-for-day lenses, these suits had cheery little torches along their visors. They had a good reason for this backward step in technology. Night-for-day vision wreaked havoc with depth perception and showed the world in monochrome. Working with color-coded wires, circuits, and diodes, these engineers needed to know red from green. Hell, even their armor was color-coded. Weapons techs wore red armor, electronic and computer systems specialists wore yellow, and engineers wore blue.
I’d brought contraband on this mission. As the only Marine in a flock of sailors, I felt duty-bound to bring a weapon—a particle-beam pistol. If Warshaw ever came on a mission with me, I’d allow him to bring a wrench . . . in the spirit of fairness.
The sailors around me had to have been chatting on the interLink, but I was deaf to them. Reminding me that this was a naval mission, Warshaw refused to give me a commandLink, the bastard. He alone could listen in on every conversation and speak on private frequencies with whomever he liked.
That left me in isolation. I stood in the tightly packed kettle alone with my thoughts.
The audio equipment in my armor was not as sensitive to ambient sound as the equipment in combat armor. I knew when we lifted off because I felt it, but I could not hear the boosters. Instead of telescopic lenses, my engineering visor had a magnification lens. Engineers don’t snipe, they inspect circuits.
“They’re away,” Warshaw said. On the off chance that the U.A. sent a patrol through Mogat space, we sent our ships back to Terraneau.
“The battleships?” I asked. I knew the answer before I asked, but I wanted to talk. I was lonely. Goddamn.
“Yes, the battleships. Harris, you said you entered one of these ships once. Is that really true or were you just slinging shit?”
“The Mogats scuttled a ship in the Perseus Arm, I went out to explore it.”
“How did you get in?” Warshaw asked.
We sure as hell didn’t ride in on a gigantic specking transport, I thought. “There was a gash on bottom of the ship. We flew a ten-man sled in through one of the holes.”
“Did you try opening the docking-bay doors?”
“Nope.”
“Did you have engineers with you?”
“Nope, SEALs.”
Warshaw sort of snorted, and said, “SEALs.”
“They knew their stuff,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m sure they did,” Warshaw said. “Look, Harris, you mind going out with A Team? It sounds like you have more experience finding your way around a wreck.”
“No problem,” I said.
A moment later, Warshaw’s voice came over an open channel as he addressed every man on the transport. “We’re opening the rear hatch. A Team prepare to launch.”
The pilot maintained the gravity field within the kettle, keeping us rooted to the ground, even as he purged the air from the kettle so that we would not be flushed out when he opened the doors. Once the atmosphere turned into a vacuum, the doors slid apart, revealing an open field of space and stars.
One of the men at the top of the ramp panicked. He screamed for help over an open frequency and tried to fight his way to the back of the kettle. Warshaw addressed the kid over an open frequency. “Westerfield, get out there.”
“I, I can’t. I can’t.”
“That is an order,” Warshaw said, but the softness in his voice made it more of a request than an order.
“I can’t do it.”
Warshaw ordered the other sailors to let the kid through, and then asked, “Is anyone else too specking scared?”
I reminded myself that these were sailors, not Marines. They had grown accustomed to having an atmosphere and walls around them.
“No other takers?” Warshaw asked. “Okay, A Team, move out.”
That was my call. There were about twenty of us on the team. We walked down the ramp, the gravity becoming weaker the farther we got. Halfway down, I could have kicked off hard and flown into space. When the first man reached the bottom of the ramp, he held his motivator over his head and lifted off.
Engineers used handheld motivators instead of attaching jetpacks to their armor. The device looked like a pair of bin-oculars with handlebars instead of a strap. Their thrust technology used noncombustible gas emissions instead of flames. When I switched on its power, my motivator lifted me from the ramp and into open space.
Following the sailor before me, I banked around the stern of the transport. As we flew along the transport, the pilot switched on the runner lights along the hull, lighting the rust-colored skids and smooth steel underbelly of the sturdy bird. Each motivator had a row of knuckle-sized safety
lights blinking a ruby red signal along their top.
Our team leader hit some button, and a headlight appeared at the front of his motivator. He only flew about fifty feet ahead of me; but I could not see him, just the cone of his headlight. The men ahead of me lit lights on their motivators as well.
We circled the wreck of a massive battleship like a swarm of flies approaching a beached whale. The holes along the belly of the ship were large enough for us to fly through, but the bottom deck of the ship had imploded.
“General Harris, sir?” My visor identified the man on the line as our team leader contacting me on an open line.
“What is it, Ensign?”
“Sir, do you know what kinds of weapons they used on this ship? I’ve never seen such extensive damage.”
Having spent the last six years of their lives trapped in the Scutum-Crux Arm, none of these boys had ever seen combat up close. “This is what happens when you get hit with your shields down,” I said. What I did not add was that this ship had gotten off lightly.
“Their shields were down?” the team leader asked. “Why would they lower their shields in battle?”
“We lowered the shields for them,” I said. “The Mogats used a centralized shielding technology that they broadcast to their fleet. Once our SEALs shut down the central shield generator, the ships were unprotected.”
“You were in on the Mogat invasion, sir?” The team leader did not ask that question; it came from another member of our little team. I heard a tone of awe in the boy’s voice.
“Yeah, I was there,” I said, trying to keep the darkness of my thoughts out of my voice. “A lot of good men died. We lost a lot more men than we should have.”
We flew across the battered underbelly of the battleship and up the port side. My interLink connection remained fairly quiet as men fanned out and inspected holes and burns along the face of the ship. Three decks up, one of the men found our doorway.
“The outer lock of the docking bay is open,” the man reported.
Knowing that the end had come, some Mogats had piled into a transport to abandon ship. They almost made it to safety. The broken nose of the transport poked out of the docking-bay hatch like a missile launching from a silo. The outer hatch of the docking bay had come down on the transport like a giant cleaver, slicing halfway through the kettle and crushing the rest into a bow-shaped heap.
