by John Lumpkin
Raleigh relented, but looked wary. Rand looked up at Neil. His eyes were righteous, angry, justified.
Rand executed a prisoner. What I couldn’t bring myself to do … Have I made a mistake?
“Are you okay?” Rand asked.
Neil knew Rand would finish off Li Xiao if he told the precise truth. Part of him wanted to do so … to let Rand do the dirty work. That’s what Donovan said, we succeed when we manipulate others to advance our goals. But Neil had made his decision, and sending Rand to kill Li felt cowardly.
Neil said, “I found the other one. He won’t be following us home.”
I’m not a murderer.
They had a running battle to get out of the jail. They collected the remaining Marines, collected Davis and Sanchez, and sprinted to meet Kieran Wu and the others waiting outside.
Wu said, “Our people are en route to the rally point.” His jaw clenched. “I’m afraid a Han drone got one of our boys.”
“I’m sorry,” Neil said.
“It’s all right,” Wu said, his Australian accent thickening. “It’s what we do.”
Rand Castillo and Violet Kelley watched from a rocky shore as Archerfish’s narrow sail sank below the waves. Rand wondered at the ultimate fate of the submarine’s crew, given that any American liberation of Sequoia was months or years away. If Archerfish survived the Chinese subs and satellites and patrol drones and spaceships hunting her, the crew would ultimately have to surface and abandon ship, not for lack of fuel or air, but lack of food.
The Chinese pursuit had been disorganized, and they had outrun it. Two drones got close, but the Pathfinders shot them down. Aguirre and Lopez had broken off an hour ago, noisily leading some of the hunting Hans away from the main body of American and Australians, buying time for them to escape.
Neil had pleaded for Rand to come with them, but his friend refused.
“We’ve got to keep fighting here,” Rand had said. “Just tell my parents I’m okay, will you?”
Neil said he would, and left.
Kelley’s voice was hollow through the rebreather covering her mouth and nose.
“Want a job, Castillo?” she asked.
Rand blinked. “What?”
“You’ve done well for yourself since the invasion,” she said. “Organized a resistance cell and been a real pain in the ass to the other side. I doubt a team of Green Berets could have done much better.”
Rand shook his head. “I don’t know how you can say that. I’ve lost almost my entire platoon, and it doesn’t look like the Hans are leaving Sequoia anytime soon.”
“It’s not supposed to be easy,” Kelley said. “And you’ve done far more to defend this planet than the idiot generals who gave up the fight so quickly. First time American territory has been occupied by a foreign power since the Sakis took a few of the Aleutians during World War II. I spent the first part of the war trying to sabotage Han infrastructure on the other side of the planet, but it looks like I can do more good here organizing a resistance. As far as I know, I’m the chief NSS operative on Kuan Yin, and that gives me the authority to hire you.”
“Technically, I’m still in the Army.”
“Then technically put yourself on detached duty. I don’t see any superior officers around.”
That’s not the way it works, Rand thought, but he didn’t argue. Worrying about my official status with the Army is pretty silly at this point.
“Do I need to be sworn in or something?”
“No, you just need to learn. And you need to learn a lot, kid. First of all, don’t you ever fucking kill someone again because they made you feel some emotion you didn’t like.”
Rand opened his mouth to argue, but Kelley stopped him with a raised hand. “I was going to kill her if you didn’t. Just made sense. Couldn’t afford to have her follow us or tell others about our composition, so I covered your sorry ass. But you did it because you were mad, and that was stupid.”
Rand swallowed his urge to fire back at her. Right thing, wrong reasons, she’s saying. She’s wrong, though. It wasn’t anger. It was ending a problem, making sure it never came back. Neil understood when he killed the other one. He thinks like I do.
“Okay, first lesson’s over,” said Kelley, certain she had got the point across. They heard the rumble of a distant jet, a Han hunter drone, no doubt. “We’ll cover car bombs, urban ambushes and recruiting in future classes. But now, let’s get out of here.”
