Variations on this basic scenario played out three to four times a year. James reflected that he was quite likely to be the last surviving member of his old command. He glanced at the wall clock. 0755. It was time to return to his office and the utterly anodyne problems that awaited him there.
He stood up from the table, alone in a crowded mess hall. He brushed the few crumbs from breakfast from his uniform and tugged his blouse down. If the powers that be deemed him unsuited for command, he would be the most perfect officer possible and thus point up their individual failings. James knew it was foolish and quite childish, but he was powerless to stop himself. Even the stories of his former shipmates, screwing up across the galaxy, reinforced in James Benison's mind his innate superiority.
He strode down the hallway, his black dress shoes gleaming from the evening's session in the auto-polisher. His spine was straight, his face fixed in a mask of quiet purpose. Nobody bothered him. He reached his office, brushed by the administrative corporal with a quiet greeting, and placed his cap precisely on the top of the rack that held his black raincoat and drying shoe covers.
It was time for the daily situation report. His corporal closed the door and the electric lock clicked on, electronically isolating the room. The Slorg War has been going against the Earth forces steadily for the last three years, as the Fleet reached deeper and deeper down in the ranks to man their ships, completely ignoring people like himself that they sidelined years before. Earth might be keeping him from contact with the enemy, but Commander Benison was fairly certain the Slorg had other ideas.
***
The briefing officer was terse. The last several weeks had been a series of shattering losses and desperate retreats. Fleet ships routinely self-destructed when the battle was hopelessly lost. Commanders knew that their men would rather die in a burst of pure radiance than suffer as Slorg larvae chewed through their innards, fighting their cannibalistic siblings for survival.
The Third Wave of the Slorg was poised off Uranus, ready to pounce on Earth. Hundreds of their scoopboats refilled their fleet's tanks with volatiles from the gas giant.
The Slorg broadcast message blanketed every channel on and off the Earth. In a passable electronic voice, rebroadcast in the fifteen major human languages, the Slorg sounded the death knell of humanity.
"People of Earth! We of the Slorg demand complete surrender, or we will blacken the sky with your ashes. No more will you stand in the way of our empire! You have thirty-six rotations your world to capitulate."
That was thirty-two days ago, and the clock was ticking. The Slorg assault craft jockeyed for position, meshing their shields and awaiting the expiration of their ultimatum.
***
"Our remaining forces are marshalling between Saturn and Jupiter. They have been fully provisioned, and are ready to fight to the finish," said the briefer. "Earth's Home Guard is nearly up to full strength. Further briefings will be held every six hours until the expiration of the ultimatum.
Lieutenant Benison sat back at his desk and thought deeply. He tapped his commpad from memory. Some of his former crew he kept tabs on, for reasons he could not say.
"Sparks. This is Commander Benison from the Home Guard."
"Benison. Benison? Wait. Holy crap, Looie Benison! Jeez, man, how are you?"
"Sparks. I am a Commander, and I still outrank you. Old home week can wait, I need a favor."
"Still got that stick in ya, I see. Well, Commander, command away. If I can get something for you, why not? We're less than a week from being Slorg chow, it would take a lot longer than that to give me a court-martial."
"There's always summary execution, Sparks. Now, listen closely, I need you to do this and leave zero tracks. None."
"Fire away. I always thought them taking your ship away from you was complete crap. Just sayin'."
***
There was death aplenty in the vastness of space. The previous two Slorg Waves had been defeated, but at a cost. From increased work in the mines, to rationing and shortages, to the very real costs of broken bodies and small urns arriving by Fleet couriers, most families throughout the Earth have been touched by the Slorg. The Third Wave was menacing mankind already short on ready resources.
The Commandant of the Home Guard, Admiral Conrad Ellison, was the end result of a lifetime of human resistance to the Slorg. Gnarled and grizzled, he was far too old to risk the high-g maneuvers of the main Fleet, yet had one of the most important jobs in the Fleet--the final defense of Earth.
