by Kali Altsoba
‘I don’t understand. What do want from me?’
“Don’t come home without an army. Don’t come back without allies who also have armies.”
‘Burn down your own Troy! Fight your own Cyclops! Bind yourself to your own mast as the sirens call! Fight your own battles and war! Why me? Why must I be your damned Ulysses?’
‘Not because I chose you, colonel. You chose yourself. No, not at Aral. No, not at the MDL. Remember Pilsudski Wood. Remember the long trek to Toruń. Remember the fight at The Crater. That is where you chose, over and over. And where our people chose you.”
‘You’re right. I did choose. But not then or there. I chose when Zofia came back for me as I waited to die. I chose in the sweetgrass. I chose when I saw your bright shining hate.’
“Good. You agree then. Remember always who you are and who you can and must be. Remember so that you return to take our vengeance, and to claim your honored place among those of us who shall never lie with cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
‘Aklyan’s a good captain. Our best, or Constance wouldn’t have given her command. So many lives in her hands! She has my pity. All generals and admirals need our pity.’
‘This is the most important mission in 300 years. That’s what Constance said ... most important since, when was it ... Ulysses? No, that’s a much older story of war and woe.’
His raggedy thoughts jump back to the Brigade.
‘Where are we going? Will I lead these fighters into battle on an alien world? Can the Brigade, can I, live up to all the hopes Genèvens place in us, in me?’
‘So much duty and hope loaded onto my shoulders by that damned woman! I would rather have my testicles lasered by RSU than go through an interrogation by her again.’
“That can be arranged, you know.”
His mind jerks back, less than halfway to reality, but back all the same. ‘Yet I can’t help but admire her. Here we are, straining upward to escape, tearing at the sky to race away from the clutching gravity of my homeworld while she leads an imprudent, hopeless ground assault.’
He’s right. Just before Alpha engaged boosters to rise into a rose-streaked dawn she ordered the portcullis lifted and marched at the head of a quarter million fighters to face gore and vulgar death outside her beloved and lost and ruined Arbor City. They did it without hope for initial tactical surprise from a blown plasma mine, used earlier to rescue lost Madjenik.
‘I fucked that up, too, costing her the chance to blow apart their main position at the Gate. I had to show up instead, and make her blow The Crater mine too early.’
He’s being wildly unfair. Using the mine was her choice. No one in the garrison thought or said afterward that it was a mistake. No one in Toruń blamed Jan or Madjenik for surviving.
Toruń’s last defenders, minus 165,000 fighters straining upward with Alpha, are giving the enemy all they have, laying down cover-fire and making sorties all around the outer berm to draw-off Rikugun reinforcements from the main force just outside the Gate. They’ll push RIK back before it recovers and begins to systematically slaughter fighters it can get to at last. In a matter of hours they’ll all be dead, wounded or captured. The entire garrison hors de combat and a defenseless and fearful city left open to occupation or destruction at the enemy’s whim.
Already, warehouses full of harvest and wool and stacks of export wood are smoking, the navy yard is burning and dry docks collapsing as preset charges are blown by engineers and scattering workers. Only the great batteries keep firing, as they will until their heterodiamond barrels crack and shatter or RIK ground forces breach the berm to rush in and kill all the crews.
Great casks of wine and tankers of beer are smashed open and left to run into smooth wooden gutters that line every street and alley way. The sweet smelling run-off turns gold-red-white as milk tankers are hastily and crookedly parked, abandoned with wide open spigots as drivers run or head out to join and die with friends and family fighting at the berm. Store fonts are shuttered with heavy wood venetian drops, except a few whose owners are gone or dead.
Two hundred streets are blocked by barricades, each with a reserve company readying to make its own little last stand. Teenagers mostly, scared and skinny, struggling to hold their weapons. Or far too willing to engage, posing as they’ve seen in vids and games. White-haired men three generations or more removed in time of life give orders to other men’s children and grandchildren. They should know better, but missed their own chance at war and want to try it now. Here and there one of the children’s mothers searches through the street companies, come to find and drag away a too young son or daughter to a deep bunker under some nearby tower.
