Endurance

by Yoshiki Tanaka

  “Reinforcements, I think, should be sent as quickly and in as great a number as possible …; This allows you to deliver a single blow that the enemy can’t return, recover your allies, and then quickly withdraw.”

  When Merkatz had spoken the word “enemy,” the faintest shadow of a spirit in anguish had been evident in his aging features. Even if they were under Reinhard’s command, they were still Imperial Navy, and it just wasn’t possible for him to be entirely detached.

  “I agree with our guest admiral’s opinion. This time, committing our forces piecemeal would actually lower our chances of recovering the division and invite an escalation of the fighting. We’ll go with the whole fleet, attack, and withdraw. Prepare to mobilize immediately.”

  The executive staff rose to their feet and saluted their commander. Even if they did have their complaints about other things, their trust in Yang’s tactics was absolute. Among the rank and file, it was fair to say this trust had already become a sort of faith. After watching them file out, Yang said to Merkatz, “I’d like you to join me aboard the flagship if you don’t mind. Would that be all right with you?”

  Within the alliance military, Merkatz was officially being treated as a vice admiral, so there was really no need for the higher-ranking Yang to ask so nicely. Still, Yang was giving him VIP treatment.

  Yang’s intent, put in extreme terms, had been to accept whatever proposal Merkatz gave him, no matter how stupid it might be. When Merkatz had defected, Yang had become his guarantor. He respected Merkatz despite his having come from an enemy state and, furthermore, was willing to make some sacrifices if it would strengthen Merkatz’s position in the Alliance Armed Forces.

  No matter how dire the tactical situation, Yang had always achieved the maximum success possible under whatever set of conditions he was given, and he felt confident he could do so again, even if Merkatz’s advice turned out to be less than top-notch. Of course, past achievements did not necessarily guarantee future successes, so in this Yang might have been overconfident.

  But Merkatz’s opinion was in agreement with Yang’s. Yang was glad to confirm once again that he was an orthodox, reliable tactician. He felt just a little bit ashamed of himself—it really had been rude of him, thinking “no matter how stupid” in regard to this tried-and-true master tactician.

  On the other hand, Yang had been considerate of Merkatz’s feelings in not wanting to drag him out into direct combat with the Imperial Navy. However, if Yang were to lead the fleet out and leave Merkatz behind, there would certainly be voices raised in concern over possible dangers that might arise while the commander was away.

  A ridiculous thing to worry about, Yang thought.

  Yet even so, he couldn’t just ignore it. It was a problem of balance in his consideration of his subordinates. Merkatz was well aware of the position Yang was in, and of his own standing as well.

  Keeping his answer short and to the point, the defected guest admiral replied, “Certainly.”

  IV

  Julian was now in the midst of an even more intense battle.

  In the same instant his friend-or-foe monitor caught the weak signal, Julian was reflexively swerving his spartanian downward to port. A split second later, the empty space he had occupied was pierced by a silver lance of brilliance. Before its energies had even had time to dissipate, Julian had located the position from which it had been fired. Taking aim, he squeezed off two shots from his beam cannon and scored a direct hit on the walküre. Its frame blew apart in a swollen sphere of white-hot light. The photoflux adjustment system activated, causing the main screen to display the pulsating, expanding ball of light as though it were drawn by the tip of an illustrator’s pen.

  “That makes two,” Julian murmured inside his helmet. He could hardly believe it himself—this was success on the battlefield. This, despite the fact that a good many new recruits were coming nowhere near to killing their opponents and were instead experiencing their last battle as well as their first. Were Julian’s results merely the fruit of good luck? No. He couldn’t be this lucky. At the very least, his skills had surpassed those of his foes.

  His dark-brown eyes were sharp inside his helmet and gleamed with confidence. It occurred to him that he might have earned his wings already. With two kills on his first sortie, even Admiral Yang was sure to praise him.

  When a new enemy appeared in front of him, he became aware of just how calm he felt. It felt like he could respond to any situation in the best way possible.