He tapped his fingers on his leg with impatience while his briefer droned through the status update. He knew from long experience that if he tried to jump ahead, everyone would get flustered and skip key details that he would need later.
"Thus, we have an excellent chance of reviving the use of stasis-encased neutronium for bombardment operations," concluded the briefer, Commander James Benison. Ellison cursed to himself. He had missed the main point, catching only the conclusion.
"I apologize, Commander. I don't quite catch how you concluded that. Could you please go over that again?" The Admiral directed his full attention at Benison, who repressed a sigh at this interruption of his carefully crafted presentation.
"The Slorg are using a directed energy field that deactivates all electrical flow. This close-range field suppresses all electrical fields. Our neutronium shells rely on electronic fusing to collapse their stasis fields at just the right moment--half a second before hull impact. If the fields don't collapse, the shells go right through their ships, leaving them with two hull breaches half a meter in diameter--easy to fix. Thus, the shell is no better than a high-speed rock.
"Our new fuse does not rely on electronics at all. It is purely mechanical, and acts to break the stasis by shattering the module that generates the field. Field retrofits are seconds per shell." Benison looked up to find the Admiral with a finger lifted. "Sir?"
"Have you done any fuse testing?" The Admiral watched as Benison struggled to avoid snapping out a sarcastic response.
"Some theoretical, sir, and some full-up testing with mock payloads. We couldn't really drill the Moon with real neutronium." The Commander puffed out his chest. "Complete success. Not a single misfire during the entire run."
"Full attack speed?" Ellison asked. "Or did you go slow to keep from rattling our Moon boys in their bunks?
"We conducted the tests at full muzzle velocity, three kilometers per second. We can't boost shells any faster." Benison looked suddenly uncertain.
"I'm sure you did all you could, Commander Benison. Still, I think you'll find that your mechanical fuse will fail in combat. Let me tell you a story from ancient history."
Ellison told his story while his eyes roved the room, picking out those who listened and those whose minds were elsewhere.
"…and that's why you need to test them at such extremes. Understand?" asked Ellison.
"I think so, sir," replied Benison.
Admiral Ellison chuckled. "You didn't hear a word I said. Your brain was back in your labs." He watched the Commander sweat a moment. "In a nutshell, then. If you fire a fuse at stationary target at standard speed, three kps, then it will function quite well. That's because the speed of sound in your fuse rod is three and a half kps. Go faster, and the shell hits the target before the shock wave can get down the fuse rod. The fuse rod disintegrates before the far end knows it hit anything. You're going to have to think of another way."
"Yes, sir," said Benison. He rolled with the punch, because he had a better topic to brief. "Enhanced D-T balloons are back."
The D-T balloon was a fabric sleeve filled with slushed deuterium and tritium from the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn. Human atmospheric miners scooped the thin upper atmospheres of the gas giants, feeding their cargo into enormous orbiting processors, where the rare isotopes of hydrogen were extracted and chilled. Laced with uranium from Jupiter's moons, the balloons were fuseless thermonuclear bombs. They were difficult for radar to detect, but were incapable
of self-detonation.
The Admiral looked up, his rheumy eyes searching the Commander's face. "If I remember correctly, we decided that we couldn't set them off for the same reason—the Slorg anti-electronics field. No way to fire the initiating nuke."
"There is another way, sir," he said, giving a half-shrug. Feeling magnanimous, he added, "But I can't claim credit for this one."
"In four days, we're all Slorg chow. I don't give a tinker's damn about who came up with it. Make it march, Mister!" Admiral Ellison's retort startled the whole group.
"We've been englobing the Slorg fleet with D-T balloons from our bases on Jupiter and Saturn. They are favorably positioned to enfilade the fleet. In the next seventy hours, we will have the balloons at three times the minimum density to disable the Slorg fleet."
"Meanwhile, the Slorg will expand their anti-electronics field to include the englobement and we're no better off than we are now." The Admiral gripped the table with his scarred hands. He was visibly restraining himself from shaking the answer out of this preening, supercilious officer.
