Redemption of Sisyphus

by Eric Michael Craig

  “Both possibilities are distressing,” Roja said, holding up her hand to stop Tana from lobbing a volley of invectives in his direction. “How many ships did you see in the fleet coming at us?”

  “Over six hundred,” Tana said. “They were scattered, and there might have been more beyond our sensor range.”

  “There are 651 ships,” Dutch said. “Dr. Whitewind is in the Kanahto control center and is scanning them.” The wall behind Jeph disappeared and a list of ships and their positions appeared overlaid on the area of space the fleet occupied.

  “When will they get here?” Nakamiru asked.

  “Twenty-six days, three hours and sixteen minutes, depending on braking curves,” Dutch said.

  “That gives us an absolute deadline to work against,” Roja said. “We need to get free of the quicksand. This has to be the priority.”

  Jeph clamped his jaw down, but forced himself not to push back as hard as he wanted. It had become his biggest sore spot. “We’re doing the best we can, but we’ve only got one person that can access the control systems.”

  “We understand that governor, but it no longer matters,” Nakamiru said. “The problem must be solved.”

  “If I may?” Tana said, leaning forward and making sure Roja acknowledged her before she turned toward Jeph. “I would like to offer our support to the work down here. My crew is made up of … specialists … and they might be an asset to you.”

  “I think you should stay with us,” Katryna said. “When the fighting starts, you will be safer.”

  “That’s still weeks away and we can make that decision later,” she said, glancing at Roja. “You and Tamir can focus on a strategy, if we need to fight. I’d be useless in helping plan something like that. Down here we can at least contribute to the effort.”

  “While I appreciate the offer, there’s a steep learning curve to be conquered before you could be of much help,” Jeph said. “Your administrative skills might be better served with the other chancellors aboard the Armstrong.”

  Tana’s face exploded into a huge grin. “I have to say you are rather good at politics. I don’t think I’ve ever been told to keep my nose out of someone’s business so politely.”

  He looked down at the table, embarrassed that she saw his real intent.

  “I don’t work for the Union anymore, so you don’t have to worry about me getting all uppity with you,” she said. “I just think, if we get a couple days on the ground, you might be surprised at how fast we can saddle up.”

  FleetCom Military Operations Center: Lunar L-2 Shipyard:

  Mayor Pallassano’s face filled the center screen. She leaned in toward the optic and gave everyone a much more intimate close up than they wanted. The uplink routed through TFC, and Cartwright and Commandant Pratte occupied the screens to either side of her. Admiral Quintana had his entire command staff around the table in his office.

  “They’re cutting their way toward Underhive,” she said, wiping away a bead of sweat that ran down the side of her face. “They’ve breached the landing center and took over the local tube control from there.”

  “Cutting toward Underhive?” Pratte asked.

  The mayor nodded. “They brought in a drill rig and they’re pushing down through the floors directly. We can give them a fight at the interconnects, so they’re avoiding them.”

  “What’s down there that they might want?” Admiral Quintana asked.

  She wiped another rivulet of sweat away with the back of her hand. “It’s all low overhead. It’s a bad neighborhood and other than a few WellCartel clinics, I don’t think there’s much there.”

  “I’d have figured their first push would be to take the civil control center,” Cartwright said.

  “Yah, so did we,” Pallassano said, nodding. “When they hit the power couplings and dropped our grid, we figured they were on the way. I’ve got a crew out there at the moment doing repairs and they’re not getting any action.”

  “It’s a delaying tactic,” Visser said, nodding. “If they can keep you thinking they’re after NHC you can’t commit the manpower to push back in Underhive.”

  “They do seem determined to take the basement first.” The mayor grabbed a towel off her desk and wiped her face.

  “It could be to get a toehold in a soft spot,” Ducat said.

  “A beachhead?” Visser said, shaking her head. “It’s a fair distance from Underhive to NHC isn’t it?”

  “About twenty kilometers, but some deeper levels extend under the outer habs of the city,” the mayor said. “Level twenty-five is massive. It might reach as far as the inner ring since it was one of the original mining drifts. Nobody’s kept the maps up for a hundred years.”

  “Seems like a hell of a detour just to avoid a firefight,” Visser said.

  “Especially since they cut through my security forces like they weren’t even there,” she said.

  “Do you have any idea how many troops they’ve landed?” Quintana asked.

  “Not yet, but it has to be well over a thousand,” she said. “We’ve got no eyeballs topside now, so we don’t know how many drop ships they put on the ground. We sent a rover crew up to take a looksee, but until they get into position we’re guessing.”

  “Tokyo down under isn’t tracking approaches?”

  “Only above thirty klick,” she said. “We’re below the horizon for their high resolution radar, so they can’t tell us what’s tracking for the landing pits. All they can say is that something is coming down, not what it is or even how many of them there are, when it comes to the smaller dropships.”

  “You do still have com with TDU though?”

  “It’s limited. They cut the inter-colony relay before they took the local loop control.” She wiped her face again and shook her head. “Frag I hope they hurry on the power,” she said as someone walked up and handed her a glass of water.

  “So you don’t know what’s above you right now?” Pratte asked.

