Through Struggle, the Stars

by John Lumpkin

  Neil knew he would volunteer. He wanted to go down to the planet – who wouldn’t? – and this was a way to guarantee a slot on the drop. But the warning from Stahl kept him from accepting immediately. Would being less than reserved with the NSS officers somehow hurt his standing on board, or in the Space Force? This is frustrating. We’re all supposed to be on the same side.

  Donovan excused himself for a meeting with Captain Thorne, leaving Neil alone with Rafe Sato.

  “The chief wanted you to read up on Chinese political leadership,” Rafe said. “Let me send you a briefing package.”

  He hit a few keys on his handheld. Neil opened the file, marked “top secret,” on his handheld and began scanning it.

  Rafe looked at Neil in surprise. “You don’t have an ocular?” Ocular implants turned the inside of the eye into a computer monitor. You still had to control all but the simplest functions with your handheld – unless you had Rafe Sato’s upgraded model. He had a “hardwire” – a rig installed in his skull that allowed him to think certain basic commands to the computer. It was a relatively new technology, custom-made, and expensive – only the very rich could afford it, or those government officers deemed critical enough to receive one.

  Still, Neil thought Rafe’s disbelief a little unreasonable. Lots of people didn’t have oculars.

  “I had a late growth spurt,” he said. You couldn’t install one until the docs approved it. “Then when I started flight training, the instructors said not to bother, that a pilot needed to learn by flying with the instrument panels first. They implant an ocular for you, free, in advanced flight.”

  “Well, you’ll need one if you stay in the intelligence business,” Rafe said, tapping his temple.

  Small chance of that, Neil thought. Right?

  Sixteen days to the next wormhole, with the Jovian planet Marble growing from a bright light into an actual disk during the final five.

  Letters from home: Every few hours the San Jacinto pinged the comm relays in FL Virginis and downloaded transmissions for the crew. Software updates made up the bulk of them, followed by intelligence briefings, U.S. fleet positions, news reports and finally personal communications.

  His parents wrote; all was well with them, although all the war news was scary. They seemed certain the United States would stay out of it, although the neighborhood was on edge after somebody broke all the windows at a nearby Japanese steakhouse. There had been some ethnic fights at the middle school.

  His roommate, Rand Castillo, also checked in.

  Neil the Merciless:

  I write to you with new wisdom learned on the decks of the glorious passenger liner Estrella Romantica, en route from Earth to Kuan Yin with 280 souls on board: Always wear your uniform on civilian transit. When I arrived, they bumped me to a luxury cabin as a thank-you for my service to the nation. Free drinks, good chow, and best of all, privacy. Who knew Army life was so grand?

  Anyway, I have my posting: Space defense artillery platoon leader attached to the 34th Heavy Infantry Brigade, outside of some podunk town called Cottonwood. No word yet on the quality and permissiveness of the women on Kuan Yin, but they aren’t bad on spaceliners.

  If you space monkeys are ever in the neighborhood, look me up.

  RLC

  Lucky bastard, Neil thought, thinking of free drinks, spacious quarters, and best of all, privacy.

  Uncle Jack also sent a short note, saying he’d heard about Neil’s posting from an old colleague and inquiring how the spook world was treating him.

  Jack signed off, as he always did, with a few lines of military humor:

  Any ship can be a minesweeper … once.

  If you see a bomb tech running, try to keep up with him.

  If at first you don’t succeed, try orbital bombardment.

  Old, tired jokes. Neil smiled in spite of himself.

  But Uncle Jack’s note triggered a line of thought … Donovan, too, in one of their daily conversations, had asked him for his thoughts on how the war would go, and Neil felt obliged to do some original thinking and come up with a response.

  So do it: Start with the laws of space warfare. Assumptions really, finally playing out in the Chinese-Japanese war.

  Chief among them, straight out of Uncle Jack’s joke:

  To control low orbit is to control a planet. The threat of sustained orbital bombardment on economic targets with lasers or kinetics should be enough to drive any organized, reasonable political body to surrender.

