by Marko Kloos
“You may want to consider something, too. Maybe General Masoud is right, and you are more than qualified for your job. And maybe you’re well outside of your lane right now. Both of those can be true at the same time, you know.”
She walks out of the room, and I listen as her footsteps trail down the passageway, still rattled by her criticism.
CHAPTER 10
JUMPING OFF
“Now hear this: Replenishment personnel, stand by for transfer operations. NACS Littleton is now coming alongside to port. I repeat, stand by for transfer operations on port stations.”
I am at the TacOps station in the CIC, which gives me a ringside seat to watch our pre-Alcubierre replenishment operation. Littleton is one of the Fleet’s large supply ships, fifty thousand tons of mass at a standard g, but she is utterly dwarfed by the bulk of Washington, which is ten times as heavy and five times as long. Just a few years ago, two ships joining up in space for transfer operations had to be maneuvered into place manually, but the new integrated management systems have turned the procedure into a fully automated event. Five minutes after Littleton has matched speed and course with us, the projection of the docking status board hovering above the plot table shows green lights in every field.
“Littleton, we are green across the board for transfer ops. I show hard seals on collars one through six,” the XO says into her headset.
“Washington, our board is green as well. Hard seal confirmed. We are commencing transfer ops.”
“Affirmative, Littleton,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says and taps the side of her headset to terminate her comms link.
“All right,” she says. “We are topping off. Comms, hit the jukebox.”
“Aye, ma’am,” the lieutenant at the comms station says. A few moments later, classical music comes out of the sound projectors on every deck. It’s tradition in the Fleet to play music during replenishment ops, but the choice of tunes is up to the commander, and Colonel Drake seems to be a fan of Vivaldi and Bach.
We are a few hours away from the transit point for the Alcubierre chute into the Capella A system, and I am more nervous than I can recall being since the windup to the Second Battle of Mars seven years ago. Even the stupendous amount of firepower all around us doesn’t fully quell my anxiety. We are in the middle of a small fleet of warships: two battlecarriers and their respective battle groups, almost twenty ships in total. The plot is dotted with icons for friendly ships: four space control cruisers, four frigates, several scout corvettes, and two supply ships, all surrounding the two carriers at the center of the display like a cloud of satellites orbiting a binary star cluster. None of the ships in the combined task force are older than ten years. The battle group assembled in this space right now is vastly more powerful than the entire combined fleet of Earth just ten years ago, and it only represents a sixth of the new fleet. But I’ve been in battle against Lanky seed ships before, and I have seen just how quickly those friendly ship icons on the plot can wink out of existence one by one.
On my console screen, the external feed from the optical sensors gives me a seamless view of the space around Washington. Just a few kilometers away, ACS Johannesburg hangs seemingly motionless in the blackness of deep space, aligned in the same attitude and heading as we are so that the two carriers are in parallel formation. Jo’burg is a Mark II Avenger, slightly more advanced than Washington, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell them apart without their different paint schemes and hull markings. It’s comforting to see another Avenger alongside, dozens of missile silos and a double particle-cannon mount wrapped in half a million tons of steel and titanium alloy, armor that renders her almost invulnerable to the kinetic penetrators of Lanky seed ships. Each Avenger is armed with forty-eight nuclear missiles and a dozen Orion kinetic energy missiles, and just one of these ships could bomb Earth back into the Pleistocene. The only way we could develop and field warships with that much destructive potential was to spread them around among all the contributing alliances of Earth. The NAC and the SRA have three each, and six more are crewed and financed by the smaller power blocs: the African Commonwealth, the South American Union, the Euros, the South Pacific Alliance, and Korea and Japan. It’s a carefully calibrated balance of power, made necessary by the inherent tendency of our species to abuse strength. Our biggest challenge isn’t going to be defeating the Lankies, but resisting the temptation to use all this new firepower against each other when the outside threat is gone.
