Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  We taught them everything we knew about the capabilities of cloudships and the capabilities of DIED forces. We studied strategy and tactics. Much of this I and my instructors had to create fresh. We solicited the input of every trustworthy military mind in the Republic, but the truth was there had never been a major naval battle fought in space in the history of humankind. I never let my students forget that fact, either, and most of our tactical preparation was concentrated on learning how to react in unforeseen conditions.

  We concluded every day with an hour of drill and, at long last, target practice. The staff and I were not merely preparing minds for future learning, we were, instead, about to fling these youngsters directly into harm’s way, and none of us forgot it. Of course, we would likely be going into harm’s way ourselves. In the end, we were all learning together, and none of us had any real idea of what we were getting ourselves into. But it had to be done, and we did it.

  One e-year later, and we had made warriors out of brats. They were untested, true, but no longer did I, or any of my fellow instructors, have any doubt that they would acquit themselves well. When we inducted our second class, we also had student officers to help out with our second Plebe Summer. I was amused when our second e-year students expressed their total dismay and disgust with their plebes.

  None of these kids were officer material! They were hopeless idiots—spoiled and pampered by coddling parents! What were we thinking when we admitted them in the first place?

  I agreed completely with my dismayed charges.

  “I know they’re a sorry lot,” I told them. “You’ll just have to do what you can with them. They’re all we’ve got.”

  I had thought I was a hard taskmaster during the previous Plebe Summer, but my newly promoted spacers made their own hell month seem like a pleasant jaunt among the asteroids when compared with what they put this later class of plebes through.

  Everyone followed the developments sunward with razor-sharp interest. Perhaps never before in our history had cloudships paid such attention to the doings of the planet-bound. Another Jovian moon fell to DIED attackers, and Cloudship Sandburg was killed in the conflict—the first casualty among us cloudships. We decided to name the main quad of our virtual academy campus after him.

  It was becoming clear by the middle of our second Plebe Summer, 3015, that a new attack on Neptune was imminent. Ships and soldiers were congregating in the Saturn system. Pluto had become a lockbox, controlled by a coating of military grist that had seemingly subsumed the native commercial variety by sheer weight and profligacy in multiplying itself. When the call came from General Sherman to ready ourselves for immediate action, it was not a surprise to teachers or students. What’s more, we were in a pretty good state—Plebe Summer had just ended. We had a class of spacers who had just finished a year of training, and had now spent three e-months providing actual leadership to the incoming plebes. Companies were set, chains of command established, and the spacers were familiar with one another.

  We could have been in a far worse fix when it came time for fighting.

  Excerpt from

  The Journal of Spacer First Class Stone

  I know that I have complained often about my original classmates in the past, and I continue to believe that there is much room for improvement in their performances. Nevertheless, I have to say that they have come a long way over the past year. I have developed what I can only call a grudging respect for the populist Sojourner Truth. I even have to admit that something I believed impossible—the evolution of the slack-off trickster Schweik into a first rate naval officer…

  …has occurred.

  Excerpt from

  The Journal of Spacer First Class Sojourner Truth

  Something awful has happened. I actually like the Dildo and the Nimno. In fact, I’m going to have to start calling them by their real names. Stone, Schweik, and I not only did some amazing things and made some incredible progress this past e-year, they stuck by me in hard times, they helped me when I was down. They even took a couple of lumps for me from the instructors.

  Oh, shit. Have to admit it.

  I couldn’t have made it without them.

  Excerpt from

  The Journal of Spacer First Class Schweik

  Well. So. I used all my prime Fuck-Up. Every last smidgen of it. And I still made it through the first year.

  And now I look at these pathetic incoming plebes and all I can think is—

  I used to be just like them.

  Oh. My. God.

  Twenty-two

  PLUTO SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 12:12, APRIL 10, 3017

  Even though he had Sherman boxed in and near defeat, Blanket was an aggressive man at heart, and he didn’t enjoy biding his time. Besides, Blanket was working for a commander who was even more impatient than he. Amés would want to see progress very soon. Three weeks was too long for a standoff. Sherman was beginning to make Blanket feel a trifle ridiculous. Why couldn’t he finally defeat the man? Blanket considered another flushing run at the fremden forces.

  What luck that he’d been able to talk Haysay into sending the five extra ships to Pluto.

  I’m going to have to revise my opinion of Haysay, Blanket thought. He may be slow as molasses, but he’s not the bumbler I took him for.

  One of those ships, the Calcio , had taken damage from a broadside of rocks from the Boomerang. There were several thousand casualties as well. But the breach was sealed, and the ship had been brought back into service immediately in a backup role. It would take several e-weeks of more extensive repairs before Blanket could use it for direct assault.

  Be that as it may, Sherman and his cloudship companion were outgunned. Although the planet and moon had, unaccountably, turned against friend and foe alike, the system minefields were entirely under Met command. Moving minefields would take e-days, but it could be accomplished. Each mine had a small degree of impulse mobility built in. Blanket had already begun the process of moving his mines from the concentrated clumps that he’d dispersed in arrays around the entire planetary system. He was bringing them in toward the moon and planet ellipse to form an ever-tightening net.

