Tyger Burning

by T. C. McCarthy

  When the countdown reached zero there was nothing. At first Maung thought he’d avoided danger but then the temperature inside his makeshift box rose and his semi-aware listed the effects of gamma and x-rays, which interacted with solids to raise their temperature. But it was only a few degrees. At the same instant Maung flinched when loud alarms rang through the ship, announcing elevated radiation levels on all levels and electronics failures. He reached out wirelessly, hoping to link up with the semi-awares, but Maung couldn’t find a signal and realized that for the time being he was stuck there—until radiation levels fell.

  His plan was in the hands of the semi-awares.

  By the time he made it back to his compartment Maung was out of breath from dragging a medical bot. Even though the thing weighed nothing, it was awkward. Several times between sick bay and his couch he had to pause and unsnag its dangling, spiderlike arms from pipes and hatches, and he doubted the thing would work at all—now that it took such a pounding in transit. He shut the hatch and cycled the air. Maung’s readings showed there was some radiation still but it wasn’t bad, and he released his helmet with a hiss, holding his breath for a moment before exhaling. He forced himself to inhale.

  Maung set the bot on the floor and strapped it down so it stood beside his couch, looking down on him. He activated it. The bot sprang to life and expertly unzipped the access ports on the suit so it could make injections and take samples, after which it paused for a few moments before announcing that Maung had radiation poisoning. It injected him with microbots, then announced a ninety percent chance of survival.

  When he put his helmet back on to relink with the semi-awares, they seem startled. We thought you were gone for good, one sent, and Maung thought to himself, So did I.

  How is the fight going? he asked.

  In the six hours you’ve been absent, we’ve lost forty percent of the Fleet and our sister carrier, the LeGuerre, lost one main engine; she won’t be able to keep up with us, unit Maung. Chinese losses are negligible.

  When will the Nan Yang arrive?

  All of the semi-awares answered at the same time. One more hour. It’s almost to the point where the Chinese would not be able to counter the Nan Yang’s attack, even if they spotted it.

  Maung hesitated before giving the next order. That he’d made it this far stunned him, making him wonder if any of it was real, like maybe he’d had a bad nightmare; soon he’d wake up next to Nang so he could lean against her stomach and listen for the first sign of their baby. But it was real. And with one hour to go, the next phase would have to be carried out soon or the enemy could lose focus on the Langley, not caring anymore and returning to a more general defensive posture. Maung couldn’t let that happen; if he did, the Nan Yang would be spotted.

  Pull LeGuerre out of formation, he sent. Move her slowly toward Phobos so it looks like she’s retreating.

  What for? one asked.

  Just trust me.

  Once the LeGuerre pulled out of formation, the Chinese made their move and the decision tore Maung’s soul in two. He rejoiced when the enemy took the bait, but it would kill thousands of Allied crew members in a crossfire; the LeGuerre’s move put the Fleet lifeboats between it and the Chinese. He conferred one last time with the semi-awares. A minute later they turned the main Fleet to meet the enemy, launching all their remaining attack drones; the LeGuerre then launched her fighters, but they stayed in defensive formation, circling around the mother ship.

  Unit Maung, we suggest arranging our cruisers and destroyers in a more efficient pattern, a semi-aware sent.

  Maung took a moment to compartmentalize his processes so he could communicate without pausing the offensive. Why?

  We analyzed their tactical movements; they intend to focus primarily on us, with only a secondary concentration on LeGuerre.

  Do it. Maung gave the order before he could think and crunch the numbers; he wanted to move quickly and avoid any possibility that the semi-awares might announce the lifeboats were in danger. Most of all, Maung wanted to avoid reports of how many personnel had died.

  We predict that LeGuerre will succeed in diverting one Chinese carrier group; it improves the Langley’s chance of survival significantly, unit Maung.

