by John Lumpkin
All this space, and we’re still tripping over one another, Neil thought. “How did we find out about it?” he asked.
“Sources and methods, Neil.”
“I’m sorry?”
Donovan smiled. “First lesson of intelligence: Don’t ever expect an answer to a question about our sources of information or our methods in obtaining it. That’s the stuff we have to protect the most; if we burn a source, we very likely lose that source of information for good. Word gets out we burn sources, and fewer people want to talk to us.”
Neil thought that one over. “Fair enough,” he said.
“In any event, I don’t know how long we’re going to be able to stay out of the war, either,” Donovan said.
Neil swallowed. “Really?”
“I hope I’m wrong. But President Delgado is no friend of China’s.”
News to me, Neil thought.
“Perhaps the prospect of our entry into the war on Japan’s side would cause China to consider a ceasefire,” Donovan said. “But I imagine if their back is to the wall they’ll come after us with the stick rather than the carrot.”
“I doubt President Delgado would respond well to the stick,” Rafe Sato interjected. Delgado’s “American Pride” platform was built around returning the country to its former glory, not kowtowing to stronger foreign powers.
Donovan didn’t argue the point. “Maintaining neutrality is going to be tough. One missile goes astray here in orbit and we’ve got several thousand dead Americans and a casus belli.”
“One last question,” Neil said. “The XO said you requested me as your liaison. Any particular reason?”
Donovan said, “What’s the strategic value of AD Leonis?”
Neil’s response was almost immediate. It took him more time to form the sentences in his head than to recall the information.
“Well, the star itself is a red dwarf and a flare hazard. It has a few planets, but I’d have to look up how many and their types. I have never heard of any mining there, so I would gather that the strategic value is that it serves as a critical keyhole junction for the Hans and the Kims, part of the path to both Korean planets, plus Kuan Yin and Entente. It also links to American space, so it’s a trade hub.”
Donovan said, “Well done. I’d overheard you talking to some of your shipmates on the hop to Vandenberg and later on the station. You have a pretty solid command of how intelligence works. Most of your colleagues probably wouldn’t know half of that about AD Leonis. Your recall isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty good. While anyone can look up almost anything, intrinsic knowledge is the key to the quick analysis your superiors will want. If you know something, you can think about it. But more importantly, you phrased your response like an intelligence officer, despite your limited training. You not only answered the question, but you told me what you knew, what you didn’t know, and you distinguished your facts from your opinions. That’s the proper way for intelligence officers to deal with information, Neil. It usually takes quite a bit of training for someone to organize their mind properly like that, but it comes to you pretty naturally.”
Neil reddened at the praise. Donovan impressed him. The NSS officer said, “How are you in languages?”
“Pretty fluent in Spanish, plus decent Japanese.”
“Hmm, that’s not so good. Translation programs or no, it helps to be able to read things in the language they were originally written in. I’d suggest you start learning Mandarin, then move on to Cantonese and Korean.”
Neil and Tom were assigned to the same quarters, an arrangement that suited them both. It was cramped, of course, with enough floor space for a single person to stand, jammed between two sleep nets and a small desk with a computer terminal. They had one closet between them. The room opened into a lounge they would share with the other male junior officers.
After a tour of the ship, Neil and Tom joined Erin at dinner, and they met some of the other junior officers on board.
Maria Sanchez was another first-cruiser, a freshly commissioned second lieutenant of Marines, with oversight of San Jacinto’s small detachment of jarheads. Michael Hayes was the ship’s astrogator. Nestor Garcia was the directed energy officer – “directed energy” being military-speak for lasers. Kevan Avery was the medical officer. Hayes was quiet and bookish; Garcia remote and Avery downright jocular.
Neil hadn’t seen Erin since the staff meeting; their quarters were nearly on opposite sides of the ship. That was by design: Berths were distributed throughout the ship’s fore and middle sections to create distinct male and female country, and to reduce the chance that an accident or a surprise attack would kill most of the crew in a single stroke.
