by John Lumpkin
Several got through, puncturing her hull. At least one of her counterbatteries was knocked out, but beyond that, Neil’s couldn’t tell how hard San Jacinto had hit her.
“Some of the survivors from CIC report a decompression bulkhead has come down in the main shaft. They can’t get up here,” Chief Drake said. “And Damage Control reports Laser Mount Two is back online.”
“Hold fire. We don’t want to lose it again,” Mendoza told Neil, who was still in charge of the ship’s depleted laser battery.
On Neil’s screen, the Han destroyer rotated on its axis again and turned to dodge some of San Jacinto’s cannon fire.
Why does it keep rotating? Victor-9 had little reason to roll like that, unless it wanted to bring a lateral-mount weapon to bear; and Anjian didn’t have any of those.
Unless …
“Erin, it’s Neil,” he keyed a private transmission, not wanting to disturb Commander Mendoza with what could be an errant thought. “I think the target has lost several of its lateral thrusters. They keep rolling to bring their remaining thrusters to bear the right way.”
He transmitted an image of Victor-9 to Erin that included his scrawled notations of where the damaged maneuvering thrusters appeared to be.
“I think I can program a firing pattern for the guns for this,” she said. “I’ve got some work to do. Do we have any lasers back? This would be a lot easier if we could take out their rotational thrusters.”
San Jacinto suddenly turned and thrust, cutting off Neil’s response.
“More incoming fire,” Ensign Hayes said belatedly. “Sorry, we’re clear now.”
Neil said to Erin, “I’ll see what I can do.” He cut their direct link. To Mendoza, he said, “Commander, I need the laser.”
“But we just got it back,” she said. He explained his theory about the damage to Victor-9.
When he finished, Executive Officer Carla Mendoza thought for a long moment. Her ship had many, many problems. CIC was out of commission, and, for all she knew, the captain was dead. Heat was building in ship’s bowels; San Jacinto would need to extend her radiators soon. But doing so now would leave them vulnerable to weapons fire; if they were lost, everyone on the ship was certain to die the same ugly, boiling death they would face if they left them in their housings. Now that the two ships had completed their pass, the safest option was to thrust away from Victor-9, back toward Commonwealth, and leave a wake of missiles to test the Hans’ willingness to pursue.
But … she still had a little time. San Jacinto had most of her weapons and all of her maneuverability intact. Victor-9 might repair the damage to its lateral thrusters, and San Jacinto’s advantage could be lost.
They don’t pay us to survive. They pay us to win.
“All right, Hayes, initiate turnover, but do not fire the drive toward Commonwealth,” Mendoza said. Better to avoid putting any extra distance between the ship and the planet. “Mercer, rake them with the laser when she bears. Fire Control, start pounding them.”
Drawing on an image of Victor-9, Neil picked out places for the laser to shoot; the computer did all the precise targeting. It was a chancy shot; the lateral and rotational thrusters were small, and Victor-9 still had operational counterbatteries. To reduce the risk of losing the cannon, Neil selected short, high-power laser bursts at the thrusters at random intervals; hopefully the shutter would protect it. He recognized his choices presented another danger: With most of the ship’s laser power directed to the forward cannon, only 200 megawatts were available for its defenses.
San Jacinto’s guns spat out a spiraling salvo of shots at Victor-9’s nose. Erin followed that up with another dozen missiles.
Victor-9 rotated and pivoted, highlighting the locations of its thrusters. That was Neil’s chance. The laser fired, stopped, adjusted its focus, and fired again. A counterbattery tracked the target and shot back, but the laser shutter closed in time.
Now Victor-9 could only turn in one direction. And that direction was filled with incoming metal.
San Jacinto fired another salvo in her path.
Victor-9’s captain chose to turn into the first salvo rather than face the second. Point defense lasers and missiles reached out to defend her, but it was not enough. Two shells from San Jacinto’s after turret hit her in quick succession, tearing holes in her drive section. Inside, one of the drive’s magnetic loops snapped, and pieces of hull were thrown into the drive itself, where they were driven toward the nozzle.