  How to control low orbit? First, you have to control high orbit. That means having a stronger space force than the other guy. Correction: Have a stronger mobile space force than the other guy. A space station in a predictable orbit, no matter how well armed, is toast for anyone who throws enough gravel in its path.

  So far, so good, Neil thought. The key to mobility is fusion fuel. Antimatter to provide the spark, helium-3 and deuterium to provide the energy, all to push a stream of hydrogen propellant out a ship’s tail. Antimatter was the hardest to come by; it was made in large solar-powered factories orbiting Earth’s sun and the suns of the older inhabited worlds. It was the most expensive substance anywhere. A gram cost vast millions.

  So capturing or conquering the antimatter factories near the Sun was important, but the factories were dispersed across many systems, making it exceedingly difficult to eliminate a nation’s supply.

  But getting it to a standing fleet was another matter. Warships typically carried at most several hundred milligrams of antimatter, enough to keep its fusion candle lit for six months or so. Specialized freighters were required to resupply a fleet, and these could be targeted …

  Commerce war. Stop the antimatter flowing and the fleets will eventually stop moving. They become space stations, waiting to die.

  The freighters, too, had to come through the keyholes, choke points vital to controlling a system. Prediction: The belligerents will pay, and pay big, for neutrals to supply them with antimatter if their own ships are stopped. The only response: Illegal search operations on foreign commercial vessels, or unrestricted warfare on them. This could cause a small war to escalate into a big one.

  Then what? You’ve hit the enemy’s antimatter, stopped his fleets and taken high orbit. Low orbit is another matter. There, you are in range of his big surface-to-orbit lasers, like those Rand would command. They were more powerful than shipboard lasers and had an entire planet as a heat sink, so they could stay cool and fire more often. But they were immobile, so they were potentially vulnerable to bombardment or a land assault. Large, slow-moving vehicles had to stay under the shield provided by the lasers; outside of it, they could only hide and hope not to be found. Indeed, the Army planned for major land battles to be fought around fixed laser defenses.

  Neil rubbed his eyes and recalled some of Donovan’s words: “I don’t know how long we’ll be able to stay out of it.”

  War with China? The United States and China had long regarded each other as strategic competitors, but the trade and cultural ties between them had made many presume that war would never happen between them.

  But the reality was different. Trade between the two nations, once in nearly symbiotic alignment, had actually declined in the last century. It was bizarre, really, that 100 years ago it was cheaper to manufacture a two-dollar gadget halfway around the world and ship it to the United States, than it was to just build it at home. Oil shortages coupled with the widespread adoption of home assemblers – devices able to manufacture simple items like shoes and handheld computer cases – had made trade of simple consumer goods a largely outmoded concept, but more complex items, like foodstuffs, electronics and weapons, were still bought and sold on Earth. Raw materials came from asteroids; power came from the solar satellites. The economies of the major powers had come to depend more on their access to orbit than on one another. Global interdependence had waned, but the newfound wealth of the spacefaring nations had prevented any major conflicts from breaking open.

  So why w
ould America take on China now? Eh, above my pay grade. Leave that aside.

  Instead, think how America could hurt China.

  No way would Congress pass one of those wacky declarations of war unless the United States was attacked directly.

  So if not overt … then covert.

  How do you screw with China and not get caught? China is massive, industrial, tightly governed. Not a dynamic fusion of cultures like the United States. But not monocultural like Japan, either …

  Minorities. You could stir up the minorities, within Chinese territories and in their satellite states. But how?

  Neil’s handheld buzzed, loudly. It was Stahl.

  “Report to Combat, immediately.”

  “Aye aye,” Neil said. He wondered what was up; he wasn’t scheduled to go on duty for another ten hours.

  It was an imminent battle, but San Jacinto could only bear witness.

  The three Chinese colony ships and their escort had stopped to refuel at an asteroid orbiting close above Marble, now a blue-and-white ball of haze looming large ahead. San Jacinto was decelerating toward the station – Captain Thorne wanted to top off the remass tanks – when the ship’s cameras picked up a military-grade drive thrusting from the nearby wormhole that was the San Jacinto’s next destination.

