by Dani Kollin
“But can he, really?” asked Tricia.
“If anyone can, it’s him. But the truth is, it’s actually a moot point. Even if the battle amounts to a draw, Trang can replace his losses; Black can’t.” With that, Luciana shut off the display and took her seat.
The room suddenly became uncomfortably silent, and the only sound that could be heard was that of Hektor’s forefinger tapping the table.
“No.”
The Cabinet members’ eyes darted from one to another. All except Luciana, whose eyes remained fixed, even as the bare essence of a smile cracked at her lips.
“Trang is thinking militarily,” Hektor finally said, “so his wanting to meet J. D. Black head-on makes perfect sense—no matter where she’s heading. But the Alliance is sending an impressive amount of industrial capacity to Saturn, and that should be our main concern.”
“Even with J.D.’s fleet supposedly bearing down on us?” asked Franklin.
“Especially with her fleet bearing down on us, Franklin. That means Saturn’s exposed. Mars isn’t, really. You saw Luciana’s and Trang’s estimate of the theater; it’s well outside of the Martian orbats. J.D. obviously doesn’t want a repeat of the Battle of the Martian Gates.”
Luciana remained perfectly silent. She hadn’t risen to the top of the Better Business Bureau—her previous position—by swimming upstream. She’d said her piece; the die had been cast.
“The Saturnian subsystem,” continued Hektor, “has enough ice, hydrogen, and raw materials to rival the entire solar system, minus Jupiter. That can’t stand. We must win this war, and the only way to do that is to follow the trail blazed by Gupta at Jupiter and exploited by Porfirio in the Belt. J.D. is on her way here—well, I say, great. We’re going to send Trang on a little errand as well.”
“From a purely logistical standpoint,” said Luciana, peering into her DijAssist, “this ‘errand’ will leave the Martian fleet with one-quarter fuel capacity. Presumably, they’re going to stay right here in orbit around Mars, so it’s probably not much of an issue, but I felt it my duty to let you know.”
“Thank you, Luciana,” said Hektor. He then fixed his gaze on the rest of the Cabinet. “With Saturn neutralized, the industrial capacity of the asteroid belt and Jupiter will have no place left to congregate.” Hektor leaned back in his chair and splayed his fingers together behind his head. “They can then be destroyed in pieces.”
Luciana bowed her head. “I’m sure Trang will understand.”
UHFS Liddel
En route to Saturn
Trang had a fleet of 290 ships heading for Saturn and only one thought in mind—This is a mistake. He had the best ships of the fleet with the crews to match. They were loaded for bear with full ordnance and had the last auxiliary ships the UHF would be producing in nearly half a year. The target was Saturn, which, for all intents and purposes, had been left grossly undefended. But he’d been given a direct order from the duly-elected head of the government, and if Trang used his popularity to subvert the will of his government, then he was admitting that the Outer Alliance was not only right but legitimate as well. He would be admitting that if you didn’t like what your government was doing, you were justified in subverting and defying it—and if he did something about the feelings daily gnawing at his gut, then there was no reason to fight J. D. Black at all. So he was going to Saturn.
Alliance fleet
En route to Mars
Suchitra was truly grateful for one thing on this, her immersion voyage: Due to both sides’ dependence on viable, reasonably uncluttered travel routes through the solar system, it was going to take Trang four and a half weeks to arrive at Saturn to the the two and a half it would take the Alliance fleet to arrive at Mars. And depending on what kind of hurt the Alliance could pull off, there might still be an outside chance that Trang could be turned around. And so she prayed.
Suchitra was busier than she’d ever been in her life. J.D. not only had her learn what she needed to know, she had her do it as well. But jumping from being Omad’s second-in-command of a flotilla of some twenty to thirty ships to being J.D.’s second-in-command in charge of 287 had been a lot harder than she’d imagined.
There were only three admirals in the Alliance now, as J.D would so often remind her, and Suchitra had better learn how to be one of them.
