Orders of Battle (Frontlines)

by Marko Kloos

  “Occam’s razor,” Colonel Drake replies. “The least complex explanation is usually the correct one. Sorry about your afterlife ‘mead hall’ theory, XO.”

  “That means there’s a seed ship still out there within a few kilometers of us,” I say.

  “Yes, there is.” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell nods at the situational orb, still bereft of any information. “But we’re both suspended in his Alcubierre bubble while he’s dragging us along to who the fuck knows where. He can’t see us; we can’t see him. We can’t shoot at each other.”

  “But once we come out on the other side, that’ll change in a hurry,” Colonel Drake adds.

  “If we come out on the other side,” Lieutenant Cole says. “No ship has ever hitched a ride in another ship’s Alcubierre field before. We could slip outside of the bubble and get torn apart by the tidal forces any second.”

  “If that happens, we won’t know it.” The XO crosses her arms in front of her chest and starts pacing between the holotable and the edge of the command pit. “We’ll all be dead in a millisecond. Why don’t we act as though we’re not going to die? Because when this fellow gets to where he is headed and we’re still tagging along, we’ll have a problem on our hands. We’re going to come out of Alcubierre with a seed ship on our stern and our pants wrapped around our ankles.”

  Colonel Drake nods.

  “Agreed,” he says. “We’ll come out of Alcubierre or we won’t. If we do, we need to be ready to pick up the fight.”

  “We need a tactical analysis of the exact moment the Lanky popped us both into Alcubierre,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. “Bring up the last few minutes of the engagement on the table. When that bubble shuts down, those will be our starting blocks. We will have the same heading and velocity relative to each other.”

  Captain Steadman works his controls and starts populating the tactical display with data. The orange icon representing the Lanky ship pops back into life and starts heading outward from the center of the globe as the tactical officer is playing back the record in reverse.

  “All right, hold it there,” the XO says. “Skip forward fifteen seconds. Another ten. And hold.”

  The recording freezes, and Lieutenant Colonel Campbell expands the scale of the display until the orange and blue icons are taking up most of the orb.

  “That was a close fucking scrape,” she says. “When the Lanky jumped into Alcubierre, he was eighty-five meters from our starboard stern. If we had gotten out of the way two-hundredths of a second later, we’d be missing our aft half right now.”

  Captain Steadman adds the movement vectors and relative velocities to the screen.

  “Closing rate at the time of the transition was two thousand kilometers per second,” he says. Someone in the CIC lets out a low whistle.

  “Assuming that the laws of Alcubierre travel are still in effect, we’re both going to come out of the far end with the same momentum we had when we went in. The Lanky was putting on the brakes hard. He was at just nine hundred meters per second. We’ll have an immediate velocity advantage. If we light our drive right away and go to flank speed, we can exploit it and increase the distance to give us options. We can dictate the engagement.”

  “We need to get him in front of the particle cannons again,” Colonel Drake says. “Light the main drive, swing around, get back into firing distance before he can build up the speed to lead us on a stern chase again.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t aiming for us after all,” I say. “Could be he had to slow down to make the transition point.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Campbell looks at me and shrugs.

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Major. Maybe he just got pissed off and wanted to show us what happens when you pull a tiger by the tail.”

  “It’s possible that he didn’t want to overshoot his node,” Colonel Drake adds. “Or the Lanky way of going to Alcubierre has a speed limit. Nobody has ever seen a seed ship go into Alcubierre. Not until today.”

  He looks at the intersection of the ship trajectories on the display, where only the tiniest sliver of space separates the blue vector line for Washington and the orange one of the seed ship.

  “But I’m pretty sure he didn’t mean to pick up any passengers for the ride. At least I hope so. Because that would mean he’ll get an unpleasant surprise when he gets to his destination.”

  The XO frowns at the frozen tactical display.

  “That leaves one important question,” she says. “What the hell is his destination?”

  “If we are really lucky today, we will get to find out,” the commander replies.

