by Rick Partlow
It was a storage closet, dimly lit and packed with cleaning supplies, because you just can’t have a military ship without enlisted troops constantly cleaning it. There was barely enough room for both of us to squeeze in. He shut the hatch and rounded on me, his dark eyes reflecting the dim light.
“You told him, you stupid motherfucker, didn’t you? Don’t bother to deny it.”
“Okay,” I acceded. “I won’t deny it.” Which wasn’t exactly the same thing as admitting it, but I didn’t think he cared. “They would have found out anyway. They did.”
“That doesn’t fucking matter!” He punctuated each word with his finger, jabbing into my chest, and something hot flared up with each poke. I had to remind myself he was a general. Then I had to remind myself again. “We had orders from the fucking President! Do you understand what that fucking means, Clanton?”
“I understand a lot of things, sir,” I growled at him, leaning forward. I was a subordinate, but I was about to get very insubordinate. “I understand that without Joon-Pah, we’d be stuck in our fucking system, helpless. I understand that he’s taken one chance after another for us, defied his ruler, his Prime Facilitator to do it. Hell, we fucking killed one of his Prime Facilitators! My fucking fiancée shot her! And how the hell do we repay him? We lie to him. We keep things from him, things he needs to know. We’re fucking lucky he doesn’t haul off and leave our asses here.”
“Your fiancée,” he repeated, clearly surprised. “When the hell did that happen?”
I blinked at the abrupt change of gears. “The night after the Blood Hunt.”
“Well, congratulations,” he said, offering me a hand.
I took it apprehensively but he didn’t pull me into a left hook, just shook my hand. Then he sighed and tilted his head to the side, cracking his neck.
“I should fucking throw you in the brig,” he said, “but fuck it. It’s water under the bridge, and we’re probably all going to be dead in a few days anyway. But Goddammit, Andy, this is just the kind of shit I was worried about when we brought you into this shit. You gotta decide, are you in the military or are you a civilian? And what the fuck are you smiling at?”
I couldn’t help it.
“You said ‘brig.’ That’s a Navy thing. It’s gonna be the Space Navy eventually. You might as well just give up.”
“God, give me strength,” he said, yanking the hatch open and stalking back up the passageway.
I was still grinning. He’d said brig.
Chapter Seventeen
“Is it working?” I wondered.
Olivera squinted, the muscles of his jaw clenching, which I’d learned was an effort not to roll his eyes.
“I’m sure you’ll be among the first to know.”
Three days in hyperspace had, at least, offered me a chance to get some sleep. It had also offered us all a chance to worry, and it felt like everyone had taken advantage of the time to do as much of that as they could. By the time we’d jumped out into Alpha Centauri, I think I’d gone over every possible scenario a dozen times with Pops and the team and coordinated every single possibility with Colonel Brooks and the shuttle flight crews. Which was one of the reasons I was wearing full Svalinn armor and carrying a KE gun on the bridge when we made the jump, despite no indication we were going to launch a dismounted operation.
Olivera had been right about one thing. There were Tevynian ships staging at Alpha Centauri. The sensors picked them up almost immediately after we jumped, which meant if this drive field trick didn’t work, they were going to see us pretty damn quick, too.
“The Truthseeker just translated,” the tactical officer announced. Davis didn’t seem as keyed up as the rest of us—maybe that was just because I didn’t know him as well and couldn’t read it, or maybe he was just more chill because he had his finger on the trigger of our biggest gun and knew, at least, that he wouldn’t die without shooting back. “She’s implementing the drive field modification.”
Good. At least we could see if it worked when she did it. I had this irrational fear that we were really just sitting here in full view of the enemy with our dicks hanging out, even though I’m sure our ship’s sensitivity officer would have considered the idea sexually regressive and patriarchal.
Davis sighed, almost imperceptibly, but it was the first indication he was worried.
“Yeah, it’s working. I can tell she’s there, but I know what I’m looking for. If the enemy looks this way, she’s gonna look like maybe a gas cloud or gravitational distortion.” He shrugged. “As long as they don’t get too close.”
“Okay, Captain Davis,” Olivera said, “tell me what we’re dealing with here. How many of them are there?”
Davis manipulated something at his control station and the sensor display replaced the optical view of the third world out from Alpha Centauri A. It looked like we’d just zoomed into the world, but I knew from having it patiently explained to me by Julie that it was actually a computer simulation based on data from the sensors. Not radar or lidar this time, not when we were trying to remain undetected as long as possible. We were using passive sensors, thermal, spectroscopic and gravimetic, which was something no human had even known existed before the Helta came along. It was very handy when dealing with enemy starships because the drive fields emitted gravimetic energy.
The ship’s computer was a combination of the best quantum cores the Helta had to offer and a GUI designed by the best software engineers in the private sector, thanks to Daniel Gatlin. And thank God for them, because dealing with a graphic user interface designed by government engineers wasn’t worth considering. This one was sophisticated enough to take all the sensor information and turn it into an image we mere humans could understand. The red halos around the Tevynian cruisers were for our benefit, to show us they were Tangos, but the image of the wedge-shaped, silver megaliths were made for our consumption as well, a graphic representation of what was the gravimetic equivalent of a radar blip.
