“Sure,” Smythe said. “Wellamay Island used to be a nice layover.”
Colm nodded. He remembered lounging on the beach, watching dugong-like beasts feed on the surf flowers, while the locals plied him and Smythe and Bekkelund with cocktails and praise. There were perks to being in the air support division. But that had been several months ago, and now Wellamay Island was seething with Ghosts.
“Heard an explosion,” Tan said, “headed back to the bird. Couldn’t get near it. Ghosts multiplied out of nowhere, surrounded the ship. My gunner died trying to get through. My copilot had stayed on board. They hacked the ship to pieces. Had to ID his bones.”
“Fucking Ghosts.” Colm laughed wryly. “This isn’t how I planned to spend the prime of my life.”
“Me neither,” Tan said. “But you can’t say no to the deployment bonuses.”
“I was hoping to get posted to Alpha Andromedae.” Colm named humanity’s furthest-away colony, 98 light years from Earth. Now lost, of course. It had fallen to the Ghosts while Colm was in basic training.
“Why Alpha Andromedae, Collie Mack?” Smythe said curiously.
“It’s far away.” Colm tossed her a smile. “What about you, Smythe? What did you want to do?”
“This,” Smythe said. “But I planned on winning.”
Silence fell.
It was very different deorbiting to Majriti IV during the day. No electrical storms. Colm dived towards a sea of cotton-candy clouds. Other gunships painted plasma contrails on the upper atmosphere.
When they got down through the clouds, they saw Sebraiville. And twin mushroom clouds sprouting from the city center.
“Nukes,” Colm acknowledged.
“Stage Three?” Smythe said.
The mushroom clouds were blurring into a greasy black pall as the wind pushed them away from the city. Colm wondered again: where did the Ghosts get the fissile material? There were no nuclear reactors on Majriti IV ...
... except for the one purring away in the boot of Colm’s ship. And a hundred others just like it.
Tan: they hacked my ship to pieces.
“Shit,” Colm said, suddenly seeing it. “You don’t need to defeat two-factor authentication if you have a power saw. Board the ship, hit the crash dump switch, cut the reactor out of the engineering space, and transfer the fuel salt into shielded containers. Or skip the shielding, if you aren’t bothered about your guys falling over dead. Then cart the whole lot off and set it up somewhere—where?”
“Thousands of islands,” Smythe said. “Could be anywhere.”
Colm nodded. The Corps had been losing ships for upwards of a year. All that time, the Ghosts must have been collecting the little thorium reactors that powered their drives. Running them in some hidden place on this under-populated world. Extracting the uranium-233 that thorium reactors produced as a byproduct. Sintering it into hemispheres.
Building nukes, in preparation for this attack on the heart of the colony.
“They don’t do that,” Tan said.
“They don’t what?” Smythe said. “Don’t plan ahead? Don’t understand the nuclear fuel cycle? Don’t learn from us?”
Colm concentrated on his final descent, retrofiring his auxiliaries to dump speed. Down in Sebraiville, it would sound like cannons firing in the sky as one gunship after another broke the sound barrier. They were long past the point of worrying about noise pollution.
Two nukes.
Was that it? Or were there more coming?
If I was a Ghost, I wouldn’t stop at two.
Sebraiville Spaceport traffic control came on the radio. Extreme congestion. Oh, and nuclear fallout. Give us time to clear the landing zone, guys.
“Who could possibly have foreseen that?” Colm muttered. He told the Marines in the cabin what was going on, then banked and pointed the gunship away from the spaceport, entering a holding pattern that took him out over Sebraiville’s suburbs. Boulevards wound through fluffy foliage. Mansions built from the toffee-colored local limestone peeked out of the trees. Every colonist an aristocrat ... but on Majriti IV, the dream had soured years ago, when the first Ghosts appeared. Now, fences topped with barbed wire and dry branches surrounded these fancy properties. As if that would keep Ghosts out.
From up here, it looked like the entire population of the city was on the move. Helicopters zipped around like wind-up toys. Traffic clogged the streets. Where did all these people think they were going? The Unsinkable couldn’t take all of them. Not even close.
