by Marko Kloos
Always a hook in the steak, I think, remembering Halley’s comment on Masoud’s offer. But then I dismiss the thought of another setup on the general’s part. The rational section of my brain realizes that Masoud isn’t prescient, that he had no way of knowing the details of the mission or our destination ahead of time. And I took the assignment of my own free will, accepting that it would most likely lead somewhere dangerous. Whatever happens here in the Capella system, Masoud won’t be around, and I resolve to banish the general from my thoughts until we get back. This time, the fate of the SOCOM team is all up to me.
An hour and a half after our transition, the battle group is back in combat formation on the Capella side of the Alcubierre chute, and we are headed away from the node at a slow and careful pace. In front of us, Washington’s recon drones are rushing ahead into the system, little flashlights illuminating a path for us in the vast darkness. My anxiety has lessened a little, but I still watch the plot display out of the corner of my eye as we advance, expecting to see the signal-orange icon of a confirmed Lanky contact pop up at any moment. They didn’t lie in wait and ambush us at the transition point to take our fleet out one by one, so the most dangerous part of this phase is over. But I know that doesn’t mean the Lankies didn’t notice our ingress into their territory and send out half a dozen seed ships to intercept our battle group.
“The recon drones have covered half the distance to Willoughby,” the tactical officer says from her console. “No contacts reported so far.”
“We’re still calling it Willoughby, are we?” The XO steps up to the plot table and leans forward to examine the deployment pattern. “I think it reverted to Capella Ac when they scraped the last of us off the rocks down there.”
“It’ll be Willoughby again someday,” Colonel Drake says. “Just not this week. Not with what we brought. But we can knock down the odds a little for when that day comes.”
When that day comes, I think. We’re still prying Lankies out of the ground on Mars, seven years after beating them on the surface. When they have taken over a planet or a moon, they cling to it with a ferocity and determination that we can’t match. And Willoughby—Capella Ac—was a bit of a backwater colony before the Lankies claimed it, with nothing special to distinguish it that would bump it to the top of a priority list for invasion. What we’re doing now really is like poking a hornet’s nest with a stick to see how many of them remain, even if it’s a really big stick. That day, if it ever does come, will be too far in the future for me or Halley to see, and the certainty of that knowledge is a profound comfort. We will be the generation that stopped the tide. Pushing it back will be the task of another. There are too many of them and too few of us out among the stars for it to go any other way, no matter how many new weapons we have built in the last seven years.
In our solar system, on our own turf, the battle group seemed stupendously powerful. Sixteen state-of-the-art warships, armed with the latest weapons, more destructive power than we’ve ever put into space together at the same time. Kinetic energy missiles, particle cannons, nuclear warheads, automatic rail guns, enough potential energy to throw Earth itself into a long and lethal winter. But now that we’re on the other side of the Alcubierre chute, with the sea of darkness cloaking the unknown all around us, our formation doesn’t seem nearly as formidable as it did above Daedalus a few weeks ago. Just a few thousand humans, probing their way through the void in fragile titanium hulls, having to carry all their air and food and water along with them as they go. The situational display is zoomed out to the maximum awareness scale of the passive sensors, light-minutes of space, and the little cluster of ship icons at the center of it looks very lonely in the middle of so much unfriendly emptiness.
I hope we’re enough, I think. For whatever it is they sent us to do out here.
CHAPTER 13
INTERCEPT
Six hours after we arrive in the Capella system, I see my first Lanky seed ship in four years.
It’s almost a relief when the bright orange lozenge shape of a confirmed enemy ship appears on the plot, where it somehow becomes more significant than all the other symbols, as if the Capella system just shifted its center of gravity to it. Until this moment, the primitive part of my brain has done its best to convince me that the Lankies have found a way to avoid the passive sensors from our drones and scout ships, that we have been advancing into a cloud of seed ships without noticing them. The orange icon on the tactical display is proof to the contrary. But that same part of my brain has been primed for years to associate the signal color with mortal danger, and it reacts with the same reflexive fear that prehistoric humans would have felt at the sound of a pack of wolves howling in the darkness beyond the light of the campfire.