I’ve checked all my systems dozens of times in the past week, but I go through the routine again as I watch the replenishment ballet. The TacOps station is tied into every tactical subsystem on the ship, and the technology infusion from the Koreans and the Euros has boosted our neural network capabilities tenfold since I last served in this chair. Every request I send is executed immediately, no matter how mundane the query, using seemingly unlimited bandwidth. My team is fully staffed with qualified people; we have all the equipment we need, and every ship in the task force has full magazines and supply racks. We’re on a warship designed to hunt and kill Lankies, proven in its ability to stand toe-to-toe with them in space and on the ground. I should feel optimistic about the mission. But as I look around the CIC and watch everyone go through their own routines, I wonder if all this new technology is making us more confident than we ought to be. Maybe the half decade since the last big battle has served to blunt the memory of our fear. Or maybe it’s our way of facing that fear and conquering it—to put an end to our collective nightmares. Maybe we need reassurance that the monsters in the dark aren’t inevitable forces of nature, that they can be dragged into the light and killed.
As I finish my tasks and shut down my display screens, I glance over to the command pit and see that Lieutenant Colonel Campbell is watching me from across the CIC. When she realizes that I’ve noticed, she averts her gaze and walks over to the helm station. Now that I know who her father was, I can’t fail to spot the resemblance every time I see her. She’s tall and lean like he was, and she inherited some of his features, like the shape of his nose and the line of her jaw and cheekbones. Colonel Campbell died eight years ago when he sacrificed himself and NACS Indianapolis to stop the Lanky seed ship that had broken through Earth’s last-ditch defenses, and his picture is on memorial display in a lot of Fleet facilities. Even her body language and command presence remind me of her father, and I wonder whether she adopted them consciously or naturally.
“Cincinnati and Nashville are reporting they’re ready for their scouting run,” the comms officer reports, and Lieutenant Colonel Campbell turns back toward the holotable.
“Very well. Give them the green light to depart the formation and wish them Godspeed,” she says. “If all goes well, we’ll see Cincy in twenty-one hours.”
“Aye, ma’am,” the comms officer replies.
He relays the XO’s directions to the two scout ships. A few moments later, their plot icons move out of the static formation of the battle group and accelerate away toward the Alcubierre point. I request a visual from the ship’s exterior sensor feed, and the neural network replies instantly, showing me high-definition imagery of both stealth corvettes as they break rank and streak off toward the transit node. While most of the Fleet’s ships have switched to the new high-visibility paint scheme, the stealth ships are still coated in nonreflective flat black that seems to soak up light photons, and I am once again amazed by how difficult it is to see them against the background of space even through the high-powered optics of Washington’s sensor arrays.
“Scouting element is away,” the XO announces. “Clock’s ticking. Give me a mission timer, please.”
On the forward bulkhead, a timer projection appears, then begins to count down from 21:00:00. The stealth corvettes will be at the Alcubierre point in two hours, where they will start their six-hour run into the Capella system. If all goes well, Nashville will remain on station right on the other side of the Alcubierre chute in Capella. Cincinnati will reappear in the solar syste
m in twenty-one hours with up-to-date reconnaissance data, at which point the task force will be in position for the main advance.
“Twenty-one hours to stock up on beans and bullets,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. “And then the war is back on.”
Some of the officers in the CIC voice their cheerful agreement. None of the ones who sound positive about the XO’s proclamation look like they’re old enough to have been in the service when we took on the Lankies on Mars. I know for sure that none of them were there the last time we set foot in the Capella system, because I was there, twelve years and a hundred thousand lives ago, back when we were still thinking of ourselves as the undisputed masters of the galaxy.
Be very careful what you wish for, I think. Out there, things can go sideways in a hurry. Even in a shiny new ship.
I know they think they’re prepared, because I did back when I was in their shoes. And I know they have no idea, because I didn’t, either.