She had smiled warmly at Neil as he sat down. Attraction? Neil wondered. A two-year relationship with his distant girlfriend had gone south a summer ago; somehow, in the time since, he had missed out on any success in that department, unlike many of his fellow seniors. He really wasn’t sure why.
Erin was pretty and engaging, if a bit reserved. Neil decided he was open to it. Not that he had any idea how to conduct a shipboard romance. Of course it was discouraged; of course it happened.
Avery, who everyone called “Doc,” jokingly congratulated Erin on her first “kill” – the debris from the Asakaze yesterday.
He said, “I hear we’re leaving the Solar System on this cruise. Who hasn’t been through a keyhole before? There’s a tradition on board that we shave your head on your first trip out.”
Neil gulped. He liked his hair, even with the regulation short cut used in freefall.
Seeing his expression, Hayes said, “Doc is kidding. Aren’t you, Doc?”
Tom said, “Good. Nobody touching this lovely mane.” His hair was shorter than Neil’s.
Neil said, “It’s my first trip out, too.” Sanchez was the only other officer at the table who had not been through a keyhole before.
“Why do we call it a keyhole, anyway?” put in Garcia. The construction of the first traversable wormholes in the last century had opened up the stars for colonization. To expand to a new star, countries launched tiny carrier craft, bearing one mouth of a wormhole pair, through interstellar space at relativistic speeds. The other mouth stayed at the origin. When its mobile partner arrived at its destination, they were widened to create a perpetual shortcut through space.
Tom said, “This one I know. It’s shorthand. We’re too bureaucratic to call it a wormhole, so we use the formal, scientific name, ‘Krasnikov-Hirasaki Event.’ But that’s a mouthful, so we shortened it to ‘KH.’ But that’s too hard to understand over comms, so we expanded it again, to ‘keyhole,’ because Kilo-Hotel sounds stupid.”
“Brilliant,” Avery said, corralling a piece of chicken that had floated out of his tin. “You new kids got your assignments yet?”
Erin said, “Ordnance officer and assistant gunner.”
“Nice,” he said, smiling at her, and some part of Neil suddenly regarded the doc as competition.
Tom said, “I’m a comms guy, but since Lieutenant Vikram is already our comms officer, the skipper made me CIC officer. Seems like a decent gig. I just do what Chief Palowski tells me to do.”
Neil said, “I’m the assistant intelligence officer for analysis. It’s usually a chief’s billet, but they got me, instead.”
Avery said, “Stahl. Ugh. I’m sorry to hear that. But it should be pretty interesting reading all that classified stuff on the war, yeah?”
“Once I get to read it, sure,” Neil said.
“So does anybody know our mission?” Avery looked around. “They seem to be keeping everyone in the dark.”
A round of negatives from everyone, save Neil, who took a bite of bread. It was stale and crusty, and crumbs fluttered away. Neil stared at them in frustration. How do people eat bread without making a mess?
Avery noticed his silence. “C’mon, Mercer, what do you know?”
Neil tried to think of a way to evade the question, to answer without really answerin
g, or to blow it off with some kind of joke. But nothing came to him.
“I’m sorry, guys, I really can’t say. Orders.”
Avery smirked. “Can you believe it? Even the new guy knows more than I do.”
Neil sat silently, knowing more but wondering what he could responsibly say. He wondered if his new job would mean a permanent gulf between him and his crewmates.
As San Jacinto crossed the Wolf 359 system, Neil settled into shipboard routine. His daily eight-hour watches in the CIC largely consisted of observations of the ships thrusting between the wormholes in the system, marking vectors, rates of propellant use, and the like. Using automated cameras on the hull, the ship scanned its sky constantly for points of light that matched no known star or planet in the database. When it found one, it would alert the sensor tech, usually an enlisted astronaut, who would examine the picture and decide whether to point the ship’s long-range sensors – an optical interferometer and an infrared telescope – at it. Occasionally the tech would discover a new asteroid this way, but an errant luminous source usually meant a ship.
