Glory Boy

by Rick Partlow

  "The conventional engine is just a typical plasma drive," Huntington replied with a shrug and I saw a hint of disapproval in his eye from Deke's lack of military formality. Oh well, he'd have to get used to that. The only "uniform" we were wearing were unmarked black utility fatigues without so much as a name on them. "It's not particularly powerful, just your typical auxiliary engine, bleeding plasma off the main reactor. We saved the good stuff for your Teller-Fox unit."

  Huntington sauntered back to join Deke at the aft end of the spacecraft, gesturing up at the bulge of her engine compartments, oversized compared to the rest of her. "The missile cutters have two superconductive capacitor coils, so they can leave one charged for a quick Transition and use the other to absorb the energy flux when the warp field takes a hit. You follow me?"

  I nodded acknowledgement. We'd covered a bit of this in the Academy before I left, and the rest I'd received via an accelerated course utilizing my headcomp in the weeks we'd been training on Inferno. The Teller-Fox warp unit that opened the temporary wormhole into Transition Space had the side-effect of sending ripples of spacetime away from the source of the field. This made it perfect for doubling as a defense shield, but it had its limits: any kinetic or thermal energy that hit the field had to be absorbed, and if the field overloaded, it tended to collapse, taking whatever was in the middle of it with it into subatomic destruction. That was why warships carried double capacitors.

  "Well," Huntington went on, "these ships have three." He grinned. "So, this girl can absorb a lot of punishment, or you can leave one to absorb energy for the field and the other two to pull off multiple Transitions in a short period of time."

  Deke whistled, obviously impressed. "How the hell did you squeeze three coils into a ship this small?" he wanted to know.

  "They're experimental," the Major told him proudly. "They basically had to be assembled molecule by molecule in a nanite vat in the industrial center at L-5 back in the Solar System. I'd say each of them cost more than the whole drive system on a cruiser." He chuckled. "Try not to break it."

  "Weapons?" I asked, looking the thing over. If it had weapons ports, I couldn't see them.

  "The missile launch bays are internal," he explained, gesturing to slight bulges in the fuselage at the bases of the wings. "You can carry up to twelve missiles, all of them launched by low-signature coldgas propellant before their main engine kicks in, which should make it impossible for the enemy to target you from thermal sensors." He walked around the massive landing skids to the center of the fuselage and gently thumped his fist there. "The only other weapon is a laser fed by the reactor. Honestly, it's not much for space-to-space and if you have to get into a stand-up fight out there, you're screwed."

  "Don't sugar coat things just to make us feel better," Deke muttered, cocking an eyebrow at the man.

  "I'll be straight with you two," Huntington said, shrugging. "This ship is a marvel of stealth technology and it will get you through an enemy's orbital picket and sensor suite if you don't do anything stupid, and it should get you out as fast as possible. But it's not an assault shuttle and it's not a missile cutter; it's built to run and hide. Don't try to shoot it out with the Tahni in this thing."

  "Roger that, Major," I assured him.

  "Now," he smiled again, even broader, "I'd like to introduce you to Raven."

  I looked from him to Deke, confused. Deke shoot his head, uncomprehending.

  Good morning, Captain Mitchell.

  I looked around by instinct, even though a neurolink transmission could have been coming from anywhere on the planet or even in orbit. Usually, I knew who was speaking by the ID signal attached to the transmission, and even by the "voice" attached to it. But this one sounded...different. And the only ID signal was a ship's military call sign...

  Wait a minute.

  Raven? I ventured. Are you...is this the ship's computer?

  I am the Artificial Intelligence system for the CFS Raven, Captain Mitchell, the "voice" said. For purposes of conversation, it is perfectly acceptable to refer to me as Raven.

  Umm...thanks. Nice to meet you.

  It was weird talking to a computer. I knew Earthers used AI a lot, but it wasn't that way on Canaan, and from what I'd seen since I left, it wasn't that way in the colonies either. Real AI were expensive and rare anywhere off Earth and I think most people didn't feel comfortable around them. I knew I didn't.

