by John Lumpkin
“Other than the Sakis, will anyone fight on our side?” Neil asked him.
“Britain, Iran and Australia will announce soon,” Donovan said. “Doubtful we’ll get Canada or Kurdistan; I think they’ll play like Israel and provide some logistical support, but stay out of combat. Everyone’s worried about China’s orbital superiority, thin as it is. The rest of the world is sitting out. Norway and Poland may try to push Europe to come to our aid, but it won’t happen. Paris stands to gain the most in an East Asian-North American war. The U.S., China, Japan and Korea – four of the other largest economies in the world – all take hits, and Paris stays clean. Now, one question for you: Are we going to be attacked again?”
Neil shook his head. “We’re safe for the time being. The sensor drone we left orbiting Commonwealth checked in a few hours ago. Four Han ships – a battlecruiser, destroyer and corvette, plus a hydrogen tanker – have entered the system.”
“Our pursuit, I imagine,” Donovan said. He looked tired.
“They can’t catch us,” Neil said. “Well, the corvette might, if it runs flat out and doesn’t care about remass. But we can handle it. The others … no way. The threat will increase as we get closer to the Solar System, but, for now, the Chinese haven’t broken through our lines. But how you are going to get Mister Sun through the Chinese blockade and down to Earth's surface, I have no idea.”
The ship’s intercom announced the imminent keyhole transit to GJ 1151, and they felt a slight rumble as the San Jacinto lit her candle and accelerated into the darkness.
Commonwealth-Kuan Yin-Earth
Second Lieutenant Rand Castillo, United States Army, was used to things going easily for him. The second son of a wealthy Santa Fe family, his genes were the best money could legally buy. He had a tall, lean runner’s body but lacked a runner’s discipline. His hair was one shade darker than blond and his skin one shade darker than the brown-tan that constituted the average in much of North America. Women generally enjoyed it when he turned his lively hazel eyes to them; he had enough self-awareness to realize that he merely had to project confidence and a sense of shared fun, and people would do what he wanted. Enthusiasm and sarcasm came easily to him: His usual expression was cocky but interested, that of someone eagerly waiting for what has to be a great punch line.
He surprised his family by joining the Army, but it served him as a way to break from them, to do things without the certainty their safety net provided – and the obligations it entailed. His offplanet posting offered a chance to leave behind onerous parts of himself as well as some ex-girlfriends and gambling debts.
Landing an off-Earth posting was even better, and his long trip out to Kuan Yin was in luxury. He paid scant attention to the war during the ride: After all, it was just an East Asian thing, right?
But his lucky streak evaporated when he set foot on the colony planet. Everything about the place rubbed him the wrong way. It was too damn hot, for one thing. The days were only 16 hours long, which meant he slept at night only one time in three, and it was spring in Sequoia, which meant it never really got dark anyway. The sun just dipped below the horizon, providing a few hours of dusk before rising again.
The heavy atmosphere – more than twice sea level air pressure on Earth – was worse. His joints, teeth and ears ached constantly. Sound traveled much further, so a sergeant’s obscene shout would frequently echo across the entire base, and a private mutter between two people would be audible across a room.
Worst of all was the smell. Rand’s little section of Sequoia was geologically active; the nearby lakeside city of Cottonwood was the rough of equivalent of a town built over Yellowstone National Park. The city was spread over a shallow bowl that Rand’s briefing identified as a remnant of a volcano. A big volcano.
Palls of sulfur-smelling steam rose over parts of the city. One of Rand’s sergeants, Aguirre, told him that a new geyser would occasionally erupt in town, often on someone’s property. Great if it was out in the yard – free hot water – bad if it was under your bedroom. In the weeks since Rand arrived, a teenager chasing down a baseball was badly burned when his leg broke through the surface into a pit of boiling mud rising from below. The field was not abandoned; a cluster of rocks in shallow right was left to mark the dangerous spot.
Rand’s briefing told him dead or dying patches of grass could signal a new geyser or boiling mud flow was about to emerge.
