by John Lumpkin
Neil heard a deep rumble beneath CIC, following by a loud, grating knock-knock-knock. The lights died in the main shaft through the ship. Thompson, the Marine, stuck her head into the dark tube, peering down, then flipped, feet over head, arms flailing in freefall, a thin red arc spraying from her face.
Something flew into the CIC …
“Eyes!” shouted Captain Thorne.
Neil got his hand up in time; a million flashbulbs fired all at once, followed by a deafening bang.
Doc Avery, several decks above, was tending to his dying friend when his head jerked up at the sound of the blast. It was close, maybe as close as CIC. He pulled his sidearm from its holster, unlocked the safety, and pushed off toward the hatchway to the main shaft.
Through the spots in his eyes, Neil saw an armored shape in the shaft, peering into CIC over the barrel of a rifle.
Beside him, Davis unbuckled from his console chair in one smooth motion and pushed off toward the ceiling. Captain Thorne pushed herself gently into the holo at the front of the theater and raised her gun, the drawing lasers projecting wildly distorted words and images in digital red and blue on her uniform.
She fired; the figure in the doorway stumbled but brought up his rifle and fired back, just as Davis, rebounding from the ceiling, crashed into him, and they went down. Two more figures in the doorway sprayed fire into CIC; someone screamed. In front of Neil, Lang, still seated, raised his gun, and fired at them. A second Chinese trooper went down, blood from his throat collecting in globules and wafting languidly about in the air, heading toward a vent.
Erin, next to Lang, turned her head toward Neil. Her voice was firm, somehow audible over the din.
“Fifteen seconds, and our rotation gives us a solution on the carriers, Neil. My console took a shot … you’ll have to fire.”
Neil pressed a button on his console … the screen lit up with a camera view; he saw three bright lights – the assault carriers, clustered together and fleeing. The aft gun turret could hit them, just barely, with the shells using all their maneuver fuel.
The Chinese at the hatch were oblivious to this. They hadn’t expected a well-armed CIC crew, and most of their comrades – those not floating dead in the dropship bay – were trying to make it to the ship’s aft turret to disable it.
In the midst of it all, Neil’s thoughts ran like water. Three thousand people on those ships. I gave a single man mercy, and now I will take three thousand lives. There is no choice. It’s us or them. I am a killer. Neil pressed the blinking red key.
Twelve decks below him, the guns fired, propelling metal again and again. They wouldn’t stop until the magazine was empty, and they wouldn’t miss.
Thirty feet away, the Chinese lieutenant in charge made up his mind, deciding taking the CIC intact was too difficult. They could also control the ship from the bridge, several decks above.
He grabbed an explosive grenade from his belt and triggered the safety, just as he felt a sharp, hot pain in his shoulder. His hand spasmed, and the grenade spun free. Who was shooting at him? They were in good cover … His sergeant shouted “Above us!” as shots sparked off the shaft’s walls; the lieutenant looked up, saw the form, leaning out from a hatchway several decks up … he reached for the twirling grenade, brushed it with his finger …
Orange fire filled the shaft, incinerating the Chinese troopers and blowing out into CIC. Neil looked up in time to see something large and metallic heading for him.
In his next moment of awareness, he knew that some time had passed. His forehead throbbed, and, oddly, his shoulders chafed. He opened his eyes, looked as his right shoulder, then his left. He was still strapped in his console seat.
“Neil! Hang tight,” said a voice. Neil’s head swung jerkily to find the speaker, a move that released some blood from his injured forehead and blocked his vision momentarily.
The sting clarified him somewhat, and he focused on Avery floating slowly toward him. “You’re all right, man,” the medical officer said when he arrived. “Nasty scrape, but you’ll live. Try not to stop flying chunks of the ship in the future, okay?”
“What … what happened?”
“Hans apparently can’t handle their grenades. One went off in the shaft,” he said, shaking his head. “Somebody must have disrupted their train of thought. You caught some debris.”
“The battle?”