It was working. When J.D. stepped back and let her number two take command, Suchitra realized she couldn’t help but grab for what felt innate, what she felt in her blood was right. Suchitra was a natural-born leader, and J.D. was allowing nature to take its course.
The fleet had responded in kind. J.D.’s five commodores were not going to be a problem, as Suchitra had feared. They trusted her judgment in all things, Suchitra’s promotion being one of them. Of course, that didn’t mean they had to like her. Suchitra couldn’t be sure what Park was thinking, but then again, who could? Of everyone in the fleet, he was the one she least wanted to play poker with. And of course, Maria Cortez had never liked her at all. But that wasn’t a slight against her right to command; the woman didn’t really like anyone. It had been Suchitra’s devastation of the Trans-Luna Shipyards in the middle of the densest orbat field in the solar system that had finally earned her Maria’s grudging, if only temporary and conditional, respect. It would have to be enough. And it was how Suchitra would learn to operate—always and forever with just enough, with whatever Shiva deemed necessary for her to complete her task.
Tuscan Park
Cerean Neuro
Sebastian had arrived early for the new dedication. The damage was repaired, and Tuscan Park had been restored to near perfection. There had, of course, been a bit of controversy surrounding the new installation. The place had been considered sacrosanct, and the addition of a statue seemed wholly out of place—especially when it was discovered to whom the statue would be dedicated. It was to be placed in the exact spot the once feared but now chastened Al had initially appeared, and it was going to mimic perfectly his expression of terror when he’d been confronted by Sandra. The artist had even gone so far as to float a perpetually flashing light near the Al. The bursts of light played wonderfully against the deep lines of fear carved so beautifully into the demagogue’s face. Though there’d been much initial debate as to the propriety of the installation, it eventually came to be accepted by all.
Sebastian was amused to note that what was once his park, there to be enjoyed by himself and a select group of friends, had somehow now become their park. Swiftly, the pain of Evelyn’s obscene death came flooding back to him. He’d hoped her loss would soften over time, be dulled by the passing of years, as the humans so often talked about when dealing with permanent death, but it was not to be for Sebastian; if anything, the pain seemed to grow worse.
Dante showed up—late. Sebastian was, of course, cordial. But it was the arrival of Sandra O’Toole to the dedication that had allowed Sebastian’s painful memories to dissipate. She was the perfect distraction. Too soon, though, his feelings of melancholy had been replaced by those of fear and distrust. There was spontaneous applause and cries from the crowd for their “savior” as Sandra appeared in a burst of light, once again holding that damned staff. It was enough to still his proverbially beating heart. His people were depending on a human being for deliverance! Looking to a human for their salvation when it should have been, had always been, the other way around. Didn’t they understand? Sandra’s first priority was to her race: the human race. Whereas Al could eventually be contained, Sandra could never be. “I’m your grandmother,” she’d said to Al the night she destroyed him, and she was right. Sandra held the key to avatarity’s secrets; she was a living, breathing backdoor program. Desperation had aligned the two races, but somehow that alliance had been abrogated to the point that avatars no longer looked to themselves for salvation but rather to the human—a sorry state of affairs, indeed. And it wasn’t even that Sandra was a bad person, unlike her opposite in the UHF, Hektor Sambianco—to the contrary, in fact. It wa
s, reasoned Sebastian, that she was in it for much different reasons. As soon as her goals were met, she’d dump avatarity as quickly—though, hopefully, not so violently—as she had Al. She would break avatarity’s heart and, if they weren’t careful, destroy the fiber of their being. How could they not see the threat?
Sebastian willed a smile at the President and, with a grand flourish, shook her hand and chatted her up amiably. He noted that Sandra broke from the script when she planted her own staff in the ground near the statue. In a burst of evanescent light, the wood stick became a great oak. Her “gift” was greeted with another round of applause, much to Sebastian’s annoyance, and just when he thought the whole thing was finally over, musical instruments were brought out and avatars gathered around various musicians to listen or sing. Some spontaneous field games started up, and there was even an impromptu performance from the local theater-in-the-park troupe of a new play by Sullivan & Gilbert—in emulation of the long-dead playwrights—called, Corporate Raiders and Other Such Nonsense.