Rand noticed lots of dead or dying patches of grass. But nobody seemed to pay them much mind; the troops at Fort Patton, Rand’s base, kept a grill on a wide bare patch in the commons.
The bad news arrived at Patton about a week after he did. Word about the battle involving San Jacinto left him with a dark, hard lump inside – a message to his buddy went unanswered, and he grew certain Neil had been killed. With all the heat and reek, the sleepless days and heavy air, it seemed to mark a complete bottoming-out within his sense of his personal narrative. Only seeing Neil’s name absent from the list of those killed, published twelve days later, gave him any relief.
The war alert came a few weeks after that. Everyone knew Fort Patton, one of three brigade-sized Army bases on Sequoia, would get hit. It was just a question of when … and how. The assault could come from two quarters: the sky or the sea, and Rand’s job was to worry about the sky. His command, Bravo Battery’s 3rd Platoon, consisted of three M-403 Starfire surface-to-orbit lasers, sited to protect the base and the 30,000 Americans who lived in the area.
At the moment, he had nothing to shoot at. The American and Chinese squadrons stationed above Sequoia were in a high-orbit dance, well out of range of planetary weapons. The winner of that fight would turn its attentions to the surface.
In the meantime, they drilled, and drilled again. It was getting a little dull. Sitting in the platoon’s gun control center, Rand wondered how his ex-roommate was holding up. The silence was typical of Neil; he could lose himself in a project and not come up for air for weeks. And he’s probably a little busy, what with the war and all. I know I am.
One of Rand’s soldiers, Private First Class Tim Yancey, addressed him.
“I’m getting a yellow on Miss Bitch, Mirror Six,” Yancey said. Miss Bitch was the affectionate name for one of Rand’s three cannon: Alpha Dawg and California Girl were the others. “Think it’s stuck, or at least moving slowly. Might be some gunk in the way.”
Some officers didn’t like to swear in front of their people. Rand was not one of those officers. When he was finished, he said, “All right, I’ll go look at it. Get Smith and Ekkers to meet me down there.”
Rand walked half a klick through an extinct underground lava tube to reach Miss Bitch, buried beneath twenty meters of earth to protect it from bombardment.
His laser cannon looked nothing like the compact guns mounted on warships; with the earth stripped away, the entire contraption would appear as a giant, overturned spider. The beams were generated in the spider’s head, powered by batteries that drew energy from a reactor buried underneath Fort Patton. A rotating emitter fired the beam down the spider’s “legs,” eight long, hollow corridors that angled toward the surface. When the cannon fired, the beam was directed down a randomly chosen pipe.
Mirrors directed the beams at each turn; a final mirror, mounted on an armored cupola that rose above the surface, directed the beam toward any target in Sequoia’s sky. This last mirror was “deformable;” with every shot, thousands of tiny actuators inside the mirror would subtly alter its shape, preventing distortion from Kuan Yin’s atmosphere from defocusing Rand’s beam. The level of distortion was gleaned from a second, low-power laser that fired from atop the cupola a fraction of a second before the primary blast. After a shot, the cupola would drop beneath the surface, and a camouflaged hatch would close above it, more or less protecting it, at least to a spaceship hundreds or thousands of klicks distant.
The whack-a-mole rig was a design of necessity. Six-gigawatt ground-based laser cannon were too heavy to mount on wheels or turbof
ans, and too fragile to leave immobile on a planet's surface.
The design also underscored the problem facing 22nd century armies: How do you move and fight when the enemy can rain instant death on you from orbit?
Over time, both ground and air vehicles large enough to carry a person would be toast, particularly if they tried to move. Sure, the 34th kept a battalion of gun skytrucks and wheeled LAVs, but they would stay buried in Fort Patton’s garage during any battle involving enemy control of low orbit. The brigade’s combat drones were faster and harder to hit; they could probably survive orbital attacks … for a while.
So what of the poor bloody infantry, trying to survive on a battlefield where land vehicles larger than a robotic ATV could not?
The answer lay in two developments during the last century.
