by Alex Lamb
‘That’s good,’ said Ira politely. ‘An excellent start.’
He clapped Will on the shoulder so gently that he barely felt it. Will wanted badly to tell the captain that he knew how he must be grieving. He understood how close Ira and Doug had been. But he couldn’t think of a way to say it that didn’t presume some kind of familiarity.
‘I’m very grateful for this opportunity, sir … Ira,’ was the best he could come up with. He tried again. ‘I know I have big boots to fill, and I’m going to do my best.’
‘Thank you, Will. I don’t doubt it,’ Ira replied blandly. ‘Otherwise they wouldn’t have picked you to be here today, would they?’ He gave Will an opaque smile.
At that moment, Amy and John stepped through the door, sparing them further awkwardness.
Amy was in her forties with a round, motherly face. She had kind eyes, hair in plaits and the same indestructible body plan as Rachel and Ira. John was a little taller and thinner than the others, with side-swept blond hair and the face of a cartoon action hero.
‘Will,’ said Ira. ‘This is Amy McKlusky-Ritter and John Jack Forrester-Klasse. Amy runs nav and medicine. John here is our pet spy. He runs weapons. Guys, I’d like you to meet Will Kuno-Monet, Handler Div’s finest. He’s fresh out of the same firefight as us, where he managed to single-handedly rescue two battle-cruisers and save the life of Admiral Bryant.’
Amy and John nodded their appreciation of his achievements. Will blushed from ear to ear.
‘Farmer Bob has shown me some of his work and I can tell you, it’s first rate, really first rate,’ said Ira, nodding earnestly. To Will’s ears, it sounded unpleasantly as if the captain was trying to convince himself.
Amy took one of Will’s hands in both of hers and grasped it warmly, almost like a hug. ‘Welcome to the Ariel,’ she said. It’s good to have you aboard.’
‘Thanks,’ said Will, starting to unwind a little.
Then it was John’s turn. The assault officer winked and squeezed Will’s fingers just a little too hard. ‘Your first time in soft combat?’
Will nodded.
‘Don’t be fooled by the name,’ said John with a sinister grin. ‘There’s nothing soft about it.’
Will’s uncertainty returned. He watched the crew greet each other and felt like a lonely giant at a dinner party for dwarves. It didn’t take a genius to see that he was the odd one out in this crowd. They were all from prestigious space-going families that had provided them with the finest spaceflight modifications Galatean science could provide. Those mods gave them countless advantages in shipboard life. They had reinforced arteries that could pump blood in the absence of heart function. They lay on couches during high-gee manoeuvres while normal people had to be suspended in special gel-filled muscle-tanks. Zero-gee environments were as natural to them as walking. They were also academically brilliant. Every member of the crew except Will had published important papers in their chosen fields.
In contrast, Will’s parents were as poor as Galateans got. They’d only been granted a child licence because they’d volunteered for the roboteer project. With the exception of the quirky mix he’d inherited naturally through his parents’ own alterations, Will’s mods had been selected and provided by the state.
So what? No matter his humble origins, he’d still been chosen for this team. He had a right to be here.
He was urgently reminding himself of this when someone walked into the room who didn’t feature in any of his memories.
‘Greetings, all! Hope I’m not too late.’
The voice belonged to another stout man, though he didn’t look superhuman like the rest of the crew. He was middle-aged with thin, reddish hair and highly animated eyes in a pasty face. He grinned broadly.
‘Not at all,’ said Ira. ‘Folks, I’d like you to meet Dr Hugo Bessler-Vartian from Fleet Research. He’ll be our passenger on this cruise. But don’t worry, he’ll be working as hard as the rest of us. Hugo, meet Rachel, Amy, John and our other new man, Will.’
Hugo introduced himself with earnest vigour.
‘Amy, it’s a pleasure.’
‘John! The cryptographer! I read your work on counter-shells. Brilliant.’
He lingered for a moment on Rachel’s hand. ‘Rachel. Lovely to meet you. Are you the same Rachel who cracked the four-buffer problem? You are! I’m honoured.’
