Battlestations

by S. M. Stirling

Along the hull were located 256 large aperture laser cannon. All were coordinated from a central battle bridge located in the center of red deck. Twenty-four were additionally fitted with experimental virtual reality targeting units. Backing these laser cannon up were dozens of missile tubes and literally thousands of missiles stored for station or ship use. The Fleet contingent consisted of three hundred ships, with the preponderance being scout and light attack craft. Replacement parts were sufficient to almost totally replace this fleet. Keeping track of it all was the full-time task of over a hundred quartermasters.

  The journey to Star Central took over eight months. When the Hawking arrived, they were too late to save the Gerson home world. Most of those who remained behind had died two years earlier in the futile defense of the world. The other remaining Gersons may have been systematically exterminated by the Ichtons. No sign of any survivors could be detected from orbit. It was likely that the few dozen remaining on the battlestation were the last of the race. Feeling its way cautiously along behind the swath of destruction left by the Ichtons, the specialists began to draw conclusions from reports garnered from the intelligence ships that had preceded them to Star Central.

  THE EYES OF TEXAS

  by S.N. Lewitt

  “I sure would like at least a chance to shower before I bring that up to the lady,” Cowboy said, and grinned slowly. “Seeing as I smell like seven-year-old milk.” He was covered in dust and his utilities were stained and rumpled. How it was possible to get filthy working in a clean environment on electronics he’d never figure out, but that seemed to be one of the immutable laws of nature. You open up the hull and you get dirty.

  He’d been down in the bay calibrating the lasers on the Glory. She was a light cruiser, smaller than the Imperious that’d just put the bugs on the run at Sandworld. He’d heard the announcement over the loudspeaker while he was checking over the electron alignments in the controller.

  Not that there was anything wrong with the Glory’s lasers. Far from it. But Senior Weapons Officer Logan Reyes lived by the motto that there was perfection and then there was everything else. He didn’t bother with everything else. So the margin of error considered acceptable by bay crews and manufacturer’s specs didn’t cut it with him. Not when with a little tinkering he could eliminate at least twenty nanometers from the outer targeting range.

  “I admit I have finished here for the moment, but I do need to put on a clean uniform before I go on duty. And I currently am not on duty in any case, not until sixteen hundred. Which isn’t for another half hour yet,” Cowboy repeated himself. “I was just doing a little tinkering on my own time.”

  But Vijay Deseka, the Imperious’s top Intel officer, was having none of it. “Those eyes will be useless in twelve hours, maybe less,” he said firmly. “Dr. Blackwell needs them yesterday. And you are available now.”

  Cowboy wanted to argue. He was a gunny, not a messenger boy. If they wanted things hand-delivered up from the docking bay to Med Red, Mr. Analysis could just find himself some junior clerk and leave him alone. He never liked those Intel boys in the first place or the second. But the crew on the Imperious had just fought some fine battle and there wasn’t anyone else available on the dock right at this second.

  But the real reason he didn’t protest anymore was that any excuse to see Doc Blackwell was fine by him. She wasn’t even the kind of medic who grounded you, either, not at all. No, she was one of those xeno-types, specializing in alien anatomy. Add to that she was tall and pretty and had a smile that went kilowatts, and hell, even Med Red wasn’t so bad.

  So Cowboy shook his head and took the box. It wasn’t a usual gift to bring a lady. The thick-sided box smoked a mist of supercoolant condensation, and even with all the insulation his hands were slightly chilled. And the idea of alien eyes rolling around in nutrient solution made his stomach pitch and roll like nothing had done since his first training runs.

  Around him the mechanic crews were all over the Imperious, snaking fuel feeders and electrical lines already in place and pumping. Scrubs were working on the laser ports and the larger drones were maneuvering into position. It was beautiful.

  Commander Deseka gave Cowboy a withering look. At least Med Red was only a deck away. That had been done on purpose, so emergency teams would have immediate backup where casualties were most likely to be admitted. Cowboy took one of the large service lifts up one and exited into a corridor of dark crimson, a color that in merely the past six months had become indelibly associated with Medical Services and sickbay for everyone on the Hawking.