Colm banked again, flew along a railway that speared down out of the snow-capped mountains in the middle of the island. Before the war, this line would have carried ores down from the mines and holiday-makers up to the ski slopes.
“Hey,” Tan said. “Didn’t they stop all the trains?”
A gunmetal slug slid along the railway, fifty klicks from the city.
“Guess someone didn’t get the memo,” Colm said.
Traffic Control interrupted, “Warpig Ten, you are cleared to land.”
“Roger,” Colm said. “Control, do you know anything about a train heading into Sebraiville?”
“There are no trains running.”
“There’s one.”
And it was going awfully fast. Racing towards the undefended suburbs of the capital.
Colm had been at this a long time. He trusted his instincts. He did a barrel roll and screamed across the railway, low enough to capture high-rez images of the bullet-shaped locomotive and all the carriages behind it.
Ore cars.
With no ore in them, but a tarp covering the one behind the locomotive, and under that tarp—this information came from his infrared and LiDAR vision, computer-merged with the visible spectrum—a dozen large crates.
Funny: those crates were warm.
Maybe there were people hiding inside them.
Or maybe ...
“Gunny, have a look at these images.”
“Nukes,” Smythe said immediately.
“What I thought. Load the dual-stage rounds.”
“Uh ... sir?” Even Smythe was taken aback.
“We are not losing this world. We are not evacuating the rich fucks and leaving everyone else to get blown up. Load the fucking rounds.”
“Yes, sir,” Smythe said.
The train had pulled ahead. Colm threw the ship into another barrel roll, flipping through 90° again. Gee-force yanked them sideways. The Marines in the back sat stoically—theirs not to question why. Tan was going nuts. Colm tuned him out, flying lower, overhauling the train.
“Aim for the locomotive, Smythe, and fire at will.”
“Yes, sir,” Smythe said joyously.
The dual-stage rounds, ironically, carried nuclear charges. The explosive first stages penetrated the housing of the locomotive’s electric engine. The nuclear second stages turned it into a fountain of shrapnel that plunged off the rails. The shockwave spanked the gunship as it howled on and up, into the toxic clouds overhanging the city.
*
ONE OF THE HOMEMADE nukes on the train detonated a few minutes later, flattening a 2-km swathe of indigenous woodland, instead of Sebraiville’s suburbs.
The others failed to go off.
Colm offloaded the Marines at the spaceport, picked up two dozen parliamentarians plus their families and luggage, and transferred them to the Unsinkable.
He was peeling off his leathers in the locker room when the military police arrested him.
CHAPTER 10
WHAT HAD HE DONE? More like, what hadn’t he done.
Dereliction of duty.
Disobeying orders.
Flying over the limit.
Reckless discharge of munitions.
Yes, you may have saved thousands of lives, but you didn’t know there were nukes on that train. Did you, Mackenzie? No. Besides, your blood alcohol levels prove you were intoxicated. So shut up.
They even charged him with smoking on the weather deck.
For the next three days
he ate and slept and worked with a bright orange electronic monitor on his wrist. You had to wear it in a visible location, for that extra dollop of humiliation.
He was not allowed to speak to Smythe or Tan. No one else spoke to him. He’d once been popular, a sort of barmy older brother figure to the younger pilots. Now they were scared to acknowledge his existence, in case his downfall might be catching.
On the fourth day, he was summoned to the Rat’s office. This was unheard-of. Almost three thousand men and women served on the Unsinkable, five hundred of those in the air support wing. Colm had hitherto had the good luck to be part of the vast majority who’d never laid eyes on their commanding officer in the flesh.
The Rat looked less human, if possible, in his swank office on the bridge. Lean and sinewy, young for the position of responsibility that he held, he could have been a recruiter’s composite image of a heroic Navy commander. He said to Colm, “So what’s all this shit about alien spies on the Unsinkable?”
Colm was momentarily dumbfounded. Then his mind flashed back to the night of Bekkelund’s wake.