  But Maung couldn’t decide if he wanted to survive. He noticed the swarm of radar returns that appeared from the enemy carriers, a set of dots that represented an oncoming storm of missiles and fighter drones. The Langley had crossed into enemy range. Maung resisted the urge to give orders because the semi-awares had already gamed this scenario a thousand times, and he instead watched with concern as the Langley and its surrounding vessels launched their own attacks, sending what to Maung seemed like a countless number of missiles toward the enemy. The Fleet concentrated its fire on one carrier—the one that held the Chinese Dream Warrior.

  Maung marveled at the fact that, for now, the battle had been sterile; the two clouds of missiles passed each other, but some blinked out because they hit Chinese fighters who positioned themselves in sacrifice. Others disappeared when Chinese fighters fired their own missiles to intercept. His sensors showed that space had filled with hundreds of silent explosions, the kind that only occurred in a cold vacuum, sending hot sparks that looked like clouds of glitter until metal particles cooled to invisible dust.

  Are the incoming missiles nuclear tipped? Maung asked.

  Negative. We surmise that once they saw the crews evacuate, the enemy decided kinetic strikes would be more effective. None of them scan positive for nuclear payloads. While you were gone during the nuclear attack, our shielding was largely effective in countering the system-generated electromagnetic pulse. Some repairs were necessary, but nothing major.

  Well, thought Maung, at least that’s one thing that worked in our favor.

  Time was still the enemy, he realized. It was also a torture device. He watched the countdown for the incoming missiles and it seemed to slow with each second, giving him time to think and estimate the damage about to occur. And when the second Chinese group got within range to launch its missiles and fighters against LeGuerre, it slowed even more. Maung wanted it to end. By the time the missiles struck the Langley’s escorts, he smiled because now Maung wouldn’t have to anticipate the results and could begin assessing the damage to determine if they’d survive or not. He was so immersed in this thought that he almost missed it.

  Messages arrived to alert them of damage to various vessels, and at first it was a trickle. Within moments the trickle became a torrent. Three cruisers split into pieces when their magazines exploded and then touched off the fuel tanks in a series of sympathetic detonations. Maung was amazed that all three fired a last volley; it looked like everything they had. Then his body sent him a dim sensation, one that indicated the Langley shook, again and again, with warheads that penetrated the fighter hangars and detonated, ripping broken fighters to shreds and opening the hull to vacuum. All the Langley’s compartments depressurized. Maung took a moment to return to his body and make sure his suit was sealed and that he had plenty of oxygen for the second round.

  When he returned, the semi-awares gave him the news. Three quarters of the Fleet ships weren’t just knocked out; they had disintegrated into small metal chunks, but Maung reminded himself: It’s OK; this is part of the overall plan, and so far it’s working.

  How much longer until the Nan Yang? Maung asked.

  It will pass the point of Chinese intervention in ten seconds.

  Maung judged he was about to make what could be his last decision. Once they followed his order, they couldn’t turn back and it was all up to inertia; there was never any chance of them destroying the Chinese Fleet. But if the damage from the Nan Yang was as bad—or worse—than their estimates, Maung had also judged there was a good chance the Chinese would flee.

  What about their carrier—the one we targeted?

  Its engines are gone, the semi-aware sent. The ship is almost without power and we get no communication indications from it.


  Maung made his decision. Turn the fleet, he sent. Now. Fire everything we have left, all vessels, and order the remaining fighters to fire their missiles and then ram the remaining Chinese carrier. Target all missiles on the final undamaged carrier in this group and we’ll deal with the one going after LeGuerre later.

  The deceleration ripped into Maung, who knew that his body was being subjected to an incredible force, so strong that when he returned he’d feel the pain and soreness. But slowly the Fleet shifted. His screen lit with thousands of radar returns so that he had to dedicate a significant portion of his wetware to figure it all out, to trace the missiles and fighters, friendly and hostile. A status report arrived from LeGuerre. All its engines were offline and its remaining semi-awares survived on one remaining fusion reactor. There were no more fighters. Its attack damaged the incoming Chinese vessels but did not stop them, and almost a quarter of the Fleet’s lifeboats were now offline, destroyed by enemy particle cannons when the Chinese had passed through. So many of Fleet’s crews, he thought, unable to fathom it. Gone.