After my watch, when I am back in my cabin, I check the current comms delay to Earth. We are well outside the asteroid belt, and the light-speed comms need forty-seven minutes to travel home. When Halley and I both serve on Earth or Luna, we have to contend with a delay of a second at most, which means that all our comms in the last two years have been face-to-face talks, but that’s not an option when you have to wait three-quarters of an hour for a reply to your statements. On deep-space deployments, we send video messages instead, if we are allowed the bandwidth, and text missives if we aren’t. Washington has an abundance of bandwidth, so I start up my terminal to send a video to Halley before we transition out of system. But when I see the green ready light next to the optical sensor, I don’t quite know what to tell my wife in the moment, so I put the terminal on standby again to gather my thoughts.
Twelve years of good-byes. I should know all the different ways to say this by now, I think. We’ve done sappiness, snark, dark humor, flippancy, and a dozen other moods. But there’s never an easy way to have this last talk before a combat deployment. No matter which mood we choose, or how many of them we manage to cycle through in a single conversation, it’s always unnatural to have to think about the possibility that it’s going to be the last time we see and talk to each other.
“Here we go,” I say into the sensor when I’ve finally collected myself.
“We’re about to jump off. The task force is under information blackout, so I can’t tell you where we’re headed. You know the Fleet bullshit. But it’s not a training milk run.
“It’s all stuff we’ve both done before, so don’t worry too much. I’ll get on comms again as soon as I can. In the meantime, I want you to know that your ass still looks good in a flight suit, and that I’ll be your left-seater anytime. Even if I hate the view from up front. And if I get unlucky somehow, you know the drill. I’ll see you in the hills above town at night when it’s cold and the sky is clear.”
Whenever we have information blackouts, I have to be careful which words I choose so the automatic censoring algorithms don’t intervene and garble my message or delete it entirely. But after twelve years together, Halley and I have our own common history and vocabulary to send each other clues about what’s happening without having to spell everything out. Capella A was our first deployment together, right after I managed to get myself assigned to her ship, the ill-fated Versailles. We both still remember vividly what happened on that mission—our close escape from the disabled frigate in the spare drop ship, with me in the cockpit next to her for the white-knuckle ride down to the surface. I’ve only ridden in the cockpit with her twice, and I know she’ll understand the reference. If I don’t return, she will at least know where I went, even if the Fleet decides to keep a top-secret lid on the mission forever.
I smile into the sensor for a moment and end the message.
We have made it a habit to only say “I love you” in person, never in a vid chat or text message. If one of us buys it while we’re apart, we want our last expression of that sentiment to be a memory of a face-to-face conversation, complete with the weight of the other’s presence, not a line in a text or a half second of a recording that can be replayed endlessly to refresh the grief with every passing year. And when the skies above Liberty Falls are clear, Halley has line of sight to half the galaxy at night. I know that if I die in the Capella system, it will be forty-two years before the photons from the event reach the naked eye of anyone on the northern hemisphere of Earth. But the thought is comforting to us, and we’ve decided that in the absence of a cemetery to visit, we’ll treat the visible night sky as grave markers for each other if it comes to that.
I’ve been in the service for twelve years. I’ve done hundreds of combat missions and out-of-system deployments, and my job has me steeped in the most testosterone-soaked part of the military, where everyone is highly skilled and capable, trained to be physically tough and mentally resilient. But in all this time, I’ve never managed to shake the awful, unwelcome little pang of despair and loneliness I feel whenever I send off that last communication right before a combat deployment.
CHAPTER 11
BAG WORK
“New contact, bearing two by positive fourteen; distance fifty thousand,” the tactical officer calls out. “Checking IFF. Contact is friendly, sir. Cincinnati just transitioned back out of Alcubierre.”
“Very well,” Colonel Drake says. “They’re a little early.”
On the forward bulkhead, the mission timer still has thirty-one minutes left on its countdown. The icon that just appeared on the plot hologram fifty thousand kilometers in front of the task group turns from a yellow question mark to a blue lozenge shape. After a few moments, the IFF system does its handshake with the new arrival and displays a name and hull number next to the blue icon: “OCS-2 CINCINNATI.” The stealth corvette makes a ninety-degree turn, away from the Alcubierre point, and lights its engines to clear the transition spot in space in a standard traffic avoidance maneuver, just in case someone else comes through the chute unexpectedly.