  “Tokyo approach said we’ve still got sixteen science vessels in station-keeping, plus that troop carrier. It dropped low, and they lost it right after the attack began, and since we’re down to audio com only, we’re not getting much useful data.”

  “We ordered two wings of multicruisers, but they are still a couple hours out. I’m not sure what kind of ground support they can do when they get there,” the admiral said.

  “We’ve loaded up loop cargo-cars with security units and they’re en route now,” Pratte said. “If the cruisers can chase their ships out of your sky, maybe we can keep them from putting more troops on the ground before the reinforcements get there.”

  “That would help, but you need to know they might be reinforcing their orbital position,” Pallassano said. “Tokyo told us they were tracking several ships departing Galileo and moving in our direction. We don’t know if they’re still coming or if they went somewhere else.”

  “Several ships?” Ducat said. “We’ve only got six multicruisers in those two wings.”

  “Yah,” Quintana said. “If they mean to hold their high guard, then that will be a bloody mess.”

  “It is already a bloodbath in the Underhive,” the mayor said as the lights came back up behind her and she sighed. “The units they’re landing are trained soldiers, they are cutting the civilian forces to shreds and our security forces aren’t doing much better.”

  Someone else came in and handed the mayor a thinpad. She nodded and wiped her face again. “Now that we have power again, I’ve got to get on the newswave and let people know we’re pushing back. I’ll let you know if anything else explodes.”

  “Let’s hope not. We’ll do what we can on our end,” the admiral said, trying to sound reassuring as she signed off.

  “It would help if we knew their objective,” Visser said.

  Gateway Colony: L-4 Prime:

  “Look governor,” Tana said, “I’d hate having someone crawl up my ass with a microscope, too. Especially a bureaucrat.” She followed Jeph do
wn the hall toward the main lounge where he hoped to lose her to someone else’s care. Tana Drake seemed a pleasant enough person, but she was orders of magnitude higher up the air supply, so he didn’t need her attached to him.

  He stared at the floor as his ring drifted along with him. During the meeting he’d worn his PSE, but as soon as it was over he’d dialed it to standby and had let the gravity shelf give him a little bubble of personal space. He chose not to respond, hoping his silence said what he didn’t want to vocalize.

  “Here we are,” he said as they entered the open area in the center of the third stack. Anju saw them come in and waved him over. The perfect person to unload my new keeper onto. He smiled as they walked over.

  The doctor sat at a low table along one window, with Saffia Drake and another woman. Several other people Jeph didn’t recognize sat nearby. Glancing around, it seemed like he’d transported back to one of his college cram sessions in the student hall at the Academy.

  Anju didn’t say anything as she stared up at him, and nodded at the nearest group. He raised an eyebrow and looked around again. They were all staring at thinpads or talking amongst themselves. It took several seconds for him to realize the short bursts of conversation he was catching were in the Shan Takhu language.

  “I know I’m slow, but what the hell is going on here?” he asked, pulling up a seat and dropping into it.

  Anju tilted her head toward the woman across from her. “Kylla here started studying the language database just about the time you went into your meeting. That was what, maybe an hour and a half ago?”

  Jeph nodded. “And?”

  She picked up a thinpad from the table and held it out to him. One of the shanak-che primers was open and the file indicator showed it was over half way through. Taking it back from him she handed it to Kylla and smiled. “Can you read that for me?”

  “Kasha-ahn nuko-asha naka-ahku-aht ahn oshtaht rahn-che, ahn kan-che akotath-etar ako-aht naet-naka un rahn-un fet-nuko. Da-ahn un-che naka aht-osht ako-rahn …”

  “Now do you mind translating that for us?” she said.

  “Differential permeability of matter created through time space sinking, is achieved through gradient stimulation of any matter construct in upper tier stages of state change. This structural variant results through the matter space displacement—”

  “Ouch,” Jeph said, blinking both in surprise, and as his brain struggled with both versions of the text.

  “I told you we might have some skills,” Tana said.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Operations Control Center: Galileo Station:

  Derek Tomlinson caught the news of the attack on Underhive and New Hope City on the newswave. When he asked Odysseus for an explanation, he got silence. Repeatedly.

  “Are you locking me out?” he growled as he stormed through the corridor from his office to the operations control center. “You cannot do this to me.”

  His security escorts glanced around trying to spot who the director was talking to, but he didn’t slow down so they charged along behind him.

  “You need me,” he said, again causing the men behind him to scan the corridor for someone else. “I will not let you cut me out. Do you hear me?”

  “You will fragging answer me,” he snarled as he exploded through the doors to the control center. The room was almost empty and the main viewscreen carried a display of the ships around Galileo and over the lunar surface. He could hear the background chatter of what sounded like troops in combat, but there was nothing else going on.

  “What the hell is happening?” he bellowed. “Somebody, tell me what you’re doing.”

  “Watching the show,” the deck commander said as he walked up beside the director and shrugged.

  “I am solving problems you have created,” Odysseus said, over the implant surprising him with a response.

  What problems? he thought, sending the message back through the link. Silence answered him.

  What problems? he repeated. When no answer came back for the second time, he asked out loud. “Why are you attacking New Hope City?”