“We won, buddy,” he said, wiping Neil’s brow with a rag. “Big time. The guns killed the assault carriers. Their fleet twisted up and we took out all four of their beam cruisers. They got Shenandoah and a few others, but the fleet is mostly okay.”
“The boarders?”
“We got twenty live ones. The rest are dead. It was Tom who did it; he tricked our computers into decompression alerts, and sealed them in a few places. Most of them refused to surrender, anyway. And Erin got our secondaries fixed and ventilated the Hangzhou with them. The Han’s still out there, adrift, apparently with a few survivors. Fleet’s sending a search-and-rescue ship once they finish cleaning the mess at the center of the battle.
“Who’s … who did we lose?”
Avery’s face darkened. “Too many. The captain was shot during the boarding. She’s dead, Neil. So are Merrill Davis, and Maria Sanchez, and Mike Hayes, and fourteen others. The XO is in bad shape, radiation poisoning, but she’s being treated. Carranza’s running the show, with Lang as exec.”
Carranza was the ship’s chief engineer. Neil looked around and saw Erin at a console, her back to him. She looked okay. “Tom?”
“He took one in the arm, stayed at his post until it was over. He’s being treated in medical,” Avery said. “Your buddy Kieran Wu called from Fremantle. They got beat up pretty bad, but they have flight control back and have maneuvered alongside.”
The medical officer held out a hand with two pills, a red one and a green-and-white one. “Take these. General painkiller and radiation treatment. My techs are working on a regimen tailored to your genome. Come down to sickbay in twelve hours, and they should have it ready.”
“Sure thing, Doc. You know where we’re headed now?”
“Yep. The Hans are running for Venus; they are not even going to try to keep Earth orbit. The ship needs a major repair, and Kennedy’s too backed up to handle us. We’re headed to Earth.”
These guys do something right, Neil thought, watching the ferries move around the brilliant blue waters of Sydney Harbor. It was an unseasonably warm July afternoon, the height of winter in the Southern Hemisphere. He was amazed how clean the city was, how friendly the locals were. Even the seawalls and pumping stations, so rough and ugly in many of Earth’s coastal cities, had been adorned with murals and bas-relief sculpture depicting Australian history and wildlife.
They saw few obvious signs of the war. Submarine nets were up, lest some brave Chinese or Korean captain try to sneak into the port and launch an attack. Kieran commented that more pleasure yachts were in the harbor than normal; Sydney’s wealthiest didn’t feel too comfortable frolicking on the open ocean while a war raged beneath them.
They sat at a café not far from the Sydney Opera House, drinking beer and spending more money than they should, but, as Tom said, their accumulated salaries weren’t going to spend themselves. Tom and his wife Angela and Erin were here, along with Kieran Wu, who had invited them to his hometown after San Jacinto and Fremantle had made it back to Earth. Kevan Avery and Anne Fitzgerald – now a couple – would join them in a few days.
The news nets had called the Battle of Kennedy Station a triumph, and some politicians hailed it as the turning point in the war. It was certainly the former; China and Korea no longer controlled Earth orbit, and they now had only their surface defenses to protect their homelands. But they still boasted a huge, if currently disorganized, fleet.
After the San Jacinto arrived at Space Command, most of the surviving crew had been given leave. They were going to be broken up, sent to other ships, while the destroyer underwent four to six months
of repair. They joined the crews of Swiftsure, Fremantle and Kiyokaze in one massive, multinational drinker; by the end, Neil found himself in a corner with the other ships’ intelligence officers, observing the festivities rather than participating.
Afterward, Neil had gone home to Oregon. He met some people in Portland he had known back in high school, but couldn’t connect with them, not like he once did. They listened to his stories for a little while – the ones he could share, at least – and then engaged in more comfortable banter, about stupid bosses, about this new movie or game, about nothing at all. He felt a little disdain for them, the drink-until-we’re-macho guys and the vapid, open-mouthed girls, and he left early, saying he was tired from the gravity, doubting he would see any of them again.
