Murphy's Lawless: A Terran Republic Novel

by Charles E. Gannon

  Bowden swallowed. “Uh, no. I’m not sure, but your mission may be even more fucked up than mine. Good luck with that.”

  “I’ve got a few minutes, and I could use something else to think about for a bit. What have you got?”

  Bowden showed him the target and told him what he was planning.

  Tapper chuckled when he was finished. “Well, that’s a bitch in its own right, but I’d still trade you if you wanted.”

  “No thanks.” Bowden looked down at the imagery. “Got any ideas?”

  “The only way you’re going to do that is with a ground designate.”

  “I wanted to do that, but I don’t think we can get people in place.”

  “A mule’s not that heavy, and the terrain will support it…I think. That’s what I would do, anyway.”

  “A mule?”

  “The ground designate equipment—Modular Universal Laser Equipment, or MULE—to be exact. It’s the handheld laser we used back home to lase a high-value target for you brown shoes to drop bombs on. If you could get a couple of them in close—or some other sort of handheld laser—you wouldn’t have to worry about keeping your laser on target once you dropped. That would at least take care of some of the targeting problems you’re going to have while avoiding potential triple-A, and it would help with hitting your point targets.”

  “You think we can get a couple close enough?”

  “Maybe over here.” Tapper pointed to a maze of canyons and crevices that could be seen at the base of the high terrain to the east of the target. “If you can’t get through there, though, the ground designate option is out. And that’s certainly going to make the mission a lot harder.” He smiled. “That’s the best I can do for you.” The big SEAL rubbed his forehead then shrugged as he stood. “Maybe some of the local indigs can help with it. Sorry, but I have to get back to prepping for the drop into my own very special clusterfuck.”

  Bowden chuckled. “No worries. Thanks for taking a look.” He held out his hand. “Good luck with your mission.”

  “Thanks. I head to the orbital FOB tomorrow, then off to the insertion point. I’ll take all the luck I can get. Good luck with yours.” He turned and walked over to the corner table Bowden had seen him sitting at before.

  Bowden sat and looked back through the imagery again with an eye toward ground-based lasing. He’d originally given up on it due to the terrain, but if Tapper thought it was possible to get someone in there, maybe it was. If they could build a couple of handheld lasers, and if they could get them into the target area, then it would be a lot easier to cut the cables to the antenna complex. It might not make the mission’s success probable—there was too much untried tech for that—but it just might make it possible.

  * * *

  “You want to make a what?” Lotho Ferenc asked. The SpinDog pilot was Bowden’s liaison for setting up the mission and would be the lead pilot for the strike. Based on his attitude, it didn’t appear that his participation had been by choice.

  “I want to make a laser-guided, rocket-propelled bomb.”

  “I understand the need to drop bombs on the antenna, but why laser-guided and rocket-propelled? That seems like a lot of extra work. Just fly over the antenna, release a large load of bombs, and fly back home. No more antenna.”

  Bowden cocked his head at the SpinDog. “Have you ever actually dropped a bomb?”

  “No, but it cannot be that hard. Fly over the target. Push the button. Bombs fall. How is that so difficult?”

  “When people are shooting at you, it’s a lot harder than that. You have to maneuver to keep from getting shot, but still be flying in a manner that the bombs come off the aircraft going in the right direction to hit the target.”

  “Just fly higher,” the SpinDog said with a smile. “Their rifles can only shoot so high.”

  “I would agree with you…but not only does that make accuracy a lot harder as the winds the bombs fly through will be different at every level, it also puts you into their missile envelope. I don’t know how many missiles they have, but Murphy thinks they have them, and your aircraft is a great big, lumbering target. If you fly high, you’re going to get shot down.”

  Ferenc frowned. “Very well; fly lower.”

  “So now you’re back to people shooting at you with guns. The first time you see all those tracers reaching up for you, and you realize how many bullets there are that you can’t see, you’re going to be yanking the plane around so they don’t hit you. And that’s going to throw your bombs all over the place.”

  Ferenc shrugged. “It can’t be done, then. Why are you wasting my time?”

