“Yes sir.” The officer’s fingers flew across the console, pattering on the glass surface like fat raindrops. After a moment, he said, “The figures are away sir.”
“Fleet,” Cantwell said, “prepare for deceleration burn at 3 G’s A.S.A.P. Report when you are prepped.” He looked out to the myriad of glowing thrusters hanging among the stars. Jeffrey felt he could read the admiral’s mind.
How many will be with us in the end?
Cantwell said, “Notify the ship to prep for burn.”
“Yes sir.”
As the message came over the loudspeakers, Jeffrey went to the back wall, strapped a support frame onto his legs, and returned to the center of the bridge, the frame motors whirring with each step. The rest of the crew took turns putting on support frames as Cantwell reclined into his command seat, kicked back so he could look up at the fleet.
“All ships have reported in ready to decelerate, sir.”
“Fleet,” Cantwell said, “begin 3 G deceleration burn on my mark.” Cantwell looked to Jeffrey with a gravity in his expression as though the command to decelerate was the moment of engagement in the war. “Mark.”
The myriad of ships’ thrusters intensified. Some began to grow closer, some further away.
Cantwell said, “The Lacedaemon is on point, synch your burns to us.” The ships that appeared to be pulling away were actually slowing down faster than the Lacedaemon. As the burns synched, they became still again. However, one ship continued to move closer. It would soon slip past to starboard.
“Navigation” Cantwell said, “identify the ship failing to match deceleration.”
“The H.M.S. Halcyon sir. They’ve recently reported faults in their thruster systems.”
“Contact them and report on their situation.”
“Yes sir.”
Cantwell looked to Jeffrey, who nodded to him, knowing full well what was going through Cantwell’s mind. If the Halcyon had mechanical problems, it would have to be left behind, exposed to the Sthenos destroyers. The fleet could not delay the defense of Earth for one ship.
“Navigation,” Cantwell asked as he leaned back, looking up at the thrusters among the stars, “identify our lead ship.”
The young officer scanned his screen. “The R.O.C.S. Mogui Gou, sir.”
“Chinese?”
“Yes sir.”
Cantwell said. “Fleet, when we have all-stop and acceleration is on, the R.O.C.S Mogui Gou will be on point. Come gradually to a delta formation behind her. She will set pace.”
“Sir,” a navigation officer said, “The H.M.S. Halcyon has been able to increase thrust. She’s now holding with the fleet.”
Cantwell gave him a quick nod. Celebrations would wait. Small victories could turn tragic with a moment’s bad luck.
On the Nav-Con, the Sthenos destroyers’ shadows diminished on the ice as they lifted away, their formation widening. The swarming mining ships had begun docking in landing bays in the destroyer’s prows.
Delaney stood on the other side of the display, eyes locked on the Sthenos destroyers, her expression dark.
With the Nav-Con centered on the destroyers, Europa drifted out of view. For some reason, that made Jeffrey think of Sarah. Trapped in Jovian orbit, her corpse floated in the near absolute zero, abandoned. He imagined her face, a frozen death mask framed by her hair, which had been flowing and beautiful, now an icy mat. Unbidden tears began to stream from his eyes.
“Jeffrey…” Delaney said. She touched his shoulder. Pushing the tears away with the back of his sleeve, he let out a growling huff as he forced the image out of his head. He looked to her and saw, what appeared to be, sincere concern in her eyes.
The Nav-Con officer looked up from the podium. “Their course is settling out, sir.”
Admiral Cantwell asked, “And it is?”
“Coming to bear on empty space. At their current acceleration, they’ll come into a trailing position on the fleet, sir.”
Silence descended in the room as Jeffrey saw many of the young officers glance at him and Cantwell. He knew his eyes were still red from that moment of weakness, and he chided himself. He had to be stronger. Everyone around him would be looking to him, Cantwell, and the other senior officers to understand how they should feel.
The next words Jeffrey heard, spoken by a female navigation officer, took him a moment to comprehend, as if his mind wouldn’t accept the reality he had already guessed at.
