Breach the Hull

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  He clicked off the photo plate and put it away. It was time to go on duty.

  Heading for the command deck, Camden felt grateful for the dull tapping of his footsteps, for the tinny clang when he knocked on the bulkhead, for the presence of all the small sounds that filled Chang Station. He was midway down the ladder be-tween levels when the alert siren sounded, and his heart leapt at the raw, dizzying wail that filled the cramped corridors. He dropped the last few feet of the tube and darted along a short passage to the command deck. Major Wyle stood there, his face taut with worry.

  “Pre-signal, code Foxtrot-Kilo-3-1-Niner,” he announced, then looking up, “Morning, Captain Camden.”

  “Major,” responded Camden as he took up his post and launched the mandatory diagnostic check of their decrypting array. “System check,” he said, then when a green light flashed, added, “All channels open and clear.”

  “Pray for good news,” said Wyle.

  In anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours, a message, already as much as a year old, would follow the pre-signal, traveling from the Killer Eye command ship four luminal months out from the Weed system. Communications with command were infrequent; the last had been the required notification to Camden, as next of kin, of his brother’s death.

  Captain Ambrov entered the command deck, moved to the gunner’s station, and initiated the priming sequence for the torch.

  “What’s the word, boys? We going live?”

  “Don’t know, yet,” Wyle said.

  Regulations required all stations to be manned during communications transmissions. A moment later, Lieutenant Nakata joined them.

  “Captain Camden, your turn to call odds,” she said.

  “Right,” said Camden. “Okay, given we’re still technically under cease fire, I’d say 500,000 to 1 we’re getting kill orders. 50 to 1 it’s a war report, 20 to 1 it’s just a morale booster.”

  “What about peace?” asked Ambrov. “The last war report sounded promising for further negotiations.”

  “That had to be spin. How far do you think they can get with the Weeds by trading holographic projections of mathematical equations?” asked Wyle.

  “Gotta start somewhere,” said Ambrov.

  “All right,” interjected Camden. “Odds on peace are a million to 1. Get your bets on the table.”

  “Wait,” Nakata said. “What about a false signal? The last war report also warned the Weeds might be catching onto our communications tech. Maybe it’s a trick.” “Rumors, that’s all,” Wyle said. “Something to keep us on our guard.” “Rumors from almost two years ago,” said Nakata. “Could be the Weeds learn fast. Captain Camden?”

  “Fine, 100,000 to 1 it’s a ruse,” offered Camden.

  “Better odds than peace or a kill order,” commented Nakata.

  “Yeah, because you’re making me paranoid. Now, open channels with our sister stations for verification,” Camden said. “We should find out if anyone else is acti-vated.”

  Each soldier scribbled an amount on a scrap of paper and tossed it into a small depression on the central command table. They’d started the no-limit betting game and kept a running tally in honor of Vegas Strip, and they bet on just about anything they could. Captain Ambrov was up $653,486 over everyone else, and she insisted that she aimed to collect every cent of it when they were all discharged.

  After placing her bet Nakata arranged the controls to relay between the four near-est stations. Camden listened to the steady hum of the machinery that surrounded them and the tinny beeps from Ambrov’s monitor as she powered up the torch. The directed energy weapon could be aimed to strike a target as small as a single Weed or as sprawling as a city. The Killer Eye program was meant to give humanity a chance to hurt the Weeds badly enough to end the conflict. Fighting head to head, the Weeds seemed unbeatable. They’d been a spacefaring race longer than mankind; they had faster ships and better weapons. And communications at the speed of thought let thousands of them act as one in executing battle tactics. Humanity’s only chance was to remain unpredictable and attack by surprise. The Navy had been forced back almost all the way to Earth before the latest cease-fire. The next time hostilities reached a fever pitch the Killer Eyes would certainly be activated.

  Lately it seemed more and more imminent. Observations of the Weed homeworld indicated they were constructing a new type of starship that would dwarf their other battleships, one possibly intended for a final assault against Earth. Expert analysis estimated a decade at least before it could make an attack. Most of the human pop-ulation held out hope for a peace agreement before then, but two previous cease-fires had failed, and the current one seemed destined for stalemate.