  Unit Maung!

  Maung snapped to, still in mild shock from figures describing the dead and damaged. So many are gone, he sent.

  Unit Maung, the enemy fleet has disengaged.

  What do you mean, “disengaged”?

  The semi-aware sounded like it was about to laugh, barely able to form its next message for being so happy. They are breaking off their pursuit of us and LeGuerre, and all remaining fighters are heading for their carriers. The enemy is not returning to Europa, unit Maung. It looks like the entire fleet is turning for a new heading—toward Earth.

  They’ve detected the Nan Yang, Maung sent.

  Affirmative. Our missiles and drones will likely damage the remaining Chinese carrier so that it will not make it, but we just lost LeGuerre. She is totally destroyed. And we are now out of missiles and drones.

  Maung was about to respond when the final volley of Chinese missiles streaked in. He saw it on radar. One by one remaining Fleet ships blinked out and the weapons-control semi-awares went into a frenzy that Maung had never seen, a kind of berserk mode where they were incapable of receiving commands or giving messages as all their processing capacity was taken up by point-defense operations. Some spewed plasma into space. Others fired particle cannons in wild patterns designed to maximize their chance of hitting the last incoming missiles. Maung wanted to hug them. Only three missiles made it through, striking the crew decks and vibrating the ship around him so violently that the semi-awares reported systems failures throughout the vessel.

  Maung screamed in pain. His emergency procedures kicked in to force him out of the ships’ systems and when he remerged with his body, Maung looked down to see a bloody hole in his suit leg, where his thigh had been shredded by shrapnel and where a long jagged piece of the Langley’s hull protruded from his bone; it took a moment for him to realize: He couldn’t breathe.

  Maung grabbed the medbot’s input tablet and tapped. Soon his vision blurred. He was unsure if he entered the right commands before he passed out, but he dreamed that the bot came to life and had a human face, Nang’s face, smiling down at him and whispering everything was going to be fine. This was a hallucination, he thought. In a vacuum there was no way to hear a whisper. And Nang was back on Mars, anyway. Safe.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Maung thought he was hallucinating. It looked like he was in a sick bay and both his guards were back, grinning down at him. At first they were blurry and Maung screamed, thinking they were Chinese—that he’d been captured.

  “You’re not captured,” one said.

  The other one laughed. “You scream like a girl.”

  “Where am I?”

  “In sick bay. You got a nasty leg wound from one of the missile attacks but a medbot took care of it and sealed your suit. It was almost too late. By the time it injected three series of bone, skin, and blood vessel repair microbots and sealed your suit, you had gone without air for two minutes. It had to resuscitate you twice.”

  Now Maung remembered. He tried to sit up but they pushed him back down. “The Nan Yang and the Chinese fleet,” he said.

  “The Chinese fleet is gone, minus two carriers you destroyed. And the Nan Yang hit Europa hours ago, just before the remaining Fleet ships began collecting us from the lifeboats.”

  The other guard anticipated Maung’s question, speaking before he could even ask. “There are only three ships left, Maung, and they’re all heavily damaged. The Langley and two destroyers. We lost almost all the Fleet. Half of all personnel are dead because the Chinese made sure they nailed any lifeboat that came within particle-cannon range.”

  Maung drifted toward the verge of passing out. Their figures blurred again and Maung fought, blinking his eyes rapidly in an effort to shake off the dizziness if only for a few more seconds. There were so many questions. He was active for most of the fight but his injury took him out at the end and circumstances had robbed him of experiences and memories that should have been his.

  “What about Europa; how badly did the Nan Yang damage it?”

  One guard smiled and then let go of the bed, floating slowly away. He motioned for the other one to follow. “We have to go, but you need to see for yourself, Maung. The semi-awares recorded it. There’s a tablet under your pillow and it’s loaded with vid of the impact.”