He’d had that conversation with Best in the corridor. The compartments weren’t surveilled. The corridors were.
You goddamn drunken idiot, Mackenzie.
“Sir, I don’t know anything about any alien spies.” And that was God’s truth. He didn’t know anything. He only wished he did. “Sir, I was given to understand that this was about those nukes.”
“That, too,” the Rat said. “And flying drunk. That’s a serious offense. But back to the queazel for a moment. What exactly did he say to you?”
If the Rat knew that the queazel was a he, he knew more about it than Colm did. Colm denied that the queazel had said a word to him, of course. Denied it with every scrap of persuasiveness he’d inherited from his father, whose stage patter could enthrall a room full of six-year-olds—a tougher audience than sailors. But the Rat was no mere sailor. He looked skeptical.
Colm altered tack. “I’ll be honest with you, sir, I was looking forward to retiring from active service ...” Now, he wanted nothing more than to keep on flying, and he told the Rat so with passionate sincerity. Only three colony systems left. There was no escape. The only choices ahead were winning, or losing. “Give me a second chance, sir,” he begged, all but getting down on his knees.
As he wound up his plea, he heard a faint sound of scratching. The Rat’s office had a second entrance in the far corner. The sound was coming from there. It sounded like claws on wood.
“You’re from where, Mackenzie?” the Rat said.
“Scotland, sir. Inverness.” Colm named the nearest large town to his birthplace of Drumnadrochit.
“That’s what I thought. Only country in the world where you still find natural redheads.”
Colm nodded. The recessive trait had died out almost everywhere except in the Highlands, not that it was anything to boast about. As a ginger, he’d come in for his share of playground mockery. He got the hair from his father, and the blue eyes and freckles to go with it.
“I’m from Nottingham,” the Rat added, as if making conversation, but then immediately moved on. “Anyway, this is your last chance.” He typed a note on his collector’s-item mechanical keyboard. “I’m seconding you to Ops until further notice. Fuck up again and my wrath will know no bounds.”
Colm saluted his way out of the office, walking on air. The Rat was really an all-right guy, wasn’t he? A few weeks in Ops and Colm would be back in the cockpit.
Ops joke: we break the simplest tasks down to nuclear physics, and entrust them to illiterates.
In a poorly ventilated lair in the belly of the carrier, the operations officers struggled 24/7 to dispose limited forces efficiently, coordinate supply drops, and manage ongoing missions. Every now and again, when something went sideways, they all got together to brainstorm what lies to tell the Rat. Fuck-ups begat fuck-ups in nightmarish spirals of consequences.
Colm did not thrive on the work. He had more and worse nightmares. The Ghost in the TDP plant blended into the thing in the sitting-room. Dad hitting Mam. Bekkelund’s head springing off his shoulders. Red, red, red.
Three weeks into his purgatory, the Unsinkable received orders to abandon the Upsilon Andromedae system.
The decision had been taken on faraway Earth in reaction to the nuking of Sebraiville. The orders had been loaded on an FTL comms drone that was launched from outside Sol’s ecliptic plane. The drone was all engine with a data chip in a shielded compartment. It could travel at 160 times the speed of light. Even so, it took ten days to reach Majriti IV. By that time, another nuke had gone off in the middle of the moon’s second-largest city, killing four million.
Well, that’s four million less people to evacuate, the Ops officers said.
Merchant Marine transports followed behind the comms drone, converging on the Upsilon Andromedae A system over a period of months. At this point humanity had planetary evacuation down to a routine. The operation proceeded with the twin goals of saving human life and denying assets to the Ghosts. Colm even got to fly a few bombing runs—although he was still technically suspended—on account of severe pilot attrition. He dropped conventional explosives on factories, harbors, and bridges, reducing the work of human hands to rubble.
The real heroes were the Merchant Marines, who put their dropships down on besieged mountaintops and in market squares, scooping up terrified colonists amidst heavy bombardment. The fewer humans remained on Majriti IV, the bolder the Ghosts got. The Unsinkable’s satellites observed stolen construction machinery trundling away through the forest. Napalm bombing burnt away the tree cover to reveal Ghost bases, blackened rings of fortifications.