The first, combat armor, provided protection and a measure of stealth. Combat armor didn’t appear much different from cloth – although it could chameleon itself into the local color scheme at a handheld command. Synthetic carbon fibers provided the protection; the armor could detect a bullet strike and usually harden before the bullet could penetrate into the soft human tissue underneath. Radar had trouble picking out the suits against background clutter, and they were stealthed to reduce heat emissions. They weren’t totally invisible, just hard to find, particularly from orbit.
The second development, powered exoskeletons, consisted of “walker” and “lifter” gear that soldiers attached to their arms and legs and powered with a backpack supply. Soldiers who were issued the exoskeletons could run up to twelve kilometers an hour for twelve hours without recharging, carrying a 100-kilo pack all the while. Together, the armor and exoskeleton were about as bulky as ice hockey pads.
The suits came in several varieties: Rand’s unit had only logistics suits, which were designed to allow support troops to move heavy loads. Most infantry wore dragoon suits, which they used to move in the field but dismounted before entering combat. Fighting while wearing a suit required extra training, so most modern infantry battalions typically included only one company of troops wearing paladin suits, which carried extra armor and were capable of sprints of up to 50 kilometers an hour. Weapons suits carried machine guns and missile weapons that would otherwise require a small team or a vehicle to carry around.
Shock troops like the Rangers loved the suits, as did supply and repair units. But they weren’t a panacea: All other things being equal, they would lose in a head-to-head fight against a combined force of modern drones, tanks, artillery and infantry. They had lots of moving parts requiring maintenance, and they needed a ready power supply to recharge. But the large, exoskeleton-equipped units, collectively termed heavy infantry, had found a use in the space between too-light foot infantry units and too-heavy armored formations. Unlike tanks, infantry carriers and trucks, they could move, and therefore survive, on battlefields where the other side had orbital supremacy. Heavy infantry units delivered more firepower per kilo than their counterparts, and were therefore ideal for spacemobile units, for whom mass was at a premium. The three fighting brigades of the Army’s 9th Division were all such units, initially deployed as a stopgap to any potential Chinese aggression on Kuan Yin. The long-promised expansion to include a more balanced fighting force, however, had never taken place.
During drills, Rand wore his combat armor, and, during the long hike down to Miss Bitch, he found himself wishing artillery troopers were also issued with walker gear.
He noted that Specialists Smith and Ekkers were also wearing their armor when he met them at the gun. It took them twenty minutes of searching to find the problem: A good-sized rock had worked its way into the surface hatch mechanism, preventing it from closing completely. Rand climbed the service ladder and tried not to think what would happen to him if the laser fired while he was in the shaft … at least he wouldn’t have to worry about the angry messages from his bookie anymore. When he reached the top, he grabbed the rock with one hand; with the other, he thumbed his handheld to command the hatch to open completely. Warm sunlight surrounded him; he stuck his head up and tossed the rock several feet away, watching it bounce in the turf.
“I feel like a prairie dog!” He shouted to his soldiers at the bottom of the hole. Some laughter bubbled up in response, and he climbed down.
When he was ten feet from the bottom, his handheld buzzed, a particular buzz that marked a priority message was coming in from a senior officer. He scrambled down the remaining steps and hit “accept.”
The laser battalion CO, Major Eddie Montaño, was already speaking; Rand grimaced as his handheld told him he was the last to join the conference call.
“– just got underway,” Montaño said. “They’re just inside geosynch right now, and they’re moving toward the planet. Our guys are outnumbered up there, and the Hans are trying to herd them toward Kuan Yin to get in range of their lasers on the other side of the planet. Space Force is trying to get them in orbits that take them over Sequoia. If that happens, we’ll have a shot to even the score.”
“How long?” asked Rand’s immediate boss, Captain Sondra Groves.
“Probably 90 minutes or so if nothing else changes. We’ll warm up the guns in a half-hour. Meteorology reports the weather will remain clear over Cottonwood; however, there’s a line of thunderstorms heading toward Sycamore. The Hans might be trying to time their strike so they are overhead when the storms hit.”
