by Rick Partlow
“Thirty seconds,” Julie said, once the laughter had died down and expressions had sobered.
“All personnel,” Olivera said, “strap in and secure for combat.”
I must have missed the announcements for ten and five, because the next thing I heard Julie say was: “Translating now.”
Shift. It was the one word I had come up with to describe it, a shift in perspectives, as if we’d been facing one direction and were suddenly facing another. But the view on the screen told the real story, revealing the glorious blues and greens of Earth, so like her sister worlds among the stars but also so distinctive and unmistakable.
“Coalition Space Command,” Olivera said after a signal from Adams that the connection was made, “this is the USS James Bowie.”
Coalition Space Command. I barely kept back the snort of derision. “Hyperspace” was considered too campy to be used by the military, but they called themselves the damned “Coalition Space Command.”
“We read you, James Bowie,” the reply came immediately, the voice young, some lieutenant left on monitoring duty. “Wait one, connecting you to the White House.”
Uh-oh. The normal procedure would have been to link us to the Pentagon. Something was up.
“Sir,” Adams said, with all the hesitance of a junior officer interrupting a general while he was waiting on a call from the White House, “I’m picking up multiple Emergency Alert System broadcasts going out from Florida, Idaho, Virginia….” she trailed off, her eyes going wide. “Sir, they’re talking about enemy troops on American soil, multiple terrorist attacks, martial law.”
“Thermal scans are registering explosions at the orbital defense platform,” Davis added. He was trying to stay cool, professional, but he couldn’t keep the plaintive tone out of his voice. “There are at least ten…no, twelve spacecraft breaking high orbit, heading for trans-lunar space. They’re not ours, no transponder signals, different design, more primitive.”
“Chinese,” I guessed, “or Russians.”
“Or both,” Pops agreed. Not that it mattered when we were all connected via our comm units, but he was right beside me in the shuttle. The rest of the Delta team was on board, as well as Landry’s Ranger platoon, while the rest of the Rangers and the crew Olivera had deemed non-essential were spread through the rest of the birds. “I think….”
His thoughts were interrupted by Tommy Caldwell, the President’s National Security Advisor. He was a rough-hewn, jagged edge of a man at the best of times and the bigger-than-life image of his face on the main screen revealed dark circles beneath his eyes and new stress lines around his mouth, testimony of how bad things had been while we were gone.
“Olivera, thank God you’re back. I hope you have good news, because everything here has gone to shit.”
“I have news, sir, but it’s not particularly good.”
“It’s going to have to wait, then,” Caldwell told him, hand slashing across the image. “Things have come to a head here. The Russians and the Chinese are making their move.”
“How, sir?” Olivera demanded, sounding almost outraged by the idea. “With the security sensors and weapons’ technology the Helta gave us, how are we not wiping the floor with them?”
“Because they weren’t stupid enough to hit us in the face,” Caldwell snapped, not as if he was angry with Olivera, but more like he was repeating his end of an argument he’d had more than once while we were gone. “They smuggled troops and equipment in over the borders, brought them in cargo ships, and when they began hitting us two days ago, they were mixed into our population and rooting them out has been like trying to excise a tumor wrapped around your spinal cord. There’ve been extended firefights in Tampa, Virginia Beach, Boise, Seattle and Portland and we still don’t know that we got them all.”
I didn’t want to believe what he was saying, even though I’d seen it coming. The whole thing was coated with a gauzy haze of unreality, like a nightmare where I knew I was dreaming and still couldn’t wake up.
“This is fucking nuts,” Dani Brooks said, and I saw by the indicator in my HUD that she was talking to me privately from a shuttle dozens of yards away. “Those are suicide attacks. They have to know they couldn’t possibly live through that.”
“They’re desperate,” I told her. “We made them desperate. I’ve seen before what desperate people will do, in Caracas.”
“Are you saying this is our fault?” she asked, her tone sharpening, the words an accusation. If we’d been in the same ship, she would have been glaring at me.
“No, ma’am,” I said. I knew the attitude, because I’d had it once, and I didn’t take offense. It had taken me a while to realize that understanding the opposition wasn’t the same thing as agreeing with them. “There are some situations where there are winners and losers, and if you’re not one, then you’re the other. They were the losers and even though we tried to cut them in for a sweet portion of the pie, they can’t handle not being the ones in charge. It’s called dominance hierarchy, and studies in animals have shown that more than food, more than health, more than even sex, all animals want power over others. And they’ll do anything to get it.”
Caldwell was still talking and I didn’t know if I’d missed any of his report, but this seemed to be the important part.
“Just a few hours ago, they suckered all our high-altitude fighter wings with a drone strike launched on San Francisco from a submarine off the Pacific Coast, and they used the distraction to launch shuttles from Baikonur and Jiuquan. We knew they’d been working on them, but we had no idea they were this close to launch. They have to be headed for the shipyards and I need you to intercept them.”
“Sir, we have bigger problems than the Russians and the Chinese. The Tevynians have cobbled together everything they have left after the Battle of Helta Prime and they’re throwing it at us. We came straight here from a skirmish at Alpha Centauri. The Truthseeker was with us, but she’s gone, destroyed. Is the Delia Strawbridge ready for combat?”