That’s where Neil came in. If a ship was close enough, and not “in the baffles” – dead below, on the far side of San Jacinto’s drive flare – he and the tech could derive a vessel’s drive characteristics, mass, acceleration and other interesting information by watching its drive output for a while. It was easy to tell a military candle from a civilian one; given enough time observing the drive plume, you could usually work out the drive’s manufacturer – an important clue in figuring out who the ship belonged to.
The tricky part was getting the ship’s distance, which was the key to figuring out most of the rest. It takes triangulation, but it’s a very thin triangle when a single ship tries to observe another vessel hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, using two telescopes separated by a few dozen meters on the hull. San Jacinto could get a pretty accurate distance reading out to a million kilometers or so; for anything beyond that, Neil would have to release one of the ship’s drones or communicate with another ship for an accurate calculation.
He had plenty of traffic to monitor. Wolf 359 was a busy system, one of the first reached by wormhole from Sol, and there were no less than six wormholes orbiting it. Most ships were freighters; he tracked three colony transports – colloquially, “cattlecars” – plus a starliner, warships of several nationalities, as well as a few executive yachts and courier ships. But no Japanese ships were in the system, and San Jacinto had no reports of any fighting here so far.
Neil trained. He learned about foreign militaries: their leaders, their ships and their doctrines. He learned about the divide between those who gathered intelligence and those who analyzed it. He learned about all the kinds of intelligence he was responsible for: imagery (IMINT), sensor data (MASINT), and foreign communications (SIGINT) chief among them. He was surprised to learn he also had to stay familiar with “open source” intelligence (OSINT) – information published by news outlets and on internet forums. There was a lot of garbage to sort through, but occasionally you could find a real gem. He skimmed through the guidelines on human intelligence (HUMINT) – how to get information from human sources.
This was Donovan’s specialty; a ship’s intel officer rarely had an opportunity to work with foreign nationals. Still, Neil might someday find himself at an interrogation or an embassy party on a planet’s surface.
Twice a week, Neil also served as junior officer of the deck. The shipboard lingo, which Neil and the other new ensigns quickly adopted, was to “turn tricks on the deck.” That meant a four-hour watch on the bridge conning the ship, always under the watchful eye of the actual OOD, who was one of the senior lieutenants or chiefs. The trip through the Wolf 359 system was a simple one, and the deck tricks usually turned into school in how to run the ship for Neil and the other ensigns. Neil had the fortune to serve as the junior OOD during turnover – the 180-degree change in facing in the middle of their journey. With no friction in the void, the only way a ship could slow itself was to point its tail at its destination and thrust, counteracting all the velocity it had built accelerating during the first half of the trip. Braking on a planet’s atmosphere could somewhat mitigate the need for a powered deceleration, but not every destination had a planet with an atmosphere. A complete acceleration, turnover and deceleration between two points was called a “flip.”
But Neil quickly grew annoyed with another kind of flip – the odd, sudden sensation of having turned on his head, when, in fact, he hadn’t moved at all. It was one of the unpleasant aspects of adjusting to near-freefall conditions. When the San Jacinto was thrusting – which was most of the time – “down” was toward the drive, giving the ship’s interior a layout like a tower, with multiple, narrow decks. From the crew’s perspective, the ship was perpetually headed up, toward a location above their heads. San Jacinto’s usual cruise thrust was ten milligees and change, enough so something dropped would eventually hit the floor, but below the threshold of providing any sensation of weight. The first few days of vertigo and nausea were the worst, but Doc Avery gave them the right pills, and the feelings soon passed.