"We've already detected that, Admiral," said Benison, resisting the urge to smile. So far, the Admiral was reacting the way as expected. "Destroyers with field generators have moved out ahead of the fleet. We've lost communications with most of the balloons."
"Commander, I've known you since you were a cadet. I know you've foreseen their countermove. How do you plan to set off the primer nuke?"
"Kamikaze, sir. That was the best we could come up with." Stillness settled on the room. Everyone strained forward to see how the Admiral was going to react.
Admiral Ellison blinked slowly. He leaned forward on his folded hands, the nails whitening where his fingers clenched. "Explain."
"A volunteer in a stealthed scout boat heads into the cloud of balloons, then sets off the priming nuke by hand. We've replaced all the electrical and firing circuits with non-electric, mechanical versions. We've tested the primer on the far side of Venus from the Slorg. It performed perfectly."
"Who died?" asked the Admiral.
"Nobody. It was set off by a timer. The actual initiation was purely mechanical, however."
"Why not use a timer on the real thing? Why must we use a human?"
"Because there are a hundred things that could go wrong with a purely mechanical setup, sir. A human is a failsafe in the system."
"A human might decide against suicide, too," said the Admiral. "That means we'll need two."
"I'll put out the calls for volunteers, sir," said Benison. The Admiral raised his hand.
"Hold on, Commander. Before I ask someone to die, I want to know exactly how it will work."
Commander Benison touched on the extraction process, the loading of the balloons, and the complicated ballistics necessary to get the balloons within an average of three hundred meters of one another, completely around the Slorg, in order to complete the englobement. The formation had to detonate before the balloons drifted out of alignment.
"When our volunteers set off the warheads on the scoutboats…" concluded Commander Benison.
"The blast leaps from balloon to balloon as the radiation front reaches them, like grains of gunpowder in a shell. The Slorg are in the hollow center of a gigantic nuclear bomb. Got it," said the Admiral. "I'll put out the call for volunteers, Commander. It might be your scheme, but I am the one who bears the responsibility."
***
Commander Benison gazed at the message on his commpad. Good old Sparks. He set up a delayed reply to the old crewmate, giving him his thanks for everything, as well as the numbers to some untraceable hidden bank accounts.
James stood up and looked around his office. He had been in a succession of work areas as he labored in staff positions of greater and greater importance. Still, the office of an assistant Operations Officer of the Home Guard was far less than the command cabin of a destroyer.
He nodded to himself and opened his office door. "Corporal. I'm going to be here all night, but there's no reason for you to hang around. Head on home and give your loved ones some of your time. I'll see you in the morning."
"But sir," the corporal began, sputtering to a stop at Benison's raised hand.
"I mean it, corporal. Go home for tonight, and you'll be far more effective in the morning. Everything's on automatic as it is. Good night."
He waited for the corporal to depart, then he slipped out of his office door, leaving the lights on, but locking the wooden panel securely.
***
He emerged from the ballistic subway thirty-seven minutes later at the White Sands Spaceport. Striding up to the small scout boat, he presented a prepared packet of papers to the guards, and watched impassively as they verified the forged orders inside.
"Good flight, sir," they said, saluting him.
It was a short flight to South Dakota to pick up a special package, then Commander Benison lined out to deep space at maximum acceleration.
***
Sparks smiled as he completed the stealthy theft of the ship's lockout code from the Home Guard mainframe. "Looie B, we're either gonna be heroes, or it will be a photo finish between the firing squad and the Slorg."
He transferred the lockout code to the special transmitter that Benison had provided, and linked it into the global military net. The computers looked at the order tags, compared them to the command list, and transmitted the results out towards the Home Fleet around Jupiter. They would get it in about five hours.
Sparks smiled and cut his encrypted connection. He dismantled the five bounce stations between himself and Commander Benison's computer in his office. It was a shame that he couldn't do more, but Benison told him what he was really doing, and Sparks agreed to be good.
