Colonel

by Rick Shelley

  Lon sat in the cockpit of his shuttle, behind and slightly above the two pilots, and watched as they moved toward rendezvous with Golden Eagle, the ship he would be riding. The entire fleet was visible, even though night had arrived on the surface of Dirigent below it. Lights were visible on the ships—navigation markers and open shuttle hangars. Over Dirigent there was no need for the darkness of stealth conditions. In any case, the Raptor-class ships were so large that stealth was a relative concept. Within normal operating distances from a planet they could be seen from the ground during daylight hours and occulted a significant arc of space after dark.

  “Quite a show, ain’t it, Colonel?” Captain Art Felconi, Lon’s pilot, said as he started to move the command shuttle into line for its rendezvous with Golden Eagle. “I know I’ve never seen anything like this in the ten years I’ve been flying these bugs for the Corps.”

  “Quite a show indeed. Nobody’s seen a show like this in a long time, Art,” Lon said. Felconi had been “his” pilot since Lon had assumed command of 2nd Battalion, and had moved along with him to regiment. There were still a few shuttles visible ahead of them, rendezvousing with their ships. Most were already secure in their hangars, their passengers moved out to shipboard quarters. “Been a dozen years since there was anything close to this. It may be another dozen years, or more, before it happens again.” Long after I hang up my pips, Lon thought.

  “I’m handing control over to Golden Eagle now, sir,” Felconi said. “I show a lock on remote. The launchmaster has the con. All we have to do is sit back and let her drag us in.”

  “Just don’t take a nap,” Lon said, leaning forward against the straps of his safety harness to tap the pilot on the shoulder. “I feel a lot better with a good pair of hands at the controls here, just in case.”

  “You and me both, Colonel,” Felconi said with a laugh. “I always stay ready.” The pilot did not take his eyes from the monitors in front of him, and his hands always remained near the controls, ready to override Golden Eagle’s launchmaster if he thought it necessary. The odds were against that happening, but Art Felconi was an almost obsessively cautious man.

  Lon leaned back. Almost unconsciously, he gripped the armrests of his seat more firmly, though it was not the death grip he had achieved the first few times he had ridden in a shuttle cockpit. This was a routine maneuver. Mishaps were vanishingly rare, fewer than one per hundred thousand dockings, and most of those produced no casualties. The shuttle decelerated, quickly at first, then more slowly, finally coming to a stop—relative to Golden Eagle—thirty feet from the hangar door. A boom telescoped out from the top of the hangar and grappled the command shuttle, then drew the craft inside, turning it so it would be facing out. Captain Felconi did not take his hands from the controls until the shuttle had come to rest and its passengers felt gravity from the ship’s Nilssen generators. Felconi switched off the shuttle’s engines and seemed to slowly slump back into his seat, finally relaxing.

  The hangar bay’s huge clamshell doors closed in silence. The hangar was pressurized, a process that took nearly three minutes. When it was complete, a series of green lights appeared on the hangar wall and on one of the monitors in front of Felconi. That was followed by an announcement from the launchmaster that it was safe to open the hatches of the shuttle.

  Only then did Lon and the crew of the shuttle unbuckle their safety harnesses and stand. “Another uneventful hop,” Felconi announced. “Just the way I like ’em.”

  By the time that Lon got back to the passenger compartment of the shuttle his staff was already moving onto the hangar floor, where a man from the ship’s crew was standing to direct them. Although 7th Regiment’s headquarters staff had never deployed together on contract since Golden Eagle had been commissioned, they had rehearsed this a half dozen times to make certain that everyone would be able to find their way around the ship. The Corps did not like to leave anything to chance.

  Lon was met at the hangar exit by the launchmaster, a lieutenant commander from the ship’s complement. “Sir, the captain’s compliments,” the launchmaster said, saluting. “He asked me to extend an invitation for you and your executive officer to dine in the wardroom with him and his department heads this evening at nineteen hundred hours.”