Archie streams from a thousand tower tops as Jabos swoop directly over the city now that the shield is down to let Alpha out. Bombs and bits of bombers hit the sides of towers as they fall, showing the streets and squares below with millions of tiny oak or redwood splinters. Hot bits of archie shells set the tinder on fire. Empty streets are filling with aromatic smokes.
There’s no reason to hold back anymore. The shield is open, the berm is cracked and will breach in a dozen places within a few hours, letting tens of thousands of vengeful enemy pour in to Toruń, to tramp its wooden streets and kick down doors with high black jackboots.
“Burn it! Burn it all! Leave nothing for the locusts.”
No one has the orders or the heart to fire the towers, to bring the wooden canyons of Arbor City crashing down just so that Grünen cannot have them. Toruńites just can’t bring themselves to do it. Nor would it be so easy to topple the hard towers with mere fire, as an angry new Grün governor will learn when he gets here in a week.
Constance’s words swirl into Jan’s thoughts. ‘They’re not cold or timid souls. We’ll know defeat but all die merrily, our hate burning bright.’ Only they’re not her words. Just a Q-moda jumble, the Toruń Quarry slogan mixed with odd bits of his own half-thoughts. He’s losing control. ‘Yeah, but even under jitters I know the bit about fighters dying merrily is crap.’
He’s seen and he’s caused too many deaths to buy into faux-poetic nonsense about death in battle being anything but gory and profane. He can’t lie to himself, not here on a plane bunk on Asimov, possibly living the last few minutes of his life. He replays in his mind’s eye the many sordid ways people are dying on the planet shrinking below him at such speed.
He easily visualizes the awful scenes and blows he knows are being given and taken all around Toruń’s berm. Bloody, slow, obscene wounds and horrid deaths. Not heroic at all. ‘Not if they’re like the deaths I saw and made in the sweetgrass and at The Crater.’ He has seen Grünen and Krevans dying together and afterward lying together, glass-eyes looking skyward on a dead prairie burned to stubble, or cremated in the forest, or left face-down in choking ash. The dead have no nationality.
He lurches back to considering his duty, which he now realizes is far harder than dying. ‘While they fight, I’m running again. Under orders to do it, but running all the same.’
He looks down to Samara and thinks: ‘You hitched yourself to the wrong patron, kiddo.’ He can’t help thinking what he thinks, whatever he thinks. His brain goes kaleidoscope.
‘Heavy masers and plasma-cannon are shooting, searing flesh; bombs drop from Jabos, shells and missiles plunge. Tens of thousands of brave men and women live a last minute, for all of us up here. Compared to that, what’s a little sap or a hard bunk? What’s anything?’
His drug-crimped mind jigs. ‘Zofia! Why do you want me? Why did I push you away? So little time and so much death. So few days to be together, even absent this damn war.’
It jags, almost tracking the ship as he feels Asimov course-correct, hard and sharp as it strains through a thinning stratosphere. ‘That bushy-eyed gopher, Captain Tiva, will engage Type-3 boosters next. Can we do it before the Kaigun patrol blows all Alpha into fragments?’
It jigs. ‘I remember every moment that passed between us ... the first ti
me I saw you, petite and exciting in a lieutenant’s uniform ... You looked like a fresh-picked apple with your red hair and perfect skin. Then you walked across the parade ground and stared up at me with that little mocking grin you always have, not quite insubordinate but mocking nonetheless.’
It jags. ‘Gods, they bashed right through us at the MDL. I have to figure a better way to deal with their heavy armor. A surprise, so that next time we level the odds and even the score.’
It jigs. ‘Did you know it then? Did you look up my records before we met? ... Of course you did ... third in your class at KRA Academy, on your first duty but knowing you would never stay, that High Command is where you’re headed ... One of KRA’s top officer prospects ... Just needed to command a platoon to get some field experience ... Why not? You’re always ready for anything, even for me, a flunked-out company commander with not half your skill or worth.’