Leaning forward over her display, squinting, she said, “There are more.”
“More what?” Jeffrey and Admiral Cantwell asked at the same time. Jeffrey knew in his gut what the answer was, but he had to hear it.
She shook her head as if she couldn’t understand what she was seeing. “More ships… I think.” She looked to the admiral. “Sir, request permission to contact other fleet navigation officers for assistance in reconciling this data.”
“What,” the admiral said in distinctly separated words, “are—you—seeing?”
She looked at him, eyebrows twisted upward with doubt. “I-I’m not sure, sir.”
“You have permission.”
“Thank you, sir.” Her fingers flew across the black glass, creating a storm of fluid light. Leaning into a microphone on her workstation, she said, “This is U.S.S. Lacedaemon contacting all fleet navigation officers. Please confirm location, trajectory, and nature of Saturn proximal and Mars proximal signatures.”
Saturn proximal?
Jeffrey walked over to stand beside her as did Cantwell, Donovan, and Delaney. The young woman made no acknowledgement of their presence as she listened to the reports coming in.
After a few moments, she looked to her left. “Nav-Con, please split screen, show Saturn proximal and Mars Proximal formations for the coordinates I’m sending you.” Her fingers scattered across the console.
On the Nav-Con two groups of long, dark shapes appeared. The shapes were blurred, but Jeffrey could clearly make out… eight in one group and nine in the other.
Cantwell asked, “What trajectory?”
The navigation officer said, “If we follow our planned acceleration and deceleration curves, their trajectory will intercept us halfway to Earth.”
“They’re not targeting Earth?”
“No sir. They’re definitely targeting our flight path. With Saturn in opposition to Earth’s orbit and Mars nearing conjunction, their acceleration curves will intercept our flight path at the same time.”
Cantwell asked, “If we move to attack the three Sthenos ships coming from Europa?”
Her fingers blurred on the keyboard. “They’ll reach them before we can. The Saturn ships are coming fast. They must be pulling five G’s.”
In a quiet voice, Cantwell asked, “How is that possible?” His eyes locked onto the fuzzy images of the ships. “We have to get back to Earth now.”
Delaney’s voice sounded incredulous, as she said, “Surely you can’t be suggesting taking the fight to Earth?”
Cantwell walked over to her, took her by the arm, and pulled her aside. Jeffrey followed.
Cantwell said to her quietly, “Fifty years ago we faced the Sthenos with six-to-one odds and barely survived. This morning we thought we were at nineteen-to-one. Now, by my count, we’re less than three-to-one. If this goes down even close to what we’ve experienced in the past, they’ll walk through our fleet. Without us, we have to assume they plan to move on to Earth. The only hope I see in this situation is to get hardware to the planet’s surface. We can’t match them out here. We have to take the fight atmospheric where we don’t need life support to stay alive. In approximately 100 hours we’ll be fighting a guerilla war.”
Delaney’s eyes glowed with anger as she asked, “How can you possibly know that?”
“I’ve seen what those destroyers can do. I’ve seen three of our most advanced ships chewed apart by one of theirs. Now they have us in a shooting gallery, which we walked right into. We’re in a tight group in the middle of nowhere. If we
stay together, they destroy us. If we split up, they split up and destroy us.”
“If what you say is true,” she said, “then we’re doomed no matter what we do.”
“Not true,” Cantwell said. “Might doesn’t always make right. An early 21st century political scientist by the name of Ivan Arreguín Toft analyzed warfare between countries with more than a ten-fold discrepancy in militarized power and came up with a surprising conclusion. When the significantly smaller military used irregular tactics, guerilla warfare, that smaller force outstripped the larger nearly two out of three times.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Delaney said. “With that many fewer resources, the smaller side should always lose.”
“If they use conventional, or matching, tactics, they would… three out of four times.”
She looked back up to the stars. “So if you get creative—”
“Our odds of surviving almost triple… at least by our historical perspective.”