He turned at last to Will. ‘Hello, Will! I heard about your clever trick out there at Memburi. Well done.’ He slapped Will on the shoulder.
Will smiled back wordlessly. He knew nothing about Hugo. He framed a memory request to the station so that he could respond in kind, but by the time it fired, Ira was talking again.
‘Well, ladies and gentlemen, we’re all here now and I’m afraid time is of the essence. So if you’ll just follow me, we’ll get started.’
The captain led them over to the airlock on the far side of the room. Will tagged along behind the others, his stomach fluttering nervously. He was really going to board the Ariel. He was heading into space with these people. It had all happened so fast that it felt vaguely unreal. He’d barely had time to tell his family and friends.
It felt strange, too, boarding a ship without knowing where it was going. But that was how it worked in soft combat. The missions were top secret. The briefings happened on board.
The airlock opened to reveal a docking pod – a chamber shaped like an octagonal box laid on its side. It was lined with plush Fleet-green carpet. Foam handles stuck out from the floor, walls and ceiling, and little oval screens were set in each surface like pretend windows. In actual fact, the pod was lined with several metres of radiation shielding.
‘Everybody grab a handle, please,’ said Ira as Will stepped in.
The door closed and the pod began to slowly lift towards the middle of the station, shedding gravity as it went.
Will clutched his handle and floated. The rest of the crew chatted as if nothing were happening while the pod lost its spin and accelerated out along the docking spar.
Through the nearest screen, Will watched the ships pass. Without exception, they were huge. Even the Ariel, the smallest of the lot, was over a kilometre long. Most, like the Phoenix, were many times larger. They resembled petite grey worlds covered with forests of spikes. These were the collapsed field inducers, or ‘brollies’ as the engineers called them. During warp, they unfurled to envelop the ships in swathes of gravity. The hulls themselves were littered with scars and pocks the size of trench apartments – souvenirs of battle.
The pod turned off the main docking spar and followed the rail that led out towards the Ariel. It slid along the track between the mighty trunks of the inducers and down past the hull’s grey metal horizon to the interior below.
Stripped of an outside view to show, the screens provided a diagrammatic impression of their position within the starship instead. The crew descended through the exo- and mesohulls, with their networks of tunnels where the robots lived and worked. They passed the outer Casimir-buffers and entered the narrow aperture in the lead shell of the endohull that led to the tiny command kernel at the centre of the ship. Finally the pod docked softly against the airlock. After a brief pause while the safety mechanisms disengaged, the door hissed open. The Ariel’s main cabin lay beyond.
Like all Galatean starships, the interior was decorated with cream-coloured crash padding and smelled as if someone had just mown their lawn nearby. Will had expected that. What he hadn’t expected, not even with Doug’s memories to help him, was the size. The cabin was about three metres wide and five high. Three vertically stacked bunks stood on either side of the entrance, filling most of the space except for a narrow channel down the centre. A coffin-shaped tank stuck out of the floor, half-blocking access to the couches at the bottom. It pretty much filled all of the space there would have been to stand in if the ship had gravity.
Will had known the dimensions in advance, so why did the room look so much smaller than Doug remembered it? To his dismay, h
e realised Doug must have been significantly shorter than him. He’d never thought to check. He tried not to let his disappointment at the size of the space show. After all, this was where he’d be living for months at a time, with five other people. He might as well get used to it.
‘There you go,’ said Ira. ‘Your new home.’ He pointed to the bunks allotted to Hugo and Will. They were the bottom two, of course, on the floor.
‘Because we’ve got Hugo here, we’ve had to move the tank,’ Ira explained. ‘It’ll be a bit more crowded than usual, I’m afraid. But don’t worry, folks – it’s not meant to be a long mission.’
The hatch closed, sealing them in and Will’s chest constricted with sudden claustrophobia. Couldn’t they have made the cabin just a little bit bigger?