  "There's a full ViR training simulation for the Raven set up for you back in the headquarters building," Huntington was saying. "You'll need to run it as many times as you can before you take her out on your first operation."

  Our first operation, I repeated to Deke privately, still looking the ship up and down. Holy shit, we're really going to do this.

  Yeah, he replied, and for the first time I could sense a subdued tone to his thoughts, like it was really sinking in. Murdock said we leave in thirty hours. Then the next group thirty hours after us, and so on. He looked over at me and I knew for certain right then: he was scared, and not just for himself. All of us could be dead in a few days.

  "Come on," I said to him aloud, putting a hand on his shoulder and steering him away from the ship. "Let's go run some simulations before dinner. We'll get it figured out."

  ***

  Dinner was a much more solemn affair than I'd hoped for. We'd gotten into the habit of eating together when possible the last few weeks, for all that some of us weren't that fond of each other, mostly because there wasn't anyone else to talk to at our remote base. We were purposefully out in the middle of nowhere, though Colonel Murdock had assured us that we would be allowed to visit the nearest cities at some point, once we'd finished acclimatizing to our new situation, whatever that meant.

  He means once they see whether we're going to be alive long enough for it to be worth the trouble, Deke had told me silently at the time.

  So, the communal dinner had become a new tradition and I think we all knew that night that this might be the last one we all shared together. The table in the small mess was rectangular, and the whole thing began to remind me of DaVinci's "The Last Supper" after a while, if Jesus had been two meters tall and ebony skinned: Mat was sitting in the central spot, as usual, with Daniela as his Mary Magdalene.

  What did that make me? I wondered.

  Was I John, faithful and loyal, or Peter, brash and imprudent? Or perhaps Thomas, always doubting and needing to have it proved to him. At least I was fairly sure I wasn't Judas.

  We made small talk that evening, and dutifully shoveled down the bland, machine-cooked food and tried not to say the things we all desperately wanted to say. Holly sat on one side of me, Deke on the other and it helped to know that there were at least two people here out of this unlikely group that I could call my friends.

  Afterwards, Holly and I retreated to her room; we didn't have to bunk with anyone here, at least. The base was big enough and our ranks sufficient that we each had fairly sizable quarters to ourselves, though we were lacking in anything personal to put in them yet. Murdock was working on having our personal files retrieved from the network where our 'links had been backed up. Holly had managed to find a few images of her parents and sister from a family album on the 'net she still had the access codes for. She'd uploaded them to a frame and it was cycling their photos on the stand next to her bed.

  I didn't even have that option, and I wasn't sure I'd have used it if I did. I missed my family like a dull ache that I'd gotten used to. Staring at images of them every time I walked into my room would be like picking that wound open and making sure it never healed.

  "Have you been briefed yet?" she asked me after, when we lay tangled together in a knot of sheets and sweat and each other.

  "Yeah," I admitted, realizing I'd finally have to talk about it. "We're hitting a small staging base on a semi-habitable moon of a gas giant in some system with more numbers than letters."

  "Hitting it how?" She had to ask.

  "It's what the Colonel referred to in o
ur training as a morale reduction operation," I told her reluctantly. "And there's a fucking euphemism for you."

  She pulled herself up on top of me, her flesh warm and sticky against mine, her chin resting on my chest as she stared into my eyes. It felt like she weighed next to nothing.

  "He told us that was what we were going to do," she reminded me. "I know you've done it in the ViR simulators. We all have."

  "This is different," I insisted. "This doesn't feel like fighting, Holly. It feels like murder."

  "Cal," she said gently, teasing at my sparse and light-colored chest hair, "these are soldiers, fighting a war."

  "You've read about their society," I countered. "They're brought up from birth being told that their ruler is God in the flesh, practically brainwashed. They're doing what they were raised to do."

  "I know," she said, her voice sad but also fatalistic. "That's what makes them so damn dangerous. That's why we're doing this. Because Cal, if we can't make them not believe that their ruler is an infallible god, then the only way we're going to beat them is to kill every last one of them, before they kill every last one of us."

