Project Sail

by Anthony DeCosmo

  “The Russians, Colonel?”

  “Yeah,” and again Curtis sounded unsure, as if he worried about saying the wrong thing or letting a piece of sensitive information slip. “They were expected to hit us again but I thought we had another day or two.”

  “It must be nice to have an enemy who keeps to a schedule.”

  Hawthorne worried that his sarcasm had not come across clear when the Colonel responded, “I always tell my men not to rely on it.”

  The ground felt akin to snow with a layer of ice on top. Every so often Hawthorne’s boot stomped through that outer skin, sinking into dirt the texture of sand. He understood why they had built a road of crushed rock across the surface; it would have been like driving on a beach—a frozen beach—otherwise.

  There was indeed a structure built into the side of a short hill. Based on its texture, Hawthorne guessed it constructed of self-repairing concrete, which would be a logical building block for a military facility in a war zone.

  “Hurry up and stay close!” Curtis said over the radio while his arm pointed toward a big rectangle at the base of the hill about a hundred yards away. Considering the row of lights visible there, it had to be an airlock.

  Hawthorne glanced up into the murky atmosphere and spotted a trio of flying objects headed in his direction. Each resembled a flying barrel with a tiny wingspan. He wondered what firepower they aimed to deliver, worried his life might end in a nuclear flash.

  He instinctively ran faster, resulting in a stumble and fall. When he stood again and searched the sky, he saw the three objects had split in different directions, but one still aimed for him.

  Curtis shouted over his radio, “Hurry! We are almost to the—”

  The incoming weapon delivered its payload and it was a flash, a brilliant light a thousand feet up. Hawthorne expected a wall of heat or a deluge of microwaves or some other deadly release that would make Titan his graveyard. But it did not come. No shock wave, no plasma or shrapnel, no wall of fire, no lethal radiation.

  Nothing.

  Everything went quiet. Not a sound, no voices over his radio…no…

  No annoying hum from my suit’s heater.

  Suddenly, Hawthorne realized he would have preferred the shrapnel or shock wave.

  The power had drained from his gear. His radio dead, the gauges on his wrist failed, and the second-most important life support feature no longer worked. The direct connection between his tank and his helmet kept the oxygen flowing, however, the mechanism balancing the mix no longer functioned. His suit would turn toxic in minutes, but by then he would be frozen stiff.

  He stopped jogging but he was the only one. Curtis and the soldiers continued, unaffected by the pulse.

  “Oh shit, I have an older suit. They have newer ones with shielding. Oh, shit. Curtis!”

  He waved his hands and shouted, but sound carried on Titan at a much slower pace and with warped acoustics. Fortunately, Curtis either heard something or chose that moment to check on his guest because he turned and saw Hawthorne standing still in a suit robbed of power.

  After a moment, Curtis understood. He hurried back to Hawthorne and called on a soldier to help.

  Inside his now lifeless air bag, Hawthorne felt the first tingle of chill along his lower legs and upper arms. Titan’s surface temperature of minus one hundred and eighty degrees Celsius would soon penetrate his suit’s insulation.

  Commander Jonathan Hawthorne did not want to die. He particularly did not want to die on that stupid moon orbiting that dumb planet running a fool’s errand that he had been roped into by the fine print in his corporate contract.

  His only hope, he knew, was to make it to the air lock and inside before the cold killed him. Curtis and his man came to help, grabbing Hawthorne’s arms and adding their strength to his as they bound across the surface in big leaps made possible by the low gravity.

  A chill climbed up his limbs and into his shoulders while his inhales brought icy air to his lungs. His body heat retreated deeper into his person, taking shelter from the coming cold.

  They closed the distance to the air lock fast, giving him hope of survival…until he noticed the lights above the airlock had also died out. The EMP, it seemed, had hit the outpost, too.

  He considered curling onto the ground and closing his eyes, having heard a long time ago that freezing to death was one of the better ways to die. Then again, the cold on Titan was not like the cold on Earth. He was being flash frozen, not slowly sapped of energy. In seconds, his heart would beat once and then ice over. The blood in his veins would turn solid and even the tears in his eyes and the saliva in his mouth would congeal.