The answer, of course, was no. Much of the machinery on a starship existed for one reason: to shield the area intended for human passengers. Make that space larger and the size of ship required to protect it grew disproportionately. Soft-combat ships were always made as compact as possible.
Ira gestured to the hatch situated in the main cabin’s ceiling. ‘This way first, ladies and gents.’
Will knew from Doug’s memories that there were only three other chambers on the Ariel: a multi-gee toilet, a wash-space that doubled as a privacy chamber, and a gym with retractable mountings that could also be used as a meeting room or refectory. This hatch led to the gym/meeting room, which – unsurprisingly – was also oppressively cramped. They had just enough room to float in a circle, as if they were standing.
‘Welcome aboard, everybody,’ said Ira, surveying his crew. ‘If you’ll bear with me for a few minutes, I’ll explain why you’re here and why your leave was cut short.’ He pulled a display tablet down out of the ceiling. It floated between them like a table. The panel flickered into life, displaying the green and silver Galatean Fleet logo. ‘I don’t have to tell you that by the time we got out of Memburi, it was pretty clear that the Earthers had some kind of new weapon. Something we don’t have. That’s a first. In the whole history of this stupid war, we’ve always been technologically ahead.’
It was true. Will knew that had it just been down to science, the Galateans would have won the war the same year it started. The problem was, Galatea only had a few tens of thousands of people to fight with. Earth had billions. The Galateans made up that shortfall with robots and smarts. But even with genius on their side, they could only do so much against such overwhelming numbers.
‘This defeat presents a serious problem,’ Ira told them. ‘Earth has a direct route to our front door again, and enough firepower to finish us off. Needless to say, we can’t allow them to keep that advantage.’ He scanned the room, his dark eyes meeting every face in turn. ‘If we can’t find some kind of defence against their new g-rays before they send an invasion force, the war is over.’
He clapped his beefy hands together. ‘And that’s where we come in. As you know, on our last mission we liberated some data from their ships before they started shooting at us. It turns out that those ships didn’t come from one of the Earther Fleet-bases we know about.’ He clicked his fingers and the panel brought up a navigational map of the human galactic shell – the onion-skin layer of galaxy accessible with warp drive. ‘They came from here,’ he said, and pointed to a star off to the left of the Earthers’ main traffic routes. ‘It’s one of the old Pioneer stars.’
The Pioneers had been a community of space traders before the war who’d taken it upon themselves to extend the frontiers of human space. They could have been great allies to the Galateans, Will thought, if they’d had enough warning. Unfortunately, the Pioneers were too few, and too spread out, to mount a defence when the crusades began. The Earthers had invaded and occupied their barely populated star systems within a matter of weeks.
‘The Earther charts list it under a Pioneer name as Zuni-Dehel,’ said Ira. ‘We think they’re using it as a weapons-development facility. Either that or they’ve taken over something the Pioneers themselves were working on. We’re going there to take a look.’
He reached out and touched the panel. ‘We’ll be flying around the edge of Earther space, like this.’ He drew a line and their route lit up. ‘It’s a long way around, I’m afraid, but we’ll be making it fast. We have to get there and back before the nano hits the fan-o here at home. That means two fuelling stops. The first will be here, at Saint Andrews. The second is here, at Li-Delamir. With luck, it’ll be a relatively straight recon job. We go in. We make a soft incursion. We get out. We’ll be looking for anything that might enable us to mount a defence or a counter-attack against those new ships of theirs.’
Ira gestured at the nodding scientist on his right. ‘Hugo’s coming along to give us a hand. He’s the Fleet’s number-one energy systems specialist, so he’ll know what to look for. But he’s not just a theory man. Hugo worked for several years on Fleet prototypes. He’s spent plenty of time in space, and he knows how to pull his weight aboard a starship.’
Ira paused for a moment. ‘I’m going to be straight with you, people. This won’t be easy.’ He clicked again to reveal Central Command’s risk assessment for the trip. ‘This mission takes us into the thick of the enemy, to the very place where the concentration of that new firepower we saw is likely to be at its strongest. The security will be as tight as a trench-seal. We’ll have to be on our guard and doing our best work. Because if we don’t succeed … Well, we’ll all be looking for a new place to live.’