  A Japanese warship, freshly arrived in FL Virginis from Wolf 498, the next system downstream, was heading toward the Chinese ships. When Neil entered CIC, the warship was a quarter of a million kilometers from its quarry, accelerating fast.

  Neil sat at his console. CIC was laid out like a small auditorium, with three rows of consoles all facing a wall of screens. At front-and-center, the tactical plot, a volumetric image, which everyone called a holo, showed the contents of nearby space. The room was darkened, as always, with most of the light coming from the primary colors that dominated the console displays and the plot.

  “Welcome to the party, Neil,” Tom said in his ear with more than his usual bravado. He was seated across the room and was transmitting on a private audio channel.

  Stahl and the captain approached.

  “Mercer, call up the sensor data on the Japanese ship, and pass it to main screen three,” Stahl said.

  Text and pixelated images appeared … clearly a Japanese fusion drive, more efficient than that of the Americans. It was pushing close to 15,000 tons, almost twice the mass of San Jacinto. That made it a heavy cruiser.

  Neil recalled some Japanese fleet movement reports he read.

  “That’s probably the Mogami,” he said. The Mogami had been making port calls in the International Ring. “She’s accelerating at 30 milligees, burning a lot of remass.”

  “How long until she’s in weapons range of the Chinese ships?” the captain asked.

  “She was built with orbit-to-surface bombardment in mind, so she’s got some heavy lasers,” Neil said, calling up the data file. Yellow borders appeared on his screen … classified secret. “Also lots of missiles … she’s about fifteen hours from the fuel station, presuming she stays at the same acceleration and makes a flip. If she goes for a high-speed pass, it will be about seven hours.”

  “And we’ll land right on top of them. That’s a lot of trouble for one small escort,” Captain Thorne said.

  “Maybe Mogami knows something we don’t,” Stahl offered. “I wonder if our presence is affecting their actions at all.”

  Neil had plenty of data on Mogami’s quarry, Hongyao, a 3,500-ton corvette, which the San Jacinto had tracked since Wolf 359. She would be no match for the larger ship. The only hope for Hongyao’s 38 crew was to flee, but she had made no move to do so, instead remaining near the refueling base.

  “I guess the escort is staying with the colony ships,” Neil said.

  “Foolish,” Thorne snorted. “The Han should run, to make sure the cattlecars don’t get caught in the crossfire.”

  She turned her head, her voice changing from “conversational” to “command.”

  “Mondragon. Tell the bridge to increase our deceleration so we come to rest 2,000 klicks short of the fuel station, and that the captain has approved of the extra burn. I don’t want to get in the middle of this.”

  Between the time when a ship is sighted and when the shooting starts, space combat rarely offers any surprises. Ships move on known vectors; changes to those vectors are easy to see. Their superheated exhaust outshines most stars in the sky; even if they cut their drives and coast, the waste heat from their internal power plants and life support systems still render them visible from ranges far greater than that of their weapons.

  So Thorne sent most of the CIC staff to bed. Neil was too excited to drop off; after 20 minutes of lying in his room, he took a knockout pill that put him out almost immediately.

  … And, six hours later, his handheld woke him up right on schedule. No messages; he had time to clean up and eat before heading up to CIC, which he found nearly empty. Tom and Erin were the only officers present.

  “What’s the good word?” Neil asked.

  “Más o menos lo mismo, hoss,” Tom said. “The Saki flipped right on time and is decelerating toward the Hans. Hell of a way to enter combat, ass-first, if you ask me.”

  “What are the Hans up to?”

  Erin said, “The colony ships are still just sitting at the fuel station. About ten minutes ago, the corvette fired up her drive. She is boldly charging toward the Mogami.”

  “Brave hombre.”

  She nodded. “And probably dead. Unless you know something the rest of us don’t.”

  Neil shook his head. “No, I don’t know what the corvette is up to.” In the back of his head, he regretted being unable to impress her.