“Holy shit,” I said, half under my breath.
“I didn’t think they had that many cruisers left,” Olivera said in dolorous agreement.
There were a dozen of them, clustered in one of the Lagrangian points between Alpha Three and her moon, riding the gravitational stability there as they prepared for the final assault, the one that would get us out of their hair forever.
“Can we take that many?” I asked him. “Just us and the Truthseeker?”
“Not at once,” he admitted. “But if we can pick off a few here….” The expression on his face was as close to hopeless as I’d seen. “Well, hell, we have to try, anyway. Communications, get me Captain Joon-Pah.”
I was surprised they could still get a signal to him through the stealth effect of the drive field, but I guess that was something else the R&D crews had been working on.
“They’re here,” Joon-Pah said without preamble as he appeared on the main screen, “as you said they might be. What is your intent, Michael Olivera?”
“We’re going to micro-jump right into the middle of them,” Olivera told him, “too close for them to mass fires on us without risking hitting their own ships. We’ll have time to fire the impulse gun at one of them, which should be a sure kill, maybe fire the particle cannon at another before we jump back out. We’re going to head sunward, that is, in the direction of Alpha Centauri A, with our micro-jump out to keep their attention on us, then you come in behind us and do the same. We can take out two of them, almost one hundred percent, before they have a chance to react.”
“A sound plan for two out of twelve. What about the other ten?”
Three days in hyperspace had not, apparently, taken the edge off of Joon-Pah’s pique, and I wondered if anything could. He was paying back the help we’d given his people, and to some extent, because of our personal relationship, but I had a sinking feeling he might never fully trust us again.
“We may not get them all here and now,” Olivera admitted. “We can only do so many micro-jumps in
a row, and they know enough at this point to deploy in guard formations against them. I figure we get the two, force them to come after us. With the impulse guns, we might be able to take out two more before we’re forced to jump to the edge of the system and regroup. But the goal is to attrit them as much as possible before they move into the Solar System. Our static defenses there will give us some advantage, but not against a dozen ships. We have to winnow down those numbers.”
“That is sensible,” Joon-Pah agreed, though I thought I detected some reluctance in the words. “Lead us in, James Bowie. We will follow you.”
Joon-Pah’s face disappeared from the screen and Olivera sighed heavily, as if he’d been holding his breath.
“Out-fucking-standing,” he said to no one in particular. “Helm, micro-jump in one hundred and twenty seconds.” He traced a line on the touchscreen at his command station and a streak of red appeared in the center of the Tevynian formation. “Right there, or as close as you can get us. Tactical, as soon as we jump, you have helm control. Get me a kill and get it fast, before they can react. The second we fire, I want another micro-jump ten light-seconds toward Alpha Centauri A. We clear on the concept, ladies and gentlemen?”
“Aye, sir,” Julie and Davis said, almost together. I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help it. They were both former Navy and I’d recruited them into my grassroots movement to turn the Space Force into the Space Navy and the Rangers into the Space Marines.
“I blame you for this, Clanton,” Olivera warned me, though he couldn’t conceal the beginnings of a smile. He touched a control on his armrest and when he spoke again, it was on the PA speakers and the earpieces of our comm units. “Attention all personnel, this is the Commander. Secure for micro-jump in sixty seconds. Strap in and prepare for zero gravity.”
Which we dearly hoped wouldn’t happen, since that would mean either a total power failure or the drive field generator had exploded, but we couldn’t ignore the possibility.
“We ready?” Olivera asked, scanning the bridge crew. “Status?”
“Coordinates are set,” Julie confirmed, her fingers dancing over the controls. “The jump out is calculated and pre-programmed. Ready to hand helm control over to tactical.”
“Tactical is ready,” Davis said. “Capacitors are charged. Ready to take helm control at your go.”
“Engineering is a go.”
“Damage control is a go.”
“Flight ops is a go.”
And it was my turn, despite the fact that I do nothing but sit on my hands the whole time. “Security is a go.”
“Jumping in ten,” Julie said, but she didn’t count it down the whole way. She had complained to me—in private—that counting down was an Air Force thing and one of the main reasons she’d gone with Gatlin Aerospace instead of NASA. “In five. And…jumping now.”
Entering hyperspace for a micro-jump wasn’t the bad part. I’d figured that out after about the fifth time I’d done it. Entering was the same as usual…well, if entering hyperspace could ever be said to be usual. What a world. Anyway, entering was the same, but jumping back out within a second had a sort of whiplash effect, both physically and mentally. It always hit me hard, but thank God Julie and Davis weren’t as badly affected because our lives were in their hands.
“I have helm control.” Davis didn’t have quite the eternally-calm fighter pilot voice Julie did, but he gave it his best leftover Navy bridge crew enthusiasm.
His voice was the first thing to penetrate the haze over my brain, but the flares of light across my vision cleared quickly and the image on the main viewscreen made me wish they hadn’t. I knew the image was magnified, but it looked as if we’d emerged from hyperspace right in the middle of the Tevynian globular formation and the cruiser directly ahead of us was so damned close that all I could see of it was a stretch of solid, gleaming silver, the polished surface reflecting the glow of the primary star.