The drive shattered.
San Jacinto’s missiles arrived. Five of them had survived to burst into flechettes; most of these speared into the ship, followed by the shell of the original missile. Holes opened up across the hull; the remains of some flechettes actually burst from the far side of the vessel. No amount of anti-decompression gear could prevent its atmosphere from bleeding out.
Anjian was dead.
“Extend cooling fins,” Mendoza said.
Sixteen body bags, sixteen American flags wrapped around them. Only ten had occupants. Three contained what remains could be recovered of personnel whose bodies had been vaporized during the battle. The final three contained a few of the personal effects of Lieutenant Alex Rodgers, Ensign Mireya Barbaro, and Flight Specialist 1st Class Ricardo Gomez, all burned and left behind on Commonwealth. The officers had discussed going back to find their remains, but Captain Thorne, still recovering from her injuries, had put a stop to it. Their location would be noted; someone else would have to repatriate what was left of their bodies. The ship would depart Beta Canum Venaticorum as quickly as possible.
So it was less than twelve hours after the battle that San Jacinto sent the body bags off the flight deck and into a decaying orbit around Commonwealth. Rafe Sato’s was among them; the survivors from the landing party wanted him buried with military honors, and Donovan did not protest.
Thorne, her damaged eyes shielded behind a pair of sunglasses, was unable to read the burial-in-space ceremony on her handheld; the duty fell to Mendoza.
In freefall, tears do not fall for the dead. They pool in your eyes until your vision blurs, and you blink involuntarily, and they float away. Little bubbles of water drifted randomly around San Jacinto’s flight deck until they struck something or were caught by the air circulation system and carried to the vents.
Doc Avery and his medical techs were not in attendance; they had too many wounds to treat; burns, fractures, lacerations and blindness chief among them. The miserable Lieutenant Stahl had suffered severe injuries and would to need to have new eyes grown at a full-service medical facility. Avery had to sedate and confine one member of Tom’s CIC staff; the astronaut had been near Allison when the laser tore the officer apart, and he was convinced he still had some of the Allison’s remains embedded in his skin. He refused to stop washing himself to the point where he threatened the ship’s fresh water supply, and he became violent when someone tried to restrain him.
Meanwhile, most of the major damage to San Jacinto had been repaired, save for the smashed-in section of the bow and wrecked forward laser mount.
But a thousand little things were wrong. The shock of the gun and laser hits, and subsequent repair efforts, had left everyone to deal with all manner of inconveniences. Water would inexplicably stop in a bathroom; computers would lock up; some tool would turn up missing and the man or woman who knew its hiding place was dead.
In many cases, officers and crew were improvising repairs far more than they had expected. They followed the manual and performed as they had been trained, but two decades of almost no interstellar conflict had left the American military short on petty officers who had developed real techniques for use in a post-battle situation, techniques that can only be created by experience.
The absent faces and the unusual silences, in CIC, in the junior officers’ lounge, in the wardroom, made things worse. Banter died in people’s throats. The ship was in a grim mood; the crew had won a great victory, but friends and colleagues had died in the process. T
he survivors felt a growing sense that the battle was bigger than just the crew and the two ships, a sense that something of vast, interstellar importance had happened. A line had been crossed. Everyone wondered if there would be more battles, and whether they would live through them.
Neil’s elevation to both ship’s intelligence officer and chief pilot came as a brief note from Carla Mendoza on his handheld. Erin was jumped to kinetics officer, her superior having been killed by the laser blast in CIC.
