Friends in the Stars

by Mackey Chandler

  “If we are rushed, take one hab to Mars and leave it in orbit offset from our artificial moon, Heather said. “Use your judgment which one. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be too busy to want to hold your hand and micromanage it.”

  “Maybe I’m looking too far ahead,” Kurt said, “but is this a one-way trip? Is there any chance we’ll be bringing the habs back?”

  “Let’s see you stop all their attacks and maybe we could consider that,” Heather said. “If even one gets through, they will know they can do it again at any time. Are we going to stay on constant alert to yank the habs out of danger whenever the Earthies get the notion to take a shot? We can’t live like that.”

  “Take Gamma to Mars,” Delores said. “It has the highest population of new people who are going to be more upset. They run the most contrarian in Assembly voting, and they have the least mature and valuable industries built up. They hardly have any shipbuilding related industry at all.

  Kurt just nodded his agreement with that.

  “Fine,” Heather agreed. “If you get Gamma to Mars first the Earthies aren’t going to bother her immediately, and the Martians aren’t in any position to argue with them taking up orbit there. After all three habs are removed to safety, we need to do a sweep of all known forward bases for the USNA. I want to give them the same treatment as what April is doing. Leave no military ship intact capable of orbital bombardment. If it can be done without a massacre you can degrade the capabilities of the base itself. The smaller vessels ignored are to give them the ability to retreat.”

  “Are you demanding they withdraw from outside the Solar System?” Kurt asked.

  “No, they don’t seem big on listening. I feel it is pointless to make demands. It’s been on again off again war for years whenever it was convenient for them. As far as I’m concerned, we are going to drive their military from the stars by action, not words.

  “How long and much damage it takes to cause them to accept that reality is up to them. If a commander doesn’t have the brains to take an open path to retreat when you destroy his major assets, then he’s begging you to annihilate his force. I no longer intend to accept any cease-fire or treaty with North America. They simply can’t be trusted, and I suspect we will have to do the same thing with China eventually.”

  “We compromised with them, and allowed them armed passage out-system before to avoid large scale hostilities, and now we’re getting them anyhow. What incentive do we have to hold back any longer?

  “If the situation doesn’t change before then, we’ll conference again in twenty-three hours, near their deadline, and be prepared to make adjustments to any new demands and threats,” Heather said.

  “Do you want me to wait until then to start my sweep?” April asked.

  “No dear, I want their ability to bombard us removed right now. It gives them a little taste of reality to see they are powerless to stop that now. But I don’t expect it will be enough for them to back off their attack. That’s too far in motion to stop.”

  “We better keep an over-guard in place here while April is reducing them,” Delores counseled. They might decide to attack Central when April starts.”

  “Can you still do that and get your snatch teams ready?” Heather asked her.

  “Sure, any two ships not on our teams. Anything will do, even an ore hauler. They can all run jump drones even if not heavily armed themselves.”

  “Do it,” Heather commanded.

  * * *

  April headed towards Earth and what she’d heard referred to as a target-rich environment. Despite the anticipated hostilities, there was still an Earth-Moon system scan active and she had it downloaded for the previous seventy-two hours in case they cut the feed when the shooting started. Hopefully, the computer could backtrack and identify ships from that data. If something was impossible to verify, she’d just pass it by. Too close of an examination would be a good way for her to get shot.

  The first two ships were a USNA battle plate and a heavy cruiser. She jumped a drone in within a couple of hundred kilometers and holed both their drive sections so easily it was a little embarrassing. It would have been nice to be able to challenge them and give them time to surrender, but there wasn’t time. That would turn this into a weeklong exercise. Nobody was going to sit around in orbit waiting for her to work her way to them one by one seeking formal surrender.

  All of a sudden, the radio channels were jammed with new traffic. Every Chinese ship in orbit was announcing their identity loudly. It wasn’t but a minute before a few other nation’s ships thought that was a marvelous idea and started yelling that they were not a target either. It wasn’t lost on any of them who April hit first.

  There were over eighteen thousand objects cataloged in the traffic control scan as of an hour ago. Of that, less than five hundred were likely to be manned. Science packages like telescopes were easy to identify and well documented. There were communication and instrument satellites such as those for weather and crop survey. There were ocean vessel tracking and several GPS systems, phone and internet as well as totally private communications, military, and emergency beacon locators.

  The manned stations were obvious for being huge for the most part, and ships of other nations were sometimes identified on scan or had active transponders. A few had unique radar profiles. It was a lot to sort out and April didn’t want to shoot the wrong ship and start a war with perfect strangers.