As the dropship rotated to land, Neil saw the blackened furrow along Fremantle’s side, where a single Chinese gun shell had sideswiped the frigate. The Chinese corvette had paid for its impudence; Fremantle’s main laser cannon had pounded her into breaking off her attack.
The threat hadn’t passed, however. Three hours prior, Archerfish had to dive to evade a Chinese patrol plane, forcing Fremantle to delay releasing its two dropships. When they finally were able to drop, Chinese interceptors launched from a submersible aircraft carrier raced toward them, and the Australian frigate dropped a half-dozen of its own attack drones into Kuan Yin’s atmosphere, sacrificing them to defend the manned craft. The dropships had to alter their course on the way back up to avoid additional interceptors, and Fremantle descended into a dangerously low orbit above Kuan Yin to pick them up. The maneuver allowed the Chinese cruiser orbiting the planet to close. It was still below the horizon of the planet, but it would be rising soon.
The dropship rolled gently, and Neil saw Kuan Yin and its great ocean below them. Sequoia was bathed in sunlight, a rusty continent punctuated by belts and smudges of green. Then the ship’s hull blocked his view.
Take care, Rand.
Fremantle thrust away from the planet. Fourteen milligees felt wonderful compared to the near-Earth gravity and heavy air pressure down on the surface.
Neil made sure the flight surgeon tended to Donovan’s wound, then briefly greeted Tom before going to his stateroom. As he prepared to sleep, he reflected that the ship could come under fire at any moment, and he might not wake at all. The thought troubled him, but not enough that he couldn’t drop off. I must be a veteran now, he thought.
He awoke seven hours later, his body sore. He was alone, so he wandered up the ship’s bridge, which doubled as its combat center.
A haggard Kieran Wu greeted him. He’s been here since we got back, Neil realized.
“They wanted to debrief you right away, but I said let you sleep,” Wu said. “Now everybody’s too busy to bother.”
The Chinese cruiser was on their tail. Fremantle had already shot down a dozen of its missiles, the last of which was killed by a point-defense laser a mere 300 meters from the ship.
Wu brought him over to his console, where Davis and Tom were watching the display closely. Unlike San Jacinto’s auditorium setup, the bridge was laid out in the round, with Commander Boyd at the volumetric display in the center.
The cruiser was about 5,000 klicks behind them, burning remass prodigiously, and forcing Fremantle to burn more of her own to stay out of the cruiser’s laser range. The maneuvering above Kuan Yin’s atmosphere left her with precious little reserves.
Wu pressed a button, and suddenly the cruiser appeared very, very close on the screen.
“You left a camera back there. No telescope is that good,” Neil said.
Wu smiled. “A camera with teeth.”
The image wavered, and suddenly the ship grew even closer.
“We left some missiles behind, launched them dead, programmed to fire up when the target passes close. This one just fired … there they go. Han radar might pick them up, but it will be difficult to shoot them all down … whoops, lost the feed. Laser must have tagged the optics.”
Across the bridge, a tactical officer called out, “We got him. Multiple hits … she’s undergoing turnover!”
“Fine work, Freos!” shouted Commander Boyd, prompting cheers around the bridge.
Be nice if our captain was half as inspiring, Neil thought.
The allied ships fl
ed on nearly parallel tracks toward the wormhole, so it was a slow rendezvous with the San Jacinto and the others. The red dwarf system beyond, GJ 1119, was presumably still American space, although that had been in doubt since the Chinese vessel towing Dextrous as a prize had emerged. The rest of the fleet had already departed – thankfully, the troopships, and their thousands of Marines, had not been caught by the Chinese pursuit, and the Han ships had not dared to follow them through the wormhole. But no allied ship had crossed back into 11 Leonis Minoris, either.
Now, another pursuit was shaping up, not from Kuan Yin, but from the Chinese fleet still spread over the system. Again the enemy’s fuel problems were working in the allies’ favor, but several ships, including the beam cruiser Shichang, were shaping courses to intercept the fleeing vessels. Any encounter was weeks away; by then, they would be close to the wormhole.
