One of the semi-awares broke in. We advise against this, it sent. There is a recognized Chinese slowness in adapting defenses to new tactics. It’s an artifact of their penchant for hard coding on chips. So the defenses on the batteries are likely the same as when you first infiltrated while on your way to Karin.
So what’s the problem? asked Maung.
Multiple Chinese super-awares are monitoring and may expect this move. Your tactic could expose you to them.
Maung ignored the warning. Instead he projected his consciousness in a tight-beam microwave transmission, bouncing off the last drone and scanning the Chinese flagship for any openings in their communications. There had to be one. If the ship broadcast a distress call then it had to unmask at least a portion of its network and Maung soon found the gap, inserting as fast as he could and taking a chance by not setting up any defensive programs; every microsecond counted.
It was the Nan Yang, he realized—the ship’s name—a massive destroyer that to Maung seemed more like a carrier. Maung streaked through its networks until he reached weapons control and within a few seconds overpowered the Chinese semi-aware. Then he coded. Maung set up multiple programs that grew and strangled the Chinese defenses, branching out until they controlled all the surviving weapons systems, which began firing until their magazines emptied.
Maung backed out. The drone relay he’d counted on disappeared in the path of a Chinese particle beam but by then he’d already vanished, sensing the safety of his Fleet envelop him when his consciousness remerged, and the semi-awares were as close to happy as he’d ever seen; they were glad he made it back.
The Langley erupted in more cheers. Maung picked it up over ship’s intercoms in every compartment and then the captain himself broke in to give Maung the news. He disconnected from the network. Back in his suit Maung gasped for air when he couldn’t see, the helmet frosted so that at first he thought he’d gone blind—until he remembered where he was. The captain clicked into his helmet speakers, practically shouting with joy as Maung fell asleep, exhausted from what he’d just experienced.
“They’re turning around!” the captain said. “Whatever you did, one of their ships began firing on its own fleet, destroying and crippling three of their heavy destroyers. The rest of their fleet is heading back to Europa. We’ve sent salvage vessels now to capture what remains of the ones you destroyed and when we finish, Command wants us to hit Europa again with—”
Maung broke in, barely awake. “Captain, you have to let me go with one of the salvage teams.”
“Why?”
“The flagship had two of their Dream Warriors and I need to see them up close for myself. Also, they may still be alive, in which case your crews will be in danger.”
The captain paused before answering. “Fine, son; your funeral.”
“But first,” Maung said, yawning, “I need some sleep.”
“It will take time to get the fleet turned and oriented for a boarding trajectory; you have three hours for rack time, but that’s all I can give you.”
Maung shut the connection and closed his eyes. Without warning, a single realization played in his thoughts and refused to leave.
I’ll never see my son again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Maung reached out to the guard on his right until he found the man’s shoulder; he grabbed it. “Just activate your helmet cam; I can take it over and use it to see.”
“There’s got to be a better way,” he said.
“Sure. Give me a normal helmet with a clear faceplate.”
Both guards chuckled. Maung now had vision but seeing from a different perspective confused him and he bumped his helmet on the bulkhead on their way into the main ship. It took a while to work things out. The three of them floated through the Langley’s corridor and Maung soon learned that if he stayed directly behind the guard providing him with the camera, latching onto his belt, it was easier to maintain a normal perspective.
They arrived at the main shuttle launch bay, where the captain waited with a team of Marines and engineers. The Marines were at attention. Maung marveled at the way they controlled themselves in zero g until he realized they had special magnetic boots that latched to the floor. All of them wore heavy armor, reminding him of turtles with thick, shell-covered limbs.
The captain clicked in. “Maung. Stay behind on the shuttle when we board. Let my Marines clear the ship of threats and when we’re done you can enter.”
“But—”
“If we run into a Chinese threat that we can’t handle,” the captain continued, “we’ll call for assistance.”
With that they moved into the shuttle. It took Maung a few minutes to strap in and then a few seconds more to decide that military ships were even uglier than the Singapore Sun. The shuttle was all business. The group barely fit in its passenger compartment and Maung looked with concern at two boxlike massive slabs that sandwiched his chair; both had been labeled Aft Missile Magazine—No Access Without Grounding. He was glad when the guard looked away, changing his view.
Maung was listening to the Marines’ communications after they boarded the Chinese vessel when the Chinese attacked; there were few Marine survivors. The Chinese tried to repulse the boarding party and at first the men considered pulling back to the shuttle; three of them burst through the airlock, where a medic strapped two to a bulkhead so he could crack their suits and begin treatment. Droplets of blood soon filled the shuttle. Maung couldn’t stand to see much more and he disconnected from the guard’s camera, glad for the first time that he had an excuse not to watch.
Several hours passed before the captain called them over and when he reconnected to the guard’s camera, Maung saw that only two Marines were still mobile. Their corpsman was sobbing. Maung wished there was something he could do and helplessness clawed at his chest to the point where one of the guards had to push him into the airlock, reminding Maung that there wasn’t much time, before they drifted over and into the Chinese vessel.