  “Thank you, Commander,” Lon said, returning the salute. “Tell Captain Ewell that we will be delighted to dine with him.” There was no surprise to the invitation. It was a tradition in the Corps.

  By 1900 hours the armada was under way, heading out-system toward their first Q-space jump, five days away.

  8

  Accommodations aboard Golden Eagle were not as luxurious as those aboard the best passenger liners, but they were a marked step up from the Dragon-class ships, and worlds better than the extremely cramped quarters available on Port-class ships such as Tyre and Sidon, each of which could carry a single company of soldiers or function as a small freighter. The improvement that most passengers appreciated most, however, had nothing to do with living space. The Raptors escaped what had been the major inconvenience of interstellar travel. Older classes of ships required passengers to be strapped in during Q-space transits because that maneuver demanded the full power of all three Nilssen generators—which provided artificial gravity as well as propulsive energy. That meant that all activity had to be suspended three times during each interstellar journey. Raptor-class ships had a fourth Nilssen, allowing them to maintain artificial gravity even during Q-space transits.

  A combination of factors had led to the inclusion of what had previously been decried as “useless luxury.” The size and cost of the latest Nilssens had declined, making the addition of a fourth to each new ship more practical. But the rationale had little to do with the momentary comfort of soldiers. A fourth Nilssen gave a ship an element of redundancy, a “spare” in case one was damaged during a combat contract, allowing the ship to perhaps escape destruction without being forced to wait in hostile space until repairs could be effected.

  Lon arranged to view Golden Eagle’s first Q-space transit of the voyage from the launchmaster’s station, one of the few locations that offered the illusion of a direct window on space. The dome-shaped protrusion boasted floor-to-ceiling monitors giving a real-time view outside, allowing the launchmaster to handle incoming and outgoing shuttles as if he could actually see them. The resolution was so high that the illusion was nearly perfect. When he first stepped into the chamber, Lon felt an instant of vertigo, as if he had stepped out into open space.

  “Whew! That’s something,” Lon said. There were only two other people in the room, an ensign and a petty officer. The only interior lighting was muted, coming from the complink monitors and various status lights on different pieces of equipment, all of which were arranged in the center of the room.

  “Yes, sir,” the ensign agreed. “It gets everyone the first time, and some people always have that kind of reaction. I’ve even seen people gasp for breath, as if they thought they stepped into a vacuum.” The ensign chuckled. “By the way, sir, we’ve got about five minutes before Q-space insertion.”

  Lon glanced at his watch and nodded. He had started making his way toward the dome as soon as the thirty-minute warning sounded. That hadn’t changed, even though the reason for it did not exist about Raptor-class ships. Tell everyone what’s coming so it doesn’t catch anyone by surprise.

  “Don’t expect to see much during the jump, Colonel,” the ensign said. “It’s really not much of a show.”

  “I’ve seen it on monitors—small monitors—before, Ensign,” Lon said. “I just want to get the, ah, full effect.”

  “You will get that here, sir,” the ensign said. “Best view on the ship, better than what the skipper has on the bridge.”

  Lon walked around the center island, looking outward, picking out stars he could identify, and the rockets of some of the other ships in the fleet, hot points of light. One minute before Q-space insertion there was another warning broadcast throughout Golden Eagle.
The entire armada would jump simultaneously and, if every ship’s calculations were correct, emerge in the same formation at the far end of the transit in one of the major shipping lanes, forty light-years away.

  Thirty seconds: another warning. At ten seconds, a countdown was broadcast on the loudspeakers: … Three … two … one. “Q-space insertion,” the loudspeaker announced.