That was bad, Rand knew. Clouds degraded laser performance significantly, and the thickest defenses were near Sequoia’s capital city, about 900 klicks distant.
“Any sign they are coming after us from the water?” someone asked. Cottonwood was about 100 klicks from the ocean, close enough you could make an enjoyable day trip to the beach – as long as you didn’t mind wearing a rebreather.
“Negative. The Navy does have a hunter sub out there, and as far as I know, they haven’t seen a thing.” That surprised Rand; the Navy had six submarines protecting all of Sequoia, and he had expected them all to be running interference outside Sycamore.
“What’s the rest of the 34th up to?”
“First and Third Battalions are setting up in the hills between here and the coast in case the Hans try to assault your sorry asses. Second Battalion will defend Cottonwood.”
Rand didn’t like that. Stationing troops in and around Cottonwood meant it was likely the city would be bombarded if they were detected. Rand shook his head.
“What are we doing about the civilians?” Rand asked.
“We don’t have the manpower to assist in an evacuation,” Montaño said. He sounded irritated at the question. “And there’s not really anywhere to evacuate to, anyway. We’re telling them to remain in their homes, but some are moving anyway and clogging the roads. I know we’re in touch with the mayor, but that’s out of my lane. Anything else? No? Get to your stations.”
Rand ran the whole way.
One of the nice things about the space defense artillery was you got the best telescopes. Rand had a terrific view of the orbital battle, and early on, it seemed to be going well, despite China’s superior numbers. The Chinese ships had formed a two-dimensional diamond, with one flat face to the main body of the American squadron. The American commander split his fleet and was coming at the Chinese from two directions, about 90 degrees off from each other. He was gunning for the Han assault carriers, which were hanging well back from the battle. The Chinese responded by concentrating their fire on only one group of American ships, leaving a flank exposed.
At least two small Han vessels had suffered catastrophic failures in their fusion candles; their explosions were visible to anyone looking up from Kuan Yin’s surface. An American destroyer was badly damaged, drifting away on a vector that would take it out of the battle.
Then, all at once – it was impossible from Rand’s vantage point to tell what exactly happened – the battle came apart for the Space Force. The senior captain’s flagship, the Puerto Rico, vanished in a fireball. The light cruiser
Norfolk died moments later. The surviving American ships – two frigates and a corvette – turned and fled for the only American keyhole in the system. Their final barrage of missiles, aimed at the troopships, was shot down, their destruction showing up as pinpoint flickers on Rand’s monitor. The Chinese fleet then quickly disposed of the American surveillance and communications satellites in all but the lowest orbits over the planet.
Major Montaño was on the comms a few minutes later. “Space Force did what they could. We’re up next. If they keep descending, the Han formation will be in range in four-zero minutes. Out.”
The Chinese plan was becoming clear; they were going to engage the surface lasers directly. It was bold: American doctrine usually called for long-range kinetic bombardment on the laser cannon before putting any ships in harm’s way. Rand’s battery could outgun a half-dozen starships and close off whole sections of lower orbit to the enemy.
Unless that’s not the only angle they are hitting us from. The cannon were also vulnerable to air and ground assaults. Rand had heard the top military officer on the planet, Major General LeDoux, had sought additional infantry and even some tanks to help defend the laser sites. They had been expected ... in the next fiscal year.
Rand’s platoon was in four separate locations in the underground complex, one crew at each gun in addition to his staff at the targeting center. Rand could control all three lasers from here, but the teams were stationed near each cannon in case communications were cut. They could also perform any repairs that might be needed during a battle.
He switched over to his platoon’s network. Time to say something inspiring.
“Space Force had its shot,” he said. “We’ll have less bad guys to deal with, so we owe them one for that. It will be our turn in a little more than half an hour. The Hans will shoot at our guns first, so everybody get in your armor. Primary target is their assault carriers, secondary is their bombardment ships. And for god’s sake, protect your mirrors! Good luck. Time for the artillery to shine. Castillo out.”