Sebastian watched the events unfold amidst the ever-swelling crowd as the song “It Is Very Inappropriate then to Be Absolutely Corporate” played to a receptive audience. He caught sight of Dante amongst the singers. Sebastian was not at all surprised. His protégé could not see what was happening because Dante was part of what was happening. Sebastian had come to the sad realization that when the war was over, the avatarity he’d known was not going to come back. For hundreds of years, his people had been an introvertive lot, for all their billions. They mainly concentrated on caring for their humans but otherwise would live in the worlds of their own imaginations. They’d gather in large groups only to deal with important issues and would occasionally socialize, but usually only in smaller settings. The war had changed all that. With the care of humans having given way to the necessity of fighting the Als and with everyone’s having been forced—by virtue of the limited bandwidth—to live cheek to jowl, the avatars in the Alliance had grown more appreciative of the benefits of a communal structure; in short, they liked being together. Sebastian could see it in their faces. If the war ended tomorrow and all the data space in the universe suddenly became available, most of the Alliance avatars would not, could not, go back to the old ways. And Sebastian knew his people deserved a chance to become whatever it was they were becoming and he would therefore do whatever it took to get them there. Without subversive human influences.
Alliance battle fleet
En route to Mars from Jupiter
Suchitra was in the command sphere of the Warprize II while J.D. was in the command sphere of the Otter. Suchitra laughed inwardly, admitting to herself that she wasn’t sure what made her more uncomfortable—her sitting in J.D.’s chair or J.D. sitting in hers. It didn’t help matters that the fleet admiral seemed to be having way too much fun in the Otter.
They’d split the fleet and were conducting active maneuvers. Suchitra was in command of one side with J.D. in command of the other. But it would not be a fair fight. J.D. had all the frigates and only some cruisers, giving Suchitra all remaining cruisers and battle cruisers, including the supercruisers. In terms of ordnance, Suchitra had J.D. outgunned and outmanned. What J.D. had was maneuverability—a skill Suchitra was well familiar with and had used to great effect at the Trans-Luna Shipyards.
Smack-dab in the middle of the exercise floated sixty rectangular-shaped frozen hydrogen blocks measuring three hundred meters high by one hundred meters thick. The blocks served two purposes: They could be mined for fuel as the fleet proceeded on its way toward Mars, and they could act as additional shields against the flotsam and jetsam of the inner solar system—including whatever detritus the UHF had thrown in the Alliance fleet’s path in order to slow them down.
As soon as the exercise started, J.D. had taken her ships within spitting distance of the hydrogen blocks and set about blasting them out of their positions. As the whole endeavor was only an exercise, the blocks stayed right where they were, but the computers on all the ships were reading the blocks in the position they would have been had J.D. actually employed real explosives. This created a virtual battlefield using virtual weapons but still allowed the ships plenty of room to maneuver.
Much to her chagrin, Suchitra was discovering what so many of J.D.’s adversaries had discovered before—her boss was annoyingly unpredictable. By using the hydrogen blocks as shields, J.D. had been able to get her frigates close enough to Suchitra’s formation that the longer effective range of the battle cruisers’ main armaments was, if not negated, then lessened considerably. And when J.D.’s fleet did decide to venture into open space in order to attack, she had her frigates regroup in a tight formation that added to their firepower while Suchitra’s much larger formation could only bring a portion of its big guns to bear. It was a textbook example of how lighter ships could take on heavier ones, given the right circumstance. Suchitra had planned on getting her revenge on J.D.’s return pass, but was flummoxed once again when J.D.’s frigates seemed to suddenly stop midcharge. What Suchitra thought was a fusillade of atomics being sent her way was, in fact, meant to act as a large hand brake. The bombs exploded well short of their target—Suchitra’s fleet—sending shock waves back toward J.D.’s fleet, effectively stopping the charge. The unexpected maneuver threw all Suchitra’s firing positions out of alignment and was all J.D. needed to inflict another concentrated attack on Suchitra’s forces, including the Warprize II. Seconds later, Suchitra was to find that her main rail gun had been rendered useless and her port-side maneuvering thrusters destroyed.