It jags, for the last time. ‘We must be getting close to clear space, to where the Kaigun patrol will be. I hope Aklyan has something up her sleeve, because no way the ground batteries are just going to smash a path through for us. We’re truly and suddenly on our own out here.’
It jigs back to what he really needs to say to himself, to what’s really burning him up. ‘You did your duty anyway, and showed me how to do mine ... On the barracks ground, and at the MDL, in Pilsudski Wood and after ... I remember, too, a long day before the war, when we walked by the sea and somehow I found words to talk to you ... When you told me of your hopes and plans, too, and I was glad that you confided in me ... shared something of your real self.’
He relives the seaside day, innocent and chaste yet their best day of all. Their day of days. Then his recovering mind does a last leap ahead, over weeks of peace back to the war, to his shame before Zofia and the real reason he broke it off.
‘I never told you, but it was only you who kept me moving, wounded in the cornfield ... I wanted to lie down and die from the shame ... right there, where I dropped my weapon and was afraid ... but then you came back for me, worthless me, who failed you and Madjenik and ran. ’
‘In the forest your apple hair blew in a clearing’s breeze as you tossed your head back laughing, when we ate that greasy moose and all got sick ... I longed for those times when our eyes met ... loved watching you sleep under the golden boughs ... but I couldn’t say, not there, not with all Madjenik depending on me ... and I had no words to speak to you yet ... you looked at me, so disappointed ... I knew it ... but that’s what I do, Zofia ... I disappoint everyone.’
‘I watched you take charge when I was wounded, so calm and confident ... admired you sleeping in the orchard ditch .... Then you used your knife on that boy in the sweetgrass ... I understand now, but I hated you for it back then ... for spoiling my perfect illusion of you.’
He comes to the fateful moment, less than two weeks ago, when he abruptly told Zofia that it must end just as it was beginning. He sees in his mind’s eye for the first time how deep the hurt was in her eyes, the intense hurt he felt when he closed down almost forever at age 19, when that other girl did the very same thing to him on Aral: chose a fool’s illusion over him.
He knows now that he’s the cause of Zofia’s pain. His synapses recorded it, but a lying conscious mind suppressed and hid it from him. Denied it. Until he’s prone on sticky wood on Asimov with nowhere to go or hide from the truth that’s knocking to get in through an airlock.
His whole being rocks with nova force and suddenness, jolting the pine and causing Samara to whimper with concern. He sees the truth of Zofia with a clarity only the looming chance of his death permits and insists upon. The chance of ceasing in the next moment casts off all the webs of self-deceit he has woven in the dark all his adult life, ever since Aral. Death the Judge calls in a jury to render harsh judgment on him in clear and stark and forever words.
‘I pushed you away, but for what? Regulations? The good of Madjenik? No, those were just the words. I was lying, to both of us. I was afraid to feel that pain again, like on Aral and for so long after. But most afraid to see disappointment in me set in your eyes. Zofia, forgive me! I’ve made a huge mistake. Mother, I loved and lost on Aral. Now I’ve lost my love again.’
Zofia fills all his hemispheres. He’ll never be blind again. The revelation hits him with a physical jolt. He remembers a line learned at his mother’s feet. ‘Then felt I like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken.’
‘Not for anyone can I give you up! There’s no time. Our lives are collapsing. Can I get you back? Can I fix your hurt? I’ll beg you to take me back. Zofia, will you have me? What a fool I was! I am! A fool!’
Tens of thousands of other men and women teetering on the lip of personal and forever nothingness fight other private wars of regret and self-reproach. Some about lovers old or new, others about parents or a wayward child, more about paths not taken or walked too eagerly, or aborted futures of dead friends and all the unsaid and undone things that now can never be.