  There was a directory opposite the lift doors and Cowboy went to check out where the Xeno labs were. He’d seen Dr. Blackwell at a briefing on the Gersons and in the gym at Bright Orange 221. But like any member of any fighter crew, he ducked Med Red like it was enemy barrage. The directory showed Xeno way in the back near the hull, and Avrama Blackwell headed the lab list.

  He touched her name on the directory screen. The line remained dead for a moment, then he heard swearing in the background. A harried female voice answered. “Yes?”

  “I have a little package you’re looking for from the Imperious,” Cowboy answered. ‘”I’d sure be glad to hand it over to you.”

  “Oh. Right,” the woman said. “I’m sorry, we’re quite busy. Could you meet me in Ophthalmology lab six? It’s right next to Psychiatric Services. I think you know where it is.”

  Cowboy knew where it was, all right. The eye clinic was washout city, requiring gunnys and hot shots to retest every four months. To be sure the laser range and the radiation hadn’t done any damage, they said. Cowboy was convinced that it was to keep themselves in a job. After all, popping in new clone eyes wasn’t enough to keep them busy. Not enough accidents of that nature aboard the Hawking. And to get there he’d have to pass Shrink Central, the worst of the worst.

  “Sure, I know it,” Cowboy said steadily. “You sure you don’t want me to come down to Xeno for you? It would be no trouble at all.”

  “Ophthalmology,” the woman said.

  Cowboy shook his head. Well, he’d tried. “You got it,” he answered with false cheer.

  Actually, the halls weren’t that crowded. And when people in med uniforms saw the box he carried they gave him a curious state and then quickly glanced away.

  Avrama Blackwell was waiting in the lab when he entered. She took the box from him immediately and set it in a tangle of equipment. “I’m sorry I was so brusque,” she said softly. Her nose crinkled when she smiled and her large eyes glowed. “But we’ve got the Ekchartok survivors in Xeno now. And since they need radiation in the dormant state, the lab is lousy with it. And dealing with eyes, well . . .”

  Cowboy knew what she was talking about. It was the first thing he’d learned as a weapons officer, before he knew how to play the circuits into nanometer precision. Radiation exposure was sure to damage human eyes, all the way back through the nerve. Khalian eyes, too, he remembered. And even with all the regrowns in the world they couldn’t impair that level of injury. They could clone a body, but no one could replace the optic nerve. No matter how good the tech was, how minute the calibrations, nothing replaced a gunny’s eyes.

  “Why couldn’t they clone eyes for you to work with?” Cowboy asked.

  Dr. Blackwell laughed. Her laughter was musical and as warm as her eyes. “It would cost a fortune,” she said. “And there are other priorities in the cloning tanks now. Priorities I can’t even argue with.” She shook her head.

  She turned off the light and they were plunged into utter dark. Only a faint reddish glow illuminated the equipment on the lab table. Then she opened the box and took out one of the eyes with a long delicate field prong, the kind that was so low energy that it didn’t glow at all, though it held the organ without touching it.

  “If you want to help with the experiments that would be fine. But I’ve got work to do,” she said.

  Cowboy hesitated for a moment. To be quite honest, he was interested. But when she pic
ked up a scalpel he decided that he wanted to know the results, not learn biotech at this late date. He’d managed to avoid it in school and saw no reason to start now.

  “I’d love to be able to help you out, but I’m scheduled to go on duty at sixteen hundred,” he said softly. “Would you mind telling me about what you find out? Over a beer, maybe, and a good-sized steak?”

  Dr. Blackwell laughed again. “Don’t leave until I give you the signal, I want to get this specimen shielded before you open the door.”

  He’d never been so disappointed to leave Med Red, though he had less than twenty minutes to shower and change into something respectable enough for roll call.