“Contact,” the tactical officer, Captain Steadman, calls out in a voice that is unreasonably calm to my ears. “Enemy seed ship, bearing three-five-five by positive zero-one-one, range eight million, five hundred fifty thousand. Nashville is confirming the drone data, sir.”
“Twenty-five light-seconds out,” Colonel Drake says. “I was hoping for a little more range on our eyeballs. But I’ll take it. Better than having one pop up inside of minimum missile range.”
On the plot, the blue orb representing the former colony planet Willoughby has appeared just inside our sphere of awareness, and the orange icon is right in front of it, the bright color enhanced and emphasized by the blue background.
“Tactical, we have our first customer of the day,” Colonel Drake says. He gets out of his chair and walks up to the plot table. The XO follows suit. I stay right where I am because I have no useful input on the ship’s tactical disposition, and because I am quite content to remain hooked up to my chair’s service umbilical. We’ve been at general quarters for hours, but my bug suit has kept me perfectly comfortable with its built-in cooling. The vacsuits of the rest of the CIC crew only have rudimentary comfort features, and I can tell by the sheen on the faces all around me that it’s much rougher to spend six hours in a vacsuit than in HEBA armor.
“Designate target Lima-1,” Captain Steadman says. “Target velocity is two hundred fifty meters per second. That’s pretty much the rotational speed of Capella Ac. Looks like they’re in geostationary orbit right above the planetary equator.”
“One seed ship,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says in wonder. “If that’s all they have in-system, this will be a short fight.”
“I’ll never be one to complain about favorable odds,” Colonel Drake replies. “But let’s not charge in with our guns blazing just yet. Tactical, get me a firing solution on Lima-1. Comms, let Nashville know to sit tight and wait out the planetary rotation. I don’t want us to show up in orbit and find there were six more of them hiding on the other side of that rock. Do we have enough juice left in the drones to spotlight the far side?”
“Affirmative, sir.”
“Then send them around and save us some time. Send the recon data to the rest of the battle group, and inform Johannesburg that we intend to engage the enemy as soon as we have the full picture from the drones.”
“We’re not going to give them the honor of the first shot?” the XO asks. “They’re probably itching to be the first allied ship with a confirmed kill.”
“It’s been four years since we launched a war shot at a Lanky ship. And this will be the first time we use one of the Orion Vs. I’m not too keen on putting that responsibility on a green crew. They’ll get their chance soon enough, I think.”
I bring up the optical feed relayed by the scout ship that is holding station five million kilometers ahead of us with its sensors trained on Capella Ac. When I was here with Halley on the frigate Versailles twelve years ago, I didn’t have much time for sightseeing, but I remember that the planet looked different. Back then, the view was Earthlike except for the shapes of the continents. But there was lots of blue and green, patches and swirls of clouds in the atmosphere, sunlight reflecting off the surface of the oceans. Now the whole planet is shrou
ded in clouds, without a single gap in the cover to give me a glimpse at the surface below.
The Lankies like their worlds warm and high in carbon dioxide, and whatever they use to terraform the colony planets they steal from us can flip the atmosphere to their preference in mere months. Willoughby has been theirs for over a decade, plenty of time to turn the place into whatever they consider their ideal habitat. I remember the mortally wounded Versailles, shot full of holes by Lanky penetrators, already on a trajectory that would lead her down into the atmosphere and turn her into a fiery comet when Halley and I dropped out of her hangar with the spare drop ship, the last people to leave the ship before it disintegrated. I wonder if any of the major wreckage pieces made it down to the surface, and whether they sit there still, overgrown and corroded in the warm, humid air. There were scores of human dead down there as well, but I’m sure that there won’t be any bodies left after all this time. We don’t fully understand what the Lankies do with human remains, but we do know they collect them and carry them off. The scientific consensus seems to be that they need the proteins as building materials for the seed ships, but the most common opinion in the Fleet is that they eat the corpses, and the gruesome theory naturally has more staying power than the clinical one.