Victor-9 – the Americans never learned its name – was still out there, tumbling away from San Jacinto on a vector that would take it out of Commonwealth orbit and into interplanetary space. San Jacinto had not detected anyone attempting to escape the ship; it was certain that no one on board was alive at that point – she had not extended any radiators, and the interior was well past a survivable temperature. Thorne declined to chase down the wreck, reasoning she needed to get out of the system as quickly as possible and refuel. And China could get reinforcements to Beta Canum Venaticorum a lot faster than Space Force could.
News of the battle was racing through the internets. The ships and stations orbiting Commonwealth had witnessed it, far away as it was, and recordings were already showing up on news channels. San Jacinto’s hull number was readily identifiable in several pictures.
On Earth, the Delgado administration struck first.
Delgado himself called the battle an “unprovoked attack by a Chinese military vessel against an American warship on a routine patrol.” In defending itself, the American ship destroyed the Chinese craft but suffered many wounded and dead, he said.
Because Washington and Beijing are twelve hours apart, the Chinese leadership was asleep when the story broke, and the president and his staff took several hours to muster a coherent response. The U.S. vessel was carrying a known terrorist – whom the Chinese did not identify – and brazenly attacked a Chinese police vessel attempting to apprehend the criminal.
Both sides lie, but only a little, Neil thought after scanning the articles.
Within a day, every single surviving member of the crew received a communication from the White House, specifically the Office of the Press Secretary, requesting any recordings of the funeral ceremony for their dead.
None had been taken, however, and the security cameras for the flight deck were not working. Lieutenant (j.g.) Anne Fitzgerald, who, among other things, was San Jacinto’s public affairs officer, later told Neil that the request caused a tremendous row between the Pentagon and the Delgado administration. The White House had sent the request without consulting with the military.
Neil mentioned all this to Donovan, who, along with Sun Haisheng and his entourage, had come through the battle unharmed.
“Delgado could have played this differently,” Donovan said. “He could have called this a mistake and hung your senior officers out to dry, or simply said that ‘there was an incident, and we’re sorting through what happened.’ I think the Hans would have preferred something like that, but he instead chose to throw down the gauntlet. China can’t apologize without losing face.”
“So he really wants us in this war, then,” Neil said quietly. “I guess I just don’t understand why.”
“I don’t, either,” Donovan said. “If it’s Delgado simply trying to reassert U.S. supremacy, I’ve got mixed feelings about it. The world’s done well in some ways under Japanese and Chinese hegemony. They got us to the stars and probably guaranteed the human race will exist in some fashion a million years from now. You’re too young to remember the idea of us facing extinction from another asteroid – hell, I was only a kid when we still talked about it. But the Japanese and Chinese haven’t done a thing to improve the human condition outside their borders. A few countries have pulled themselves up in the last hundred years, but not many. I still wonder if we can’t do better. I wonder more if it’s worth all the blood being spilled. It’s possible the Japanese have offered us a carrot for our efforts, but if we defeat China and its allies, Japan will be on top. Delgado has decided being the aggressive No. 2 power is better than a being in a peaceful tie with Europe for third.”
The Chinese identification of San Jacinto as carrying Sun Haisheng meant she could no longer safely travel back to Earth through the international systems … Wolf 359, in particular, bordered on Chinese space, and warships would be waiting to intercept her there. Captain Thorne requested Space Command send a squadron to provide an escort home, but the request was declined; not enough ships were available. Much of the fleet was being sent to Kennedy base at Earth’s leading Trojan point for exercises – called in response to the Chinese attack on San Jacinto.
Ironic, Neil thought when Thorne briefed this to her officers. We’re too busy putting on a show of force to actually put the force to good use.
Instead, Space Command ordered San Jacinto to take the long way home, via a long chain of uninhabited systems that connected Beta Canum Venaticorum and the Solar System. It was mostly American space, and therefore safer than the international systems, but it would add months to their journey back to Earth.
So San Jacinto turned yet again and fired her drive for the keyhole to GJ 1151, a red dwarf a little less than five light-years away, where they would meet an Israeli hydrogen tanker to obtain the remass necessary to make it to friendly space.
