by Kali Altsoba
“No effect from the canister. The Kölns are holding their line.”
“Coming up to the first turn.”
“Rotate to short-range plasma as we come out of inflection, but start with lasers.”
“Weapons Station confirms: forward lasers on mark, rotate to plasma-cannon.”
“On my mark! All ships, shoot forward lasers ... Mark!”
Repeating slices of intense red and blue light shoot from a dozen lasers around the edges of the tetrahedron, searching black space ahead for the Kaigun frigates. Streaks of lethal light are joined a few seconds later by two glowing green balls, then two more, and two more after that as Alpha’s warships engage with intermediate-range plasma-cannon.
More bolts and light streaks burst, following an exacting curve through the first leg of a sharp ‘S’ maneuver Alpha is attempting. Warsaw and Jutlandia huddle in the protective wake of the three leading warships, like whale calves seeking safety inside the protection of the pod.
Weapons Stations consoles and holos on every ship erupt in brilliant, streaking vector lights as the four Kaigun warships return fire. Battle is engaged.
Prismatic beams shoot from laser batteries of twisting warships on both sides, missing or hitting as luck and skill decide. As well as AI-targeting systems, ship and missile vectors and relative distances, firing angles and velocities. Mathematics is more important than any tactics now, but human skill and courage count for something too. It’s not all physics and machines.
Three red rays from Resolve glance off strong plate armor of the Kaigun flagship, KG Karlsruhe. The daisa on the frigate rolls his ship as it scuds, shooting each battery he has on the uproll. Undamaged by Resolve, he hammers back with all available lasers as the next ship enters clear electronic sights of his targeting computers. He’s really good.
“A godsdamn buckaroo,” Magda swears under her breath. “Just what we didn’t need.”
A lucky shot from Tyco Brae cuts inboard on Lubeck, right inside the line of its bulwarks and hull, penetrating to the Engine Room and severing key optic control cables. Lubeck loses thrust controls but keeps up an intense green fire even as it drifts off the blocking line.
“She’s listing bad,” Weps calls over. “We can knock her out with another volley!”
“Let her go!” Magda orders. “Kills don’t matter. Concentrate fire on the other ships. We’re scoring hits, but not on their fusion engines or quantum gear. Aim for the masts.”
KG Braunschweig takes the brunt of the intense firing coming from Alpha. Two direct laser strikes from Resolve sheer its conning tower, wrecking its com gear and tearing apart the quantum-drive. That vital equipment is poorly located and under-armored in this KG frigate class, which is a near-masterpiece of bad peacetime design.
Major flaws are actually common in warships of all navies, even inherited from class-to-class over decades as peacetime mistakes not yet exposed by battle infest the most complex machinery ever built. So it is that a puff of demagnetized plasma is released from containment in Braunschweig’s erupted quantum-computer, poorly mounted outside the main armor, to melt a ball-shaped gouge atop the conning mast. A direct hit from Asimov next shakes the frigate astern, taking out its aft battery and ending 23 young Grün sailor lives in an instant incineration.
The frigates fight back, missing or hitting Krevan ships too, in a pageant dance of light-and-death flashing inside the long dark, cold umbra of the Wasp. Resolve loses her rear turret to a clever Parthian shot from Karlsruhe, which fires underside batteries as she rolls 360˚ back upright and then away. Ten jacks and seven jennies serving at combat stations in the rear turret die in an instant, but Resolve takes no maneuvering hit or engine or major structural damage.
Forming an outer leg of the Alpha tetrahedron, Tyco Brae shields the two thin-skinned troopships around the first ‘S’ curve. It escapes with a bad fright and scored outer armor from three glancing hits from Braunschweig, which is floundering now but still gamely in the fight.
It’s Asimov that gets the worst of it for the Krevans, starting with two direct hits from the skilled under gunners on Karlsruhe. The first hit shudders and buckles a section of Asimov’s hull on her luff-side. Collapsing bulkheads crush to death 42 soldiers who are jammed into a small mockmeat pantry, trying to stay out of the way of sailors ‘fighting the ship.’ They die in a flurry of instantly overcooked sausages and blackened chops and burned cheese, inside clouds of seared garlic.