  “I am not,” it thought to him.

  “We don’t know where the orders came from,” the officer said, looking down like he expected Tomlinson to blame him.

  “I can see you’re bombing the landing center with my own eyes,” he hissed. You are starting a war.

  “I am not,” it said. “The Sentinel Complex is below Underhive. That is my objective.”

  “The bombing is over,” the officer said. “There is an ongoing ground engagement. We think it’s somewhere above the south end of Underhive between the landing center and the main upper cross connect.”

  Underhive is part of NHC. You can’t attack one without hitting the other, Derek thought, blinking as the deck officer’s words replayed in his mind. “I wasn’t talking to you.” he added aloud as he turned and walked away several steps, ignoring the confused expression on the officer’s face.

  “That is partially true,” Odysseus said. “There will be collateral damage, however they are allies of FleetCom so you should be willing to accept this reality.”

  No. You cannot attack innocent civilians because they are inconveniently in your way. Derek thought.

  “I can.”

  “They will blame me for that. You have to stop!” the director said, his voice almost pleading.

  “We can’t stop it,” the officer said, shaking his head and checking the expression on the faces of the security escort to make sure he wasn’t the only one who thought Tomlinson sounded crazy. “We didn’t start it, and we don’t know where the orders came from.”

  “Frag off, I’m not talking to you,” Derek snarled.

  The man snapped off a quick salute, pivoted and walked away.

  “Although it was a matter of convenient coincidence, I have made provisions so they will not blame you,” Odysseus said as an image of Paulson Lassiter sneaking along a corridor flashed through his mind.

  FleetCom Military Operations Center: Lunar L-2 Shipyard:

  The fight was on. Ylva Visser stood her ground defending her argument that they could not afford to engage the ships above Sinus Iridum. Quintana let her have her way in the debate, in part because he agreed with her, but also because he didn’t want to be the only one to say no to Mayor Pallassano.

  “If we send the six multicruisers we have in there to engage an unknown force, we’re risking half the ships we’ve got in zone one. Half of them.”

  “We can’t let Tomlinson pound these people into submission,” Hamid Roudini said, slapping the table to punctuate his comment. “There are a million residents in Underhive. A million. How many of them will be dead before he stops?”

  “All of them, maybe,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe. But we can’t stop them with fragging multicruisers. All we can do is get blood for blood. That’s not how you win a war!”

  “Maybe this isn’t a war we can win either,” Ducat said. The OpsCom officer liked to be a peacemaker, but the admiral could tell instantly that he’d only thrown flammables on an already incendiary argument.

  Visser pushed back from the table so hard she slammed herself into the wall behind her. “It’s the battle we can’t win,” She growled. “We sure as frak can win the damned war, but not if we throw assets uselessly into a pointless bloodbath.”

  She clenched her jaw closed with enough force that Quintana could see the muscles of her face distorting under the strain. She let out a noisy sigh. “We don’t know how many ships they are moving into the field. How many multicruisers will you sacrifice just to appease your need for retribution?” She held her hands up and floated back to the table. “Let’s say we take all their ships out even without losing anything. Then what?”

  “Then we cut off their retreat,” Roudini said.

  “Who says they intend to retreat? We still don’t know what they’re doing there.”

  “They are punishing NHC for joining our side,” Ducat said.

&
nbsp; “No, they’re not,” she said. “Otherwise they’d be after the mayor and the leaders. They’d be looking to make a spectacle out of her to send a message to any other administrators thinking of rebelling. There’s something else happening here. We just don’t see it yet.”

  “But we can’t sit around and wait for them to whip it out and wave it in our face,” Roudini said. “We’ve got to stop them.”

  “We’ve got six multicruisers in the pool now,” she said. “And six more pinned inside the blockade here with us.”

  “We’ve also got three more due into the Zone in thirty-six hours,” the admiral added.

  “If we want to do this, then we need to wait for them to get here and focus our efforts on breaking the battle group that’s locked us in,” she said. “If we can do that, we’ll be bringing fifteen big-boys to the party.”

  Quintana nodded. “Six multicruisers they might consider taking, maybe even nine. But fifteen multicruisers is a fair fight for all of what they’ve got in Zone One.”

  “My point exactly,” she said. “We can kick them in the shins now, or we can bust their eggs in two days.”

  “But how many will die in Underhive in two days?” Roudini asked, his face showing he wasn’t ready to give up to her logic.

  “I’m sorry Hamid, but there’s no easy solution here,” Quintana said, shaking his head. “We need to let the mayor know she’s got to hang on for two days before we can get there.”

  “I’ll handle that,” Visser said, her eyes telling him she‘d do her best to make sure it went down smooth.

  “And I will get TFC to send everything but the toilet paper,” Quintana said. “It’s the best we can do.”

  Jakob Waltz Medical Center: Gateway Colony: L-4 Prime:

  They were expanding the MedBay to cover what had been the whole CrewDeck of the Jakob Waltz. It would be nice once they had the work done, but for now it was pure chaos. The only space that wasn’t half-disassembled was what had once been Anju’s quarters and even the front half of that was nothing more than a console and four chairs around a small worktable.