  Bowden smiled. “It can be done, but we need a laser-guided, rocket-propelled bomb to do it. Because it’s rocket-propelled, we can launch it from about fifteen kilometers away, so we don’t have to fly through the triple-A—”

  “The what?”

  Bowden had to work hard to stifle the sigh. Remember, they’ve never done this before. The fact that Ferenc seemed to not want to listen to any advice, though, had Bowden ready to scream. He smiled again, instead. “Triple-A is Anti-Aircraft Artillery. Basically, every gun they have that can be pointed into the air, whether it was originally made to shoot at aircraft or not.”

  “Their guns. Okay. I understand.”

  Bowden nodded. Finally. Progress. “A rocket-propelled bomb can be launched from outside the area where they can shoot at you—which is a good thing, trust me—and the fact that it will be laser-guided means that it will still be accurate enough to hit the targets we’re aiming for.” I hope.

  Ferenc squinted at the bomb two of the SpinDogs had trundled up in a dolly. “Where do you attach the laser to it? Do you mount it on the side?”

  This time Bowden did sigh, although he tried to keep it to himself. “You don’t put it on here.” He slapped the side of the bomb, and Ferenc jumped back as if it would detonate. “The laser goes on the aircraft or—better yet—is carried by someone on the ground. You put a laser receiver on the nose of the bomb and give it steerable wings. Then, when the bomb senses returning laser energy, it flies to the source of it and blows up. Target destroyed.”

  The SpinDog counted on his fingers. “So, we will need a laser on the aircraft, a laser receiver on the bomb, steerable fins on the bomb, and a rocket motor for the bomb.” He paused for a second. “They will not like interrupting normal production to make these four items.”

  Bowden chuckled. “It’s not four items. It’s three of the aircraft lasers—one for each aircraft—and at least twenty of the laser receivers, wing packages, and rocket motors. Plus, the twenty bombs to strap them onto, of course. And the two handheld lasers we’ll need.”

  “There are only two targets—the control station and the antenna cable.” Bowden opened his mouth, and Ferenc added, “Sorry, two cables need to be cut. So, three bombs. One aircraft can carry three bombs, so all you need are three bombs, and one aircraft laser. Simple, and it will disrupt production less.”

  “If only things worked like that,” Bowden said. “Let me introduce you to a little thing we call Murphy’s Law. Murphy says that anything that can go wrong, will. Nowhere is this more true than in aircraft operations. You can almost count on the fact that if we try to launch two planes, one will break, so you need an extra. We have two targets, so we need three aircraft to be outfitted and ready to go.”

  “But cannot one aircraft launch bombs at both targets? The craft is big enough to carry bombs for both targets.”

  “Yes, but it is unlikely they’d be able to guide both of them to separate targets on the same bombing run.”

  “Well—”

  “No,” Bowden said. “You never make two runs on the same target. Never. By the time you come around again, everyone in the world with a gun is firing at you. Only. One. Run. Ever. And, since we have two targets, we need two handheld lasers on the ground to identify them, and two aircraft to hit them. And, since we need two working aircraft to hit them, we need a total of three aircraft a
rmed and ready to go. “

  It was Ferenc’s turn to sigh. “I will see what I can do. Why do we need twenty bombs, though? Is this more guidance from your Major Murphy?”

  “Yes. Well, no, but yes.” Bowden shook his head, trying to decide how best to explain it so the SpinDog would understand. “We are using untested technology. Some of the bombs won’t work. Some may not see the laser spot or guide on it. Some may not blow up. The aircraft will each hold four of the bombs; I want each of them to have four, just in case.”

  “But that’s—”

  “I’m aware that’s only twelve and I said twenty. I want eight extra bombs for them to run tests with to make sure they work. There’s nothing worse than flying into an enemy’s triple-A envelope only to find out your weapons don’t work, and it was all for nothing. I won’t be there if that happens, but you will, and I doubt you would like to have risked your life for nothing.”

  Ferenc sighed again. “I will do my best, but I don’t know…”

  “Wait!” Bowden called as the SpinDog started to walk away. “We haven’t talked about Sidewinders yet!”