Neil’s work changed dramatically. He was no longer on the sidelines, beholden to Donovan and Stahl. Researching the daily briefs for the other officers consumed much of his time. Each one started with a rundown of current U.S. military threats, terrorist threats, criminal threats and “systems threats” – the last marking new viruses and attempts to hack American military computers.
He also had a staff to manage: three young astronauts and a petty officer. Neil had never been able to figure out what such a large staff was for; it seemed Stahl accumulated personnel without really giving them anything to do. The petty officer, Copeland, was a malcontent but was a skilled translator and a pretty good computer technician – the latter an especially valuable skill, as calling in one of the ship’s regular systems techs to the intelligence office required two hours of prep beforehand to ensure the tech was unable to access any really secret data while he or she worked.
The three astronauts were another matter. Two of them didn’t even have security clearances necessary to look at most of the sensitive data that came through the office! Within a week, Neil released those two for reassignment, earning him grateful thanks from the two departments that received them. He kept the sharpest of the three, Garza, as an aide and an imagery analyst.
As intel officer, Neil was also nominally in charge of the ship’s sensors. Fortunately, the detection section was in the hands of Chief Drake, an experienced petty officer, and Mendoza and Davis told Neil to let him run his own show.
Neil also discovered the most distasteful part of the job – counterintelligence. A watchdog program swept all personal communications going out of the ship – and there were many – and alerted him to any containing potentially damaging information or that were going to an unverified or suspicious address. It was apparently a part of the job Stahl relished; Stahl had set up scores of keywords that would trigger the watchdog to flag a message for his perusal. Some of them – including a variety of sexual terms – Neil could see no military value in. He trimmed the keyword list, and the number of flagged messages dropped precipitously.
Neil guiltily read the few that were left; they were all false positives, containing a potentially worrisome word or phrase that caused the watchdog to flag it. He sent them all on without changing a thing.
He poked around for an alternative to reading his colleagues’ mail – and found one. The watchdog program was smart enough to prioritize the communications it scanned, distinguishing low-priority threats from people communicating classified fleet movements; Stahl had either turned off that option or had never found it.
Neil, suspecting the former, had Copeland rig up a program to reject the low-pri
ority communications tagged by the watchdog, sending them back to the owner with a note the automated security system found a problem. The high-priority ones would still require Neil’s review.
An imperfect system, one that might allow something through … but Neil thought that was extremely unlikely. Or was he just rationalizing not wanting to read other peoples’ mail?
The red of the Chinese flag on the title screen behind Neil reflected in the sea of faces in front of him. He had spent a week preparing a one-hour brief on China, only to have it postponed by Captain Thorne several times.
Finally, it went forward. Only two officers were absent – the officer of the deck and the engineering watchstander. Even the blinded Stahl was led in to listen.
Neil took in a breath. This was the first time a briefing was entirely his show. I hope I don’t say anything stupid. He had rehearsed for days. He advanced a screen, called up a map of the Solar System.
“Because this will double as our regular briefing, we’ll start with the latest,” he said. “There have been several major events in the last week, which we’ll recap. First, a flotilla of Japanese transport and attack submarines surfaced off Korea, and Japanese marines established a beachhead near Pusan. It was, incidentally, the largest wet amphibious operation since 1950, when our General MacArthur landed elsewhere on the Korean peninsula, at Inchon.
“They tell us their goal is not to hold territory, but to destroy some underground weapons depots in the area. They haven’t reached the main storage complex, yet, however. The Japanese ran the operation because they believed they had achieved space superiority in low Earth orbit. After losing a couple of supply convoys, the Chinese had withdrawn more than forty ships from LEO to Venus’ trailing Trojan, apparently to rearm and refuel, leaving fewer than twenty in Earth orbit. Of those, fourteen were Korean. Now, the Chinese-Korean fleet avoided combat with the SDF until yesterday.”