She fell silent for a moment before asking Cantwell, “What the hell am I supposed to tell the president?”
“We’ll decide that in a few minutes. Right now we all need to be on the same page.” He took her by the shoulders. “Are we?”
“Are you so sure they’ll do that much damage?”
Jeffrey said, “We have fifty-seven ships facing twenty Sthenos cruisers. They didn’t come back to the bar with two friends, they brought twenty heavyweights.”
She watched the Sthenos destroyers on the Nav-Con for some time before looking back to Cantwell and Jeffrey. “I’m not buying it. You want to sell me on how frightening these Sthenos are, but I can’t see it. There isn’t simply an evil race of murderers among the stars bent on our destruction. We’ll discuss tactics with the president, but my recommendation will not include a return to Earth.”
“Sir!” a navigation officer called out. “Four more, sir.”
“Four more?” Cantwell asked, “Where?”
“A few hours from Earth Orbit sir.”
…
Thirty minutes later a young woman looked up from her console. “Admiral Cantwell, a text-based message has come in from the president.”
Cantwell, Holt, and Delaney all walked over. She pointed to her screen.
All ships return to Earth.
They would prove to be the final words of John Moore’s presidency.
Chapter Fifteen
Jeffrey walked down the corridor wondering what Delaney’s next move would be now that President Moore was out of communication. A few moments after the president’s message had come in, the four Sthenos destroyers reached Earth, and communications had immediately gone dark. Jeffrey had waited on the bridge for an hour, but when no responses came after the expected message delay, he’d left. With the Sthenos closing in, he felt the need to find his Hammerheads. No matter what Delaney and Moore wanted, he wasn’t about to put that talent in useless, virtual-reality drone seats.
As he approached the officers’ quarters, two female pilots, who’d stood talking in quiet voices, fell silent. Looking at his list of names, he asked, “Can either of you tell me where I might find a Lieutenant Sebastian Grimstad?”
One of the women asked, “The big Norwegian guy?”
“I think so.”
“Last I saw, he was in the lounge.”
As he walked away, he heard the other woman say, “You realize you always know where Sebastian is?”
“Shut up.”
The sound of, what Jeffrey assumed to be, a fist hitting a shoulder, brought a smile to his face as he made his way to the officers’ lounge. He found it empty save a few men playing cards at a corner table and, in the center of the room, a man, almost as tall and broad-chested as himself, sitting with his legs extended out on a table. He had his hands clasped behind his head of slightly unkempt, white-blonde hair. When Jeffrey approached, he did not open his eyes, but said in a thick Northern European accent, “Is that you Brooks? Leave me alone or I hold you down and nookie you.”
“I sincerely hope you mean noogie.”
The man’s eyes came open, and seeing Jeffrey, he jumped to his feet, knocking the small table over. “Captain Holt. My apologies. I thought—”
“It’s fine,” Jeffrey said, indicating that Grimstad should sit. Jeffrey sat across from him and held up his tablet. “I’ve been looking over your stats.”
Grimstad leaned forward. “Are they acceptable to you?”
“Yes, very good, but,” he set the tablet down, “I need to understand the man behind these numbers.” He leaned back into the soft couch. “Tell me what brought you to flying.”
Grimstad frowned as though confused. “A bus?”
“No…” He thought for a moment. “What motivated you to join the Luftforsvaret?”
“Oh, yes… I see,” he said with a rich laugh that showed both rows of squared teeth back to the molars. “I was not intended for this.” He held his hands out to the lounge. “In my youth, I resolved myself to a fisherman’s life.”
…
Quiet fog lay over the water and long docks, which extended into pale nothingness, fishing boats tethered alongside. Sebastian’s father sat in the stern of his worn fishing trawler wearing a salt-infused wool sweater, green rubber boots, and heavy duck-cotton pants with reinforced knees. His father’s old hand, the last pinkie permanently curled shut, moved around a hole in the net, mending it with a large needle.
Enveloped in the mist, a distant thunder rose, but did not fade. It grew and grew still more until it ripped overhead and was gone, leaving growling echoes to dance in the close cliffs.
