by Trevor Wyatt
I feel the blood drain from my face as I am united with the reality of our present predicament.
We can’t go on fighting this war. But can we afford not to?
I’ve always been a solitary man - unmarried and without kids. Right now, I feel that to be a blessing. The end to which the Terran Union and the Armada are headed to is not an end I would want my family to exist in.
Jeryl
A few hours later, Ashley and I are going over the Wolf Offensive in my private office off CNC. It’s smaller than my old office aboard the original The Seeker, even though the electronics are superior. There’s more computing power in this one chamber than there was in the entirety of the old ship, but it isn’t as comfortable.
“Details of the plan,” I tell her, sending the file to her tablet. “There are 395 ships in the fleet. According to Flynn we’re going to be leading a smaller flotilla of twenty-two ships ranging in size from dreadnoughts to small cruisers and one-man fighters.”
“Are all the flotillas going to be broken up like that?”
“Depending on how many of equal size can be put together from the complement of ships, yes,” I reply. “Some will have more or less of a given weight class, of course. No more than one dreadnought, ever, but anywhere from seven to twelve fighters. Ours has eight, for example.”
She wrinkles up her nose. I almost smile; I always found that expression very cute. But this isn’t the time or place for me to mention it. “Eight isn’t very many,” she says.
“That’s true, but figure that out of the 396 in the entire fleet, you’ll have well over a hundred. And it’s my understanding that this isn’t the only fleet.” She nods, staring at the data on her tablet. “How are the repairs going?” I ask.
“Well enough,” she says with a small smile. “That engineer I was talking to told me it would be ready on his timeline. Then you came over and destroyed all the resistance!”
I grin. “What can I say? Straight from the top.”
“Nothing like cutting through bureaucracy. Anyway, everything’s on schedule, and none of the crew will mind getting some extra sleep period or a little more shore leave.” She shrugs. “As long as those damned inertial dampers are fixed, I don’t care.”
“And the resequencer,” I say. “The coffee on this tub is bad enough without it tasting like soapy water like it does now.” I click my tongue. “Anyway, so look.” I send the attack plan to the room’s main screen. “The main thrust of the Wolf plan will be toward Beta Hydrae, which Terran Command believes is the nexus of Sonali control within this Sector.”
She makes an interested noise as I continue.
“Now, you can see here that Beta Hydrae is a double-star system. The larger component is a blue star about two and a half times the size of our sun.”
“Hot,” she says.
“Very. And it’s also a variable, α2 CVn variable. Lots of metals on its surface layers, uneven temperature distribution across the photosphere, that sort of thing.”
“A place to avoid,” she acknowledges. “The Sonali can’t be from there, can they? I mean, a variable, it’ll flood that system with all sorts of radiation at intervals.” She looks at her tablet.
“They’ve established a series of underground and shielded shelters for a sizable population,” I say. I expand the view. “There are five planets, as you can see here. The third one out from the primary is the one we’re interested in, Beta Hydrae III. No one’s given it a proper name yet. Intelligence says that the place has some sort of religious significance for the Sonali.”
She looks blank. “Like what?”
“No one knows for sure. Something like how the Star of Bethlehem was for Christians.” She nods in understanding. I say, “Anyway, some mythological nonsense. The Union believe if they can wipe it out, it’ll ruin Sonali morale.”
The nose-wrinkling again. “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe.”
“Well, Command thinks it’s worth committing a hell of a lot of resources to do.”
“We’ve been fighting those bastards for a while now,” she says. “Do we have a clear idea yet of the exact volume of space the Sonali control?”
“Intelligence says their territory is roughly half the size of Union space. Our colonies are far-flung, but the Sonali’s are closer together and more developed than ours.”
“What exactly is the point of this mission, Jeryl?” she asks me, as she reads the specifics on her tablet.
I take a pause.
“The main assault will come from the main force,” I say in measured tones. “We expect heavy Sonali resistance. Our job is to take a small contingent of ships through a more circuitous approach. Come at them from another direction while they’re busy holding off our main fleet. And then bombard their infrastructure on the planet and destroy their ability to use their infrastructure on conducting war in the future.”
There’s a pause.
She studies her tablet. “I don’t know,” she says again after a few moments. “I know we’re anxious to strike a decisive blow, but this...capturing or destroying Beta Hydrae III? The Sonali are fanatics, Jeryl. Half the deal with this war is that they see us as heathens, unbelievers. If we crap in their manger, they could really get pissed off. It could be like stepping on a nest of fire ants.”
“I agree; but look, Ash—this could be our last chance. You know as well as I do what the scuttlebutt is; we’re sucking wind in this war. It isn’t going well. This attack is probably the only thing humanity can do.”
“What’s the population according to our estimates?” she asks.
See, this part rankles me. But I know I need to let her in on it.
“We estimate up to 1 billion Sonali are living in shielded subterranean caves or domed and shielded structures,” I say.
Silence.