  Maung looked for the handset and slid it out from under the pillow. He turned it on. You won’t see much, his semi-aware stated and Maung nodded; the ship had been moving fast. They’d sent the Nan Yang at constant, maximum acceleration for a slingshot maneuver around Jupiter, boosted so that by the time it reached Europa it was traveling at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour relative to Europa’s orbit.

  At first there was nothing. Then the moon’s surface erupted in what looked like a massive explosion of ice and water vapor that sent a visible ripple around the entire surface. To Maung it looked like a tidal wave. The ice rose in massive swaths that left huge cracks behind, cracks which then filled with liquid water that froze almost instantly to heal the wound, until another wave followed behind—this one smaller, but still large enough to crack the surface a second time.

  Maung grinned. There was no way the Chinese surface installation—or its occupants—survived. If there was any chance of that, their fleet would have never abandoned Jupiter’s moons to the Allies, who now owned the system.

  The war, he concluded, was going very badly for the Chinese.

  Within a few hours, Maung felt like he was going crazy and asked to leave but the head physician refused to let him; the sick bay had filled with injured. Wounded crew members filed in, carried by nurses and doctors wearing magnetic boots, and the medics strapped them into cots. Most were unconscious—drugged to kill their pain. Maung couldn’t stand seeing the ones who were missing limbs and he shut his eyes, not wanting to witness the results of his decisions and not wanting more memories of war superimposed on the ones he already carried. Sometimes the wounded woke up. It took a minute or so for the attending bot to float over and administer more painkiller, a minute or so of screaming and groaning that Maung knew was his fault.

  His guards finally got Maung out of sick bay when they notified the admiral that the doctors had placed him in the main treatment room where any number of people could see him. Back in his compartment, Maung sighed. The hum of machinery drowned out any other noise and the red stains on the floor and walls suggested that he’d lost more blood than he realized. A massive four meter by four meter patch had been welded to the wall, covering the hole punched by the portion of the enemy missile that had penetrated.

  “You’re lucky the semi-awares dumped the air out of here,” one of the guards said. “They created a vacuum just before the missiles hit.”

  Maung looked at him with a blank face. “Overpressure?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen missile strikes on ships before and if you’re not wearing Marine armor, the overpressure inside compartments lique
fies your internal organs.”

  “That’s a really pleasant topic,” the other guard said.

  “I’m just stating a fact. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

  “It’s OK,” Maung said. “I knew that already anyway.”

  Maung tried to plug in, thinking that maybe linking with the semi-awares again would distract him with news of the Fleet or of Earth. But he couldn’t access. Every time he tried to link a signal pinged, indicating that he wasn’t authorized.

  “They’re blocking me,” Maung said. “Do you guys know why?”

  “Fleet locked everything down for an internal investigation. Everything is frozen. We can’t even get coms to Mars right now.”

  The other one nodded. “Only the captain knows what’s going on. We have to just wait for him to come back.”

  “Where is he?” asked Maung.

  “Europa. With the surviving Marines and a refill crew. All three remaining ships are overloaded with people and have almost no fuel or air left so he took them to Europa to melt ice and process it for hydrogen and oxygen.”

  “Any chance of another Chinese attack?”

  The guard shook his head. “I doubt it. They’re all halfway to Earth by now and it looks like the Chinese are bugging out.”

  Maung shrugged. “You mean they bugged out.”

  “No, I mean from Earth. Their command—the elites and a large military force—are leaving Earth, abandoning the rest of the Chinese people to rot in underground cities planetside. We just got reports that the thing they’re building at their elevator is some kind of deep-space vessel.”

  Maung processed the data. It made sense for the Chinese to run now, because the Sommen were going to slaughter them anyway. Plus they’d just lost a major battle, one that would cut them off from the rest of the solar system and revoke their access to the biggest supply of fuel off Earth. Maung factored in a million different variables. A full statistical analysis took a few minutes but at the end of it he had his answer: The Chinese had likely been planning a departure since the Sommen first arrived, long before they’d been warned against continuing with their man-machine creations.