  I let my head fall back against her pillow.

  "You're right," I told her. "It scares the shit out of me, though. After this, are we going to be the same people anymore?"

  "It won't change you unless you let it," she said. Her eyes had a faraway look. "Brian and I are going to one of the colonies they bombed, out where the Neutral Zone used to be. They've set up show-the-flag bases on them, as a sign to their people that they're doing this for the glory of the Empire."

  She cocked her head thoughtfully. "We could just send missile cutters in from the new Attack Command, nuke their base. But they'd just send more soldiers and build another base and it would be the cost of doing business for them." Her eyes focused on me again, and I saw her lower lip quiver as she tried to be cold and ruthless but failed. "But when the next resupply mission comes and finds them all the way we're going to leave them...they won't be able to shrug that off and they won't be able to cover it up. Colonel Murdock is right about that. Soldiers talk, whether they're human or Tahni."

  I hugged her to me tightly. I knew what she was doing: she was practicing what she was going to say, how she was going to justify it to herself afterward, how she was going to reconcile what she'd have to do with who she was. I felt her breath catch and a shudder went through her, and I kissed her, her cheeks and her forehead and her eyes before I covered her mouth with mine. Her lips opened and I could feel her eagerness to push it all away again for a little longer.

  For me, I felt something slipping away, something I desperately wanted to hold onto, but I knew I couldn't. We stayed together the rest of that night, talked little and slept not at all. But in the morning, I had to go begin the pre-mission prep, and so did she. I wouldn't see her again until after. Until after everything was different, after everything had changed. Holly watched me leave her room from her bed, the covers tossed aside carelessly and her propped up on an elbow as if she was letting me take one last look. So, I did, in that second before the door slid shut.

  I knew with what they'd put in me, I could call that image back, relive that memory any time I chose. Maybe that would be the one I'd play back when a Tahni grenade had blown a hole through my chest too big for the nanites to fix. One last memory of having some fun with Holly. I wanted to call it making love, but I had a sudden conviction that the term would be childish and dishonest. We didn't love each other that way; she'd said it from the beginning, we were friends. I had wanted it to be more, to be the thing that finally got Rachel out of my head, but Holly wasn't looking for love. She wanted a friend she could trust, a comrade close enough and sure enough that she could satisfy her sexual cravings with someone she liked. But that wasn't a feeling of wanting to court as we said it back on Canaan.

  I was her friend and her teammate and we enjoyed each other's company in bed and that was all it was ever going to be. That all came to me in that moment, frozen in my memory like a statue of pure neutronium.

  I headed down the hall, looking for Deke, looking to get back to work.

  Chapter Thirteen

  There was no sound. The narrow hallways and low-ceilinged rooms of the small, prefab outpost were silent, with neither a breath nor a heartbeat to betray a sign of life. Then I began to hear a gentle "tap-tap-tap;" when I looked around for the source, I discovered it was the slow runoff of blood dripping fitfully off the laser-honed blades of my wrist talons and landing in tell-tale splashes on the hard, polymer floor.

  I felt as if I'd just fallen into a nightmare, dropped into place in media res and not knowing how I'd arrived there. But my brain filled in the details like movies playing in my headcomp. The flight from Hermes: days of utter boredom and constant tension and endless ViR simulations. Was this another simulation? Had my grasp on reality slipped, was I only imagining this was real?

  Either way, the blood wouldn't stick to me. The chemical coating of the blades shed it, and the Reflex armor's molecular makeup wouldn't let any liquid stain its surface. It was all around me, pools of it, splashes of it, gathered in oceans of red around the bodies of the Tahni soldiers. They'd died in their bunks, or in the kitchen, or in the control rooms, or lying sprawled in the hallways, their faces frozen in pain and terror, hands in the midst of some gesture to ward off evil.