I clenched my teeth and my asshole and wished to hell there was something I could grab onto. We were moving left to right across the face of the thing and I just knew, more than I knew my own name and the love of my son, that we were about to take a half a dozen particle cannon or laser blasts right in the teeth.
“Firing.”
The ship rocked from the violent expulsion of a tungsten slug the size of a sports coupe from the electromagnetic launcher that was just the first stage of the weapon. Then the drive field got ahold of the thing and accelerated it to a good fraction of the speed of light. Ideally, we should have tried to line it up with two of the ships and make the most of it, but we had scant seconds before they reacted to our presence and filled us full of holes. We took the shot we had and were glad of it.
We were close enough that the expanse of bare hull seemed to disintegrate into a supernova of light and heat, which was close enough for government work to what actually happened. The cruisers were huge ships, but that much pure kinetic energy transferred into their hull split them in two in an explosion of plasma as hot as the heart of a star.
“Splash one,” Olivera said, betraying his Air Force fighter pilot past.
“Firing particle cannon.” Davis added, almost as an afterthought. “Control to helm.”
I couldn’t even see what the particle cannon hit past the glowing nebula of what was left of the cruiser, and I didn’t care that much because I knew what was coming next and it was going to suck.
“Initiating micro-jump,” Julie said, just a hint of a regret in her voice, as if she was trying to apologize for the misery which she was about to cause us. Or maybe just me. I was egotistical enough to think she might be talking to just me.
I tried to forgive her, but it wasn’t easy after a grenade went off inside my sinus cavity. At least, that was how it felt. The psychic shrapnel seemed to slice through my inner ear and I would have fallen to my knees if I hadn’t locked the suit in place before we jumped. The sensation of toppling over without actually moving was uncanny, like the hypnic jerk from waking up from a half-sleep, the feel of a fall ended abruptly by the surface of the bed.
And I’ll be damned if Davis still didn’t recover from it immediately, like the whole experience didn’t bother him at all.
“We’re ten light-seconds out from Alpha Three,” he announced, though that was really Julie’s job.
I could see the planet now. Before, it had been off our starboard shoulder and I’d been too absorbed with the Tevynian ships to pay any attention to the view of it in the side screens, but it was half of a blue marble on the main viewer, the dark side of the sphere facing away from the twin stars, her moon invisible on the other side of her. We were about eight times as far away from her now as the Earth was from the Sun, and there was no way we could see the Tevynian ships with our optical telescopes, but the gravimetic sensors had longer range, with the added bonus of detecting waves that travelled around 15,000 times the speed of light.
The representation of their signal by the computer was nearly as real as the optical images we’d see only moments before, right down to the expanding sphere of white light that had used to be a Tevynian cruiser. They were moving now, turning toward the direction we’d jumped, and I could sense their confusion, almost hear the arguments back and forth between ship captains trying to decide if they should jump or come after us with their drive fields.
“They haven’t seen the Truthseeker,” Davis said, half a pronouncement and half a prayer.
They hadn’t, and when she appeared out of hyperspace just a few miles away from the ship closest in to Alpha Three, they didn’t react until she’d fired. The discharge of the impulse gun would have been invisible on an optical feed, but the computer simulated with a solid red line connecting the Helta cruiser to the enemy ship, until that enemy ship ceased to exist. I tried to imagine what it was like for them, if the end was instantaneous or if they had time to realize what was happening before the wave of ionized gas turned them into burnt cinders. I hoped it was quick, because I wouldn’t wan
t to know.
“Splash two.” Michael Olivera sounded pleased with the outcome of his strategy, but all I could think was, get the hell out of there, Joon-Pah!
He wasn’t stupid, was probably the best starship captain the Helta had, probably better than anything the Tevynians could muster up after his time training with us, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t fuck up, didn’t mean the micro-jump couldn’t have scrambled his helm officer’s brain just enough to slow them down a second too long. A second is an eternity in a battle, if it’s the wrong second.
I breathed a sigh of relief at the warp corona even before Davis made the announcement.
“They jumped,” he said, and I restrained myself from responding no shit only with great difficulty.
I’d expected them to reappear immediately, from the impression I’d had during our own micro-jumps of hardly any time at all passing between entrance and exit, but it took a count of ten before a second warp corona marked their exit. They hadn’t come out right beside us as I thought they would, though I didn’t recall that ever being discussed. Instead, they were a good distance off to our port…well, at least to our port as represented in the image on the screen. God only knew what our real orientation was.
“The Truthseeker is a light-second out toward the orbit of Alpha Three,” Davis clarified.
“What course, sir?” Julie asked, her fingers hovering over the controls, as if she didn’t want to stay in one place too long. I didn’t blame her for that. I wasn’t too comfortable just sitting here, either.
“Wait one,” Olivera told her, peering intently at the tactical display, elbow resting on his knee, chin propped on a fist as if he were posing for a new Rodin sculpture entitled “the Tactician.” “I want to see who they go after.”