  A light flared out from the walküre’s rail cannon, near where its diagonally crossed foils met, but while it was still nothing more than a speck of distant light to Julian, he was already flying to port. The round missed his spartanian by mere centimeters and flew off toward eternity through the ultralow-temperature void. Julian pulled the trigger on his neutron-beam cannon, but the walküre dodged with such suddenness and speed that it seemed to have kicked off from the empty space itself. The javelin of light pierced nothing but infinite darkness.

  Tch—!

  The frustration Julian felt at having missed was no doubt shared by the enemy pilot. The boy was watching for a chance at a second shot, but then a group of allied and enemy fighter craft came racing into the space where he was dueling. A torrent of light and shadow filled his field of view, and Julian lost sight of his opponent.

  The battle grew chaotic.

  Anger at the intruders boiled up in the young man’s heart. If he had just had another two or three minutes, he would have had another mark on his scorecard. That other pilot had just been lucky—

  And the instant that he caught himself thinking that, Julian felt like he’d been punched in the gut.

  Inwardly, he turned beet red. He had just become aware of the conceit that had taken hold of him—the illusion that destroying a brace of enemy fighters his first time out somehow made him a battle-hardened war hero. That was a joke. Hadn’t his duties up until a few hours ago consisted of getting shouted at by instructors and veteran soldiers? Wasn’t he just a greenhorn whose concept of battle came from imagination rather than experience? Clashes between massive fleets he had witnessed up close at Yang Wen-li’s side. But at those times, it had been Yang doing the surmising, inferring, and deciding. No matter how excited and earnest he may have felt, Julian had been nothing more than a bystander with no duties of his own. To go into battle was to bear the weight of duty. Duty to carry himself properly, as well as to fight the enemy.

  That was something Julian should have learned from Yang. Yang had taught him that lesson not with words, but through his attitude and actions. Yet even though Julian had reminded himself repeatedly to never forget those lessons, here he was now, getting a big head at his first taste of success. Julian felt miserable. While one man bore the duty to protect millions of subordinates and fight millions of enemies, Julian could hardly even bear his duty to himself. When would he be able to close that gap? Would that day ever come?

  Even as he mused on these things, Julian continued overworking his trusty spartanian. He dodged enemy beams and avoided allied craft, saturating the empty spaces with his exhaust trail. He fired off a few dozen shots as well, but he didn’t manage to score a killing shot with even one of them; maybe his guardian angel was off taking a nap now or something, or maybe he was now fighting to his actual ability.

  Presently, a red light started flashing on the control panel. It was his signal to return to the mother ship. Both the spartanian itself and its neutron-beam cannon were almost out of energy. Ten minutes later, Julian docked inside the mother ship. This was accomplished by Lullaby—the special response system that operated between the mother ships and the fighter craft they carried. Julian reported to the control officer while he watched the mechanics come running.

  “Sergeant Mintz, reporting. I’ve landed.”

  “Acknowledged. Permission granted to stand down during reenergizing. Please act on
ly in accordance with regulations …;”

  The time given was thirty minutes. During that period he had to take a shower, eat a meal, and get ready for his next combat sortie.

  The water in the shower alternated between freezing cold and hot enough to turn him red, and Julian’s fresh, youthful skin contracted tightly. He got dressed, went to the mess hall, and was handed a tray. Its contents included protein-fortified milk, chicken au gratin, noodle soup, and mixed vegetables, but Julian’s stomach, it seemed, was bearing the full load of his mental and physical stress, leaving him with practically no appetite at all. He drank down all of his milk and was starting to get up when, from across the table, a soldier who had also touched nothing but his milk spoke to him.

  “That’s the ticket, kid; it’s best not to eat. If you’re shot through the stomach when you’re full, your abdominal wall’s sure to get infected. Peritonitis. You can’t be too careful.”

  “You’re right. I’ll be careful.”