  There weren’t many pieces of trash to identify. Four nations had junk clearing operations and they were at the point they were keeping up with new items and keeping things clear at a constant level. The larger pieces were cataloged and listed in the scan pending their removal. Rare pieces above a half meter in any dimension got priority to be visually examined by a remote operator, approached carefully and grappled remotely in case one was a remote-controlled weapon.

  Then there were thousands of smaller satellites two meters to three meters in length that most folks didn’t try to approach too closely, some of them well stealthed to radar and time consuming to detect visually. Some were warheads in reentry vehicles, plain old Rods from God kinetic weapons and exotics a little bigger like rail guns and beam weapons. The trouble with those was most of them had AI controls making them booby traps if you poked your nose too close. Indeed, some of them were weapon systems owned by April and her partners. You did not want to try to capture or open a device safeguarded by Jeff’s systems. He was devious in the extreme.

  When two cruisers ahead of April’s sweep pulled out of orbit and ran for jump she didn’t need to ping them for a USNA ID. They fled to jump out on diverging courses. She went for the light cruiser first and lost her first jump drone to it. They seemed to be firing anti-missile missiles in random fans, and one locked on and took her drone out as soon as it emerged. When she destroyed their drive section it left the ship coasting towards Orion having attained a velocity that would take it from the Solar System if nobody rescued them.

  The other cruiser was a heavy, and had a brilliant captain. April’s targeting software was designed around destroying a ship. Getting a drone in close enough to hole the engineering section without killing the whole crew and breaking the ship up wasn’t automated. She had to instruct the drone what to do in simple terms. It’s simple AI could not adjust and cope with fire or maneuvers at electronic speed. The weapons system in the heavy cruiser didn’t have that limitation and could operate at its peak efficiency.

  April’s drone had to be able to put its shot on target within a couple of meters to do what she intended. The first drone she sent from a half light second away was out of location to be able to take a shot because the captain had cut his drive as soon as he saw her. It materialized out of jump too far along his projected flight path to fire. The second time it jumped in he’d boosted his acceleration the other way to over three g, and it failed again. The third time she made the mistake of jumping in at about the same time interval, and an X-head missile was waiting right on top of its
predicted point of emergence to take her drone out.

  The crew of that cruiser must be throwing up by now, being whip-sawed back and forth by the violent maneuvers. Once again, she was too predictable about her drone placement, this time by position rather than timing and lost a second drone. By the time she finally damaged the cruiser’s engines she was upset. This would undoubtedly be used as a training tape in the future, but as an example of what not to do. She won, but at great expense against an inferior foe and hardly covered herself with glory.

  * * *

  Johnson positioned his ships beyond Jupiter’s orbit but not so far out that a ship arriving deep in the Solar System at high speed would emerge behind them. Any attack had to come from an angle calculated to miss Earth, after passing through the area behind the Moon where the Home group of habs orbited around a common center.

  The directions along which a strike could come were further limited by needing to end in the Sun or to exit the Solar System entirely rather than be a future hazard to navigation around Earth.

  There were only six stars in direct jump range of Earth, close to being in the plane that defined those targeting conditions. Johnson sent a ship to each one hoping to catch a ship on the proper vector before it could jump out and attack the habs.

  In Survey System 19 there was no permanent Human presence to provide a system scan of the transiting traffic. The private Central ship Nomad owned and commanded by Glen Travaro and volunteered to Johnson’s group made a series of jumps in the system stopping to sample possible wavefronts propagating from a cone-shaped entry volume opposite possible Earth exit vectors.

  The third stop discovered a burst of entry radiation and two more jumps and sampling of the radiation burst defined the trajectory of the ship. They caught up with it on the outbound leg aimed along a Sol exit vector just as they expected.

  “I expected them to be further along with a lot more velocity,” Glen told his copilot.

  “They are accelerating at a bit less than .8g,” Ben said.

  “Well it does appear to be a freighter,” Glen allowed, “even so, they came in from the other side and haven’t braked. You’d think they would have a lot more speed by now.”

  “Unless they are very, very heavy,” Ben said. “Maybe that’s all they can pull.”

  “He shouldn’t have any weapons, but let’s not be stupid. I’m going to stay well back and hail him from ten light seconds with a drone and move it to listen for his reply.”

  “Works for me,” Ben agreed. “Let’s stay back a few light minutes and the drone can jump back to us with any reply. I’ll have a second ready to switch places with it so they won’t be talking and we miss it having retrieved the drone.”

  “Perfect, set it up,” Glen agreed.

  “Nothing,” Ben said after a full two minutes and the drone didn’t return.