The seed ship is a streamlined black cigar shape in front of the planet’s cloud cover. I feel a chill trickling down my spine when I look at the familiar outline, bumps and ridges on an irregular surface that is so black it seems to swallow the sunlight. It plods on along its orbit, seemingly motionless as it rotates in sync with the planet below, oblivious of the virtual bull’s-eye our tactical officer has drawn on it already.
I wonder how many protein chains in that hull used to be my crewmates, I think with a little shudder. But I was only on Versailles for a few weeks, and after all this time, I find that I can’t recall a single name other than that of Colonel Campbell, who was the XO of the ship and went on to command Indianapolis. I still remember some of the faces, however—random crew members of Versailles, caught by surprise by the sudden decompression of their compartments and asphyxiated, corpses with terrified expressions floating in the semidarkness of the ship’s passageways. They died without seeing what had killed them, the last humans in history who would know nothing of Lankies.
“We have a firing solution on Lima-1, sir,” Captain Steadman says. “Orion time on target is twenty-nine minutes, forty-two seconds.”
“Keep them locked in and update the solution as we get closer. I want to be able to launch our birds at any time. Weapons, warm up Orion missiles in tubes one and two.”
“Warming up Orion tubes one and two, aye,” the weapons officer replies. “Launch prep initiated.”
The new Orion V missiles are half the size of the old Orions we used above Mars, so each Avenger can carry twice as many. But they’re still enormous ship-sized missiles that have more mass than a corvette, so even an Avenger only has eight Orions, tucked away in two rows of ventral launch silos. Between Washington and Johannesburg, the battle group can engage sixteen seed ships at long range. Not every Orion we’ve ever launched in anger has scored a hit, but those that did have a 100 percent kill rate. Even if a quarter of our shots miss, we can blot a dozen seed ships out of space with the rest, and we’ve never faced off against that many, not even when we went up against the fleet they had around Mars. With two Avengers aiming their Orions at it right now, the solitary seed ship in orbit around Capella Ac is living on borrowed time, and it will die as quickly as my shipmates did above the same planet twelve years ago when Versailles ran into a Lanky minefield. The thought of this impending karmic symmetry fills me with grim satisfaction.
For the next thirty minutes, we continue our course toward the former colony planet. The distance readout next to the seed ship’s blaze-orange icon counts down with every passing second. There’s no maximum range for the Orions—they will burn out their nuclear charges and then coast ballistically once they’ve stopped accelerating—but there’s a line on the plot marking the minimum range, the point in space where a launch would be too close to the target for the kinetic warhead to build up enough energy for a certain kill. It’s still a long way from reaching the orange seed ship icon, but it draws closer to it every minute. The Avengers have a very long spear and a very short sword to back it up, and nothing at all to cover the range in between.
“New contact, bearing three-five-eight by positive two,” the tactical officer announces. “Distance seven million, two hundred thirty-nine thousand. Designate Lima-2. Another seed ship just popped up on the equatorial horizon. Same bearing and speed as the first one.”
“Looks like Jo’burg will get a shot at glory after all,” Colonel Drake says. “Hand off the target data to them and ask them to lock on with their Orions for a simultaneous time-on-target launch.”
“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer says and turns toward his console to contact his counterpart on Johannesburg.
The second Lanky seed ship emerges on the left side of the planet just above the horizon and makes its way around the equator line, following the course of the first seed ship. Against the vast backdrop of the world, it looks tiny and forlorn even at maximum magnification. I bring up a window with the live image from the other ship and move the outlines next to each other on my screen. The second ship is noticeably different from the first—shorter by maybe five hundred meters, with a more streamlined and even hull shape. However the Lankies manage to put these things together, standardization does not seem to be on their list of priorities.
“Give me a time to target for the Orions, please,” the commander says.
