by Bobby Adair
“Nearly half of their force is there, now,” says Chikere, “and it’s been that way since the capitulation.”
“Earth is the prize in the system,” says Leroux. “That’s what they came here to get. It’s what they’ll do the most to hold onto.”
“Maybe we flip the script and take a run at the moon,” I say. That leaves everyone silent. “Instead of waiting for the guns from the battle stations we capture to hit it, we fly in, nuke ‘em and get out. It could give us a big head start on winning this thing.”
"The number of railguns on the moon is mind-boggling," says Chikere. "If you go there, you'll need to come out of bubble super close to the surface—dangerously close. That’s the only way to limit the number of guns that can be aimed at you. You’ll need to drop the nuke from very close, so they’ll have less time to shoot it out of the sky, and you’ll have to bubble back out before you get shredded.”
“Pretty much what we’re doing now,” I say.
“Only they’ll be ready for you there,” he says, “and they have a lot more guns.”
“Probably mostly armed by humans,” I counter, “who won’t want to hit us. Not really.”
“Not until after you drop the first nuke,” says Chikere. “And for all you know, the gunners are MSS loyalists. They might be manned by Trogs and targeted by Grays, for all we know.”
“I think,” says Phil, letting one of his dramatic pauses catch everyone’s attention, “that if we do run at the moon, and we do it right, we might be able to drop five or six nukes in the space of ten or twelve seconds, and destroy most of their largest-caliber weapons, the ones the Grays used to hold the earth hostage. I don’t know if any of you remember this, but the largest railguns the original Grays built before the siege, the city destroyers, were all constructed near the original landing site. All the other railguns built on the moon were built for targeting Trog cruisers. So if we drop a handful of nukes all over that one area, we can destroy them in one pass.”
“Do we have the ability to drop that many nukes that quickly and put them all on target?” asks Leroux.
“I can work it out,” says Phil. “It’s all precision and ballistics. Out here in space, ballistics is nothing more than the study of gravity and momentum. No air friction to complicate things. I can do it.”
“That’s what we’ll do, then,” I tell them. “We’ll hit a few more bases. Chikere, make regular passes through the earth-moon system, okay? Add that to your schedule. As soon as the Grays pull some of their cruisers out to defend the supply bases, we need to zip in and pound the railgun installations on the moon. And I do mean, as soon as they do it. We don't have a lot of advantages in this war, so we need to maximize the ones we have. If we can make them think their decision to set up traps for us out here was a mistake, if we can make them believe we're one step ahead of them, it'll slow their collective thought process so much that it might actually paralyze them when it counts. And that could be huge, not just in the assault, but in the negotiations. If they always think we've got a sucker punch hiding behind our backs, they'll be more likely to give us a better deal than if they think they have us over a barrel."
Chapter 20
At the prescribed moment, according to the schedule of random time intervals we’ve laid out, we pop out of bubble near one of Uranus’s moons, a small, eccentric body named Margaret. Chikere and crew scouted the rocky blob less than an hour ago. No Trog cruisers were present then, nor are there any when we arrive.
Margaret isn’t the next most important base, according to how we’ve prioritized them after hours of reviewing all the information Bird’s scouts had collected on them over the past year. It’s on the small side and seems to only have the ability to service cruisers at the rate of one every three weeks or so. The limiting factor is how long it takes for the base to manufacture a full load of railgun slugs and process enough hydrogen to fill a cruiser’s tanks. Our choice to destroy Margaret isn’t based on any of those factors. Like the timing of our attack schedule, the order is randomized, as well.
The point where we exit the bubble is precisely mapped out prior to our arrival, in that we know exactly where we wanted to be. The thing that we’ve never taken the time to understand, because of the circumstances under which we always take the risk, is how greatly nearby gravitational masses affect our actual bubble exit point, relative to our calculated endpoint. So Peterson’s job, among her other duties upon arrival, is to get a fix on our position.
If we’re eventually going to make a run at the moon, we need to know what we can get away with.
We begin our attack run with a burst of heavy g, coming at the base from an oblique angle, perfecting a tactic that’s been working well for us, in that it keeps us out of the line of sight on most of the installation’s railguns.
From arrival to bomb release, we spend twenty-six seconds accelerating to the optimal bomb release speed, dialing the Turd II in on the attack angle, and reaching the release point. After that, we spend another seven seconds in the line of sight with the base before we put the bulk of Margaret between us and it. Three seconds after that, the nuke detonates, and we bubble out again.
We chalk up the run as a success and reduce the count of active Trog bases by one, leaving just twelve, of which the next on our list should receive our visit in fifteen hours and twenty-two minutes. Phil sets us up for a thirty-second bubble jump, and Lenox punches the drive array just hard enough to push us in the general direction of the next target.
Chapter 21
“Smoke ‘em if you’ve got ‘em,” says Brice as he heads forward. He turns to me and inflects his tone just enough to let me know how pointless his upcoming task is. “I’ll make sure they get that next nuke loaded.”