Daily exercise helped. Everyone on board was required to exercise under simulated gravity for an hour a day, lest muscles become flaccid and bones deteriorate in the absence of the real work that standing on a planet required. The ship wasn’t wide enough to comfortably rotate on its long axis to provide this simulated gravity, so during normal flight San Jacinto extended two chambers on booms on opposite sides of the ship and spun them along a belt. The arrangement could provide about one-half Earth gravity, enough to where exercise felt useful, showers were cleansing, and food stayed in the pan. One of the chambers was set up for sports; however, the Coriolis effect made games involving loose or thrown balls pretty unlikely, although some tried. For most, fencing and a no-kicking, small-field variant of rugby were popular. When the gyms stopped spinning and reverted to freefall, teams quickly formed for a three-dimensional version of basketball.
Several weeks of war news had provided little hope of a ceasefire anytime soon. Korea joined China and declared war on Japan, helping China win control of Saturn. This seriously threatened Japan’s fuel supply for its fleet in the Solar System. The final battle for orbital superiority around Earth was expected in a few weeks; after that, one side could potentially bombard the other on the surface.
In Washington, an argument in Congress over the war had nearly come to blows between one representative from Hawaii and another from California. Supporting his ethnic cousins, the former had introduced a bill to declare war on China; the latter, a competing bill to declare war on Japan. It was the first time anyone had introduced a bill to declare war without the president first asking for it; it was also the first time that competing declarations had been sought against two belligerents. Neither bill had any real support; the majority of Congress, including many with Asian heritage, appeared determined that America stay neutral. The politicians were going so far as to challenge the media’s naming of the conflict the “First Interstellar War,” favoring the moniker “East Asian War” instead. Most of the American public seemed relieved the war didn’t involve them; voices calling for the United States to try to broker peace were matched by those arguing the war was to America’s advantage, as two strategic competitors battled to the knife.
On a Friday while the ship crossed the Wolf 359 system, Captain Thorne invited the ship’s junior officers to dinner. Some of Neil’s older colleagues commented it was about time; most captains had their officers to dinner within the first three or four days of a cruise. But Thorne was not a social captain, and Neil had the feeling the invitation was distinctly pro forma.
It was a surprise, then, to find Donovan and Rafe Sato in attendance. Neil saw Donovan daily, but Sato only rarely. Neil had the feeling Donovan’s technical aide didn’t like him very much; in any event, the NSS officer spent a lot of his free time down in the enlisted women’s area.
The meal wa
s stuffed burritos; they and their foreign equivalents were popular with cooks in space, because biting into a wrapped tortilla in freefall didn’t send little pieces of food flying in all directions, as it would with a sandwich. Still, Neil found a way, and he watched a small cube of diced tomato spin toward the ceiling, where it was caught in an air current and pushed slowly toward a ventilation grate.
The captain politely didn’t notice. She spent most of the meal prompting talk among the juniors, querying Neil and the others on their hometowns, families, and education.
As the main course was concluding, she said, “I believe we’re passing near the Recons 2 wormhole; is that correct, Mister Hayes?”
The astrogator swallowed some food and said, “Yes, ma’am.”
Erin, seated next to Neil, put her fork down and stared into her tin.
Recons 2, red dwarf, part of the wormhole chain down to Leviticus, orbiting Alpha Mensae, Neil recalled at once. Leviticus used to be called Jefferson, until Reverend Jessie Cameron exhorted his flock to move there. It wasn’t long until the colonists declared independence, saying America had betrayed its Christian values, and renamed the planet.
“Has anyone here been to Leviticus?” the captain said. “I am curious how our lost colony is faring.”
Erin looked at the captain. She was rigid.
“Yes, ma’am. When I was a child.”
“Do you remember much?”
“Yes, ma’am. My parents were stationed there during the revolt.”
“Did they see action?”
“They were killed.”
“Oh,” Thorne said. “I had no idea. I’m sorry.”
Tom was nodding slightly. She must have told him, Neil thought through his surprise. Did she decide I wasn’t worth telling?
The Jefferson rebellion was mostly peaceful, and most U.S. loyalists were allowed to leave without incident. But some violence erupted, and in one case, zealots demanded a U.S. Army company stationed on the planet leave behind their weapons. The soldiers refused and a firefight erupted. Seven soldiers and around 40 rebels died. Including the Quintanas.