Neil’s handheld alerted him to a personal message from San Jacinto as soon as communications were allowed between the allied ships. He went to respond, hoping it would be from Erin, but it was Astronaut Rodriguez, heartbroken over the death of Sun Haisheng. In his response, he did his best to console her, failing to contradict her mistaken assumptions about the manner of his death: “Tell me he died fighting for Taiwan,” she pleaded. “His ideas will live on,” he replied.
As they fled, Neil tried to debrief Donovan. He couldn’t imagine Donovan talking to anyone else on Fremantle – or San Jacinto, for that matter.
The elder spy’s thigh wound was healing quickly, but something had aged in him during his captivity. He talked about his interrogations and the strange torture that Li Xiao had employed on him, but Neil eventually noticed that his descriptions were devoid of emotional content; it was as if he was describing events that happened to someone else. Out of loyalty to the man who had shown him a good deal of kindness for no reason that he could discern, Neil felt he should try to help him. Does he need a professional? The nearest psychologist with a security clearance high enough to talk to him was probably 30 light-years away.
At one point, Neil asked Donovan about Sun Haisheng’s death.
Donovan said, “He and I were using each other, but he wasn’t a bad person. His death is a significant blow – the Taiwan Liberation Congress is headless without him, and the movement will probably splinter. Not that any of them will trust us for a long, long time: We couldn’t manage to get their leader back to Earth. And the larger mission, to exploit ethnic and political divisions within China … I don’t see it going forward anytime soon. With Taiwan rising, we were planning to push revolts among the Tibetans, Uighurs, eventually the Cantonese. It may still happen, but Beijing will be ready for it now.”
Under Commander Raleigh’s oversight, Neil, Kieran Wu, and Fremantle’s systems officer spent hours gingerly accessing Li Xiao’s handheld, trying to avoid triggering any programs that would erase its contents. Neil berated himself to no end during the project; when he found the handheld, Li was still logged in, and Neil had full access. But sometime during their escape from Kuan Yin, the computer’s power-saving features had kicked in, and security walls had gone up with them.
If they could regain access, the potential payoff was huge. Li Xiao’s messages and personal files could provide a wealth of information: names of contacts, bank account numbers, and details of past and current operations.
Raleigh, informed of Donovan’s true affiliation, told Neil to leave the NSS officer out of the loop. Neil wanted to ask why, but held his tongue. Ambition? Interagency rivalry? he wondered.
Eventually, they cracked the handheld. It apparently hadn’t been in Li Xiao’s possession long, and they eventually convinced the machine they were factory technicians and gained full access.
Neil and Kieran divided up the work, forwarding files to each other that looked interesting. Unfortunately, Li Xiao hadn’t stored a great deal on the computer. Most of his text messages were mere headers; the contents were stored on a Han mainframe back on Kuan Yin. But Kieran dug into the computer’s local memory cache and found the complete contents of several recent documents, mostly reports forwarded to Second Bureau agents on Kuan Yin. Some of them would be useful to the resistance there; Neil made a mental note to provide them to Gardiner Fairchild.
Neil found video recorded by the handheld of Li Xiao and his aide – whom nobody had been able to identify – executing Sun Haisheng and some of the others. He started to watch it, but cut it off, sickened after watching each spurting red burst that ended a life.
A day later, he found a report that had taken a curious path to Li’s computer, buried in its unemptied trash folder. It was a summary, prepared for Chinese military and intelligence personnel, built on information stolen from Japanese and American classified sources. Neil wondered how the Hans had obtained the data:
REPORT ON LONG-TERM INVESTIGATIONS INTO HABITABLE PLANETS
… Recent long-range infrared and visual surveys show a marked decrease in life-bearing and therefore potentially habitable worlds in regions considered to be future Japanese, American, Russian and international space.