Although not everyone is thinking profoundly about life and fate and death. One kid is regretting that just before boarding he ate bad sushi. Now, the turbulence is making him queasy. Another is remembering and reliving his last sex, his hand under his blanket. A third is humming pop songs. Odd ducks, we humans. Oddest of all when we go quacking off to war.
Samara whimpers as Asimov boosts out of the upper Genèven atmosphere. Still, even this is better than running hungry and sleeping on the oak-boarded streets of Toruń as she did for two lean months after being abandoned by the awful slaughter and confusion of the war.
As the flotilla finally breaks clear of gravity’s clutch she feels the terrible acceleration pressure ease. ‘I can move my tail!’ She gives it a wag, just to be sure. Able to raise her silver head again and open her eyes, she stretches torso and neck a few inches upward and licks Jan’s face in gratitude. He grins down at her. He’s recovering, too. Samara barks happily at him.
Alpha rises into a revelation of stars so bountiful they becloud all nine Main Scuttles, spilling in a broad pinwheel as from a great steel milk can tipped over into a running creek. As air thins around each ship and white stars appear in side scuttles, too, every prayer is already said. Every ship’s gun and missile tube is primed. Each mud-hopping middy and jack and jenny and all the knife-creased uniformed officers are expectant of fast action and their dreadful duty.
Whatever hope or striving is felt, results are no one's to command from this moment on. For it’s not true, as the poet said, that “everything comes gradually and at its appointed hour.”
In war things happen pell-mell, with blind and reckless fury and random promises of Death and Chaos and Departure into Nothingness in the bottomless black hole of Eternity. And that’s on the ground. Alpha’s heading into war above the sky, betwixt the Heavens and all the Earths.
And there they are! Brighter than the brightest morning stars. White-hot streaks of eight fusion tails, incandescent across a galaxy lying on edge and ink-black with old battles.
Data search: navigation.
Result: LPs, quantum-drive.
Historia Humana, Volume V, Part III (c)
We bid our children farewell as they left to cross stellar seas on light sails and GDM ships, not expecting to see them again. Then we resumed our affairs. The old dream of faster-than-light travel to the stars seemed so unattainable a fancy that no serious FTL research was attempted. Einstein’s determined god of relativity stayed in place for centuries as the first ships sailed on. A defiant deity, resplendent in tyranny over our grasp of the cosmos and our place within an expanding, flat snow globe of energy-particles-waves. The Universe remained utterly indifferent to the superluminal ambitions of Humanity, and to the convictions of cosmologists.
The first critical idea leading to a ‘star drive’ arose from a probabilistic loophole in Einstein’s concept of gravity under general relativity. Relativity assumes that spacetime is locally flat. In asymptotically flat spacetime, cu
rvature of a gravity field fades to negligible at great distance from an isolated massive object at the center of the field, such as a star. General relativity posits, with subtle complications and asides, that gravity is essentially a curvature of normally flat space-time caused by concentrated mass. Stars twist normal spacetime like desert dust-devils or prairie tornados twirl dirt and leaves. The real Universe is therefore not truly or asymptotically flat. There are crinkles and turns where mass concentrates so that gravity twists straight lines along an infinite curve until the distance from point to line approaches zero.
Discovery of ‘gravity echoes’ combined with solution of an old three-body problem that pre-dated Einstein, where at five fixed points there is near-zero net force and the third body is at equilibrium. Known to ancient navigators and system gas miners as Lagrange points (LPs), these are also called by modern navigators bohr-zones or jump-zones. They led to the second loophole, this one in Kepler’s Laws, that made possible ‘mechanics’ of a quantum-drive. LPs are so orbitally balanced that centuries after being exploited by miners and in coms systems, no one asked if they had effects beyond their remarkable stability and orbital energy conservation. Yet, except for habitable planets and ice moons, today we know that LPs are the most critically important places in any solar system. For only in a bohr-zone may we observe and access by quantum analysis intersecting spacetime or gravity crinkles that make stellar jumps possible.