  The Weeds simply rejected the concept of humans as being equal to themselves.

  Camden wondered if his brother were truly dead. Because no one taken prisoner by the Weeds had ever been recovered, military policy declared those captured as killed in action after thirty days. But maybe Zarrow still lived, caged in some silent prison where the Weeds studied him. Or maybe they’d dissected him alive. Or incinerated him. There were hundreds of stories about what the Weeds did to prisoners, but not a shred of evidence to prove any of them.

  The uncertainty somehow made the loss all the more painful. A military death declaration worked to close the files, but for Camden it just emphasized how alone he was now with his entire family ushered into oblivion. All he had left was the mili-tary, and they’d made him into more of a machine than a man. His physical needs were rigidly satiated, his emotional needs neatly cataloged and accounted for. They’d been told they were special, that as Killer Eyes they were granted responsibilities and privileges beyond those of common soldiers. But the freedom, the self-reliance, the isolation were illusions crafted to disguise that fact that KE soldiers were no more than carefully chosen, strictly trained triggers—extensions of the military intelligence machine. With minor variations, the soldiers on all thirty-five Killer Eye stations were exactly the same, as if they’d been stamped out of clay on a factory line. They ate, they slept, they excreted, they copulated, but mostly they did their assigned duties and spent as much time alone as possible. There was no need for discourse or de-bate; they were all perfectly attuned to each other. Like members of a cult, it had re-cently occurred to Camden, and for the first time in his tour of duty it bothered him. He hadn’t considered it much before his brother died, before the dreams started, before the scent of Lieutenant Nakata’s sweat began to linger in his memory for days. But now the irony seemed inescapable—to fight the Weeds they’d shed their humanity and become in some ways exactly like their enemy.

  Camden’s gaze drifted to Lieutenant Nakata. He wondered if she felt any of this, if she’d been drawn to him like he’d been to her, or if she were just going along with him out of duty.

  “Comm channel check. Confirm status,” Nakata said, snapping Camden out of his thoughts.

  He ran the program and scowled. “No contact with our sister stations.” “How can that be?” asked Nakata. “Interference?”

  “Between us and all four of our sister bases simultaneously? Unlikely,” replied Camden. “Besides, all readings are clear, and we’ve had minimal sunspot activity for three weeks.”

  “Maybe technical failure?” she offered. “Our comm gear is due for maintenance in two days.”

  “I’m checking that now,” said Camden. “And all equipment appears fine. Could be failure on one of the other bases but not all five simultaneously. Do we have line of sight with any of the stations?”

  Nakata summoned a fresh display on her monitor. “Philip Station will be in posi-tion in forty-five seconds. Go to Morse laser for contact confirmation?” Monitoring the conversation, Major Wyle glanced over Nakata’s shoulders at her screen, and said, “We’ve never used the signal laser, Lieutenant Nakata. It’s meant as a last resort. The Weeds could see it. How long will we have line of sight with Philip Station?”

  “Approximately nineteen minutes before planet rise
puts Vegas Strip between us and them,” Nakata told him.

  “Then, let’s wait and see if our orders come through,” said Wyle.

  “Major Wyle, all D-E-W systems active,” Captain Ambrov announced. “Targeting systems operational. The torch is primed and ready to light.” “Thank you, Captain.”

  The alert siren blared back to life with dizzying urgency. Wyle darted to his station, while Camden and Nakata managed the incoming signal.

  “That was fast,” Nakata observed.

  “Record time,” said Ambrov. “Anyone else getting a bad feeling about this?” “Quiet,” Wyle snapped.

  Camden’s fingers clacked over his keyboard, assigning computers to the decrypt their orders and route them directly to Major Wyle’s station. A cold draft of tension crept through the room as each soldier waited. The signal transmitted for several minutes then ended. Major Wyle’s eyes remained glued to his monitor as the decrypted orders scrolled across his screen. He read them over twice and cross-checked them against his mission journal.

  “Is that it?” he asked.