Caldwell went pale and I thought for a moment he was going to stumble backwards off camera in a dead faint, but he rallied and snapped a quick series of orders to someone off camera.
“She is,” he finally answered Olivera’s question. “We cobbled together a skeleton crew from the personnel we had working on her in the yard and they’re boarding now, trying to get out ahead of the enemy shuttles, but we’re not sure if she’s going to be out of the chocks in time to intercept them. We need you to run interference, to get in there and take out the shuttles so we can save the shipyard.”
“Take us into high orbit, Colonel,” Olivera said to Julie and turned back to Caldwell. “What about the other two ships, sir? I know they aren’t completely fitted out, but if they can fly, we need to get them out of there before the Tevynians arrive. Honest to God, sir, if they can’t fight, then we need to get them somewhere they can hide to preserve them from the enemy.”
Caldwell had muted his transmission to speak to whatever senior officer he had handy in his office to ask questions like that.
“Their drives are operational,” he reported. “One of them has a working particle cannon but no impulse gun. The other doesn’t even have that much, just point-defense turrets.” If it were possible for the man’s face to turn grimmer, then I believe it would have. “But we don’t have crew up there for them yet, and we won’t be able to send any up through the shit going on right now.” A glint lit up his eye, a hopeful idea finding purchase somewhere on the lava-rock slopes of Mt. Doom. “But you could get the people to them, Michael. You have enough backup crew, right?”
Olivera nodded, a frown etching more deeply into his face.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “I’ll get backup crews in the shuttles and send them out immediately, then we’ll move to intercept the enemy shuttles.”
“Good. Because if what you’re saying is accurate, we need to clamp down on this situation now, before the Tevynians arrive.”
“Sir,” Olivera sai
d, “I know it’s not my business or my command, but if the President has a bunker somewhere deep enough to protect against what’s coming, I’d think about getting him to it.”
“He’s on his way,” Caldwell assured him. “Otherwise, he’d be talking to you now. Send me a status report when you’re in position for an intercept.”
Caldwell touched a control below the level of the video pickup and the screen went black. Olivera touched a control on his chair.
“Auxiliary control room crew Alpha, drop what you’re doing and report to Shuttle Four immediately. You’re going to be running the bridge of one of the starships under construction at the L-5 yards. Minimal crew. Grab one of the engineering techs on the way.”
“Crew Alpha on the way.” I assumed the voice was Colonel Tygart, the XO. He kept mostly with his backup crew and worked the shifts Olivera was off and I’d barely spoken to the man the few months he’d been on the ship, but I assumed he was competent or the ship’s commander wouldn’t have kept him around.
Shuttle Four was one of the Ranger transports, its call sign technically Gunfighter Four, though I wasn’t sure if anyone who didn’t spend a lot of time riding the bird in combat would have known that. They had extra seats and so did we, so I assumed the other crew would be heading our way.
“That’s one,” Olivera said, as if to himself. Then he turned to Julie. “Colonel Nieves,” he said, “you’re going to be in charge of the second crew.”
“Sir!” she exclaimed, looking, for once, taken aback. “You’re going to need me on the bridge when the enemy ships get here….”
“I need you exactly where I ordered you to go, Colonel. Grab the Bravo-shift bridge crew and an engineering tech and get down to Shuttle One.”
Her face contorted with indecision. I knew her, knew she wanted to argue with him. He knew it, too, because he didn’t give her the chance.
“Get moving now, Colonel,” he warned her, an edge in his voice, “before I call security to haul you down there in handcuffs.” But then he smiled. “Looks like you’re getting that command whether you wanted it or not, Julie.”
She was, I judged, in agony, called away from the biggest fight in human history to captain the B-team. But she yanked the quick-release on her restraints and stood, shoulders squared.
“Yes, sir,” she said. “Good luck, sir.”
“It’s been a pleasure serving with you, Colonel Nieves.”
She disappeared from the bridge cameras, heading, I knew, toward this shuttle. Toward me.
Maybe, I thought, we’d get the chance to die together after all.
***
“Couldn’t you at least let me fly the shuttle?” Julie asked, arms crossed over her chest despite the boost, though I wasn’t sure if her plaintive tone was put on or honest. She was in a space suit, as were all of the Space Force crew, and I couldn’t see her face from this angle with the helmet in the way, but I could picture the pout. She hated to be on any ship she wasn’t piloting.
“No, ma’am,” Captain Lee said with the good-natured rivalry of a former Air Force fighter pilot for a former Navy Airedale. “You are a passenger on my bird, Colonel, and your time here is strictly temporary.”
I didn’t know how they did it. We were boosting away from the Jambo at what I estimated was three or four gravities, but they both looked as if they could sing show-tunes for all the effect it had on them.
“Are we going to make it to the station before the enemy?” I asked, managing to squeeze the words out in a fairly normal tone at the cost of about twice the breath it normally took.