… Current technology allows the reliable detection of potentially habitable, oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres on terrestrial planets in distinct orbits out to roughly 30 light-years and the detection of similar Jovian moons out to 12 to 15 light-years. Only a close survey, however, can distinguish human-habitable worlds from those with conditions hostile to life … The recent Japanese disappointment at Nu (2) Lupi III, in which close survey teams discovered untenable levels of atmospheric chlorine, is an example of this …
… Recent Japanese long-range observations of 51 Pegasi, Delta Equulei, Iota Pavonis, Gliese 776 and Gliese 797, all considered candidates for habitable planets, found no evidence of a planet with oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, or any other evidence of biological processes at work.
… Efforts beyond the American ring are similarly frustrated, and it is at present thought unlikely Australia and Iran will succeed in settling planets through exploration off of American systems, and Britain will be limited to their single world.
… On the international ring, few candidate colony worlds have been discovered beyond the new intra-American world, Guadalupe (settled in recent months by an alliance of Latin American and Caribbean interests, excluding only the United States, Brazil and Argentina), although search efforts in this sector are sporadic.
… Thus it appears there is a dead zone inward on the Orion Spur, the term for this region of the Milky Way Galaxy. It may be centered near the nexus of the Ophiuchus, Hercules and Lyra constellations, but it appears to affect a significant portion of the sky.
… The Chinese and Korean ministries of colonization, however, continue to detect potential Terran-class worlds within their sectors. Candidate worlds we expect to investigate by 2170 include Gliese 231.1 V, 37 Geminorum IV, and 171 Puppis III, among several others.
… The recent disappointments with Chinese space, at 58 Eridani III and 111 Tauri IV, should not be attributed to the effect being discussed here; both planets possess life, but an overabundance of carbon dioxide in each atmosphere prevents human colonization.
… The dead zone phenomenon, kept secret by the Japanese and American governments, has caused a rethinking of general notions that life-bearing planets are both common and uniformly distributed in the Orion Spur, of which we have explored the barest fraction.
Neil paused. Could this really be kept secret? No way could the U.S. government clamp down on astronomical research by universities like that. Then again, the planetary searches were typically performed by ship-based telescopes moved deep within the keyhole chains – usually from around miserable red dwarfs that drew no traffic other than the survey craft and keyhole breeder ships. And the American ships of those classes were operated by the federal Department of Colonial Affairs. He returned to the report.
… Instead, it is theorized that we may be in a bubble of space in which habitable planets are able to exist. The American and Japanese rings have hit th
e edge of the bubble; the location of opposite edge is beyond the range of our telescopes. Or there may not be a far edge at all.
… The European colonization effort appears to be along the edge of this dead zone; thus, they may have limited success in securing new colonies in the coming decades.
… Explanations for the dead zone vary in accordance with theories regarding the abundance of life in this region, but it is possible some massive catastrophe in the distant past, such as a nearby supernova, a gamma ray burst or cosmic ray explosion from the collision of two neutron stars, has rendered those star systems sterile. There are several as-yet unexplained mass extinction events in Earth’s history that could have been caused by such events; they may have been close enough to kill much of Earth’s life, but too distant to wipe it out entirely.
… It should be noted that the world of Liberty (Iota Persei IV), settled in 2137 on the leading edge of American space, is unique in that fossil evidence of complex, multi-cellular life forms has been uncovered, but the only native life on the planet today is an analog to Earth’s single-celled cyanobacteria. It is suggested that some sort of disaster destroyed complex life on the planet.
… Further research aimed at tying mass extinction events across several systems is needed. However, the vagaries of stellar motion over millions of years make locating any original event difficult. It is also possible that a star with a life-bearing world has since drifted into the “dead zone,” although we have found no evidence this has happened.
... Regardless of the cause, the political implications are clear. Over the long term, if the situation otherwise remains the same, China and its allies will expand to additional worlds, while Japan and the United States will not. A minority of our analysts believes this is the key explanation for the Japanese willingness to go to war. It is further believed that the Americans may have been persuaded to join them by the same data.