“Time to target is twenty-four minutes, eleven seconds, sir. Johannesburg has locked on to Lima-2 and is tracking the target. They are reporting ready for launch.”
Our recon drones continue their patrol arc, expanding our sphere of awareness with every passing minute. When the plot expands beyond Capella Ac and starts to show the space on the far side of the planet, I almost expect to see a cluster of two or twenty orange icons, a hidden fleet of seed ships ready to spring their trap and converge on us. But when the drones complete their sweep, the only orange markers on the plot are the two seed ships we have already spotted.
“The drones have eyeballs on the dark side,” Captain Steadman says. “Nashville confirms that we only have two bogeys above the planet.”
“Hand off terminal guidance to Nashville and open the launch door on tube one.”
“Uplink confirmed. Opening launch door on tube one. Tube one is ready to launch, sir.”
Colonel Drake looks around the CIC, where everyone seems to be holding their collective breaths.
“This is where we commit,” he says. “Weapons, fire on my mark. In three. Two. One. Fire.”
Lieutenant Lawrence, the weapons officer, flips the manual cover off the launch button for Orion silo number one and presses down firmly. A second later, a slight vibration goes through Washington’s hull as the one-thousand-ton Orion V missile leaves its launch tube, propelled by a chemical booster rocket. I watch the feed from the starboard sensors to see Johannesburg disgorge her own Orion from its ventral launch tube. Both missiles streak away from the formation in a wide arc. When they are a few thousand kilometers from the battle group, their guidance systems nudge them onto new courses, and I watch their trajectories on the plot curve toward the Lanky seed ships.
“Booster engines shutting off. Nuclear ignition in three . . . two . . . one,” the weapons officer narrates.
On the plot, the little blue V shapes representing the Orion missiles leap ahead as if someone accelerated reality by a factor of ten. Some five thousand kilometers away from the battle group, the two missiles just started their nuclear propulsion systems, expelling atomic charges and igniting them behind the ablative pusher plates at their rears, one explosion every second. It’s a crude and brutal approach to propelling a missile, but it’s by far the fastest method to accelerate an object, and no other way comes even close
. If we had people on the Orions, the hundreds of gravities of acceleration would overwhelm even the best artificial gravity compensators in a few milliseconds and turn the crew into a fine organic mush. But the warheads on the tips of the missiles are inert blocks of super-dense materials—depleted uranium and tungsten—crude-looking cylinders that nobody bothered to even shape into penetrating points like our rifle bullets. Whatever the Orions hit at the end of their acceleration run must absorb insane amounts of kinetic energy in a few nanoseconds, and not even seed ships are tough enough to withstand that sort of blow.
“Missiles are on the way,” Captain Steadman says. “Time to target is now twenty-two minutes, thirty-one seconds.”
On my screen, I still have an active overlay that shows the seed ships side by side. They’re creeping along their orbital paths quietly and steadily, unaware of the warheads accelerating toward them at hundreds of gravities per second and working up apocalyptic levels of kinetic energy. If one of the missiles fails to hit its designated target, it will slice through the atmosphere of Capella Ac in mere seconds and slam into the ground with a force many times greater than all the nuclear warheads in the task force combined. We never fire Orions at seed ships when the backstop is a planet with humans on it. But Capella Ac has been Lanky soil for a long time now, and any lives we wipe out on the surface with a missed shot would only be a bonus.
Twenty-two minutes feel almost indeterminable when they are spent watching two little V-shaped icons crawling across the holographic orb of a tactical situation display. The missiles streak along at fractional light speed after using all their nuclear propellant charges, but it still takes a while to cross seven million kilometers of space, and as much as I would like, I can’t will them along any faster. After clashing with the Lankies so many times, I fully expect some unforeseen twist that will put us on our heels once again. Any minute, the target ships will alter course and throw off our aim, or more seed ships will appear nearby seemingly out of nowhere and send our battle group running back to the Alcubierre node in full flight.