Jan is sealed in the next compartment. He survives unhurt, curious as to why he smells strong garlic, worried about the fouler odor of scorched protein. Seven of the 42 dead fighters hail from Madjenik, tough old hands of the Battles of Pilsudski Wood and The Crater. They’re overflow from Resolute, where Zofia berths with the majority of the new 1st Battalion. The rest are Toruń garrison troops, reassigned to new-formed 3rd Battalion of Wysocki’s Wreckers.
A second strike by Karlsruhe wounds many on Asimov: the ship’s purser, purser’s mate, the chief warrant officer and 13 ratings. Dead are the master chief petty officer and two old-timer tarpaulins, all three among the ship’s ‘windjammers.’ A third punishing hit, from Lubeck’s cannon, tears apart all aft torpedo tubes and a firing station and kills 14 more crew. Lost catapult steam ejecting into space forms a pretty trailing cloud of powder ice-snow.
Also lost are two intact, unarmed missiles that fall from racks into tumbling oblivion as the fight moves on ahead. Their AIs were not released from pre-firing lockdown and so are unable to reorient or stabilize uncontrolled spins. The AIs will keep trying to steer for two Universal Standard Years, which is how long it will take the blue gas giant to capture the full fuel tubes and draw them into its atmosphere. No one will witness their end. No one will see one AI signal a last salute to its fellow traveler as its only mate signs back, just before both dip into the swirling top clouds to exist and think and experience the wondrous Universe no more.
A fourth strike, the only one by poor top gunnery on Raule, cuts a sliding hole in Asimov’s hull just above the skeg. It nearly severs a key joint where the over keel or top ribbing meets the magnetic rudderpost that’s critical in setting directional thrust of the main nozzle. But neither the fusion chamber nor the rudderpost is damaged. Asimov is wounded, nearly crippled, but it can still steer. It holds formation as Alpha finishes the first curve of the planned S-turn.
A minute later, struggling to draw away from the still hard-shooting Kaigun frigates, Asimov’s second officer updates Tiva on the fourth hit. “Rudderpost bulkhead sealed, vacuum is contained. Main engine is on-line and functioning. No casualties, sir.”
He’s wrong. Just before auto-seals closed off the damaged section several chunks of metal, wood-slab splinters from three shattered sycamore bunks, and a boy fell out into space.
***
It’s Jarred Whitmore, just past his 19th summer. He has pale-blue eyes and light-blond hair. His round face is more pleasant than handsome, gentle and distant. Usually, he wears a shy and embarrassed smile exactly like that of a ten-year old offered a stick of cotton candy at a country fair, but unsure if he can or should take it from a stranger. Now he’s falling into void.
Perversely, he liked training. Teamwork, the physicality, a sense of having earned his end-of-day meal and deep sleep. He thought he might make a good soldier. The trainers said so, too. They encouraged him not to wait until his one-year required service was up. Recruited him hard, right out of basic.
“You should go career, kid. You’ll make a great soldier. Sign here.”
So when he finished basic a year ago he signed for a full-up, five-year hitch in the KRA, saying: “I want to be a mortar man with Gold, like my father.” He really enlisted full-time to escape moiling forever in his too-small village, wasting away on the lower coast of Northland.
Recruiters have been saying like things to boys for millennia. To legionaries and Janissaries and Cossacks, to Coldstream Guards and the Foreign Legion and the Waffen SS. Then to Luna crater troops and Jovi
an War mercs. In the three big Orion Wars, the Oetkerts and dead Dauran Emperors sold the same phrases and ideas to hundreds of millions. Every army says pretty much the same things in every century. Why? Because the things they say work, especially on boys.
