by Bobby Adair
“Do we have enough of a speed advantage for this?” I ask.
Penny nods. “I don’t know if the damage you did to their drive array made the difference or if those Chinese assault ships are just slower.”
I turn back to Brice. “You’ve spent some time up in the hangar with the repair crews. Anything you can tell us?”
“Nobody knows for sure. Everybody thinks they’re slower because of the smaller drive array and smaller reactor, but with no grav lens, those ships have a lot less mass to push.”
Penny chuckles again.
“So,” I summarize, “you don’t know.”
Brice shakes his head. “There’s something you will find interesting. About half of those ships are armed.”
“Interesting isn’t the word I’d choose.” Though I’m stymied for a better one at the moment. “Do tell.”
“Some of them have a railgun mounted down the axis of the ship. A big bastard, sixty feet long.”
Penny whistles.
“So that’s how they were supposed to work,” I muse. “Some of the ships were tasked to shoot holes in the Trog cruisers, and then the Chinese SDF troops were to disembark and pour through the holes in the hull.”
“Sounds like a recipe for big casualties,” says Brice.
Turning to Penny, I say, “If that—”
“It’s not my first day on the job, Skipper.”
“Sorry.”
“You just be ready to activate that grav lens, in case they do get a shot off.”
“I linked back to the base,” says Silva.
“Any updates from Blair?” I regret asking.
“She wants to know why we left so much of the other vessel intact.”
Brice puts a hand on my shoulder to calm my instant anger. I shouldn’t say what I want to.
Brice answers for me, “Ask her to launch some ships to capture the loyalists.”
“Did you hail the loyalists?” I ask.
“No response,” Silva replies.
Disappointing.
I turn back toward our quarry, which is growing closer as we pick up speed and angle in for our attack.
The other ship’s grav signature shifts.
“It stopped accelerating,” I tell her. “It killed power to its drive.”
Penny pushes the Turd faster and adjusts her angle.
“They’re spinning the ship,” I tell her.
“Turn on that grav lens!” she shouts at me.
“Not yet.”
“They’re trying to line up that gun to shoot at us,” Brice clarifies.
That’s one of the things about dogfighting in space that’s distinctly different than dogfighting between terrestrial aircraft, spaceships don’t have to be pointed in the direction they’re flying. If a ship kills its drive power before turning, it can pivot in any direction without changing course.
“Grav lens,” Penny urges.
I tell her and Brice, “I don’t want to spook them away.” And I know it’ll be difficult for me to see them once the grav lens powers up and obscures every gravity field ahead of us. God, it would be good to have Phil here.
“Almost around,” Penny tells us. “Everybody prepare for impact.”
“One way or the other,” Brice laughs darkly. He braces himself against mine and Penny’s seats.
The other ship’s nose lines up on us.
I push power to our grav lens as a dozen rapid rounds spew out of the other ship, red and menacing as they bear down on us.
Just as impact seems imminent, the hot slugs skew off their paths and fly harmlessly into space.
Our grav lens did the trick.
I guess the bridge crew in the other ship must be realizing they’ve made a terrible miscalculation.
More rounds fire toward us as the other ship’s drive array fires up and the vessel starts to pivot to a new vector.
They’re still far enough away that they might escape.
“Max grav!” I command.
The bridge pulses to bright blue, and I feel grav pull me aft as Penny accelerates our ship and adjusts course to keep the escaping assault ship lined up.
Before I can gulp another breath, the loyalist ship grows huge ahead of us.
The grav lens flashes blinding blue and the inertial bubble pulses with the collision.
We ram the other ship just behind the bow, tearing down through the main cabin and blasting out the other side, just in front of the bridge.
Penny’s cutting hard into a turn and decelerating as we come out the other side.
I kill the grav lens.
The squad cheers. They know what a collision feels like.
I turn to look, and sense pieces of the disintegrated ship careening in every direction.
Penny turns back to Brice. “Direct hit.” She looks at me. “We good?”
I nod. Of course.
“The ship,” she clarifies.
“Oh yeah.” Dammit. Running through a few sims and being competent at a job are two very different things. I sigh. “Sorry, I’m no Phil.”
“We only need one Phil.” Brice smiles widely. The number of people we just killed doesn’t seem to have phased him at all.
I realize I don’t feel anything either. I start checking the status of ship systems on my console.
Chapter 12
In the principal’s office.
Well the lobby, really.
It’s my first visit to this part of the asteroid base. The control room being Blair’s lair, I subconsciously manufactured excuses for avoiding it. Until now.
The Potato Queen has summoned me.
Ugh.
I’m with Brice, looking through a row of blast-proof windows into a semicircular control room. On the flat side, a bank of monitors covers the wall. Inside, a few dozen techs work at computers tracking various aspects of colony infrastructure and equipment. Others surveil the empty reaches of space surrounding us, while still more scan the comm channels picked up by the assortment of radio receivers packed into the little parabolic dish farm up on the surface.
Altogether, the place reminds me of a launch mission control center from one of the pre-siege space videos.