  We'd come out of T-space on the other side of the gas giant, from out of the system's primary to mask our warp signature. The giant planet had filled our forward view screens, a god clothed in robes of purple and orange, mocking our mortal squabbles with its sheer mass. Radiation from it had hammered at our shields as we stayed just far away enough to keep the warp field in place, riding the gravity slingshot around until we reached the orbit of the moon.

  It was a desolate place, half ice and only habitable for us or the Tahni in isolated valleys between snow-capped mountains where thorny brush held fast against the burrowing animals that fed on it and the predators that fed on them. We'd waited for a radiation spike from the gas giant that would scramble their sensors, then come in on the opposite side of the moon from their base and skimmed the ice until we'd found a flat spot in the mountains.

  It was well below zero outside and the oxygen was thin in the mountains. We'd had to wear breathing gear for the run down into the valley, but we'd left it behind to be reclaimed on the trip back. The base seemed like a waste of time, but the Tahni thought long term. For the moment, it only held the construction crew for a defense laser, the pit for it half dug by the massive excavators we'd passed, but eventually it would serve as the base for a project to mine the gas giant's atmosphere remotely. Or it would have. This crew wouldn't be constructing anything.

  Their screams still echoed through the dead silence, like a ringing in my ears, yet I felt nothing. I stepped over corpses with their entrails spread out around them, past faces gone paste-white as the blood drained out of them, and yet I felt nothing. I had a thought that my headcomp was keeping me from feeling anything, because it would compromise my situational awareness, but even that thought was somewhere so deep it barely scratched at my conscious mind. Maybe the bitter cold outside had simply frozen my conscience.

  I opened the door at the end of the hallway and found the last of them. He was curled up inside a closet, with the handgun he'd use to kill himself still wrapped in his oddly curled, overlong fingers, and the top of his skull blown off. The walls of the storage closet were awash in his blood and brains. He must have seen what we were doing to the others, I figured. Seen it and been too terrified to try to stop it, too terrified to die that way.

  How scared did you have to be to put a gun to your own head and blow your brains out instead of trying to fight?

  Clear this way, I told Deke, no emotion in the statement.

  I got the last one over here, he told me, calling from the maintenance garage on the other side of the complex, where they serviced the huge excavators. Unless someone ran into the brush
and crawled into a hole, I think that's everyone.

  If they did, I said, that's probably even better.

  They'd spread the word. The demons were here and the Emperor wouldn't save them. Nothing could save them from us.

  ***

  I wiped the vomit off the corner of my mouth with the back of my hand, then shut the toilet lid and kicked the flush button. The smell in the tiny ship's head was strong and I almost puked again at the stench, but I lurched out through the narrow, swinging door and slammed it shut behind me.

  Deke was standing outside the little compartment, arms crossed, leaning against the bulkhead. I searched his eyes for some sign of mockery or disapproval, but only saw sympathy. I wasn't sure that wasn't worse.

  I'd kept it all bottled inside me on the run back into the mountains, hadn't thought of anything except evading the automated sensors and the orbital drones on the way out. We were lucky in that: the Tahni didn't believe in automated weapons. It was against their incredibly dense and complex religion, if something that stemmed from their reproductive cycle and governed every part of their life could be simplified into calling it a religion.

  We'd blasted out with our turbines, again timing it with a radiation burst, hoping it would fuck up their sensors enough that they wouldn't be able to tell we'd ever been there, so that there'd be no explanation for what had happened to their troops. Then it was out the way we'd come and back into T-space. And that's when it had hit me, just after the artificial gravity kicked in with our warp field. I'd barely made it to the toilet in time.

  "You could have made your biofeedback loop keep you from having to throw up," Deke pointed out.

  "I feel better now," I told him, leaning back against the bulkhead on the other side of the hatch to the head, drawing in deep breaths. "I feel better getting rid of it." I looked back over to him. "We were on that moon for less than four hours, Slick. Between the hike down the mountain and back up, and the recon, and waiting for the next radiation spike from the gas giant, we were inside less than half an hour. How many of them did you kill?"