“We’ll be bombarding the planet to the point to make it tectonically unstable. No ground troops,” I say. “Intelligence estimates that we can accomplish this through sustained bombardment with ten ships. We have twenty in our flotilla in case some get scrapped along the way.”
“Genocide,” she whispers.
“It’s been done to us by them,” I say evenly. I’ve prepared for this. “We’ve done it too. This isn’t the first time.”
“A billion people,” she counters.
“Things are bad out there, Ash,” I reply.
“I don’t want to think they’re that bad that we have to do this,” she says.
“Who the hell does? For the past three years, all Sonali attacks on our territories have come through this route. They’ve all followed this path. It’s as if they make a sort of, I don’t know, a parade pass of Beta Hydrae III on their way to fight. Like they think they’re receiving a blessing or something. Here, look.” I call up some more data files, stuff I know she hasn’t seen. “These are scans from hyper-speed robot probes we’ve sent through that system.”
“What?" she frowns. “Hyper-speed what, now?”
“Robot probes. One of our ships drops out of FTL out past the cometary cloud and spits out a probe, then heads out on full drive again, so fast the Sonali don’t know it’s been there. The probe drops sunward at three times light speed. The hyper-drive fries its instruments, of course, because it’s too small for adequate shielding; but before that happens it whips past III so fast it can’t be detected unless you know exactly where to look. And as it passes, it images the bejesus out of the planet. Then it plunges into the star. Poof! Gone, like it never existed.”
“Well, that’s pretty frictionless,” she says in admiration.
“It is that. So, from those little probes, we know the Sonali have major defenses around III.”
“Fine, but we’re not going to be able to get in like that,” she says. “Looks to me that we’ll have to come in through this nebula, here; the radiation output from its central star will mask our drive signature.”
“That’s exactly right,” I say. Then I see that a peculiar look has crossed her fa
ce.
“Jeryl...”
“What?”
“Well, look at the location of that nebula.”
I don’t get it. “What about it?”
“Do you not recognize those coordinates?”
I scowl at my tablet, and glance up at the main screen as if the larger numbers will jog my memory. And then I see it, I understand her point. “Aw, hell,” I say. “That’s The Mariner Nebula. Goddammit, that’s where I, we, the Union, had First Contact with the Sonali.”
“Yes,” she says in a grim tone. She doesn’t need to say anything more. It’s where the Sonali said they claimed this space and that they didn’t destroy The Mariner.
It’s where the war started.
Well, fuck me.
She says, “If we had filed a different report, then 4 billion people might still be alive and we wouldn’t be at war.”
“I’m not going to argue that,” I mutter. She’s right. And it isn’t as if I haven’t thought about that report a thousand times or more over the past few years. When I walked away from the confrontation, it was like Chamberlain appeasing Hitler. I basically gave those blue-skinned bastards carte blanche to make bolder incursions into our space, because they knew we were there, and that we couldn’t outfight them. The whole thing is my fault.
“Everyone will be annihilated when we destroy that planet, Jeryl,” Ash says again.
“So what? It’s not as if they haven’t killed enough of us over the past five years.”
“Violence begets violence,” she says.
All I can do is stare at her. Where has this come from? Have I been so busy that I haven’t noticed my wife changing before my eyes?
Then I think about it. I’ve changed, too, and I know it. I’m a hell of a lot more cynical than I used to be. “Look, if you can’t do your job,” I say, trying to cover my confusion.
“I understand my job!” she barks. “And I’ll do it to the best of my ability...but I don’t have to be thrilled that it’s being made worse by more killing.”
I struggle to find something to say, but before I can she says, “The ship will be battle-ready within the next 10 hours, sir. I’ll see to it.”
And she turns and leaves the room.
Marriage. And command. The two don’t mix well.
Jeryl
One thing that takes a lot of getting used to in the new fleet—for me, anyway—is the transformation of the ships and stations into what are essentially space-going cities. This, I know, has come about because we want to be seen by the Sonali as being every bit as capable as they are of lofting huge starships. So now our battle cruisers are almost as big as theirs. I personally find it rather wasteful of resources but I can’t deny that the results are impressive as hell.
Our stations? Well, those are now impressive fortresses with guns pointing outward. And filled with opportunities to separate you from your money the moment you walk in.
The Union has contracted with a number of corporations to provide services aboard our stations, which are now so big that they dwarf anything that would ever be conceived five years ago.
I’m standing on Edoris Station looking at the Promenade. There are 5,000 people on this station. Hell, that’s bigger than some global cities were at the end of World War III. Flashy logos and enticing odors meet my eyes as I walk along the station’s central promenade. The corporations have dialed back the level of interaction so that the 3D holos are a lot less “in your face” than their civilian versions, but even so none of this stuff really belongs aboard a space station, as far as I'm concerned.
But I’m older than most of the new blood that’s entered the service. They are a different generation, and are used to different things. The military is catering to them, in my opinion, and I find it irksome. I mean, really, does there need to be a brothel on board this station? I pass by one owned and operated by Trinidec. The girls are pneumatic and hospitable; some of them are even human, as opposed to sexbots. I don’t think they belong here, but it isn’t my call.