“Cincinnati, this is Washington. Welcome home. Glad to see you all in one piece. When you’re ready, contact Littleton for pattern entry instructions to commence refueling ops,” the comms officer says.
“Washington, Cincinnati. Confirm handoff to Littleton for refueling ops. The tactical upload is commencing. The coast is clear on the other side. No enemy contact, and nothing is stirring for at least five light-minutes into the system.”
“Glad to hear it, Cincinnati,” Colonel Drake replies. “Now top off your tanks and take a breather because you’ll have to get ready to do it again.”
“Affirmative. Cincinnati out.”
“At least we won’t be jumping into a knife fight,” the skipper says. “Maybe they’ve packed up and left.”
“Wouldn’t hurt my feelings any,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. “Although it would be a terrible waste to bring all this firepower across forty light-years and then not use it.”
“Let’s go through the tactical upload from Cincy before we roll in like we own the neighborhood again,” Drake replies. “I want to take some time to look over the recon data while we head for the node. In the meantime, let’s get this procession on the way. Two-minute transition intervals, carriers first, cruisers next, then the tin cans. Let the supply ships bring up the rear. Regroup on the far end in deep-space formation, then resupply again. Whatever we find in that system, I want to have everyone topped off before we head in.”
“Aye, sir,” the XO replies. “Comms, give the green light to the battle group for acceleration. All ahead at one gravity, follow the carriers in two-minute intervals. Fifty-three minutes to the transition point.”
“Aye, ma’am,” the comms officer says and starts relaying the instructions to the rest of the combined battle group. A few moments later, the situational orb on the plot table stirs into movement as Washington and Johannesburg burn their main engines and accelerate toward the transition point at one standard Earth gravity. The artificial gr
avity system compensates for the acceleration so efficiently that my inner ear never even feels the movement, even though we just went from coasting in space to moving forward at almost ten meters per second squared.
One by one, the other ships of the battle group line up behind the two carriers, one taking up position in the queue every two minutes, until the fleet is strung out in space in a long line of warships that stretches thousands of kilometers. The most dangerous part of the transition will be the exit from the Alcubierre chute in the Capella system—if the Lankies manage to ambush the first ships, the rest will find themselves in the middle of a battle once they emerge because there’s no way to wave them off while they’re in Alcubierre. But the second most dangerous part will be the traffic caused by almost twenty warships emerging into the same spot in space in two-minute intervals. A cruiser rear-ending a carrier at hundreds of meters per second can cause every bit as much destruction as a broadside from a Lanky seed ship. We have navigation procedures just for that purpose—the ships of the battle group will take sharp turns in alternating directions once they come out on the far end—but the Fleet hasn’t had a chance to execute large-scale transitions in a while, and this is the largest Alcubierre deployment I’ve ever seen. It would be terribly anticlimactic to die in a multi-ship pileup while exiting a transit node. But astrogation and helm are not under my control, and I wouldn’t be much good at the job even if they were, so I’ll have to trust in the skills and the training of the young lieutenants and NCOs who crew those stations right now.
“All departments are reporting ready for transition, sir,” the XO tells Colonel Drake. He nods and drums his fingers lightly on the armrest of his command chair. If he is anxious or nervous about our impending forty-two-light-year sprint into Lanky-controlled space, it’s not showing in his demeanor. Back when I joined the Fleet, the commander of a warship was the Old Man, and all of them were old from the perspective of a twenty-one-year-old kid from the PRCs who thought he would be young and fit forever. But now that I am in my midthirties, Colonel Drake doesn’t look that much older. He has maybe fifteen years on me, and his trim frame and handsome looks make him seem younger than he is. Our generation is now in command positions, and to all the lieutenants and enlisted on the ship, we’re the Old Guys now. It feels strange to think of myself as a leader and mentor, because part of me still feels like that young kid who stepped off the bus and onto those yellow footsteps at NACRD Orem on the first day of boot camp.