Armies know how to push the buttons of bored youths who want adventure and off-world travel, and above all, a higher purpose in their lives. Boys barely interested in girls or too shy to score a simple date. Not interested in women yet, or scared of women. Not ready to be serious about anything, can’t resist the ancient, discordant sound of a recruiting drum. It works for girls, too. Outside the Grün Imperium, they play snare drums to lure in girls as well these days.
War came before Jarred was ready. His platoon was wiped out when armtraks broke through his piece of MDL, 60 klics south of where Madjenik was also overrun that same day. One drove right over his head as he ducked to the bottom of a slit trench. His two best friends were killed. He saw them die. One shot, the other one crushed under ultrasteel tracks.
So he ran, for days. Lost and alone. Lying still under a simple camo sheet when he heard Jabo or Raptor engines in an unseen sky, thinking they could still see him. Or worse, hearing armtraks and strange voices shouting one field over, then a scream of terror and click-clack.
After ten days of fearful wandering he sat crying uncontrollably and alone in Pilsudski Wood. He had no food or water and didn’t know what to do. A pretty lieutenant with apple hair found him squatting in a soiled and torn uniform. He was hiding from her under an immense redwood tree root, the whole tree rising 200 meters tall and 35 in girth. He had wet tears and muck on his face. He pointed his maser at her chest, but he was too scared to pull the trigger.
She slapped the barrel away angrily and ordered him to his feet. “Follow me, soldier.” That was it. Nothing more. No words of comfort or relief. Just “get on your fucking feet right now!” when he hesitated to come out from behind the giant root and take a water canteen she held out to him. It said ‘RIK Engineering Corps, 10th Armored.’ He thought that was strange.
With one curt command Jarred Whitmore of 7 Lotus Street, Portwen Village, Northland, Planet Genève, joined Madjenik Company. Then he walked all the way to Toruń. He started in Pilsudski Wood and survived pursuing fires and bombs in the Old Oak Forest. He lingered as long as he could while crossing the sweet bio-boundary of honeysuckles and african moons that led to the ash lands of Toruń Woods, until the pretty lieutenant told him to haul his ass across.
Jarred doesn’t know if his parents are alive or dead, back in Portwen. He’s thought about his mother a lot since the war started and they were separated. Especially when he stepped from the Old Forest into the wondrous botanical barrier before the ash. The floral scents transported him to his mother’s garden, carefully tended in front of her modest cottage. Then and always, the red-haired lieutenant barked at him to wake up and walk straight. She was always shouting.
His spirits sank with everyone else’s as Madjenik marched parallel to the Old Forest Road, just to avoid its haunting host of ghosts. They followed anyway. All the way to where he fought at The Crater, so that he could march over the bridge and under Toruń’s berm. That’s why they said he had to do it. What did he know? He didn’t want to get left behind or yelled at.
He knows that he’s a real mooncalf who’s always behind somehow. He was left out of scatter fights in Pilsudski Wood but he’s sure he fought well at The Crater, his first real action. He thought he might have killed a man outside a bunker there, but now he’s not so sure. The apple lieutenant said the guy was already dead when Jarred blew his face and head off, getting brains all over his already filthy weaves. He fired down into a bunker right after that and is sure he heard terrible screams inside. He didn’t like to think about it afterward.
There was so much shouting and madness in The Crater he can hardly remember it. He never knew what to say when admiring people asked him later: “Were you really there?” So he said nothing. ‘They seem to think they know about it anyway, better than I can remember.’
Two days ago, in a warm Toruń hostel, he gently kissed farewell to the first and only girl he ever slept with. It was the end of the most wonderful day of his life, a tender night for two lost children of Genève. Two children overwhelmed by war. She cried forever after he told her he couldn’t beg, borrow or pilfer a place for her beside him on Asimov.
“Fighters only, no exceptions,” his ginger CO said, repeating the order he knew came straight from General Constance. The new major had that look. She brooked no argument.
“She’s a major now. That’s a real big deal,” he told the girl. “I have to obey.” Then he kissed her a last time on the outside Shipyard walkway. Tears in his eyes, fear and love in hers.