  “Let’s run another assault,” Blanket told the captain of the Streichholtzer , Madelaine Dekbat. “This time no separation, I think. All ships together, all guns forward.”

  “Yes, sir,” Dekbat replied. “All for one and one for all.” She turned and issued orders to her own helm, and relayed the instructions to the other ships in the group.

  While many DIED commanders had problems with their immediate underlings, Blanket had always gotten along with Dekbat. It helped that the woman wanted nothing more than to run a carrier for the rest of her career. She’d turned down a rear admiralty in order to avoid being reassigned from the Streichholtzer. Blanket had heard that Dekbat came from a good (meaning extremely rich) family on Mercury, and was considered a sort of black sheep by them.

  Blanket himself was from Vas stock. His family was as plebian and middle-class as could be. His own ambition had been a hot coal within him since he was young.

  “All ships online now, sir,” Dekbat reported. “We’re ready to move on your word.”

  Blanket scowled his best commander’s smile and prepared to issue the attack order. This time he would get his kill. He was sure of it.

  “Very well—”

  Something red in Blanket’s peripheral vision. He blinked. It was still there. Not his internal systems. It was a physical light, there on the bridge.

  And then Blanket heard a very physically loud Klaxon.

  “Report, Captain!”

  Dekbat relayed the command directly to her subordinate. “Report, Nav!”

  “Ma’am, I’ve got two…three…four…several anomalies at extreme range. Approaching rapidly.” The young lieutenant commander spoke with a shaky voice. “Make that nineteen anomalies. Twenty. Twenty confirmed. Tactics estimates deliberate propulsion.”

  “Give me a vector, Nav.”


  “Yes, ma’am,” the nav officer replied. “All out-system and inward bound. All moving in the same direction. All vectored on… us. On Pluto, ma’am.”

  “Speed?”

  “One hundred ten thousand kilometers per hour,” said the nav officer. “They’ll be here in 12.4 hours, ma’am.”

  Blanket thought through the situation quickly. This was almost certainly a human-made phenomenon. And, coming from the Oorts, that meant that the cloudships were involved. But it was a given that the so-called Constitutional Congress out there was caught up in a contentious deadlock. Not all the cloudships were fremden sympathizers. Not by a long shot. In fact, Blanket had been receiving supersecret intel from members of that congress as to just what a state of disarray they were in. Still, as his sources had informed him, there was the possibility of a small faction going their own way and causing trouble.

  “Are those comets?” Blanket said. “The damn Oort dwellers may have found a way to divert a field of them in our direction.”

  “No, General,” said Dekbat. She was looking over the nav officer’s shoulder, examining the readouts herself. “Too big for that. Way too big.”

  “What then?”

  “Configurations consistent with cloudships, sir.”

  “Cloudships!” Blanket felt his face go flush. His voice sounded very loud in his own ears. “That’s not possible.”

  “Tactics confirms, sir,” Dekbat said, her voice now as shaky as her young navigation officer’s had been. “Twenty cloudships heading our way.”

  A massive intelligence breakdown. That was the only explanation.

  Twenty.

  How could this have gone undetected by the watchers in the Oorts? How could such a deployment have gotten past the Congress—where Amés had the next best thing to veto power using the minority faction he controlled.

  Something had gone terribly wrong.

  “General?”

  “What?”

  Twenty cloudships.

  “General, the local group is powered up. They’re awaiting your command.”

  There were theoretically three solutions. Stay and fight to the death. Retreat at full speed. Blanket immediately rejected both of them. The first would serve no purpose other than getting them all killed. The second was…not in his nature. There was also the distinct possibility that this was all some sort of ruse.

  It had to be some sort of ruse.

  Yet Blanket’s gut told him that it was not.

  Nevertheless, only one option open. Fall back. A fighting withdrawal from the system. His system, goddamn it! Retreat was retreat!

  Use your reason. Survive. Live to conquer again. Amés trusted him. He was not some politically necessary appointment like Haysay. Blanket had risen through the ranks on ability and ability alone. Amés had recognized that. Amés would not remove him from command.

  Probably.

  It didn’t matter. Given who he was, Blanket had only one choice. As he had made countless others, he made this one.

  “Pull back,” Blanket said. “All ships are ordered to take cover in the mines.”

  Twenty-three

  PLUTO SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 04:53, APRIL 13, 3017

  Sherman breathed a sigh of relief. So far the plan had worked—with a few snags. The orbits of Pluto and Charon were now in Federal hands. The surfaces were another matter entirely. His Virtual Extraction Corps had established some beachheads down there. They had volunteered for what seemed like a suicide mission to rescue the Federal paratroopers from the grip of the renegade surface grist, and they had succeeded.

  Many of the VEs, over half, had been lost to the murderous grist below—wiped from existence as completely as any erased computer program might be. But Philately and her corps had succeeded in breaking many of the biological soldiers free from the grip of the surface. There was no doubt that they had saved a good portion of the Third Sky and Light’s Company C.