  “Yes, Sir,” answered Camden. “It cut short.”

  Wyle turned to Nakata. “Status of comm channels, Lieutenant?” “Still off-line, Sir.”

  “Line of sight with Philip Station?” “Open for another nine minutes.”

  “All right, activate the laser. We need confirmation,” Wyle ordered. “Sir?” asked Nakata.

  “We have been assigned a target and ordered to fire,” Wyle told them. “I want confirmation.”

  “What is our target, Sir?” asked Ambrov.

  Wyle tapped his keyboard and relayed the decrypted portion of their orders to the other stations. On each monitor appeared: “Arbor Spaceport Omega, 09:00.” It was a prime target in the planet’s southern hemisphere.

  “That’s it?” asked Ambrov.

  “It came in segmented and heavily coded. There might have been more to it, something that got truncated,” said Camden. His fingers crawled over his console. “More was embedded in the transmission, but the signal ended before we received the final close code, so we can’t decrypt the rest.”

  “Then our orders are incomplete,” noted Wyle. “I’d say they’re pretty clear, Major,” Nakata said.

  “We could be missing something important, like a secondary target, or a firing condition,” Wyle countered. “I don’t like proceeding on half-baked information.” “The rest of it was probably just a war report,” said Camden. “An update on ne-gotiations.”

  “Or lack of them,” added Ambrov.

  “We don’t know that for sure,” said Wyle.

  “Commencing signal to Philip Station,” Nakata announced.

  The four soldiers waited, outwardly still, yet each of them running mental drills as their battle training swept them into fight mode. They imagined the strike and the inevitable Weed retaliation; they wondered what had happened to bring about activation of the Killer Eyes. If one base acted alone, it was almost certain the Weeds would locate and destroy it. Only if all of the KE stations fired simultaneously to utterly devastate the Weed world could any of them really hope to survive. But there was always the possibility that command needed just one heavy attack to make a point to the Weeds, to win an advantage in negotiations, or to eliminate a critical target. For that, a single KE station was expendable.

  “No reply from Philip Station,” Nakata reported. “Their sensors should’ve sighted our laser by now.”

  Wyle stood and rubbed his forehead with his thumb and forefinger. “Captain Camden, you care to give odds on whether or not Philip Station still exists?” “No, Sir,” Camden said. “Bets are already on the table.”

  “Consider this a new hand,” Wyle replied. “Because we all know what happens after we light the torch. Unless it’s a prelude to an all-out attack against the Weeds, there’s no doubt they’ll find us and destroy us. For all we know, that’s what happened to Philip Station. Maybe they received orders before us and acted. Or maybe some-thing just went wrong over there and Philip Station is down by a quirk of fate. They could’ve been gone for weeks. Our last communication with them was—what?”

  “Seven months ago,” Nakata supplied.

  “But the loss of radio communication with the other stations suggests something more at work,” Wyle said.

  “Like maybe the Weeds are jamming our transmissions,” said Camden. “The kill order could be a trick to flush us out. The truncated signal would camouflage the fact that the Weeds don’t have the close codes needed to authenticate the orders. They’re hoping we’ll overlook that and give ourselves away.”

  “So, they’re fishing,” said Wyle. “Could be they’ve got an idea we’re here, but they don’t know for sure.”

  “Which might also explain the silence from our sister stations,” interjected Nakata. “Maybe they figured this out ahead of us and went dark.” “So, of course, we go blundering in with the damn Morse laser,” said Ambrov. “Great.”

  “Not likely the Weeds’ll notice our laser with Vegas Strip so close by,” said Wyle. “Anyway, we’ve got bigger problems to worry about.”

  “Such as?” asked Nakata.

  “Do we fire?” said Wyle.

  “We have orders,” said Ambrov.

  “But our orders are incomplete and unverified,” Wyle pointed out. “The absence of a close code aborts authorization. For all we know, this could be a drill or a targeting test—something that would’ve been disclosed in the portion we lost.”

  “Or KE command could’ve been destroyed before completing transmission,” said Camden. “When have we ever gotten orders so fast after a pre-signal? They were rushing. There had to be a reason.”