  Combat was beautiful, Cowboy thought. Light danced around the board, red, yellow, green. It pierced the darkness and opened up the glints on the screen into explosive flowers. “Above,” the green sphere of the watery Silber planet blossomed with colored blades that homed on the enemy emission traces and consumed the Ichton fighters. The small craft ignited and blew over kilometers of star-strewn space, their fragments invisible against the glare of the close-packed suns of the Core.

  Cowboy sat strapped motionless at his screen, his mind as big as the battleground. He touched the screen gently, picking targets with the AI, directing fire. He was there, he was on top of it, he was cold as the AI plotting the fire patterns. Always been cold when the adrenaline hit, like time slowed down, and he could see into the patterns of movement, see the unexpected and preempt it.

  There were others in the fleet control station on the Glory in the dark. The only illumination under battle conditions was the boards themselves. But Cowboy didn’t care if there was anyone else there. He didn’t notice them at all. It was just him and the screens and the flashes of light, the hottest, fastest game in purblind creation.

  Four bugs were zeroing down to a single ungainly Silber installation, the one targeting broad sweeps through the sky and disabling at least two bugs in every pass. Maybe killing them, Cowboy couldn’t tell. Over the range he could only see that they were intact.

  Don’t forget Miss Ellie’s old Maine coon cat lying out watching the squirrels looking deader than last week’s lottery tickets all fluttering where the trash pickup had dumped them on the ground. That cat could even smell dead, for sure. Looked dead, smelled dead, lay there like carrion when the dog tried to wake it up in the sunshine. And it always got at least two good squirrels for the pot. Good eating, those squirrels were.

  Now there were four coming down on the position, coming wide with shields glowing with energy burn, so that the pale wide-sweep of charged particles wouldn’t touch them, swooping down like buzzards on a cold night. Hated buzzards.

  And below them the Silber weapons station, hardworking, flaring desperately against the incoming enemy. They fired wide band again, but the bug attackers had spread and were dancing around the edges of the wave. They knew its range. And it glowed less brightly against the million stars of the Core, losing energy, draining. Still the blasts came, acid green wavering down the energy spectrum to yellow, orange, red.

  Cowboy could imagine the Silbers in this post, power running low and under attack, praying for reinforcements (if Silbers prayed, Cowboy rather thought under the circumstances they would) and knowing it was hopeless. And still firing, knowing they were dead and gone but draining every last erg and drop of blood to defend their homes and families.

  He hadn’t known more of the Silbers than he had seen in the same transmissions everyone else saw. Now he could imagine the defenders below, individuals, maybe a few young kids who’d never left their mothers before, who’d never done the Silber equivalent of a night on the town and who now would never get the chance. Maybe the commander was an older guy with a baby at home who only wanted to return to his family and eat some good cooking and play with the kid.

  He touched the points of light on the screen.

  “High error margin,” the androgynous computer voice said without inflection.

  “I got override and you better listen up or you are going to be one hunk of stinking burnt junk,” Cowboy muttered as he studied the display. He touched the four specs again.

  They were far away and moving, the trajectories on a max evasion curve. But he could see into it, the time slowdown and his own instinct coming together at that moment to see the pattern whole and complete. He did not touch the specs again. Instead he jabbed points a little beyond them in the hard fire-control order.

  The AI obeyed but felt required to lodge its protest. Cowboy didn’t even bother to listen. The streaks of light he had sent searing through vacuum touched four different bug fighters and took them all out together. All four flamed in unison creating a multihued spiral in the center of the screen.

  And in the microsecond it took for the wreckage to clear Cowboy searched fruitlessly for another target. In range. In his range, a different range than anyone else in the whole Fleet.

  No joy, no joy. Frustration welled up in him and he barked an order at the board to increase range spread. The AI refused to comply. Instead there was an announcement on the speaker that pierced his concentration. “The enemy is in retreat. Go after them. Do not, repeat, do not let any of them make it back.”

  Cowboy licked his lips. Easy pickings, too easy maybe for his liking. But he understood what had to be done. Couldn’t let the damned bugs get word of the Hawking, no that wouldn’t do at all.