  * * * * *

  Chapter Eleven

  “Outpost”

  Murphy leaned back, having just jabbed a period at the end of his most recent log entry. The change in posture once again brought his eyes level with the op-center’s forward observation screen. The view from Outpost’s bow was mesmerizing: a slowly falling starfield on endless loop, repeating every seventy seconds.

  He forced himself to look back down before the Zen-trance of the cycling image put him to sleep. Which would not have surprised anyone in the operations center. Murphy had been standing oversight on final approach and insertion for twenty hours straight, and at a certain point, stim tabs lost their efficacy.

  However, just because the others in the op-center would be unsurprised did not mean they would be understanding. Rather, they were likely to see grogginess as yet another confirmation of their perception of him, and, by extension, the rest of the Lost Soldiers. Namely, that they were undisciplined, imprecise, ill-trained, dim-witted, and clumsy.

  It was hard to argue the last point, at least as long as they were spaceside. Even in the long, hollow asteroids where Murphy’s men were now billeted, they remained awkward, still acclimating to the .75-gee equivalent. There was also their lack of adaptation to the Coriolis effect. Specifically, their planet-trained eyes had not yet learned to predict the seemingly curved trajectories of free flying or moving objects in a rotating environment. Nor had they learned to anticipate the potential for disorientation when they turned their heads perpendicular to the direction of the spin. So the SpinDogs were not simply fabricating an unflattering characterization when they labeled their guests “awkward:” the Terrans were broader, heavier, and stumbled around like inebriated gorillas. Among the most prejudiced locals, the Hardliners, the term “Terran” was being supplanted by “Trog.” Murphy considered the odds to be about fifty percent that it would become the most common label for his people.

  Unless, of course, the Lost Soldiers decisively proved their claimed superiority in a planetary environment. Which they were about to do, and which was why Murphy had been in Outpost’s op-center for the past twenty hours. Officially, he was a coordinator of the first joint Terran-SpinDog mission to the surface of R’Bak. But more essentially, he was the guardian angel for the two Lost Soldiers assigned to it. Their relations with the SpinDogs were still evolving and not all of their hosts were happy with it. Not happy at all.

  He checked his G-Shock; only fourteen minutes to orbital insertion. Time enough to make sure that the mission log entry he’d just completed made some kind of sense when read in the context of all the ones he’d written before. He flipped open the green-covered, ring-bound notebook he’d dragged with him all the way from Fort Benning, and stared at the last three entries:

  Day 023 Olsloov departs.

  Day 024 Mission dropship commences op with tug boost toward R’Bak along retrograde orbital track.

  Day 028 Dropship lascom confirms all parameters are nominal; mission on track.

  Murphy read his last entry. In minutes, he would know what fateful emendation he would have to make to that final clause: “mission on track.”

  But the actions that would determine the change he would have to make were out of his hands, as they were for everyone else in Outpost. That would be decided in real time by the crew of the dropship and the joint ops team, now almost thirty million kilometers behind them.

  “Behind”? Murphy frowned at himself: in space, nothing was ever really “behind” or “in front” of you, any more than the terms up and down had any real utility. But it was hard getting used to the strange terms that prevailed when trying to establish spatial relationships independent of gravity or fixed objects. Still, no better time than the present…

  So: “behind.” Murphy pinched the bridge of his nose, tried to visualize the actual positions of the objects in question. Outpost shared R’Bak’s orbit around the secondary star, which they called Shex. However, Outpost preceded R’Bak in that orbital track, maintaining a constant distance of about 22 million kilometers—which was also .15 AU (astral units). Or, more important when calculating the comms delay, 75 light-seconds. And because it was “ahead” of R’Bak in the same orbit (anything up to 180 degrees in the lead was deemed “ahead”), Outpost was “spinward” of the planet. Conversely, any object following up to 180 degrees “behind” R’Bak was deemed to be “trailing” it.