  “You think the cease fire broke?” asked Nakata. Camden shrugged.

  “How long would it take to replace KE command?” said Ambrov.

  “Eighteen months at least before another ship can be moved into position,” said Wyle. “If that’s the case then we’re now under the direct command of General Cuidera.”

  “Which leaves us with a three-year turnaround if we request confirmation,” said Camden. “And our orders are to fire in just under two hours.” “Reassess the transmission, Camden. Maybe we missed something,” said Wyle. “I’ve checked it six times, Sir. We’ve gotten everything we’re going to out of it.” Major Wyle settled into his seat and peered at his monitor while he replayed the full transmission, watching the progress bar track across the width of his screen only to halt and freeze just before the end, leaving him with nothing more than a jarringly succinct time and target.

  “All right,” he said, turning back to the others. “We’re cut off and it’s up to us to decide. Anyone have a problem with that?”

  “We have our orders right here,” said Camden, tapping his screen. “What’s there to decide? At 09:00 we fire.”

  “So you’re not worried it might be a Weed trick?”

  “Does it matter? We take out one of their key spaceports, give them a black eye,” said Camden.

  “And give ourselves away,” said Wyle. “Maybe even blow cover for the whole KE program.”

  “It won’t matter if all stations fire.”

  “We don’t know that will happen,” Wyle argued.

  “Listen, if the orders are legit, then all stations probably received a target. Maybe some of them even received the full transmission. And if it’s a trick—if the Weeds are out there fishing—then somehow they’ve gotten their hands on some radio gear and they’re jamming our communications and transmitting blind. That means everyone’s getting the same message, the same orders. They’ll fire.”

  “Not without verification,” said Wyle. “Absence of verification negates an order. Effectively we have no kill order. That’s protocol. We’re out here on our own, con-nected by the slenderest of threads to the rest of the military. We are not a bunch of cowboys. Procedure is the only thing that holds us together. It’s been that way since day one, and that’s how it has to be now. Captain Ambrov, power down th
e D-E-W.”

  “Wait,” said Camden. “Have you forgotten what we all enlisted to do? We’re here to defend Earth.”

  “We won’t do that by launching an unauthorized attack that could jeopardize our entire mission,” said Wyle.

  “What if they’re counting on us?” Camden asked. “Waiting for us to soften up the Weeds before bringing the fleet into position?”

  “We’d have received a war report and orders,” replied Wyle. “We just did,” Camden insisted.

  “No, what we’ve got is an unverified signal from an unidentified source. Less than an hour ago, you—yourself—called better odds on it being a deception than a kill order,” said Wyle.

  “Yeah, and Ambrov really thinks she’s going to collect her winnings from us after our tour,” Camden said. “You can’t take that seriously.”

  “What I take seriously is that I’m not willing to gamble with our mission,” said Wyle. “Captain Camden, report to your quarters until further notice. I will not have you brewing dissent.”

  Camden stiffened as though he’d been struck. He clamped his mouth shut, saluted stiffly, and then exited the command room, pausing to glance back once at Lieutenant Nakata. Her worried expression burned like a bonfire in contrast to the pale passiveness on Captain Ambrov’s face, and though he wasn’t sure why, Camden took comfort from it. Then he was in the well and climbing to the upper level.

  He bypassed his room and headed instead to the observation chamber. Vegas Strip filled the sky with saccharine ribbons of color, a sight Camden had seen many times, but one of which he never wearied. He knew that if he ever returned to Earth, this of all the things he had done and seen since his enlistment would remain bright-est in his memory. The mesmerizing whorls of color swirling through bands that seemed to be spinning like the cutting edge of a power saw. The light and dark flashes of storm activity. The contradictory sensation of serenity that such wonderful chaos fostered in him. This proof of the sheer wonder of the universe. This reminder of the magnitude of humanity’s accomplishments in challenging cold, harsh space and conquering it. He wondered if the Weeds saw Vegas Strip the way he did, if any single living creature among them was capable of looking upon the planet and expe-riencing the awe it inspired in him.