Stage Three, everyone said. It’s happening in front of our eyes. Colm wasn’t so sure. This just looked to him like more of the same—first the farms, then the cities, then the whole planet.
A year from now, based on past experience, the satellites would see Majriti IV’s native vegetation vanishing, patch by patch, island by island, to make way for the Ghosts’ characteristic plantations. After that, the satellites would go dark.
The Unsinkable was the last ship to leave the system. Loaded with several thousand evacuees, it spun up its plasma drive and burned out of orbit. When it got far enough from Majriti’s gravity well, it powered up its zero-gravity field generators and slipped out of Einsteinian space-time.
They say mass warps space and time like a bowling ball sitting on a trampoline. It doesn’t if you have no mass. The zero-gravity field—a gift from the sentrienza in the 21st century—cancelled out the mass of the Unsinkable and everything and everyone aboard it. What’s massless? A photon. A wave or particle of light. So you’re automatically travelling at light speed as soon as you switch the field on, but the cool thing about light speed is that when you reach it, the very concept of light speed ceases to have any meaning. Hit the accelerator and you can go even faster.
Mundane ship specs came into play at this stage. Within the bubble of the zero-gravity field, the Unsinkable was still its normal self, weighed down by everything from the Rat’s antique keyboard to the lumps of Marine feces in the sewage pipes ... not to mention 5,000 evacuees and their life-support requirements. With a hideous mass-to-thrust ratio like that, the carrier could not possibly go as fast as a comms drone. It couldn’t even go as fast as a carrier.
Eight long, hungry weeks later, the Unsinkable emerged from the zero-gravity field near Gna, a rogue planet wandering in the void between Earth and Alpha Centauri.
Colm picked up local radio chatter in the ops room. Nothing in the austere exchanges reflected the mood on the Unsinkable, or the devastating truth implicit in its return. The Fleet had fought its hardest, and failed. Humanity was down to just two colony systems.
CHAPTER 11
THE RAT, HIS STAFF, and their Marine Corps counterparts stood in the Unsinkable’s airlock to see their crew off on surface leave. It was traditional. The officers were not there in person; their hol
os hovered, slightly larger than life, in the house-sized airlock chamber. But two-way cameras allowed them to see the dispirited men and women trudging past on their way to the landing shuttles, and to exchange a few words with this one and that one, in a grotesque parody of jollity.
Colm saluted as he came level with the holos. The Rat’s voice said, “I’m sure you’ll fly through the incident review, Lieutenant Mackenzie. Have a good leave.” Taken aback, Colm cut his eyes in the direction of his CO. The Rat was smiling blandly.
Colm mumbled an acknowledgement and carried on through the airlock.
Incident review? Did he mention that before?
As soon as he reached the spaceport terminal, military police slid up on either side of him and whisked him off to a courtroom.
It was not an incident review.
It was misdemeanor court, one step below a court martial.
The Rat had let Colm think he was getting away with a temporary suspension, while actually bringing charges against him for his actions on Majiriti IV.
That Sassenach arsehat ... Have a good leave ...
Stunned, Colm stood in front of the judge who held powers of life and death over his career. He had waived his right to an independent counsel, so they were alone in the courtroom, except for the armed guards at the door. It was a small room, hung with velour drapes that made it feel smaller. The ventilation pipe that ran along the ceiling behind the judge was dripping, spreading a dark stain down the drapes. Colm kept his eyes fixed on the stain as the judge droned on.
“Due to the severity of the defendant’s infraction, it has been recommended by his commanding officer that financial penalties also be levied ...”
Gna had gravity 6% heavier than Earth’s. Colm’s knee, although long healed, began to ache as he stood at attention.
“Finding, in addition, that the defendant has a history of minor disciplinary infractions, it is therefore the verdict of this court that the defendant shall be discharged from the Navy of the Human Republic, effective immediately, without honors.”
The Chemical Mage: Supernatural Hard Science Fiction (The Tegression Trilogy Book 1) Page 6