  Of all the cognitive dissonance I’ve felt on this deployment, the strongest one by far is the experience of watching the entire CIC crew go about their business and prepare for an engagement while we are traveling in an Alcubierre bubble that is not our own, in conditions that may obliterate us any second. I don’t want to leave the CIC and drop out of the command loop, so I stay in the TacOps chair and try to come to terms with the fear that is eating away at my consciousness. We are in a space-time shortcut that is not of our own making, with no control over the journey, and no idea where we will end up once the ride stops. I know that I should be doing something other than just sitting at my station and watching everyone else busy themselves. But if I die, I want to be aware of my last moment instead of just ceasing to be in the middle of some insignificant task.

  “We’re in good shape,” the XO finally reports to Colonel Drake. “I mean, other than the fact that we’re hitching an Alcubierre ride to parts unknown from a Lanky ship. Systems are green across the board. Nothing broke when we got jolted into Alcubierre.”

  “I guess that’s something.”

  “Lieutenant Cole says that if the Lanky ship’s Alcubierre bubble had the same relative size as the ones our drives create, his bubble would have sliced the ship in half. Part of us would have been left behind in Capella.”

  “There’s a cheerful thought,” Colonel Drake says.

  I try to imagine the bisected wreckage of an Avenger-class carrier, drifting in space, cut in half by a superluminal space-time bubble so cleanly that it looks like a cross-section image from a book about warships. The people in the aft section would be able to take to the pods unless they were unlucky enough to be in one of the compartments that were sliced open and exposed to space. But the crew in the forward part would be trapped in the Alcubierre bubble, unable to launch pods, with only emergency power and limited air, destined to suffocate while riding the transit chute. I have lost count of how many times I have owed my survival to a few milliseconds or a couple of centimeters the fates nudged in my favor, and I’m sure I only know about a tenth of them at best.

  “Give me a shot clock,” Colonel Drake says. “Starting from the time we got pulled into Alcubierre.”

  On the forward bulkhead, a time readout appears, then jumps forward to show 00:31:44.

  “We have no idea how long this son of a bitch intends to spend in Alcubierre,” the commander says. “But we need to be ready for a fight the second we emerge on the other side.”

  “What’s the closest networked system to Capella?” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell asks.

  “Our solar system,” Lieutenant Cole replies without hesitation. “Forty-two light-years. Six hours of Alcubierre.”

  “With our drive,” Colonel Drake says. “Theirs may be a shitload more efficient. Or not efficient at all. We may be in here for six hours, or two, or twenty.”

  “We were nowhere near the transit node to Earth,” the astrogator replies. “Whatever his jumping-off point was, it’s not the one we use. This one’s new. Uncharted.”

  After hours in the chair, my biological needs are finally pressing enough that the discomfort overrides my anxiety-fueled reluctance to leave my post. I unbuckle my harness and get out of my chair, and the ache in my joints and lower back makes me suppress a little groan.

  “Hot date, Major Grayson?” the XO asks.

  “Negative, ma’a
m” I reply. “But if we’re all going to buy it, I don’t want to die sitting in a puddle.”

  She chuckles and turns back toward the holotable. I stretch my back and walk to the CIC door on slightly unsteady legs.

  There’s a head adjacent to the CIC for the use of the command crew, and I relieve myself for what seems like forever. Then I step in front of the sink and wash my hands and face, savoring the feeling of the cool water on my sweaty forehead and cheeks. It’s only when I dry my face and take stock of my fatigue that I realize the absence of the bone-deep discomfort that usually comes with Alcubierre travel. It still feels like any metal surfaces I touch are slightly charged with electricity, but I no longer feel like something is trying to stretch my bones.

  A rumbling vibration shakes the deck under my feet and makes me lose my balance enough to cause me to grab the edge of the stainless sink. The lights in the head go out, leaving me in the dark momentarily. Then the dim emergency lighting comes on.