He thought of the dead. Davis, who managed to have fun during the long hours in CIC. Mike Hayes, the astrogator whom Neil, as a fellow introvert, had felt a quiet kinship to. Captain Thorne, who, if nothing else, gave him a shot. Sun Haisheng. Maria Sanchez. Rafe Sato. He thought about Rand Castillo, probably slogging through some ditch out in the boonies of Sequoia, while everyone here was so damned comfortable.
He thought of the 1,726 people he had killed. He knew that number: He had looked up the crew complement of the assault carriers and added it to the number of troops they were carrying, and subtracted the number of survivors taken from the ships. It was a number he couldn’t conceive of, really, just a black place in him that he tried to ignore. Sometimes, he succeeded.
Some of the older adults were a little better. A few saw his uniform and awkwardly thanked him for his service. Others felt entitled to give him their opinion on the war, positive or negative. His parents told him they were proud of him, told him how they worried for his safety. Without meaning to, they made him feel like a kid, which he didn’t like. And they hadn’t understood why he decided to spend the last two weeks of his leave in Australia.
But Uncle Jack had.
“Things will be different for you from now on,” Jack had said. “You’ve seen things people down here can’t begin to understand. Go decompress as best you can, spend some time with your comrades, before they send you back out there.”
Decompress they did. Kieran’s parents were loaded – they lived in a large waterfront house on one of gorgeous little bays that graced Sydney metro. They spent days out on the Wus’ boat, taking in the sun. They spent nights grilling out or bar-hopping. Neil and Erin had shared more than one long kiss on the Wus’ back porch, and, given it was only lunch and they had already started drinking, they probably would again tonight.
And, Neil knew, that’s as far as it would go. Erin was a driven woman, and she would only let herself have a certain amount of fun. He figured this was about as close as she would allow anyone to get to her, and he decided to take it as a compliment and leave it at that. They were probably going to be light-years apart before too long.
Neil sipped his beer, some national concoction that, despite its name, wasn’t all that bitter, and listened to his friends talk about the news of the day.
The story had broken while he was on the San Francisco-Sydney suborbital over the Pacific Ocean. New Jersey Senator Darren Gregory, a member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, went public with a report that the United States and Japan were making war on China to take their colony worlds and wormhole networks, because the allies expected to find no more habitable planets in their regions of space.
A storm of response poured in. Some commentators were horrified at what they termed a “new imperialism.” We have several worlds to fill, they said, continent after empty continent, which would still be frontiers generations from now. Why should we care that other countries find more space than we do?
The Delgado administration reacted mildly, announcing that yes, it was aware of the dead zone theory and was looking into it. However, pro-administration pundits, taking private cues from Delgado’s staff, reported that a pre-war diplomatic effort, aimed at allowing the United States access to space off one of China’s arms, had failed. Some of the president’s shriller supporters painted a picture of a future humanity that was entirely Chinese: politically, culturally, and yes, ethnically. Nobody in the mainstream had evoked the phrase “yellow horde,” at least not yet.
And they questioned the patriotism of Senator Gregory for going public with the report at all, suggesting it told the Chinese too much about American war aims.
One of the moderate commentators tried to imagine the questions Delgado must have asked himself, upon learning the truth. “What if the United States had been confined to the original 13 colonies, surrounded by old empires who didn’t share our view of the world? Would we have thrived? Would be have led the world for as long as we did? Now, in this new era of humanity, will the United States of America be a footnote, a minor power, solely because we took an unlucky turn as we went to the stars?”
Neil found only one American writer who took a longer view, looking beyond the mere geopolitical implications of the report. This columnist wondered at the cause of the dead zone. “We left Earth because we feared a planetwide catastrophe that could wipe out our species,” she wrote. “Once we looked up in our summer skies and saw hope and opportunity, but now we learn our constellations contain only dead worlds. Now we learn that catastrophes may spread across the light-years. Now we learn our summer skies may contain danger.”