  Curtis retrieved a metal pipe from a compartment by the bulkhead. Hawthorne wondered if Curtis planned to smash his faceplate to hasten his demise in a weird act of mercy. But no, the pipe was a crank that matched a gear set by the door. Instead of investing in EMP shielding for the air lock, they had invested in a means of manually opening the door during a power outage.

  Typical army-think.

  It worked, although Curtis had to wind the crack repeatedly. By the time the airlock opened enough to squeeze in, Hawthorne could no longer feel his toes, his helmet had frosted over, and his skin tingled as nerve endings went numb.

  He did not lose consciousness at that point, but his thoughts grew jumbled. He heard the door close, he heard the hiss of pressurization, he felt his helmet and suit come off and he heard voices while lights shined in his eyes.

  Eventually the numbness faded and he felt a needle prick his skin.

  At some point, he moved to a corner against a rocky wall while people hurried back and forth and the occasional rumble shook the outpost. He was not sure how long he was alone, but after a while, Curtis returned.

  “Hey man, I accidentally gave you an older suit without EMP shielding. Sorry but the medics say you’re fine. Oh, there has been a lull in the attack so we can move up and track down Lieutenant Thomas now. Commander, can you hear me? What’s that? What did you say?”

  “I said, fuck that.”

  13. Front Lines

  Hawthorne decided to continue his mission because he had no choice. He would receive no return transport to Camp Conrad unless Lieutenant Thomas accompanied him and Thomas happened to be on the front lines, five kilometers from the outpost.

  After a thirty-minute rest, a hot energy drink, and two protein bars, he was ready. This time his host provided a modern suit complete with helmet sensors and protective plating. Before he could ask Curtis where he found the extra armor, Hawthorne noticed a repair patch on the upper chest plate.

  They shared a four-wheel ATV and were nearing their destination when the cloudy sky filled with enemy drones and missiles. Fortunately, automated defensive fire rose to meet the attack.

  The USNA forward position was a concrete dam-like structure stretching from one side of a valley to the other, anchored on each end by towers above bunkers built into hills. Large, multi-barreled guns mounted on swivels lined the span and their rapid-fire cannons met the incoming ordnance, destroying drones and missiles one after another.

  As he rode on the quad watching the fireworks, Hawthorne wondered why the enemy used such low-powered weapons when a nuke or kinetic impactor could pulverize the defenses.

  He saw a bunker door open and a line of wheeled buggies equipped with antenna, guns, and launch tubes roll out and move among the gun emplacements, adding their firepower to the battle.

  “What’s so important about this position?” Hawthorne asked his host.

  “It’s one of the main approaches to the harvesting stations on the eastern edge of Ligeia Mare. Once they take this valley, we will have to pull our extraction teams off this part of the lake. Similar battles are happening further north.”

  That valley was to Hawthorne’s left and filled with the remains of destroyed war machines. He saw battle tanks with cracked domes and unfurled treads; crashed planes with shattered cockpits; melted armored transports, flattened a
rtillery guns, and a demolished radar dish sitting atop a pile of twisted beams.

  For every recognizable piece, there were a thousand unrecognizable bits and chunks of blasted military hardware. He saw Russian and North American flags in the mess together, a sign that this valley had been won, lost, and won again over and over.

  “Colonel, how many times have you fought here?”

  Before he could answer, Curtis received a transmission from the base which Hawthorne heard over the proximity radio.

  “Colonel, we are getting royally cyber’d. The systems are crashing, one after another!”

  “Corporal, we cannot lose those guns today. Maybe tomorrow but not today.” He then said to Hawthorne, “Now I know why they hit us with the EMP. Our weapons are shielded, but it distracted us long enough for them to slip a hacker inside the perimeter. Christ! There go the turrets!”

  The turrets atop the barrier stopped functioning and while the robot soldiers remained, they could not produce the same volume of defensive firepower

  Hawthorne shouted, “What do you mean?”