  Under the last numbers of the count, Lon had felt the ship’s normal vibrations increase markedly as the Nilssens cycled up to full power. There was no audible sound to accompany the vibration. The Nilssens were in separate pods outside the main hull of the ship, with the connections well insulated. The vacuum of space carried no sound. As the voice on the loudspeaker said “Q-space insertion,” the view around Lon changed instantaneously. The familiar rich star field visible from Dirigent’s system was replaced by a featureless, uniform light gray. There were no visual clues to tell the observer how far away the “horizon” was.

  “A void without form,” the ensign said, “like it says in the Bible. I know what the manuals say, sir, and I had to sweat my way through the transformational math in training—the basic, practical levels, not the deep theoretical stuff—but I can’t really say I understand it. The Nilssens generate an ovoid bubble of quantum-space, a pocket universe, that is just barely larger than the ship. Theoretically, we are tangent to every point in the ‘real’ universe, but we’re all alone, out of touch with that universe or the similar Q-space bubbles holding each of the other ships in the convoy. The Nilssens stress the bubble just so for just so long and then reverse polarity, dropping us back in normal space however many light-years we may have jumped. Our bubble universe will disappear, cease to exist, its Big Bang and Big Crunch happening just minutes apart—if time has any real meaning in it—the only evidence that the bubble ever existed a series of gentle gravity ripples that damp themselves out until they can’t be detected. That’s why we wait three days between transits, to make sure the, ah, residue from one jump doesn’t affect the next.”

  I know the theory, Lon thought, but he just nodded, not paying much attention to the ensign’s school text recitation. Lon was too busy staring at the blank gray surround, illuminated only by the few exterior lights Golden Eagle showed.

  The transit did not last long; they rarely did. Two minutes after Q-space insertion there was an announcement that extraction would occur in thirty seconds. Lon waited. Again there was a countdown through the last ten seconds and then normal space blinked back into view, abruptly. The star field visible through the dome’s monitors was considerably different. Other ships were visible, right where they were supposed to be—as far as Lon could tell.

  “Thanks for the briefing, Ensign,” Lon said. “An interesting show.”

  “Glad you’re so easy to please, Colonel. Always nice to have company here. Don’t get many repeat customers.”

  Lon kept busy during the voyage. He spent hours each day studying the database on Elysium, committing as much of the material to memory as he could—concentrating on the most likely area of operation, the region surrounding the capital, University City. He sketched out possible plans of attack, based on the information that Chancellor Berlino had brought to Dirigent, and the updates contained in the MR that had arrived just before the fleet left. Lon scanned large-scale maps, looking for whatever advantages of terrain might be found. What would I do in this circumstance, or this? Try to determine what the enemy might have done in the four weeks between the dispatch of that MR and the arrival of the Dirigenters. The final plan, based on what the Dirigenters learned when their ships emerged from the final Q-space transit of the journey, would be made by Bob Hayley, but he would seek the advice of Lon, the senior staff officers of the two regiments, and the battalion commanders, as well as the planners in the combat information centers of the fleet ships.

  In addition to the routines of administration and his planning efforts, Lon had to reserve an hour each day for physical exercise in one of Golden Eagle’s four gymnasiums. An hour was spent with the SMO, Dan Norman. Eight hours for sleep, guaranteed by the patches that Major Norman had prescribed, another two hours for eating and other personal necessities.

  “You’re doing well,” Norman told Lon the day after the second Q-space transit. “And the regiment is holding together nicely as well.”

  “I’m staying too busy to … brood,” Lon said.

  “That’s part of the therapy. By the way, unless something goes terrifically haywire with your blood chemistry in the next twenty-four hours, I think we’ll be able to forget that second session in the trauma tube.”

  “Best news I’ve had since we left home,” Lon said. “We might have had trouble fitting it in, since Colonel Hayley wants a full staff meeting on Peregrine before we make the final transit. Senior regimental staff and all the battalion commanders and executive officers. That could take most of a day, with the commute there and back.” Peregrine was the ship carrying Colonel Hayley and would serve as flagship for operations during the Elysium contract. Its combat information center would coordinate all activities of the ships and would handle communications between the fleet and the force on the ground.