I have a bit of downtime, when I don’t have to be in a meeting or reporting to the admiral or overseeing a battle plan. The battle plans are done. Tomorrow we’ll engage the Sonali. Again. But I can’t think about it anymore. I’m restless, dissatisfied.
I left my little cramped office, therefore, and went for a walk through the huge central atrium of the station, what would once have been called a utility core but which has been expanded and reshaped into a vast promenade.
It seems more like a marketplace than a military establishment. Sure, the rank and file of the Armada is happy with the changes that have come down, and it’s good to keep them motivated in the face of this war, but even so, I question the wisdom of it all.
I haven’t spoken to anyone about it, but I’ve done a lot of thinking. I take a seat next to a babbling fountain in a small pocket park off the main drag. Given Earth’s recent history, I suppose it isn’t surprising how we’ve ended up as we are. The corporations were the repositories of vast amounts of money, and during the reconstruction of the planet their surviving officers bought their way via venture capital into seats at the governing table. All the rules were rewritten to allow it, over the strenuous objection of the “old guard.”
So what we have now is a corporate republic, something new under the sun. There are five pillars holding up the society. The first pillar is the President. The second, the legislative body and the senate. The third pillar is the Armada. Then there are the institutions: the Diplomatic service, the courts, the universities, the government offices, and the science establishment. And the final pillar of society is upheld by the corporations, each with its own representative to a “Corporate Council” that advises the government. The corporate media is part of this, as well, monitoring the entire system.
As anyone could expect, with that much money and power floating around, several of the corporations have their own standing fleets of mercenaries and “career” soldiers, in essence private armies that do their masters’ bidding. The corpers have at times been reluctant to put these assets into play during the war with the Sonali. This has resulted in some recent talk of nationalizing those private fleets, absorbing them into the actual military, if the corpers don’t contribute more regularly to the war effort. In an effort to pour some oil on that troubled water, the corpers cut a lot of deals with the fleet to install supply outlets and what not into Armada installations at a far lower rate.
They lost some money up front, as I understand it, but that’s why we now have brand-name fast foods aboard our vessels, and outfits like Trinidec doing hospitality on our station. And let’s not forget Pooz, the hologram giant, providing holodeck gaming services next to the subdued multi-denominational house of worship.
There’s another side of this as well. I pull out my tablet and tap into my e-mail program. There’s a communication there from MacroCode Stargazers LLC, an offer in fact. How they could possibly know that my current hitch is about up is beyond me, but they must—because the e-mail contains an offer to hire me at a salary that is far greater than what I take home as an officer in the Union military. They want to hire “the Avenger,” which is my nickname—the Avenger of The Mariner—to helm their corporate space fleet. These would be state-of-the-art vessels, and I’d have total control over battle plans, supply contractors, everything down to the choice of bands at company dances.
All I’d have to do is resign my commission.
And, may the great spirit of the galaxy help me, I have been considering it.
This is the third time some corporation has tried to pry me away from the Union. I’m under no illusions about it; I’m something of a celebrity, and the corpers trade off that sort of thing. There is no doubt that if I were to take the offer, Ashley and I could have a far better quality of life than we currently do. The new The Seeker is a hell of a ship, but it’s not really military/exploration any longer. It’s all geared toward war. Like we said fuck you to exploring.
I lo
ok around the commercial playground. I know it’s been done to keep the troops happy during this grinding war, but it doesn’t seem right to me. I know from what I've seen of the corper fleets that they are leaner and meaner in some ways than ours now is.
I have seen so many ships destroyed and so many people dying. I’ve done so much killing myself. Tomorrow I will see more, no doubt. I have had my fill of fighting and death. I see the statistics, I watch the numbers of dead tick up. I have become inured to it all. I’ve had to—otherwise I wouldn’t be able to do my job. But after years of it...if the casualties go from 9 to 10 digits of dead people, at what point does it even matter? I feel that I have lost my determination in the face of the endless struggle.
I have accomplished much in the name of the Union. If I could spend my sunset years aboard some sleek corper ship maintaining order in a mining colony or keeping shipping lanes secure, then who’d think the less of me?
As I say, I’m a celebrity.
Well, the answer is, I would think the less of me.
I trash the offer.
I get up from the bench and join the flow of people, walking with no destination in mind. I never used to question my place in all of this, this interlocking structure of our culture. I had my assignment, and I carried it out as best I could. I took pride in it. I had Ashley, and her love.
But when did I ever have peace? When did I ever have a family?
To be honest, I never wanted one; neither did she. But now I’m older, and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to be a father. It feels as if my life has split into pieces, and I am left wondering how to put them together. What am I, who am I, without this war?
Do I love Ashley, or do I simply want comfort from her? Without the war to shape us, to give our lives purpose, what would we be? Would we still even be married?
So much has changed...it’s jarred loose unpleasant thoughts and doubts that now spin around inside my head.