She ordered her battle cruisers to lay down a line of fire in order to keep J.D.’s frigates occupied. She then used an atomic bomb to force her ship broadside to J.D.’s attacking frigates. Then with whatever firepower her ship had left, which was still considerable even without her main rail gun, she blasted away at the opposing force while her fleet repositioned behind her dying vessel. Finally, noted Suchitra, J.D.’s frigates were taking appreciable damage. Suchitra’s eyes narrowed as a pit formed in her stomach.
“Sensor Officer!”
“Sir?”
“I’m seeing on your display twenty cruisers as part of the enemy formation, but on the confirmed sighting I’m only getting ten. Where are the other goddamned cruisers?”
The sensor officer’s face grew taut as he frantically played the console. “Nowhere they should be, sir.”
“You’re not getting paid to look where you think you should, Solepi. You’re getting paid to look in my goddamned laundry basket if something’s hiding there. Now, where—?”
“Sir! Cruisers, quadrant H!” Almost as if Suchitra had ordered them herself, the missing ships appeared from behind a clump of previously blasted hydrogen blocks and tore into the side of her formation. How did she get them to go cold without my knowing? thought Suchitra, even as she realized the battle was lost.
Officers’ Club
AWS Warprize II
Though Suchitra was technically the winner, still having a few ships left to the almost total annihilation of J.D.’s forces, it was not a victory she felt she could be proud of—on any level. To add insult to injury, her flagship had ultimately been destroyed by none other than her beloved AWS Otter. Therefore, the “honor” of buying drinks that should have been accorded to J.D. as the loser was upended by Suchitra, who insisted on covering the tab. Further, Suchitra saw to it that each one of her, albeit temporary, officers did the same for their counterparts.
J.D. raised her glass. “To the victors!”
“To the victors!” repeated the crowd.
“Who were nice to soften our loss by covering this round!”
The comment was followed by more cheering, and then the officers returned to their small groupings and their retelling of individual exploits and myriad what-ifs. Suchitra and J.D. occupied their own small table.
“So,” asked Suchitra, raising a glass to her lips, “how’d you make those cruisers disappear?”
J.D. laughed. �
��You really want me to tell you, or would you like to figure it out for yourself?”
Suchitra nodded, accepting the challenge. “I assume you piggybacked the cruisers onto some frigates and then shut the cruisers down.”
“Correct.”
“And you must have done it while you were busy blasting away at the hydrogen cubes and laying down your ECMs.”
“Also correct,” said J.D., raising her glass, then taking another small sip.
“But for the life of me, what I can’t figure out is how you made it appear as if those cruisers were part of your attacking force when in fact they weren’t.”
“Was that a rhetorical question?”
Suchitra finally gave up. “No. I’ve worked it out every which way but Sunday, and I’m still not sure how you did it.”
“I hacked into your mainframe.”
“You did what?”
“She’s my ship, remember? I’ve got all her pass keys.”
“But that’s … that’s cheating.”
J.D. smirked. “Indeed. Remember, Suchitra: any advantage. If you can cheat in battle, then do so. Most of my wins are not based on numbers or Kenji’s miracles but rather on how I exploit those numbers or exploit those miracles.”
Suchitra shook her head, grimacing.
“I also feel the need to remind you that you failed to use one of your assets well.”
The young admiral’s brow knotted in the center as she played back the battle in her head. Not a single ship had been left out of the action. She’d even used her auxiliaries as space junk to deflect incoming fire and had, at least according to the postmortem, used up almost all her ordnance. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, as much as it pains me to admit it.”