  Tom transmitted messages around the ship to keep most of the senior officers up to speed on the impending battle. About an hour before the Hongyao entered Mogami’s weapons envelope, CIC began filling up. Nobody wanted to miss the show.

  Neil’s handheld alerted him to a call. “Neil, it’s Jim Donovan,” said a voice in his ear. “Mind if I come up to CIC to see the battle?”

  “I don’t see that it would be a problem.”

  Neil was wrong. As soon as Donovan floated into the room, Lieutenant Stahl raised a loud protest, but Thorne overruled him. Donovan sat at an empty console next to Neil’s.

  “Sorry about that,” Neil whispered. “I didn’t expect Stahl would make an issue out of it.”

  “Don't worry about it, Neil. Can you help me work this thing so I can watch?”

  “Sure. Your timing is perfect; the ships just pulled in their cooling fins.” The unarmored fins were among the most fragile parts of the ship. Retracting them meant the ship relied on tanks of liquid lithium to serve as heat sinks. Eventually, those heat sinks would fill up, and the ship would have to expose the fins, disengage, surrender, or fry.

  Hongyao made her move, turning 90 degrees and thrusting perpendicular to Mogami’s approach. It was risky: It exposed Hongyao’s less-protected flanks to Mogami’s main laser cannon.

  “The corvette is trying to draw off the Mogami. The Hans must think the Sakis are going to attack the cattlecars!” Neil told Donovan, who nodded, intent on the display. It was an insane notion. The colony transports held 3,000 people each. They had no military value.

  Across CIC, a sensor tech seated next to Stahl was monitoring the colony transports. She said something to the lieutenant.

  “Captain!” Stahl said. “Two of the colony transports are under thrust. They are moving in separate vectors, away from the Mogami and away from each other.”

  Mogami began firing at Hongyao at a range of 3,500 kilometers. The corvette had nothing that could damage the cruiser at that distance. The Chinese ship's single counterbattery fired, to no effect, as Japanese blacklight lasers penetrated just ahead of the corvette’s drive section.

  Neil saw flashes, followed by a momentary sunburst at Hongyao’s position. Several small contacts tumbled away on different vectors.

  “Sensors report Hongyao was destroyed,
” Stahl announced. “Multi-kiloton explosion is consistent with loss of antimatter containment.”

  “Message from Mogami,” said Lieutenant Vikram, the comms officer. “They’re advising us to watch out for debris.”

  “Polite of them,” Donovan muttered. “That’s their way of telling us they know we’re here.”

  It was two hours later when Mogami cut her deceleration and coasted toward Marble. The third colony ship, apparently delayed at the asteroid refueling station, finally departed. But she fell in Mogami’s weapons envelope within 40 minutes.

  “What the hell is the Saki doing?” Tom’s voice said in Neil’s ear.

  Before he could answer, Vikram said, “I think the Mogami is broadcasting a surrender order to the cattlecars, but she’s also putting out so much jamming that I doubt the colony ships can hear them. Even if they could, Mogami probably couldn’t hear their response.”

  Oh no, Neil thought. The Mogami is planning to attack the colony transports and wants to make sure we don’t hear the colony ships’ surrender. They might try to communicate on a laser but we’d never know.

  A moment later, Stahl said, “Mogami is firing on nearest transport.”

  “Comms, advise Mogami on the laser that they are attacking a civilian ship,” Thorne said.

  “Aye aye, captain,” Vikram said. After a few seconds, she said, “Mogami replies negative; they are firing on PRC troop carriers that have refused to surrender.”

  “Bullshit,” the captain said. No way were the colonials troop transports. They had launched from the civilian station at L-4, and assault carriers had military drives and dropships attached to the hull. These ships had neither.

  Mogami continued firing. The cattlecar had nowhere to run.

  “Charlie-3 is destroyed,” Stahl said after a while. “Mogami extending cooling fins.”

  Silence in the CIC. Somebody whispered a prayer for 3,000 dead.

  Stahl said, “Mogami now pivoting to pursue second colony ship. She will be in weapons range in twenty minutes.”