  That’ll be just my luck, to die in the fucking head after everything that’s happened, I think.

  I dash back to the CIC, which is bathed in the red backup lighting. All the viewscreens and consoles are dark again. As I rush over to the TacOps station and fling myself back into the chair, there’s another low rumble deep inside the hull, and the consoles come back to life seemingly all at once.

  “We are out of Alcubierre,” Lieutenant Cole shouts.

  “That means we are still alive,” Colonel Drake says. “Get the sensors back up, and get that propulsion online.”

  “Aye, sir. Reactor restart complete in seventeen seconds. Sensor network is online.”

  The tactical display appears above the holotable again. It stays empty for a few moments, and then the orange icon of a seed ship appears.

  “Hostile contact, bearing one-eighty-nine by negative twenty-two. Distance thirteen thousand kilometers and increasing.”

  “Weapons,” Colonel Drake shouts. “Bring the particle mount online and set the system to live as soon as those reactors are up.”

  “Aye, sir. Preparing to charge coils,” Lieutenant Lawrence replies.

  On the plot, the distance between us and the Lanky rapidly increases. He’s behind and slightly below our stern, and with every second, we gain another thousand kilometers on him.

  “Reactor reboot sequence complete in ten. Nine. Eight . . .”

  “Lay in a course that brings us around on a least-time intercept with that seed ship,” the commander orders. “As soon as the drive comes back online, bring us around so we can blow that son of a bitch to hell.”

  “Reactors are back online. All systems green. Main propulsion is lit.”

  “Execute intercept maneuver. Swing us around, helm.”

  There’s no atmospheric friction in space, no way to bank and turn a five-hundred-thousand-ton ship like a fighter from an old war documentary. Instead, we have to change direction with thrust only, a difficult act that Halley once likened to balancing a ball bearing on a dinner plate while skating across a frozen lake. The tactical display whirls around as the helmsman uses thrusters to turn the bow of the ship, then burns the main engines selectively to redirect our momentum. I’ve been looking at situational displays on warships for a long time, but I quickly lose track of the vector lines and projections as everything twists and swirls.

  “Bogey is accelerating,” Captain Steadman says. “Lima-1 is now at two thousand meters per second and climbing, two and a half g.”

  “Coils are charged. Particle-gun battery is ready to fire, sir.”

  “Lock on to the bogey and set for auto-trigger,” the commander orders. “Let’s finish what we started.”

  When the plot stabilizes, I can see that we aren’t on a straight course for the Lanky. Instead, the helmsman has used our momentum and thrown the ship into a curved trajectory that looks like we are drifting around a turn in a race car. Our nose is pointing at the Lanky, though we’re not close enough yet to be in our effective weapons range. But as we continue on our wide parabolic curve, I can see that each passing moment brings our arched trajectory a little closer to the Lanky’s straight one. The physics involved in maneuvering in zero gravity are still a mystery to me, and I’m glad that the crew are well-trained experts, no matter how young some of them seem.

  I was launching onto Lanky worlds in bio-pods when I was just twenty-three, I remind myself.

  “If that’s his top acceleration, there’s no way he can get away before we make our pass,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says with satisfaction.

  “We almost had him in range once before. Let’s not do a victory dance until that thing is an expanding cloud of superheated debris,” Colonel Drake cautions. He fixes the orange icon on the holotable with a glare and drums the fingertips of his right hand on the armrest of his chair.

  “The optics are having a hard time tracking him even at this short range. If we hadn’t known where he started out in relation to us, we may have never gotten a lock.” Captain Steadman looks concerned. “Something is off about this ship all of a sudden. It’s like trying to get a visual on a black cat running across a dark cellar.”

  “Just don’t lose track of him now, Lieutenant.”

  “Negative, sir. We have him.”

  “Firing window is five and a half seconds,” Lieutenant Lawrence reports. “We’re getting a nice, juicy flyby of his broadside for two seconds of that pass. And if we miss, we get another shot just past the apex.”