  That was all the answer Julian gave. How effective was a warning like that when it came to combat in outer space? The greater part of the casualties out there were blown to bits instantaneously, just as Julian’s opponents had been. Even if someone did get shot only through the abdomen, the pressure differential between the inside and outside of his body would push out his organs, boil his heart and brain cells with the blood in his own veins, and send fountains of blood spraying from his mouth, ears, and nose long before any abdominal-wall infections could bring about the onset of peritonitis. There was no way he would survive. Still, if a soldier could move his odds even a micron closer to surviving, it was his duty to make every effort to do so. That was the real lesson Julian had just learned from that soldier.

  Twenty-five minutes had elapsed by the time he left the mess hall. He ran to catch an electric car bound for the flight deck. It was about to depart with five or six soldiers. He leapt lightly aboard and jumped off three minutes later.

  His spartanian was already prepped and ready for relaunch. Julian put his gloves on while walking quickly toward the fighter craft. One of the mechanics called out to him: “Break a leg, kid! But don’t get yourself killed!”

  “Thanks!” Julian called back.

  But as he answered, his mood soured just a little.

  He didn’t want to die, after all. Not while he was still young enough to be called “kid.”

  The second launch went well—at least compared to the first one.

  The instant the mother ship cut him loose from its gravity control system, his sense of up and down was still thrown completely off-kilter, yet even so he was able to shake off the disorientation in about ten seconds this time.

  Like flowers blooming in a night-black garden, the lights of energy beams and explosions were blossoming and scattering their petals, all of them proof of humanity’s passion for murder and destruction. The dregs of that wasted passion gave rise to tumultuous swells of chaotic energy that came rolling in to pitch and toss the tiny spartanian about.

  Julian wanted to know how the battle was progressing overall, but with the battlespace currently roiled with invisible billows of EM waves and jamming signals, it would be useless to try to get anything out of his comm system. The fleet was somehow maintaining an organic, flexible posture by using all manner of transmission signals and—perhaps a bit amusingly—shuttlecraft bearing message capsules. In ground-based battles, allies had communicated using relayed orders, and sometimes even messenger dogs and homing pigeons, which meant that the clock on this battlefield had in a sense swung back almost two thousand years.

  In any case, Julian didn’t think his allies had the upper hand. Rear Admiral Attenborough was a capable commander, but in this battle his subordinates wouldn’t—no, couldn’t—act according to his wishes, aside from a small number of exceptions like Julian. Their newest recruits were probably proving ideal sacrifices for the enemy’s gruesome carnival. For his part, at least, all Julian could do was pray for the safety of his mother ship, Amәrәtāt. The word amәrәtāt meant “immortal,” he had heard, and Julian sincerely hoped that would prove an apt description.

  A surprise arrived just as he was thinking that, as a huge wall rose up in front of his spartanian, blocking the way. If he hadn’t instinctively put his craft into an emergency climb, he would have slammed right into it and met with certain death.

  It was a cruiser. Compared to a battleship it was small, but next to a spartanian it could be only be described as a mobile fortress. A conglomeration of geometrical shapes formed from metal, resin, and crystalline fiber, it was a palpable mirage born of bloodthirsty engineering technology. At just that moment, it was basking in the glory of having turned an alliance cruiser into a ball of flame.

  Julian knew instinctively that he dare not make any careless moves. If he took a direct hit from a cruiser’s main cannon, he would be wiped from the universe before the pain could even register. That might, in a sense, be an ideal way to die, but Julian had no desire to go down that road. He adjusted his speed to about the cruiser’s and maintained a cautious distance of around three meters from its outer hull. He was practically touching the energy-neutralization field emitted by the cruiser.

  Suddenly, one of the gun turrets on the hull began to swivel toward him, but its muzzle failed to lock on. Julian had probably been spotted by its enemy-detection system momentarily but had now ducked into its blind spot. From the cruiser’s standpoint, a tiny, vastly inferior foe had flown right up next to it while it was busy slaughtering an enemy its own size. Moreover, it was precisely because no real eyes were actually used in sighting enemies that the cruiser was having such a hard time judging whether that shrewd little foe had run away or was right up against it.