  So, in the shorthand of everyone from the 22nd century—aliens included—R’Bak and the dropship carrying the ops team were presently .15 AU to the “trailing” of Outpost. Murphy pinched the bridge of his nose again. When he had enough time to write the terms down or think them through, they all made sense. But then the locals started rattling them off in their high-speed jabber, often adding two positional coordinates that could either be oriented to the system’s ecliptic or to the observer’s own location and attitude. That was when Rodger Y. Murphy conceded defeat and simply resolved to wear an expression of calm focus instead of slack-jawed confusion.

  Which was pretty much the same expression he had worn the first time he saw Outpost from the bridge of the spindly RockHound “packet” that brought him out from the largest of the habitats: Spin One.

  Like the “spins,” Outpost was an oblong asteroid. But whereas the spins revolved around their long axes, like huge stony logs rolling slowly in place, Outpost was tumbling ass-over-eyeballs. So, where the spins’ centripetally-generated “gees” held your feet down upon their long inner walls, at Outpost, the maximum gees were felt at its ends. Murphy had come to envision it as living and working inside the rubber caps of a high-school twirler’s baton, the soles of his feet racing past the faces in the watching crowd.

  Shortly after arriving, he’d made the mistake of commenting that these features made Outpost seem like a pretty awkward choice for a facility so proximal to R’Bak. When the ops support staff from the Hardliner families had drifted away hiding (but not really) sneers of contempt, a comparatively tolerant Expansionist technician had explained that Major Murphy could not be more mistaken in his assessment.

  Firstly, Outpost was the closest semi-stable object from which they could watch R’Bak. Murphy accepted this as proof that the mantra of 20th century real-estate agents was universal: location, location, location! Specifically, Outpost had started its existence as part of the swarm of planetoids that any planet captured in both the spinward and trailing equilibrium points of its orbit. Murphy had actually heard of those, they were called LaGrangian points. Unfortunately, that infobite did not impress the technician in the slightest. In retrospect, Murphy supposed trying to impress her with his space knowledge was the equivalent of her proudly pointing out how, when trees grow close together in a big bunch, that’s called a forest!

  However, Outpost was, in every way, an outlier from the asteroids in R’Bak’s spinward LaGrangian—or Trojan—point. No
t only had it fallen thirty million kilometers behind that cluster, but its end-over-end tumble was both uncommon and unusually “clean.” By which she meant that its motion was all along the vector Murphy thought of as pitch; there was almost none of what he called roll or yaw. The terms the locals’ used to describe these vectors of motion made no sense to him and did not seem to have transliterations; they were not inherited from the cant of mariners, and the technician gave no clue as to their origins.

  Considered together, she concluded, this made Outpost an extremely fortuitous find for the SpinDogs. Murphy frowned, expressed concern that the rock’s unusual tumble might attract unwanted attention.

  The technician’s lips strained into an indulgent smile. Even if the space-faring monsters from the Jrar system began to suspect the existence of space dwellers somewhere among the planets and asteroids of Shex, a freakish rock like Outpost would be the last place they’d check. Just over 800 meters long, and with a spin rate that provided barely sufficient gee-forces to a small portion of its opposed poles, it could not support a viable long-duration community. Consequently, the raiders’ first searches would be for something more like the spins themselves: long, large asteroids in slow, stable rolls. But the only reason the invaders from Kulsis would ever search at all was if they detected movement, artifacts, or emissions that did not originate with them. Which was why the present mission to R’Bak had been launched in the first place: to ensure that the SpinDogs and RockHounds remained undiscovered and unsuspected.

  One of the more Hardline overseers—the ops command group had been carefully drawn from across the SpinDogs’ and RockHounds’ strange political spectrum—glanced sharply in Murphy’s direction but did not make eye contact. “Drop time is on track: two minutes.”

  Murphy resisted the impulse to chew on his lip or cuticle or both. “Two minutes” actually meant “forty-five seconds until their capsules are released and then seventy-five seconds for word to reach us.” Meaning that in just a little over half a minute now, the first part of this insanely ambitious—not to say risky—plan would begin. And by the time that word reached him, the outcome would already belong not to the present, but to history. As would the ops team if things went wrong.