Jarred is thinking about the girl he left behind in Toruń when the leeside fight starts between Alpha and the four Kaigun frigates. He’s strapped into a sticky top bunk, but he’s not wearing a vacuum suit. There aren’t any, not for so many KRA. He lies still as the battle begins, listening to Asimov’s fine guns and keeping out of the way. Then a flash of blinding green light opens a sudden hole above him. The belt on his bunk breaks and he whooshes out into space.
He’s “gone drifting,” as swabbies say of anyone lost overboard. It happens in an instant. Cold bites at all his exposed bits: face, fingertips, ears. His nose dries out rather than ices up as he expects. The last thing he ever smells is pine sap, as he’s whooshed out the hole and a small gust pushes up his open collar, over his chin, into his nostrils. It’s the last air he’ll ever breathe.
His first thought is startlingly obvious. ‘I’m outside the ship! How?’
Next comes sheer astonishment that Asimov is vanishing from sight. Already it’s no more than a small blue dot of receding plasma thrusters, growing ever smaller and dimmer.
‘Stop! Why are you leaving me here?’
Too late. The tiny blue light snuffs into black.
“Come back!”
It’s a wholly unsuccessful effort to shout, but it saves him for a moment. Had he held his breath instead, his lungs would now be bursting apart from pressure. As it is, the little bit of air that’s left inside is fast expanding. It’s starting to tear his saccular thoracic tissue.
‘Ohooo, my chest really hurts.’
It’s a stupid, useless way to die with no greatness or sweetness or meaning in it, and he knows it. He concludes that the Universe is a place of infinite messiness and infinite mediocrity. Though he does like flowers. Ten seconds more and he’ll lose all higher mental functions.
‘How interesting! Space smells blue, not black.’
Water in all unprotected soft parts begins to vaporize. His neck, face, and hands swell. He doesn’t dry-freeze instantly despite the -3° Kelvin temperature of shadowed space around him. There’s no medium in the vacuum for fast heat-loss by convection, so he suffers only slow loss by radiation transfer. His body core remains warm as his mind drifts away.
As all moisture on his tongue boils away into vacuum he discovers tiny, rough and round projections in his gaping mouth that he never knew existed. The new asperities match his rising asperity of mood, his bitter anger and rough bewilderment that this can be happening.
‘To me! Why to me?’
He starts to cry, but the tears form little ice-balls that cling in his eyes in zero-gravity. Each new tear freezes over the first, building an ice-pearl in each eye. When the surface water on his pale blues evaporates his pupils freeze and crack. His light is forever spent ‘ere a seventh of his days in this dark world and wide.’ The onset of blindness brings with it certainty.
‘I’m dying.’
Anger passes as swiftly as it arrives and for a moment Jarred feels oddly calm. Like the time when he was three and almost drowned in a tidal pool off the quiet beach near his home. The experience filled him with curiosity rather than panic while it was happening. He felt oddly detached, until an arm reached down into coursing surf to lift him up and out.
Only when he recognized the frightened, sweetly reassuring face of his loving and beloved mother did he feel fear flood back. Her arms encircled and rescued him and her hands rubbed warmth back into his shaking, goose-bumped little body.
No strong arm catches him now, pulls him out of the starry surf into warm comfort of the disappeared dot that Asimov is become. He rolls over and over in the planetary umbra, blind to the dark disk that looms above him filling a tenth of the sky or more.
‘I’m alone. I’ll die all alone. Mother!’
Now he feels it, the first mortal pain. It’s gas distention. His gut expands, bloating his once flat belly where the girl laid her head after they finished making love and he stroked her raven hair until they both fell asleep. On his one transcendent day of days and night of nights.
A sharper pain is tearing his chest. His calm passes as fervid stabbing swells to fill all his personal universe. Acute, overwhelming. A hyperinflating crucible of torment with no purpose beyond torment. A few seconds more of this severest trial by ripping pain of his short life and Jarred Whitmore loses consciousness, never to think or feel or love or live again.