“Thanks,” I tell him. “After that, do you mind walking the ship?”
“Visual inspection?” he confirms. “Got it.” He’s not excited about spending time on that either, but he appreciates the need to keep busy in the slow times. “I’ll recruit the nuke handlers up front and inspect every square inch, if you like. Make ‘em double check each other’s work, too. Then, I’ll make sure they get some down time.”
“I can always count on you.” I turn to Peterson. ”After you finish with your positioning data, get it over to Phil for analysis, please.”
“I’m already on it,” she says.
I look to Phil.
He rolls his eyes and sighs. “I’m already running diagnostics. We don’t appear to have taken any hits yet. No systems have malfunctioned. We’re still at one hundred percent.”
“That’s a miracle all by itself,” says Silva.
I reach up and pat Lenox on the back. “Good flying.” I look over at Phil. “And good nav. We’ve all done a good job.”
“How long do you think our luck will hold out?” asks Lenox.
I give it half a thought. “Brice would say we make our own luck.”
“No he wouldn’t,” she tells me. “On our first trip out, you, me, and him were sitting in the platoon compartment with our backs against the grav lens, flying out to the potato. You remember that?”
I nod. Of course, I remember.
“Brice told us that war is a matter of luck. Sometimes you just get hit. Sometimes you die, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
“Yeah.” I still don’t agree, though. Not completely. “We’ve taken some losses because of bad luck. I can’t argue with that. We may again. But we’re damn good at what we do. After all we’ve done, we wouldn’t still be alive if that wasn’t true.”
“You still haven’t answered my question,” she says. “How long?”
“I think our luck will last long enough to win,” I tell her.
“Do you truly believe that?” she asks.
“If you didn’t believe it, too,” I ask, “then why did you stay? And I don’t say that to be combative. Seriously, why’d you stay if you believe our luck is going to run dry and we’ll all be
killed?”
“Same reason as you,” she says.
“Are you having second thoughts?” I ask.
“Lay off her,” Silva tells me.
“I’m not picking on her,” I defend myself.
“It’s okay,” says Silva.
“Yeah, more than you know.” I look around at all of them. “It’s okay to talk about this kind of stuff. We all have our doubts, but we’re in this now. We need to accept that.”
“I never said I wasn’t in for the duration,” says Lenox. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Silva stops the conversation with her sudden attention to the comm panel. We all wait while she listens. After a few minutes, she looks up, urgency underpinning her words, “Message from Bird.”
“And?” I ask.
“Blair is set.”
“Everything?” I ask.
“The message said she’s met all goals. Details to follow.”
“It took a long time for them to tell you that,” I say.
“Bird also wants you to know he approves of the changes to the operational plan,” she says, “though they want us to be careful with our attack on the moon. It might be the best defended real estate in the solar system. Their words, not mine.”
“Noted.”
Phil looks at me with expectant eyes.
“Yes?” I ask him.
“They’re right about that, you know,” he says. “It’s not just the big railguns, designed for hitting the earth, they also have hundreds in batteries nearby, for defense from attacking ships.”
“We’ll go in fast and get out fast,” I tell him. “The number of guns won’t be a factor.”
Phil disagrees. “The number of guns is always a factor.”
“Do you think the plan is a mistake?” I ask.
“No,” he says. “I’m reluctant to say what I think.”
“Why?” I ask, looking around the bridge, wondering what I’ve done along the way to have put this distance between me and the others. Was it my behavior, or the deaths of our friends?
“I think it’s a brilliant plan,” says Phil. “But I don’t want that to go to your head, because as much as I agree that it’s the best move we can make, I think we’re underestimating the risk.”
“By how much?” I ask.
“I can’t put a number on it,” he says. “I think it’s good that we’re proving the tactic with these attack runs on the outer bases, but the moon is a different animal. I don’t know that success out here translates to success against a target like the moon base.”
My first instinct is to argue and defend my plan, but I don’t. I take a patient breath, and think it through. “If we don’t attempt to nuke the moon base, we still have a plan to neutralize it with the guns on the battle stations. There’s plenty of risk in that part of the plan. You were in those meetings back on Iapetus, Phil. We talked endlessly about the hundreds of things that could go wrong.”
“We did,” he says. “I’m not going to say it’ll take a miracle for us to pull this off, considering how many things have to go right for us to win, but the odds are against us once we start the assault on the battle stations.”
“Worse than if we make a bombing run on the moon base?” I ask.
"Yes," says Phil. "On that, I agree."
I’m getting frustrated, because I feel like Phil is jumping from one side of the issue to the other. “I don’t understand. Are you against bombing the moon base?”
“No,” he says. “I think the risk is higher than we’re accepting, but I think the intangible element, that of making the Grays believe we can strike them at will at their weakest points, is valuable at the end game, when we go to negotiate with them. I just don't know that we'll live long enough to get there. It's like we're depending on a coin flip to come up heads for us ten times in a row."
“But that’s the only way we win this war,” I say. “Isn’t that right?”