  The screens changed, flowing into each other like they were melting. The navigator and the helm were taking the Glory around and entering the pursuit, but from his strapped and bolted position in the gun station Cowboy knew only the stream of target screens as the enemy fighters before them turned Doppler blue.

  And then something caught his eye and his intuition reacted with his hand. He touched a blue spot before them and then moved his finger back and to the side. “Area,” he requested brusquely.

  The screen immediately showed a detailed magnification of the subregion he had indicated. It was barren. The blue spec was to one side and not turning. Still, something rang like bells in his head and he knew.

  “There,” he said, jabbing his finger hard against the changing screens. There was nothing in the space he indicated, and it was behind and to the side of the running bug, not in his direction of travel at all.

  “We are in pursuit mode,” the AI informed him.

  “I don’t care if we’re the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, we’re taking them,” Cowboy insisted. And he felt the quiver of the firestrike through the bones of the substructure, although he knew that was impossible. Only imagination.

  But what was happening on the board was not his imagination. The blue spec he had jabbed on a screaming hunch became less blue, slowing. And as they hit high definition he saw it wasn’t fighter size. Larger. And at the far edge of his viewboard a bright orange friendly appeared alone.

  Whatever he had shot at was much larger than a fighter, especially compared to the friendly at the far edge. It had to be a cruiser. And as he watched it began to slow and turn, attracted by the friendly coming on hard with guns blazing full. The cruiser avoided the blasts from the friendly fighter and came around hard horizontal. Just exactly to where he knew it had to be.

  And then the blaze of Glory’s guns hit it full power. Its shields turned it bluer than running light and for a moment he worried that it was just going to cycle harmlessly forever, an APOT feedback loop. The Ichton cruiser sat there like a burning sapphire for what seemed like eons. And then its systems went into overload and it exploded with such violence that the screen had to go to reduction eight to catch the whole show.

  “So that’s why they call you Cowboy,” said Muller, who sat at the next board. But Cowboy wasn’t listening. He was spread over a hundred klicks of vacuum as the enemy attack force was annihilated around him.

  They were drinking down in civ country, in a place on Bright Green called the Emerald. Not real imaginative, though the smart money on the Hawking said it was named for the Emerald Is
le and not the deck. This theory was borne out by the fact it was the only place on board that served Guinness Stout. Which was what Cowboy was drinking, courtesy of Sutter Washington the Third.

  “Yeah, boy, you sure saved my ass,” Washington said when he spotted Cowboy sitting with a couple of chief gunnies from the Impaler and Kingdom Come. “I don’t know how you managed to nail that cruiser from your position, but I sure do owe you a drink and a favor. You ever in a tight spot, you know you got Sutter Washington the Third at your back, brother.”

  Cowboy just blinked. “I didn’t know any of our people were out that far,” he stammered.

  Washington threw back his head and laughed. “Not many were. But I can push that baby so hard she don’t know when to come. And chasing those bugs down the hole, well, they were sure pushing light. Though you know they don’t have any kind of warp drive anyone’d care about. Lousy engineers, those bugs.”

  “Don’t ever underestimate the enemy,” said Chief Gunny Xia Ling. “That is the first and the second mistake. These Ichtons are not going to roll over and die because we spray Raid.”

  “Like I said, those bugs are lousy engineers,” Washington repeated and rolled his eyes. This time Ling got the joke and they all laughed too hard.

  “Well, I was in what you would call hot pursuit,” Washington went on. “I was ready to fire at anything. My granddaddy was an ace in the Fast Attack Wing in the last war. You might have heard of him, Sutter Washington. So I feel like I got to live up to the name, know what I mean? So I was going hot and heavy after them. Already got two in the battle here and wasn’t near ready to stop. So there we were after them as they were trying to hightail it home, and I was way ahead of the pack. Luxury pickings, what you might call a seriously target-rich environment. And I had that cruiser baby in my sights and was ready to draw on him and he turns on me!

  “Can you imagine? He slows to half-light and does a one-eighty and brings guns to bear. ’Course, that means when I fire I only got a little fellow, real disappointing.” Washington stopped to wet his throat a little, telling the story was thirsty work.