  Julian waited. Taking no action of any sort, and with the beat of his heart his only companion, he waited for the scales to tip in his direction. After a few moments that seemed to last an eternity, a small slit opened in the back side of the gigantic enemy vessel, and from it rose the silvery-gray warhead of a photon missile. Its malicious, hemispherical tip was taking aim at an FPA destroyer. Julian held his breath. Just as the missile launched—in the instant that it penetrated the force field from the inside—Julian emerged from his formless hideout, fired his neutron-beam cannon, and launched immediately into a steep emergency climb. Behind him, a burst of light exploded, and a rolling wave of energy scooped up his spartanian, tossed it up high, and then scooped it up again …;

  V

  “Cruiser Rembach has just been destroyed.”

  Operator reports often left Commander Eisendorff feeling unpleasant. Whether the report was delivered with robotic calm or with a hysterical sense of emergency, both styles had a way of scrambling his nerves. So what? he wanted to shout back at them. The solitude of command—that inability to delegate judgments and decisions to anyone else—was making him want to lash out at these people who had no such responsibilities.

  “Stop reporting every needless detail!” he said, rewarding the operator with not only a shout, but a blow to the back of the head as well. Perhaps the operator too could now be numbered among Julian’s victims.

  Over on the Alliance Armed Forces’ side, however, Rear Admiral Attenborough was feeling a similar sort of irritation. Although possessed of outstanding qualities as a commander, someone else might indeed be better suited to the challenge of leading this “troop of boy scouts” into battle.

  For Attenborough, Rear Admiral Eisendorff’s excessively circumspect attitude came as an unexpected salvation, and yet at the same time, it was slowly but surely increasing his fear that their fatal weakness might be discovered at any moment. It was then that Attenborough, who had been shouldering the nigh-unbearable weight of command, saw an allied vessel flit calmly across his main screen as though it hadn’t a care in the world. Doing a double take, he asked his aide, “That was Ulysses just now, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir. Ba
ttleship Ulysses.”

  At the sound of that name, a smile spread across Attenborough’s youthful features. Even in the midst of fierce battle, it was still possible to tickle humanity’s undying sense of humor. Ulysses was the leading “brawler” of the Iserlohn Patrol Fleet, surpassing almost all the other vessels in terms of both its number of combat flights and its distinguished military successes. Nevertheless, Ulysses was most widely renowned as “the battleship with broken toilets,” which was why its name never failed to draw a grin when spoken or heard. The nickname had no basis in fact, but to most people, a falsehood dressed up to suit their own tastes was far more enjoyable than a prosaic fact, no matter how annoying that falsehood might be to its target …;

  “I’d like some of that ship’s good luck to rub off on the rest of us,” said Attenborough. “All hands, stay alive, even if you look bad doing it.”

  The sound of laughter broke out around the bridge, and if only for a moment, a feeling that things would be all right drifted through the air. Though the crew of Ulysses might prefer otherwise, the ship’s nickname was clearly effective in easing the tension of fleet personnel and revitalizing them in both body and spirit.

  Nine hours had already passed since the battle had commenced. During that time, Julian had flown four sorties from his mother ship, Amәrәtāt. On his third time out, he had destroyed neither fighter nor warship. This had probably been because the spartanian squadrons, having lost fighter after fighter, were becoming easy prey for walküren gunfire, and a gap had appeared between the two sides in terms of numbers of surviving fighter craft. Coming under fire from two walküren at once, Julian had been forced to desperately flee this way and that just trying to stay alive. Julian had soon given up on useless counterattacks and focused only on escaping. The two walküren had competed over their prey, both relying on solo moves rather than cooperating. If not for both of these factors, Julian would have been dead. But instead, the two walküren had interfered with each other. After Julian had shaken them off and just barely managed to flee back to his mother ship’s womb, he had sat in the cockpit for a while afterward with his head down, unable to say so much as a word.