Water, oil, blood and a number of other fluids mingled in droplets that floated through the narrow spaces, growing each time one droplet merged with another, and Maung’s guard paused every few seconds to wipe his camera lens. If he thought the shuttle was bad, Maung decided, this was a nightmare. Because the Chinese warriors were manufactured—semihuman machines specifically bred for shipboard roles—the corridors weren’t meant for human passage and parts of them had been blown open. Maung figured this was what cost the Marines so dearly, since they didn’t just have to fight their way through the ship; they had to fight the ship itself and widen passageways that prevented them from moving freely in bulky suits. The captain guided them forward over the radio, urging them to hurry since they had a tight schedule.
When they arrived, the captain was waiting outside a massive steel door striped with yellow and black; red Chinese characters marked the upper right portion.
“The bridge,” he said.
Maung nodded, making sure they were on a restricted channel before he responded. “I read Chinese, Captain.”
“My men have already secured the area but I’m not going in there again. Whatever you’re going to do, you need to do it fast. My orders are to space these freakin’ things and then see if I can get the ship ready to fly again.”
“Fly again?” Maung asked. “Why?”
“Command wants to know if you can control it—use it in the next phase of the battle plan.”
“Whose battle plan?”
The captain pushed off, heading down the tunnellike corridor and squeezing past Maung; there was barely room for him to pass.
“Just do what you have to. I’m dumping these freakin’ things into space in ten minutes.”
Maung entered the bridge behind his guard; they moved in single file, squeezing through a narrow set of pipes and conduits with sharp edges that could rip their unarmored suits to shreds, and once through Maung gripped his guard’s shoulder even more tightly. The entire section of the bridge tha
t should have been overhead, armored and protecting its crew from the vacuum of space, was gone—ripped off from the explosion that resulted when the drone impacted. Overhead was empty space. Millions of stars filled the void in a view that reminded Maung just how vast and cruel the universe was and Maung wished that the man would focus down at the ship so he didn’t have to keep looking at such emptiness. To take his mind off it, Maung performed a quick calculation. Within a second he decided there was no way that, even with a full fuel tank, the drone he sent to ram the Chinese vessel could have caused this much damage and concluded it must have done it with one missile still locked onto a hardpoint.
“What the hell did all this?” his guard asked.
“A drone from the Langley. It rammed the ship and still had a missile, which detonated at the moment of impact.”
“I don’t get it.” The other guard pressed in behind them and latched onto a metal pipe—obviously scared of slipping and winding up in space. “Where are the crew members the captain was talking about? I don’t see anyone here; they all got sucked out or something.”
Maung told his guard to pan his camera around the bridge. He watched the scene creep through his mind and slowed it further as he recorded, so that it slipped by, frame by frame, until he spotted something pale and out of place among the black metal and ceramic of the Chinese wreckage. It was only visible briefly. Water vapor spurt from a burst pipe to create a kind of ice mist that floated off at a constant rate, but it obscured part of the bridge until air in the line created a break. Maung guided the guard toward it. Once they moved past the cloud, he almost threw up.
“That’s not right,” the guard said. “Are you seeing this?”
Maung nodded. “Yes.”
“She can’t be more than fifteen. Neither of them. I can’t tell if the other one is a boy or a girl.”
Maung asked him to zoom in for a closer look. When the guard did, he picked up the girl’s figure more clearly. Unlike the other Chinese he encountered on Karin, her body was normal and whole from the neck down and dressed in a loose environmental suit. And her face was pale—probably once-flawless skin that had tiny red splotches from rapid decompression. But from the forehead up, she was a nightmare. Her head fused into a bank of cables and wires so that very little of her original gray matter existed, and Maung wondered why they didn’t just use semi-awares like the Americans, and forget linking to human tissue. His semi-aware inserted itself, letting Maung know that a human brain injected a randomness difficult to replicate synthetically; perhaps, it finished, the Chinese concluded that this degree of imperfection was critical.
Next to her, another girl lay strapped into a similar acceleration couch. At least Maung thought it was a girl; he couldn’t be sure. A section of the ship crushed the Dream Warrior and hid most of her features under frozen blood and steel, so only long hair came from where her head should be, motionless in the empty vacuum.
“We should get going,” the guard said.
Maung handed him the end of a cable, pointing to a data port next to the girls. “Plug it in there.”
“What for? The bridge is hosed up. Nothing works.”
“Just do it. The sooner we try, the sooner I can leave.”
Maung plugged the other end into his helmet and waited. By the time the guard finished, Maung had already set up his defenses, ready for anything that might have tried to leap over the connection and into his mind, and he opened the stream. At first there was nothing. Maung projected his way in, the exertion draining him of strength since there was no power to draw from the ship, and he thought he’d have to back out before finding anything useful. Then he found a weak signal. It was like a heartbeat and part of Maung recalled that he’d analyzed something like it before, pulses of packets that rode on such a weak signal that he almost missed them. He ran the data through his system. At first he thought that he’d identified the signal’s purpose, but close to the finish his system flashed a warning signal. Maung backed out.