  “They sneaked a package in and did a hardline hack into the automated defenses.”

  A cloud of projectiles dropped toward the robots. They destroyed most of that cloud, but one tube-shaped bomb survived and burst above the machines, releasing a pocket of oxygen followed by an ignition spark. The result resembled napalm as the device turned Titan’s methane-rich atmosphere into a weapon.

  Although they were one hundred yards from the detonation, a wall of heat and a storm of shrapnel swept toward the two men. Curtis stopped the quad and they dove for cover. A moment later, the sound of the explosion warped by Titan’s strange acoustics reached their ears and sounded like nails falling on a tin roof.

  After creating an orange and white fireball fifty meters in diameter, the explosion appeared to rewind, collapsing back into its center until disappearing, leaving the robots silent with melted guns and fried servos.

  Hawthorne ran his hands over the seals of his suit in search of breaches. When he found none, he stood and saw the America defenses were either inoperable or destroyed.

  “You have to pull back.”

  Curtis replied, “We need another twenty-four hours to meet our harvesting quota. We can’t pull back until tomorrow.”

  “What does that mean?”

  From above came an electronic buzz, like a giant mechanical bumblebee. Hawthorne looked up and saw a flying drone. It had a boxy main body, a six-foot wingspan, a black nose cone that resembled a beak, and the USNA flag painted on its chassis.

  The drone hovered for a moment and then flew down into the valley on the northern side of the barrier.

  Curtis said, “That is one of Thomas’ drones searching for the intruder. Ops has narrowed the splice-in to a trunk comm line at the bottom of the wall.”

  Hawthorne responded sarcastically, “That is just dandy, can we go inside now?”

  Curtis ignored his guest and responded to another transmission from the Operations Center: “What’s that? Hang on, I’ll check.”

  The Colonel hurried toward the wall and the remains of smoldering drones and looked into the distance. Unable to think of anything better to do, Hawthorne followed and shared the view.

  Curtis said, “Oh shit on a stick.”

  Something moved on the horizon. Hawthorne felt around on his suit controls until activating the helmet’s built-in binoculars. They zoomed out and optical enhancement cut through Titan’s natural haze, allowing him to see the Russian army.

  Two armored columns approached from the north. Hawthorne counted twenty low-profile tanks armed with rocket pods supported by three-legged ten-foot-tall laser-equipped robot soldiers as well as self-propelled mortars mounted on treaded platforms and several dozen flying drones of various configurations circling above.

  Curtis said, “We’ve got five minutes to get the automatic defenses online, or we will be overrun.”

  “Colonel, there is no time; just pull back.”

  Curtis forcibly replied, “No way. We can get away with anything until we start missing quotas, then the brass will be all over us. The equipment broke down last week and put us a day behind, so we are not pulling out until tomorrow. We come up short on harvesting and command will send in the big guns and this shit will get real.”

  Now Hawthorne understood why two battleships hovered in orbit staring at each other instead of fighting. Their entry into the fray would turn the skirmishes on Titan into total war.

  “Am I hearing you right, Colonel? These battles are for show?”

  “Not for show, just, you know, limited.”

  Hawthorne said, “Their robots hit your robots; their drones hit your drones, and you go back and forth until you reach your quota, pull back and they take the lake. Then you attack with your drones until the Russians have their fill and withdraw; nobody gets hurt but no one ever wins.”

  Curtis shot back, “I lost fifty men last week and probably double that already this week. It’s not just drones fighting, Commander.”

  “Those soldiers are dying for nothing! This is madness!”

  “These soldiers are fighting for North America’s fair share of the resources on this moon! If we don’t get these defenses working soon there will be more casualties, starting with you and me.”

  A missile slammed into the wall where the pile of melted robot soldiers sat silent, a low-yield, conventional weapon. A chunk of concrete and metal blasted into the air and sent a ringing noise echoing across the valley.

  Curtis received a transmission and then told him, “Moe found the splice-in at the base of the wall about two thirds of the way across. I have to go down there and neutralize it directly; otherwise it will fry the line. Come on.”