Along the arcs of the semicircle both left and right of us stretches a walkway providing access to rows of glass-walled offices looking out onto the control room. The doorway off the lobby to each walkway is closed. Armed guards in the uniform du jour—coveralls with stamped rank—stand at each door with serious faces and eyes that might as well be comatose except they’re open, staring straight ahead, and blinking so infrequently it makes me uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, like the guards that stand in the corridor outside the lobby, these two are necessary. We don’t know how many more SDF loyalists are still lurking among us, waiting for an opportunity to throw a monkey wrench into the cogs of our diminutive war machine.
Or hoping for a chance to assassinate the Potato Queen.
Or looking for a favorable circumstance to rid the solar system of me.
“Those guards are a good idea,” says Brice, as though he’s been auditing my thoughts.
Overly dramatic?
I wonder if the bug in my head is somehow broadcasting on a tight thought band that self-activated a connection between us because of all the time we’ve spent together.
More excess drama.
Perhaps a more parsimonious explanation is a possibility, like Blair is making us wait for no other reason than to lord her rank over us, and Brice and me are bored from sitting out here, and our thoughts happen to be wandering in similar directions because the room is white, the chairs are boring gray, and once the control room busywork lost its grip on our attention, the only visually interesting thing left were the two guards pretending to be heartless killers.
“I wonder how she selects the loyal ones?” muses Brice.
I skip right over that question and silently try to guess whether the gua
rds are loyal to her, or loyal to the Free Army? Either way, not productive things for me to dwell on. “You’ve been spending a good deal of time up in the hangar with Penny—”
“With the ship,” Brice corrects.
I turn and shoot him a knowing look.
He shrugs and smiles. “We like each other’s company.”
I let it go. “What’s the deal with things up there? How many ships will they be able to repair?”
Brice thinks about it for a moment. “Seven Arizona-class ships—”
“Arizona-class?” I immediately make the connection, but I didn’t know. “Is that the official designation for our class of assault ship?”
“It is now,” answers Brice. “I picked it up talking to the techs in the hangar. They’re calling ours the Arizona class as a way to distinguish them from the Chinese ships we saw stored in the bottom of the strip mine. Those are Beijing-class.”
“Beijing?” I ask. “I thought the Ticks obliterated Beijing during the siege. Did they rebuild?”
Brice shakes his head. “I think it was the only city name any of the guys up there could think of.” He laughs. “Come to think of it, that’s the only Chinese city I could name.”
I shake my head to show my disappointment, but don’t admit I couldn’t name more than two or three. “Are they fixing the Beijing-class ships too?” Good news, except we don’t have crews for those.
Brice nods. “Three Arizona-class ships are nearly ready to go. The others, they think they’ll be able to get airborne in a few weeks. One needs its drive array rebuilt with scavenged plates. Most have damaged reactors.”
“Can they use the Beijing-class ones for parts?”
“The Chinese reactors are so much smaller, nothing is interchangeable.”
That’s disappointing. “I heard a rumor about the number of Chinese vessels that went up. I don’t know whether to believe it. Did you hear anything?”
“Three thousand?” guesses Brice.
That’s the number I heard. Unbelievable.
“Details are sketchy,” says Brice. The rumors say they tried to assault the known Trog bases in the asteroid belt and on the Jovian moons. Heard they were massacred.”
“Some of them must have deserted.” I look involuntarily up toward the surface. “Those Chinese ships that arrived for the ambush here.”
Brice nods.
“Three thousand ships.” It had to be an impressive fleet. The Free Army might have a few divisions of Chinese assault troops floating around out here. Hundreds, hell, maybe a thousand out here somewhere. All on our side.”
“Let’s not get too optimistic,” says Brice. “For all we know, those Chinese are frozen dead like the bunch we found up top when we arrived.”
One of the guarded doors swings open and Blair’s adjutant steps through and summons us.
Chapter 13
I sense it well before we arrive at the door.
I feel it when I enter Blair’s office. She has g, and it’s set to earth standard. It fills in the gaps in my suit’s inconsistent field and reminds me what the burden of full-g feels like.
Brice stumbles when he crosses into the office, but catches himself without comment.
Blair sits in a plush chair like a sadistic cat with a passive face, catching mean-ass perv thrills from watching mice squeal after finding their feet stuck on a glue trap.
Or, she’s bored and staring blankly across a desk made from a sheet of polished asteroid rock big enough to dance on.
I go with option A.
Of course, I do. I don’t have any incentive to imagine charitable thoughts sprouting from her selfish cortex.
I come to a stop at the edge of the shiny slab of rock. “Yes, Colonel.” I don’t salute.
She tries to keep her anger under a lid, yet she says nothing.
Her adjutant steps into the hall and heads off on some errand—pointless is my bet. Blair likes to yank on the reins of her underlings.
Blair tells me, “I need you to scout some Trog outposts.”
“Okay.” Sounds reasonable. “What have we heard from earth? Did the Trogs mount another attack?”
Making no effort to answer my question, Blair’s lips remain mannequin-still on her plastic face.
I challenge her with my own silence and wonder what game we’re playing.