He grinned, revealing a broad spread of perfectly even teeth. It was a dark kind of humour. If they lost the war, finding somewhere to live was likely to be the least of their problems.
Will stared down at the assessment and tried to appear as relaxed as the others. The threat indicators for the mission were nightmarish, into the red right across the board. However, no one else around the table looked remotely fazed, so Will hid the fear that churned inside him. These people were clearly used to dealing with situations far more precarious than the ones he usually encountered.
‘Any questions?’ asked the captain.
John stuck up a lazy hand. ‘Any clues in the rest of that data about what we’re looking for?’
Ira glanced at Hugo. ‘You want to answer that one?’
Hugo nodded. ‘I’ve been working on it since you got back, and we think we’ve found something – a new program in their soft core with rather heavy encryption on it. As far as we can tell, it’s a monitoring harness for some kind of energy source. Presumably the energy source that was powering the attacks, given that it feeds directly into their main supply conduits. But there’s no code in the core governing the source itself. In fact, there’s no data about it anywhere in the enemy systems. It appears to be a sealed unit.’
Hugo’s eyes gleamed with enthusiasm as he talked. Will had no doubt the man was used to giving lectures. Ira didn’t look thrilled that Hugo had launched into a full explanation, but Hugo seemed oblivious.
‘The source only appears to take three instructions,’ the scientist said. ‘On, adjust power level, and off. The energy source takes a map of the local space as the only parameter on its ignition sequence. And there’s nothing for refuelling or maintenance.’
Hugo made this last point with one eyebrow crooked, as if to underline the mystery. Will had to admit that it sounded weird, and he was no energy specialist.
‘No refuelling?’ said Rachel. ‘That’s impossible. The energy has to be coming from somewhere.’
Hugo nodded eagerly. ‘Certainly it does. Thus far, we’ve come up with two possibilities. Firstly, that the source unit is disposable. It’s created with a certain amount of power and runs down over time.’
‘But in that case, what’s the map for?’ Rachel asked.
‘Exactly,’ said Hugo. ‘The second theory is that they have some way to pipe energy in from elsewhere, and the map acts as a frame of reference. Perhaps there’s another ship outside the system.’
Amy frowned. ‘But how wo
uld they do that? Some kind of particle beam?’
‘Nothing showed up on our scans,’ said Hugo. ‘Seems unlikely, doesn’t it? And their use of disrupters would appear to rule out curvon technology. So it’s a mystery. Something totally new.’
Will had never seen a man look so hungry for knowledge. Hugo was about to start up again, but Ira beat him to it.
‘And that’s exactly why we’re going, folks: to find out. I’d like to take this particular discussion offline. There’ll be plenty of time to puzzle over it on the flight out and I’m sure our guest will furnish you with any extra details you desire. Meanwhile, are there any other questions before we begin?’
Will could think of nothing to say. The prospect of waltzing straight into the enemy’s most secret base had temporarily robbed him of his curiosity.
The captain nodded, pleased. ‘Okay, good. In that case, take your places, people. We’re heading out.’
The crew floated back down to their bunks. Will dragged himself to the bottom-right couch and slid through the narrow gap between the muscle-tank and the bed above. The tank’s side was open so that he could slide in quickly, in the event of a firefight. As the only member of the crew lacking the mods to keep him alive during high-gee turns, only he needed one.
He clipped himself into the webbing and listened to the sounds of people adjusting themselves above him. The bunk’s ceiling and bulkhead wall both doubled as display screens and were currently showing him a view of a Galatean lichen field and a bottomless blue sky. No doubt it was supposed to look homey and familiar, to compensate for the pitiful space he was supposed to inhabit, but it was far from convincing. Will’s claustrophobia returned, stronger than ever. He fought the feeling down and connected the retractable fat-contact to his neck.