  Hawthorne shouted, “I’m not cyber ops trained.”

  “You just need to cover me.”

  “I’m not armed.”

  Curtis grabbed Hawthorne’s arm and pushed a series of buttons on a control panel. A metal tube popped up on his forearm and a targeting reticle appeared on his helmet display. Curtis hit another button and the words AUTOMATIC DEFENSE SYSTEMS ACTIVATED scrolled across the interior of his helmet.

  “Well I’ll be damned.”

  “C’mon, we have to get down there.”

  Curtis pointed to the base of the wall three hundred feet down and Hawthorne did not see any stairs.

  “Wait a second; we can’t just fly down there.”

  “On Titan, everyone can fly,” and Curtis slapped a button on his and then Hawthorne’s chest plate. Membranes unfurled between their shoulders and elbows.

  Hawthorne eyed them suspiciously and muttered, “I look like a flying squirrel.”

  “Just remember to flap your arms.”

  Curtis pulled the reluctant Commander over the edge. Hawthorne screamed, despite falling at a slow rate. Still, he was falling and the rocks would surely tear him to pieces on impact. So he flapped his arms, just as Curtis coached. To his surprise, it worked.

  Low gravity plus dense atmosphere equals lower wingspan for flying, Hawthorne realized. Still, it felt more like parachuting than flying.

  Nonetheless, his descent slowed and, following Curtis’ lead, the two men circled in a series of swoops until reaching the ground. The Colonel landed on his feet; Hawthorne hit, stumbled, rolled, and landed on his back.

  Moe—the flying drone—hovered near the base of the barrier, shining a spotlight on a black object that had penetrated the wall.

  They saw it to be a three-foot long drill-equipped pod that had blasted off four square feet of concrete exposing a matrix of tubes, wires, and conduits. Prongs extended from the intruder and clamped onto one of those lines.

  Curtis said, “I’ll defuse and remove it, you cover me!”

  Like the southern side of the wall, the northern side was littered with the remains of previous armies, making it difficult for Hawthorne to spot any of the approaching ground units.

  Nonetheless, he did see a flyi
ng object hurrying toward his position, a metal cylinder attached to a kite, about six-feet long and half that wide. He had the uncomfortable feeling of being watched by robotic eyes.

  WARNING. WEAPONS LOCK DETECTED scrolled across the inside of his helmet.

  “Oh shit. Um, Colonel Curtis! I need help here!”

  But his compatriot focused on the contraption that had hacked their defense systems.

  Something shot out from the flying kite.

  WARNING. INBOUND MISSILE DETECTED.

  Commander Hawthorne considered running for cover, he thought about firing his arm-mounted gun at the missile, but mostly he thought about Regan Fisk and UVI tearing him from his lovely navigator, placing him on a dingy freighter, and shipping him into an insane war zone. He hoped to wake up in his cabin to find this a nightmare.

  So many thoughts, but no action; his mind jammed by fear, regret, and disbelief.

  AUTOMATIC DEFENSES ENGAGED. COUNTERMEASURES DEPLOYED.

  Sparkling balls ejected from compartments on his shoulders, a combination of chaff and flares. Their release caused him to stumble and fall face-first into the ground but after a moment, he heard an explosion—again, like piano wire snapping.

  He looked up and saw that his suit’s countermeasures had misdirected and detonated the missile.

  “Holy shit! Holy shit! YES!”

  Euphoria overcame Commander Hawthorne and even a sense of invincibility thanks to the high-tech combat suit.

  The kite thing still hovered in the air, perhaps wondering what had become of its missile. Hawthorne raised one gloved middle finger in the drone’s direction, but a message flashing across his helmet’s HUD wiped the smile from his face.

  COUNTERMEASURES DEPLETED.

  “Shit. Wait a second, I have a gun.”

  He raised his right arm and a targeting reticle inside his helmet fell on his flying adversary. However, he could not find the trigger.

  “Curtis! How do I shoot this gun thing?”

  “What? Oh, hold the safety down and make a fist.”

  Safety? What safety?