“Time to work in the world boy, not stare at it,” his father said.
Sebastian, not yet as tall as his father, walked over to the old man and helped him fold the net, his hands passing over the pitted floats, which were crusted with bits of bull kelp. Their rights to fish the protected area required use of the old, difficult way—small nets, checked often—the wrong fish and other beasts freed by hand. He could have chosen an easier life, as his brother had, but in the hard work, he felt a connection to his forefathers. He would someday teach his own son to pull thrashing, silvered life from the dark waters.
His father fired the trawler’s fusion engine. Sebastian unwound the lines from the cleats and set them aboard. As his father pulled away from the dock, Sebastian stepped over the widening gap with the ease of a young man, who’d grown up on the water.
As they moved through the inlet, their wake coiled out across the mirrored surface to lap against the stony cliff face. He knew the peaks, towering beyond the mist, well enough to envision their invisible ridge against the sky. Moving forward, he lay on his chest, head hanging over and watched the water bend around the prow as if a sheet of melted glass. Here it lay cold, sometimes crusted with ice, but deep and alive.
They’d almost lost everything, but as being good shepherds of the world became paramount to the human race, it voluntarily cut its numbers back. Now, deep under him, the world ran wicked with big-scaled life—healthy, strong, and plentiful.
He sensed its pulse in the depths and loved his place in it. He held profound gratitude in his heart for his family; to his father for the strong hands he’d passed down to him; to his beautiful mother with her white-blonde hair for the laughter she’d brought to their home; to his sister, whose short life had taught him to hold each day with care; and to his older brother for the rough years that had toughened his heart.
As they made their way to the fishing grounds, the mist evanesced revealing cloud-draped peaks against a pale-blue sky. The air remained still. Ahead, a black blade rose from the long, flat sheet of water. The surrounding surface bent and poured from a shining, gray back. A plume of hot breath exploded upward as another black blade rose and another, each followed by the bending back and plume. The brume of breath touched his hands and face, and he breathed deeply of the air from the whales’ lungs.
When his father shut off the engine, the boat drifted into stillness
. The two men went to work in silence, their actions serving as the conversation between them. As they laid out the net at the back of the boat, preparing it to be played out into the depths, the thunder returned. Sebastian looked to the northern end of the fjord where it opened to the ocean. The thunder grew louder as five sharp shapes came into view, raced toward them, and ripped by overhead so close he could read the warning markings on their bellies.
Sebastian watched the aircraft disappear up the fjord and cursed aloud, not because he felt anger, but because he felt it was what his father would want to hear. He looked down at the net in his hand. It suddenly seemed foreign. He didn’t understand the sensation at the time, but that night his thoughts were consumed by the memory of the jets streaking through his limited world.
He spent the winter working the frigid waters, obsessed. In the spring, as they mended nets, he told his father he wanted to join the Luftforsvaret, that he’d talked with a recruiter, and they would take him.
His father’s old hands went still, weathered eyes rising from the net, and he said, “Men of the same blood climb the same mountain.”
In that Sebastian felt his father was angry with him or somehow disappointed.
“But,” his father said, “You cannot fulfill yourself following another’s path. Each man must find his own route to the summit if he wishes to have satisfaction on his deathbed.”
With those few words, his father had set him free, and he, as always, had loved him for it.
His father had died while he was in flight school. When the news reached him, he lay in his bunk, the dark pipes of the carrier K.N.M. Andøya overhead, smiling as the memories of the old man and the fjord filled his heart. He took comfort in knowing his father had found satisfaction on his deathbed, and in his wisdom, the old man had assured Sebastian would find satisfaction on his.
Chapter Sixteen
Later, Jeffrey found Lila Okoye in the empty gym. Very few would exercise during acceleration and deceleration, but still, there she sat on a bench, sweat soaked into her gray T-shirt. The dark skin of her delicate neck glistened, and when she turned to look at him, efficient muscle flexed along her thin arm.
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