I could still tie my helmet HUD into the shuttle’s tactical readouts, could see the feeds from the external cameras, the lidar and radar and what data we could still get from our satellite network, though much of that was down. Julie had told me it had been taken out through the fairly low-tech expedient of scattering ball-bearings in front of the satellites from Chinese and Russian kill vehicles they’d launched disguised as communications birds. I reckoned if we all lived through this, that we were going to have to do something about using Helta technology to harden the next generation against such methods.
I would have laughed if two or three people hadn’t been sitting on my chest. I’d actually had the thought we would all live through this. I wasn’t usually that blindly optimistic. We hadn’t “all lived through” any of this. Jambo had died on our very first mission. Delia Strawbridge and a third of the Delta team at Helta Prime. Now Joon-Pah was gone, and with every one of them, I’d felt like a piece of me had been sliced off and left behind.
Satellites or no, I could still see the Chinese and Russian shuttles, boosting on their second stages now, out of high orbit and into trans-lunar space. This would, I thought, be a historic moment for the Chinese and Russian space programs, both. It was the farthest out either nation had sent a manned mission. And all it took to motivate them was the chance to rule the world.
I could also see the Jambo heading for them, picking up speed as the drive field strengthened, repropagating after it had been shut down to let us launch. And the shipyards themselves were easy to make out, shining spider webs reflecting the sunlight, radiators wasting heat into the vacuum, lit up like signal flares. But I couldn’t judge the distances and certainly couldn’t do the math to figure out intercept times.
“We wouldn’t make it quite in time,” Captain Lee informed me, very cheerful about the whole thing. “But the Jambo will intercept them long before they reach the shipyards.” He laughed. “As if those fucking strap-on solid-fuel rockets could compete with the cruiser’s drive field. I almost feel sorry for those dumb bastards. When the particle cannon turns them to ashes, they won’t even know what hit them.”
“Damn good thing we showed up when we did,” Lopez added from the gunner’s seat. “If they’d gotten a toehold inside the station, that would have been a stone bitch for you guys getting them out.”
“Gunfighter One, this is Command.” It was Adams on the Jambo, and I didn’t think it was a good sign.
“Go ahead, Command,” Captain Lee replied.
Olivera took over the transmission and I knew this wasn’t going to be good news.
“We have multiple hyperdimensional translations out past Lunar orbit, Gunfighter. The enemy has arrived in the Solar System. We are going to have to break off and meet them. I’m afraid you’re on your own.”
“Copy that, Command.” Lee was still Captain Cool, at least on the outside, but my stomach was dropping.
“Guess I jinxed us,” Lopez said. “Sorry about that.”
They were here.
I managed to turn my head against the force of the acceleration and caught Julie’s eye. The words came of their own accord, no forethought, but they were apropos of both our current strategic situation as well as our personal one.
“I thought we’d have more time.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Ten more minutes,” Lt. Lopez muttered. “Ten more minutes and we could have taken them out with our shuttles before they docked.”
They hadn’t tried to take any shots at us, if they’d had weapons at all, and we hadn’t been in a position to shoot at them. We could have. Our coil guns had unlimited effective range in a vacuum and the enemy shuttles didn’t have the maneuverability to avoid them and still reach the shipyard. But we hadn’t been trying to target them, leaving them to the Jambo, and now, as Lopez kept reminding us, it was too late.
The shipyard the Helta had helped us build were modeled after their own, and if I said it looked like the skeletons of a half a dozen skyscrapers laid side by side, welded together at the junctures and wrapped two thirds of the way around three starships, with about half the gaps in the structure filled in with gleaming stretches of burnished bright alloy, I wouldn’t have been doing it justice. Constructing the thing had taken almost as long as building the ships from the hyperdrives up, and the structures were large enough that we couldn’t even see the docks where the enemy birds had put
in from this side.
“Ten more seconds,” Lee retorted, “and the Bears would have beat the Dolphins in the championship last year and I wouldn’t have to listen to my cousin in Miami constantly talking shit whenever I visit. Stop whining.”
Free fall so soon after heavy boost did nasty things to my stomach, but it didn’t last long. The thing about Helta is, they don’t like free fall any better than I did and they did away with it whenever they could. And since they had artificial gravity technology, they could do away with it anywhere they could squeeze in a fusion reactor and the guts of a drive field generator. Not in something as small as a shuttle, but an installation as big as a shipyard, definitely. When we sat down on the moonward landing pad—that was my own personal term for it, since it was the side of the station that permanently faced the moon rather than Earth—we had to hit the belly jets against a sudden tug of standard gravity. Standard gravity for us, which the Helta considered slightly on the heavy side, and as my teeth clacked together with the impact of the landing gear, I couldn’t help but agree with them.
“We’re down,” Lee announced, redundant but still SOP, because until he made the call, the shuttle was his. Now that we were down, it was mine.
“Prepare for hard vacuum,” I said, leaping up from my seat, knowing time was short and the Chinese and Russian troops already had a head start on us. “Pops, hit the ramp in ten seconds. Ship’s crew, stay behind us. Use us for cover and do not attempt to engage on your own. We are expendable, you are not.” Which would make Julie mad and most of the Space Force crew very relieved.
“If they get into those ships before us,” Pops told me on a private channel, hand hovering over the control for the ramp, “you know how it’s going to be.”