When he unplugged, the guard asked, “Did you find anything?”
“Just a second.” Maung sipped on a hose inside his suit, almost draining his entire bladder of nutrient formula even though he hated the taste. His blood sugar was dangerously low; Maung continued swallowing, waiting until the dizziness left and his systems indicated that power levels were returning to normal.
Maung was about to answer the guard when his wetware finished its analysis. “Back to the shuttle!” he shouted.
“What?” the guard asked.
“There are explosives under their couches for self-destruct. They’ll go off in less than a minute.”
One guard pushed Maung off of the bridge, the other pulling him back into the maze of Chinese corridors. Maung watched the countdown on his heads-up, and when it reached five seconds he told the guards to stop. In the end, he was embarrassed. The explosives barely caused a vibration in the ship’s metal, and in the absence of an atmosphere there was little need to move so far away from the bridge because now that he bothered to run the numbers Maung understood what the explosives were intended for.
“Sorry for causing a panic,” he said.
The guard behind him clicked in. “What do you mean?”
“It was only meant to liquefy the girls’ heads and melt the semi-aware components. Not damage the ship.”
“I’d rather we weren’t around to see that anyway. I say we get back to the shuttle and let the Marines finish here.”
Maung felt alone. The captain gave permission for him to activate a camera on his own suit so that he didn’t have to rely on his guards, but he was still forbidden from moving outside his quarters without escort. Left to only his thoughts, he’d go crazy. Maung kept his helmet off as much as possible but the room air soon went stale as they sat, strapped and motionless, with nothing to do while Fleet maintenance struggled with the Chinese flagship. Maung reinserted into the Langley’s system, sometimes for companionship with the semi-awares, and sometimes just to pass ideas back and forth about new tactics and to receive news from Earth. The semi-awares refused to give him control. But whoever instructed them never told them to completely shut him out of the system after the Chinese attack, and Maung imagined that they liked his company now; he almost thought they had personalities. It was his first time spending so much time with Allied, combat semi-awares, and they kept him occupied with war planning. Maung guessed that the Old Man was allowing it. Whatever the reason, the ship’s systems assured him that they valued his input for the coming engagement.
What coming engagement? Maung asked.
We’re going to Europa, one said. Decoded Chinese intercepts indicate their ships will regroup there and make one final attack on Mars. We have no choice; Fleet has ordered Mars to be protected at all costs, even if we are all lost or captured. Additionally, Earth satellites have been monitoring a massive construction project at China’s space elevator for years. It could be a new kind of ship. Whatever it is, we assess it is near completion and if we succeed at Europa our orders are to attack the new Chinese ship on Earth before it can launch.
Another one broke in to finish. We are to take Europa and Ganymede—expel the Chinese from the outer solar system and then return to Earth. To finish them.
There was a time, Maung thought, when such a decision would have chilled him and made him think twice—the extermination of an entire race. But now he thought of his wife. A new war had begun and the first battlefield was in his mind. On the one side emerged a part of him he hadn’t appreciated even existed, one happy to get rid of China once and for all. The other was the part weary of destruction.
Maung almost couldn’t stand the sight of Nang when she sent a holo-message; it hurt to be so far away. Nang looked perfect on the holo, her face bright in the Martian facility’s white lighting so Maung thought she was more beautiful than he remembered—more beautiful, maybe, than even his wife. The Chinese will pay. Maung’s thoughts drifted while he watched Nang speak, and his hearing faded when he
focused on the thought of his first wife and her loss, the fact that she died simply because he and the rest of them had become a risk. Maung had to restart the message, forcing himself to pay attention this time.
“We got the Chinese engines running,” said the captain, “but she’s still in bad shape.” He smoked an electric pipe, blowing water vapor into the air. Maung wanted nicotine so badly that the pipe made his skin tingle and he almost asked for a pull—until it was clear from his mannerisms that it was a bad idea; the captain wouldn’t get near Maung, floating instead near the entrance, and he barely looked him in the eye.
“How bad?” Maung asked.
“Only one engine works. But it’s a large one and we won’t be slowed down too much. Plus, if we can use it to get codes and shut down Europa’s defenses . . .”
“That’ll be useless. They’ve changed all their codes already, I’m sure.”
The captain shrugged. “Well . . . anyway. Get some rack time. We’re heading to Europa in twelve hours after our reload of drones arrives. Maung, the admiral wants you to link up with the Langley semi-aware systems an hour before that—to decide on a strategy and acclimate yourself with controlling the Chinese ship. It looks like it still has some functional weapons systems. We—”
“Captain,” he said, interrupting. “I know how to fly the ship. I don’t need you.”
Maung worried he’d gone too far but it was too late to take it back. The captain’s lips curled in a sneer and he opened his mouth to say something, instead pushing off the bulkhead to close the distance.
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