  The three senior Elysians—Chancellor Berlino, Minister for External Affairs Beoch, and Treasurer Chiou—were also present for the planning session aboard Peregrine, more as observers than as participants; primarily, they were there to answer questions. The conference was held in a room next to CIC, in the area of the ship between crew territory and the passenger section. There weren’t enough complink stations around the U-shaped table for everyone to have a place. Staff officers and seconds-in-command had seats behind their principals.

  In the center of the U a three-dimensional projection of Elysium and its system spun, mimicking in scale the motions of the real system. Elysium’s sun was slightly hotter than Earth’s sun. Elysium was slightly farther away, giving the planet conditions very similar to those on Earth, Dirigent, or hundreds of other worlds that humans had settled. So many hospitable worlds had been found that colonists rarely had to accept anything that was not “just right.”

  “Tomorrow morning, we transit Q-space into the Elysian system,” Colonel Hayley said once everyone was seated and the initial small talk had ended. He gestured at the holographic chart. “The plans we make today must be seen as extremely preliminary and subject to almost certain change once we are in-system and learn what developments there have been since the Elysians sent that last MR. The information that contained will be twenty-nine days out of date when we hit Elysian space, so it is possible that the situation may have changed drastically.” The Elysium contract was no different from any other in that regard, and the situation was often much worse. The available information might be two months or more old by the time the mercenaries reached their destination. Most commanders made a point of emphasizing the age of their data.

  “As a precaution, the fleet will emerge from Q-space in three separate elements, widely spaced, too far apart for the enemy to easily intercept all of us even if they’re sitting there just waiting for us to arrive.” He cleared his throat and made a hand gesture. A chief petty officer from Peregrine’s crew, sitting at a console at the rear of the room, inserted red arrows in the holographic map, all well away from the system’s ecliptic, two coming from “above” and the other from “below.” Colonel Hayley detailed which ships would come in at each point. “The commanders of each ship already have their navigational data,” Hayley said. “We will—subject to change once we see what the New Spartans have waiting for us—be able to rendezvous in attack orbit seventy-one hours after we emerge from Q-space.” That elicited a few soft murmurs around the table. Standard doctrine called for ships to emerge seventy-two hours, or more, out from any significant planetary mass.

  “An hour is the most we can afford to risk, even though the commanders of all the ships agreed that it leaves a considerable safety margin,” Hayley said. “The problem is that we don’t know how considerable. But being
able to get into position even that much sooner might give us a slender advantage, even though we can expect that the New Spartans will calculate our course and speed in fairly short order once we emerge from Q-space.” He smiled. “We should, at a minimum, throw a hint of uncertainty into their planning. If we’re willing to chance doing one thing that the ‘book’ says we shouldn’t, what else might we attempt that they won’t be expecting? That is, at least, our hope.

  “The basics of our attack plan are fairly simple, again, depending on what we find.” Hayley gestured again, and the CPO at the controls adjusted the holographic view again, moving Elysium to the center, enlarging it, and showing only the surface of the planet and space directly around it. The amount of surface detail increased, and the district centered on the capital was highlighted in a bright yellow.

  “Agamemnon and Odysseus will move to engage the enemy’s capital ships with their own weapons and the Shrikes they carry, striving to keep them fully occupied while we put troops ashore. If the enemy’s strength and disposition on the ground have not changed significantly, the initial landing assault will include seven line battalions, leaving 7th Regiment’s 4th Battalion aboard ship as reserve. The heavy-weapons battalions of both regiments will also remain aboard ship until our people on the ground establish safe LZs to bring in their tanks and guns and we can use Shrikes to cover the landing of their equipment. If initial operations go well, the delay might be no more than an hour or two. If necessary, we can use a landing by 4th of the 7th as a diversion for the heavy weapons.” Another gesture, and the projection of Elysium stopped rotating and the image of the highlighted area trebled in size.