  Now those soldiers could be recovered. The Met forces had pulled away.

  No doubt Blanket got wind of what was coming from the Oorts, Sherman thought. Blanket would run, but he wouldn’t run far. Sherman had known and admired the man at West Point. What Blanket didn’t know was that Sherman had issued orders for fifteen of those approaching cloud-ships to change course. Only five would be decelerating into Plutonian orbit. The others would head straight for Neptune.

  The merci was jammed in that direction. Neptune was cut off, as it had been before, and Sherman had no way of knowing what was happening back in his home system. This was Colonel Theory’s first big test as a theater commander. Sherman had bedrock faith in his subordinate. He’d based his entire strategy around Theory’s ability to take command at Neptune. Yet other seemingly staunch officers had let Sherman down before. You never could tell about a soldier until he or she was tested in battle. It wasn’t even a matter of courage most of the time. It was merely a matter of doing one’s job to the fullest. Many people—LAP, simple biological aspect, or free convert—simply didn’t have follow-through built into their makeup.

  Sherman was betting that Theory was one of the other kind.

  It was out of his hands now, in any case. And the new Federal Navy was on its way to Neptune! What an incredible relief it was to be able to think the thought, to say the words.

  “Federal Navy,” Sherman muttered to himself.

  “What’s that, sir?” said the Ops-Chief.

  “Nothing, Chief,” Sherman replied. “How are the uplinks and evacuations coming?”

  “We’re bringing in the last batch now,” said the chief. “Looks like we got that Neiderer. The one who took out the rip tether back on Triton.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Sherman. “The man gets into some awful deep shit to keep surviving so well.”

  “That he does, sir.” The chief put a hand to his ear. “All right, all right,” he said, speaking to someone who was communicating with him through the knit. “I’ll pass it along to intel.”

  Sherman looked at his chief expectantly. “Anything I should know about?”

  “I don’t think so, sir,” the man replied. “We’ve brought up a number of prisoners. One of them is making an odd claim, and he’s a good enough bullshit artist to have the soldiers who brought him in believing in him.”

  “Who captured him?”

  The chief blinked his eyes, consulting records in his peripheral vision. “Why, it was the Neiderer fellow, sir. He’s a sergeant these days.”

  “And Neiderer believes whatever information this POW has?” Sherman asked.

  “He thinks it bears looking into, sir.”

  “And what is the information?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure how to put this, sir,” the chief replied.

  “Put it in plain Basis!” Sherman said sharply.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the chief, chagrined. “Well, it’s like this. The prisoner claims to be your son.”

  “My son is dead,” Sherman answered quickly and emphatically.

  “No, sir. Your other son,” said the chief. “He claims to be Leo Sherman.”

  Twenty-four

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD 11:02, APRIL 7, 3017

  CLOUDSHIP AUSTEN

  “Austen, have you got an angle on that bastard?” Twain spoke to her in a tense voice over the special merci channel cloudships used for intership communications.

  “He’s moving too fast,” said Austen. “I’m headed outward from the planet, not inward. I’ll have to reverse course and match velocities.”

  “Okay,” Twain replied. “Looks like she’s going to get a shot, goddamn it.”

  “What do you think she’s armed with?”

  “Don’t know,” said Twain. “Nothing good. If I follow her much farther, I’m going to get trapped in the well and pulled down into the atmosphere.”

  “Don’t you do that, Twain!” Austen exclaimed. She knew that the old cloudship was brave enough to sacrifice himself.

  “Don’t worry a
bout it,” Twain answered. “I’d crash into the Mill and kill fifteen thousand souls for nothing.”

  Austen had momentarily forgotten about Twain’s troop contingent. It was just so unusual for cloudships to be carrying large numbers of biological humans.

  But not unusual anymore, she reflected. There would be a great deal of that sort of thing before this war was over. It gave her a creepy sensation for a moment. To constantly feel like you were full of swarming parasites. And on purpose. Yuck.

  “Here she goes!” shouted Twain. “She’s going to drop her load.”

  As if on cue, the Martian Dawn pulled up from its headlong dive toward middle of the Blue Eye of Neptune, and turned into an arching traverse of the Mill. The DIED ship was, Austen estimated, about a thousand kilometers above the Mill mechanism itself.

  They were depth charges of some sort. Depth charges guided by free converts, no doubt. But, according to Met protocols, free converts that could back themselves up only once every two e-years. For some of these free converts, their plunge to destruction would erase everything they had become since their last backup.

  The waste of it all, Austen thought. The productivity and innovation the Met was giving up by, in essence, killing these people. It was bad economics. There wasn’t anything Austen detested more than bad economics.

  This close to the Mill, the Martian Dawn was below the minefield defenses. But there were a few carefully placed hover stations that were actually connected by ultrathin cable all the way back to Triton itself. They were modified versions of the weather stations that had been the original charge and raison d’etre for Sherman’s Third Sky and Light Brigade. The hover station fired upon the depth charges as they fell, and a good number exploded before they were near enough to do the Mill harm.