She wears the most inexpressive face I’ve ever seen on a human.
Instead of chasing those thoughts to another derogatory description, I instead recall my conversation with Brice about how she’s doing a good job with the administrative aspect of our revolutionary endeavor.
Is it possible the root of our disharmony is my attitude toward her?
I think about what her life on earth must have been like while I was trudging through my years in the grav factory. She was working her way up through the MSS, lying more in a day than I had to lie in a week. Every single person she worked with, or talked to, and probably everyone she socialized with would have thrown her into a torture room if they suspected what she was.
What does that do to a person?
How different, really, was that from my life?
Still, I decide not to challenge her further. I’ll try and play the good military boy and follow her pedantic, often obscure rules, until things get better. Putting every ounce of sincere syrup into my tone, I say, “We can scout the locations. I simply request information so I can better do my duty.”
Without giving an inch of ground, Blair says, “My adjutant will provide the orbital coordinates of Ceres and the other suspected Trog resupply depots.”
Like I can’t find Ceres.
Brice nudges my boot with his. He’s telling me not to lose my temper with Blair’s implication that my crew can’t navigate.
He is getting very good at reading me.
I keep my calm. “May I speak?”
The plastic-faced Potato Queen lets my request hang in the ether for a moment before she deigns to grant my request with a nod.
“If we time our scouting run to occur twelve hours after an attack, it’ll give the Trogs plenty of time to return to their resupply bases, configure their guard, and settle into the routine of restocking their holds. We’ll get a picture of how many ships resupply at which bases, and we’ll better be able to plan our eventual attack.”
Letting the boredom in her tone speak louder than the words she chooses, Blair says, “We know the cruisers don’t resupply at the same bases every time. Sometimes they go to the same base two or three times in a row. Sometimes they don’t return for months.”
“This is good intel,” I compliment. “The Free Army obviously has multiple sources throughout the solar system. Are they not able to provide a current picture of what’s at each base?”
Blair doesn’t answer my question. “You’re tasked with scouting the outposts on the list.”
“These other eight ships,” I guess, “are they out scouting bases?” Knowing I’m not going to be given an answer, I push straight on to the reason why my questions are important. “If they are, then you need to keep in mind Grays can see grav better then you and I can see visible light. If the ships come close enough to a base, any Gray looking up at the sky will see them shining like Christmas stars. That only needs to happen once before the Grays know to keep a lookout for more scout ships to come through. They might start laying traps. Worse, even though all of these vessels look alike to us, they don’t look that way to the Grays. Those big-eyed Ticks can see the unique grav fields generated by each ship’s array—unique because they were all so shoddily constructed back on earth. What I’m saying is, by scouting them, we’re giving away our strength.” I realize my argument is turning indignant. I take a breath to calm myself. “I know you don’t want to give the Trogs any intel and you don’t want to get any of our people killed. That’s why I need to know what you know, so I can help you make better decisions.”
Blair’s face shows she’s thi
nking. That’s good. At least my arguments have geared up enough of her brain so it’s incapable of fully maintaining her impervious façade. “We haven’t been sending ships,” she admits. “The intel is old, generated from sources we had in place from early in the war. That’s all I’ll tell you.” Her face goes hard. “We still don’t know if you’re a spy for the Trogs or the SDF.”
I shake my head in disgust. If she believed either of those things, she’d have locked me up by now.
“How many locations do you need scouted?”
“You have orders for three.”
“Not just us. How many ships are you sending out? How many suspected Trog bases do you need intel on?”
“You want to know how many Trog bases we know the locations of?”
“My God! Give it a rest.” That just slipped out in full, exhaustive exasperation. Sometimes it just happens. I calm myself before I proceed in a civil tone. “Let’s stop pretending this spy thing is about anything real. Play that game with your adjutant and the other officers if you want, but between us, you know what I’m about. So give it to me straight and let me do my job. Let me help the Free Army win this war.”
Blair turns her attention to a computer monitor, and the fingers on one hand tap randomly on the keys. She’s buying time.
My guess.
Finally, she looks at me. “You’re right. We don’t want to give away our strength to the enemy while trying to assess his. My adjutant will send the coordinates of eleven suspected bases to your d-pad. You’ll be the only ship going out. Leave tomorrow morning. Provide me your flight plan. I don’t expect to see you back here until you need to refuel or you need to participate in the next attack.”
“I need to be in on planning that,” I tell her.
Ignoring my assertion, she continues. “I need to know where you’ll be and when. Send us a communiqué every time you come out of bubble jump and before you jump again. I’ll need photographs of—”
I cut her off there. “No photographs. We won’t get that close. Phil can sense grav like a Gray—well not nearly as sensitive as a Gray. His long-range grav sense is better than anything we’ll get out of the navigation cameras mounted on our ship. We won’t be able to keep the Grays from seeing us, but three hundred and sixty degrees in 3D space is a lot of sky to watch. The farther away we are, the less likely we are to be spotted. The less likely they’ll be able to do anything about our presence, especially if we only stay for a few minutes before we bubble out again.”