She had done her research and included some reassuring comments from astronomers that there were no imminent, nearby supernovae, magnetars or other phenomena that could sterilize dozens of star systems in a stroke. But, the experts cautioned, certain fast-moving, hard-to-detect objects could present a serious problem. “With all our advances, are we still in the same boat?” she wondered. “Fighting over limited territory, with the omnipresent, if rarely mentioned, threat of annihilation?”
Two messages had arrived in Neil’s queue during the flight. The first, from Jim Donovan, showed up shortly after the story broke. Neil wasn’t sure where Donovan was, but it had to be nearby, given how quickly he had sent it. It was brief:
Neil:
Presume you’ve seen the news by now. Interesting.
Regards,
Jim
Strange, Neil thought, that Donovan would contact him with such a vague message. Was it his way of confirming he had leaked the report? Going to a senator was probably the smartest route: It was a protected activity by any employee of the U.S. government. Let the senator go public, and see if the Delgado administration wanted to take him on.
Neil wondered if he would hear from a Space Force counterintelligence officer soon.
Reading the reactions, he asked himself again whether he was right to give the report to Donovan with the aim of getting it out to the public. Already, polls were showing a ten-point drop in support for the war. Did the truth of the war make it easier to prosecute, because officers knew what the real aims were? Or harder, because it could turn the public against it, as President Delgado apparently feared? Neil wasn’t sure.
Erin, for one, had only invective for Senator Gregory, arguing the release could only damage the war effort. Neil noted this with some sadness. If she ever learned what he did, it would likely drive a permanent wedge between them, and Neil quickly found he couldn’t help but regard the wedge as already there.
The second message was from the rear admiral whose administrative command included San Jacinto, offering him a choice.
First, a slot was available in the next advanced flight training class. He could be a dropship pilot after all.
Or he could accept a temporary, educational posting to the intelligence staff at Space Command, with the expectation of being assigned to a ship within a few months.
We don’t often offer choices like this, but you earned it, the admiral wrote.
Neil wondered who had given him a positive recommendation. Most of the officers in a position to do so were dead, and Commander Mendoza was barely out of her coma.
“What are you going
to do?” Erin asked, after Neil told his friends about the offer.
He took a deep breath. “I’m taking the intel posting. It’s more interesting to me, now, than flying. With what’s coming up, I can do more good there.”
Tom nodded. “I agree with you.”
“What is coming up?” asked his wife.
“We knocked them down,” Neil said. “Now we push them back.”
Wormholes were initially discovered not by some deep-space telescope but as an odd solution to Einstein’s theory of general relativity. It wasn’t until the 2050s that Japanese scientist Hirasaki Masuyo isolated one as it bubbled up from the quantum foam on Phobos. It was infinitesimally small, and it didn’t lead anywhere exotic: Its two mouths were a mere Planck length apart.
But Hirasaki developed techniques to grab each mouth and keep them from winking out of existence. He learned how to incorporate mass and energy into the wormhole, widening it. Separating the mouths allowed him to connect two points as if they were right next to each other.
Japan’s then-monopoly on solar power stations, asteroid mining and antimatter manufacturing allowed it to finance the grandest project of all: sending a wormhole mouth to Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to Earth. The first men and women transited the wormhole a little more than a decade after Hirasaki’s discovery.
To open up new stars, nations employed big breeder ships to detect and capture wormholes before they evaporated. When one was secured, one mouth was placed on a tiny robotic wormhole transport, called a "Valkyrie," which relied on direct antimatter annihilation to achieve relativistic speeds. The antimatter fuel – far more than conventional ships used to spark their fusion drives – made them terribly expensive, but they could reach a star five light-years away in just under six years for the people waiting back home.
Once the distant Valkyrie entered orbit around the destination star, engineers at the origin would widen both mouths to the standard Jumpmax diameter of 40 meters and change; any larger required prohibitive amounts of energy. They would construct a solar array on both ends to provide the energy to maintain the opening, and a new star system was free for exploration.