  For the next ten minutes, we watch the two icons on the tactical screen shift position ever so slightly with every refresh of the hologram. We are closing in on the Lanky with what looks like an insurmountable speed advantage. The little yellow cone that marks our particle cannon’s firing arc and range creeps closer to the dotted line with agonizing slowness.

  “Visual of the bogey, on-screen,” Colonel Drake orders.

  The image that appears on the forward bulkhead shows just the vaguest and most indistinct outline of a seed ship in the darkness, enhanced by the image intensifiers and processing algorithms of the ships’ optical sensors. Where our spaceships leave the bright thermal bloom of a fusion drive in their wake, there’s nothing trailing the Lanky that gives any clue about how their propulsion systems work. We have fought them for over a decade, but their technology is still almost completely unknown to us. We know what they do, but not how they do it, or how they developed the way they did. But we know that they can be killed, that their ships can be destroyed, and that’s all the knowledge we need in the moment.

  I wonder if you’re scared, I think as I look at the shape of the seed ship on the screen. I wonder if you’ve ever had to run away before. It’s not a fun experience, is it? I wonder if you fear death like we do.

  “Twenty seconds to intercept,” Captain Steadman says. “Coils charged, auto-trigger enabled. Reactors are at full output.”

  The low noise in the CIC progressively decreases in volume the closer our blue icon gets to the orange one. By the time the yellow firing cone of the particle cannon touches the dotted line where the seed ship is going to be, it’s dead silent except for the static hum of the machinery and the soft whispering of the air-conditioning.

  “Dodge this,” the XO says softly.

  “Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. Fire.”

  The lights in the CIC dim as the twin particle-gun mounts claim almost all the available power output of the ship’s bank of fusion reactors. Deep down in the hull, the cannons mounted along the centerline spew hydrogen atoms at the Lanky seed ship at just below the speed of light, carrying terajoules of kinetic energy across the intervening space.

  The dark image on the screen turns into a bright white one. Ten thousand kilometers in front of Washington’s bow, a new sun briefly blooms in the inky black as the hull of the Lanky ship is superheated by subatomic particles that chew through the armor in a few microseconds and unleash the fury of a hundred nuclear warheads inside.

  “Target,” Captain Steadman sh
outs. “Splash one. Broadside hit. Lima-3 is history.”

  The CIC crew breaks out in cheers and whistles. This time, I add my own relieved shout to the chorus. Colonel Drake sinks back in his chair a little. From where I’m sitting, he looks like he has aged about ten years and shrunk ten centimeters in the last few minutes.

  “Well done,” he says into the din. “Cut the drive and secure weapons. Wait for the poststrike assessment before we officially break out the party hats, people. I am not taking a damn thing for granted today.”

  We watch the glowing debris cloud expand and dissipate slowly over the next few minutes, three kilometers of Lanky seed ship and a million tons of mass or more disassembled into its component atoms. When the glow fades, there’s nothing left but the darkness of empty space.

  “That’s a clean kill,” Captain Steadman says. “Both cannons, dead center on the hull. Scratch one seed ship.”

  “We came a very long way for that kill mark,” Colonel Drake says. “Now let’s see where the hell we are. Astrogation, give me a fix on our position, please.”

  “Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Cole replies. “Stand by for astrogation fix.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Campbell looks up at the Alcubierre shot clock that is still counting on top of the CIC bulkhead.

  “Stop the clock. Reset it to the moment we came back out of Alcubierre with that Lanky.”

  The numbers on the clock freeze, then change to 00:33.15.

  “Thirty-three minutes in Alcubierre,” the XO says. “Where the fuck did you take us in thirty-three minutes?”

  Lieutenant Cole looks from his display to the XO and then back to his screen.

  “I’m . . . I’m really not sure, ma’am.”

  “What do you mean, you’re not sure, Lieutenant? Is the astrogation equipment still off-line?”