***
The old man sat in his library, gazing around. This might be, he thought, the very last time he would sit here. The glass-fronted bookcases with their precious first editions of fine English literature held tales of bravery and derring-do. He smiled sadly. His family lived up to the ideals in those pages. He was a veteran of both Slorg Wars, rising from gunner to executive officer of a destroyer as the Fleet promoted everyone they found capable. His eldest son died during the last stand bombing of the First Wave. His older daughter was killed in action off Pluto, stopping the Second Wave. The shock of her passing probably led to the heart attack that killed his beloved Susan. With no grandchildren, the Ellison family, seven generations of military glory, was reduced to a grizzled old man and his youngest son, Zach, currently serving the torch ships that flashed from Earth to the outer gas giants.
He sampled the brandy he held close to his nose. One last round of luxuries, he thought, and then, most likely, the end. He refused to be bug food, and patted the pocket where he kept a small vial.
His valet found him there later that evening, nodding over one of his favorite authors. He eased the Admiral into his room, tucking him into his bed. The next seventy hours would likely kill the man, he thought, closing the door softly behind him.
***
"He did what?" shouted the Admiral into the microphone. "Recall that ship immediately!" His gnarled hands ground into each other.
The commander of the orbital processor around Jupiter, Captain Davies, looked shocked. "We can't, sir. He radioed that he was disabling all of the radios so the Slorg couldn't track him. Said it was part of the plan."
Conrad Ellison fell back into his chair, his skin a sickly gray. Captain Boggs, his aide, dug frantically through his own desk, looking for the emergency medical kit he kept handy. He appeared next to the Admiral, a bottle of pills and a glass of water at the ready.
The Admiral waved him off, his mind a whirl.
"He said he had your permission! He even showed me authorization with your signature on it. I wasn't going to stand in his way, sir. Besides, your announcement did ask for volunteers. Lieutenant Ellison had all of the qualifications." Davies looked just as stricken as the Admiral.
"Sir?" asked Boggs.
"Z
ach. He took the scout boat with the primer nuke." The aide immediately understood.
"He left you a message, sir," offered the commander.
"We confirm receipt," said Boggs. Looking at the Admiral's sagging face, he spoke to the screen. "There was no way for you to know, Commander Davies. Thank you for all your work in getting the globe set up. We'll be in touch. Discon." The screen faded.
"The last Ellison," muttered the Admiral.
"Do you want to see his message?" asked Boggs. He didn't really know what else to do.
The Admiral waved slightly. "Just, just…give me a minute, Captain. I have to…um…I have to do something…"
Captain Boggs strode over to his desk and spoke quietly into his phone. "Celine. The Admiral is in conference and cannot be disturbed for," he looked over at the broken man. "For at least another half hour." He listened to the secretary at the other end for a moment. "Thirty minutes, Celine. I'm dead serious."
The Defense Forces had several Strike Commands, all under the Admiral. While Admiral Toth was nominally second in command, he was also directing the Fleet out past Mars, and couldn't be spared for coordinating planetary defenses. Boggs thought through the succession question, should Ellison prove unable to command. He strode back across the office, feeling the crush of command. Boggs wasn't exactly taking over the Home Guard, but he felt the sudden load of duty carried by the Admiral. The circuits of Ellison's mind had tripped, and he needed some time to regroup. Boggs was just a temporary bridge.
Boggs sat quietly by the sad, lonely man for a pace, letting him grieve his last child. Ellison slumped in his chair, the slow tears of age trickling down the gullies of his face. Boggs watched the clock occasionally. There were certain things that could not be long delayed. All too soon, the last minutes trickled away. It was time for action.
"Admiral. It is time. We must go to the War Room." Boggs watched as the old man shuddered minutely, then touched his damp cheeks with slight surprise. He wiped them dry quickly, then appeared to fill out as the habits of a lifetime of service to Earth took over. It was, Boggs thought, almost inhuman the way that the Admiral put aside his private grief like a priceless Ming vase when duty to the Fleet called.
The Expanding Universe 4: Space Adventure, Alien Contact, & Military Science Fiction (Science Fiction Anthology) Page 18