“I believe it is,” says Phil. “We need to get lucky.”
“Or we need to execute perfectly,” I say.
“Brice wouldn’t agree with you on that,” says Lenox.
Chapter 22
Hours turn to days. Raid follows on raid, with the Trogs doing nothing at all to stop us. And then they start to get smart.
I mentally kick myself, and remind myself that the Grays and Trogs are already smart, in their way.
And in some ways, they're much smarter than I'll ever be. Having babbled my way through that little bit of logic, I kick myself again at the realization that the Trogs may have been setting traps for us since our first day of bombing their supply bases. Maybe we didn’t notice the traps because they’d always failed. Who could know?
By the thirteenth day of the operation, we’re aborting more attacks than we’re completing.
The Trogs are trying everything they can to destroy us. They leave their railgun crews on high alert, ready at a moment’s notice to unload on anything that pops out of bubble in close proximity to their bases. The days of swooping down on sleepy, slow responders have ended. On every attack run, we fly through a sky that is streaked red over black with defensive railgun fire. And because we can't keep our grav lens oriented toward the bases through the full run, we take hits, at least a dozen altogether, most of them through the ship's midsection, costing us a quarter of our hydrogen supply.
Trog cruisers, first in full squadron strength, and then in half-squadron, start lurking close to the bases, or at least most of them, as the Trogs don’t have enough strength to leave a full squadron at each base unless they pull everything they have in the earth-moon system and give up the effort to search the solar system for us and our base of operations.
They start bubble jumping from base to base on random schedules, perhaps learning from us. They foil several attacks using that method, as we show up to destroy outposts that Chikere has only just scouted, to find that in the time between when he leaves and we arrive, the Trogs have shown up, too.
And then they get really smart and start lingering at a distance, where we won’t see them upon our coming out of bubble to make our attack run. But they aren’t so far off that a telepathic alert can’t be sent from the Grays on the ground to the Grays in the cruiser waiting to ambush us. The tactic that almost works for them more than once is to bubble out right along our escape vectors, dropping out of space at a standstill, with guns blazing. Each time, it costs us time spent on evasion, time in the range of gunners from the ground, time leaving us too close to the nuclear blast, leaving Phil, Nicky, and me to wonder what permanent damage we’re doing each time the detonation leaves us disoriented and shaky.
Still, we manage to slide seven more bases onto the kill list.
Unfortunately, the more bases we bomb, the more likely it grows that we’ll encounter Trog squadrons. That is just the mathematics of success working against us.
"Just one more run," says Phil. "That’s all we have time for, unless you want to go for carelessness and hop through the last five stations in rapid succession, trying to kill them all. The assault on the battle stations is slated for tomorrow. We have just over nineteen hours.”
Most of the crew is resting. I’m in the pilot’s chair. Brice is on the radar console with his comm off to anything but urgent messages. He’s enjoying his quiet thoughts, or tormenting himself over what he could have done differently the day Penny died. Phil is in his usual seat.
“Of the five,” I tell Phil, “the Trogs only have one base of any significance. That was what, number two or three on our target list? We missed it the first day. It’s the only base left that’s large enough to resupply more than one ship at a time.”
“And every time we’ve made a run at it,” says Phil, “there have been cruisers there."
“We have to hit it,” I tell him. “If we get that one, then the Trogs’ supply infrastructure will be too crippled to sustain their fleet.”
“It’s already too crip
pled,” says Phil.
“This one base represents over half their resupply capacity.”
“Which is why they keep it guarded,” says Phil. “The Trogs aren’t so stupid that they’re going to leave it alone for us to bomb.”
“Doesn’t matter at this point,” I tell him. “We need to find a way to get it done. You and me, we need to figure it out.”
“There is no way that doesn’t involve us taking too much risk.” Phil sighs. He stretches. He has other things on his mind.
“What?”
“What do you mean, what?”
“Phil, c’mon. Really? Why don’t you just tell me?”
Phil sighs again. Brice looks up, but doesn’t join the conversation. He turns back to watching the radar screens, or daydreaming. Or whatever. We’re six AU’s below the orbital plane. Nothing’s bothered us out here since we started this mission. I doubt anything’s going to find us today.
But, I remind myself, that’s how complacency works.
I lean back far enough to see Brice’s screens, too.
“The crew is frazzled,” says Phil.
“I know.”
“And?”
“Phil, you understand them better than I do. You can get in their heads if you want. Tell me what I should do about it.”
“The only thing we can do,” he says. “Stop bombing. Everyone knows the odds of success are getting worse.”
“They know the assault on the battle stations starts tomorrow. Things are what they are. I don’t have control over them. Nobody does. The pieces are in motion already.”
“The long anticipation of the upcoming battle is wearing on them,” says Phil.
“We all have to deal with it.” Then something occurs to me. “Phil, are you telling me the crew can’t handle the stress? Do you think they’ll crack?”
“We’ve all been through a lot together,” says Phil. “People weren’t made to endure the ongoing stresses of battle.”