  “Switch drones and test the first one on its return to make sure it is receiving emergency frequencies,” Glen ordered.

  “Nothing wrong with this drone,” Ben assured him after he traded them. “They don’t want to talk to us.”

  “Or it isn’t manned at all,” Glen suggested.

  “Most folks won’t trust an AI to fly a ship across several systems,” Ben said the obvious. “It’s a good way not to get it back.”

  “I suspect they don’t plan on getting it back,” Glen said. “I think we are looking at a jump missile. I’m going to punch a hole through its engineering spaces. Once it is disabled, we’ll listen just to make sure there isn’t a crew. Surely, if there is they will want to be rescued once disabled. If we get no answer, then I’ll feel safe to regard it as unmanned and destroy it. Jump a drone with a lance in close. A half light-second should give you decent accuracy, and punch a hole anywhere near the back end, in the drive spaces. Pop another in two light seconds away to record what happens.”

  The drones disappeared from beside them, returned almost within the same heartbeat. The video showed a good shot. The gravity lance punched a hole through about three meters from the rear of the ship. Debris could be seen to be ejected from the far side. After a barely perceivable delay, the entire ship exploded from the middle, far from where their shot had pierced it. The flash wasn’t the brilliant flash of a nuclear device, it was a very modest chemical explosion.

  “What the… that doesn’t make any sense,” Glen said. “Slow that video down and let me see it in detail.”

  The hull could be seen to expand before it burst, then there was a dull orange fireball inside, obscured by a thick dark haze.

  “They set off a small charge inside a hold full of something. I suspect it is just plain old gravel. Why spend money to manufacture metal shot when the natural stuff is cheap and readily available?” Ben told his captain.

  “Yes, it’s a shotgun, but why have it blow up here before it jumps out? It’s wasted now and will just head off towards Sol slow. It will take so long now that Sol won’t even be there in a few thousand years when this goes through where it was.”

  “It was set up with a fail fuse, so it would blow if intercepted in the Earth system,” Ben reasoned. “If it had made it all the way to jump it would have made sense. If it was intercepted before, as we did, then it was going to be a loss anyway.”

  “It was within an hour of attaining minimum jump velocity. We lucked out and found it easily. I know the habs won’t be there if there are any more of them, but it’s pretty scary seeing how effective this would have been. What if they had just launched them with no warning? Or what if we believed their deadline was a genuine offer and surrendered? If we didn’t detect a pattern of entry radiation, then the habitats might have only had ten or fifteen minutes warning before radar saw a flying gravel pile.”

  “Our Lady will be very interested in the video,” Ben said, grimly.

  Chapter 25

  “We need to report to you early,” Kurt told Heather apologetically ten hours later. “The Earthies aren’t going to give us twenty-four hours. Johnson reports he found one USNA vessel and destroyed it in Survey System 19. It was a robot, and definitely on a run to attack our habitats.

  “Three other vessels jumped hot and deep into our system, immediately dumping a load of crap that is now impossible to intercept. We might push a few pieces around, but at this distance, we could be nudging as many pieces on target as off. If they’d held them back from release pending our surrender, we might have been able to intercept them while they still had their shot loads contained aboard, and vaporize the whole thing. However, it looks like they were aiming for a time on target arrival at the habs about one minute after their deadline expired.”

  “So, they never really intended to take our surrender,” Heather said. She seemed unsurprised and beyond getting excited over one more treachery.

  “Likely, no matter what you said they would have found it wasn’t sufficiently compliant, or they have a list of things to which you would never agree, and would have kept adding them until you refused,” Kurt suggested.

  “Hold a moment,” Heather told Kurt. When she returned, she explained. “Since that’s how they want to do things I ordered April to finish off every USNA ship to be found in orbit, destroyers and frigates, surface shuttles and fleet support vehicles. If that strands somebody they can depend on the kindness of strangers for rescue. If anyone objects or interferes, she is weapons free to engage them too. She had to pursue two cruisers that ran for jump when she approached. They are headed out-system no longer under power. Somebody else can rescue them and charge a huge fee.

  “Did you meet your six-hour deadline? Can you initiate the Bug-Out right now?”

  “It took me eight hours, but we’re both ready now. There were a few folks who caught shuttles off Beta and Gamma, but there wasn’t a pilot who wanted to leave home and chance not making it back before it is snatched away. There’s going to be a bunch of folks you’ll probably have to restore to the Solar System later, or they are going to be trouble-makers you don’t need. We’re short o
n time just like we discussed, and will have to run Gamma to Mars and get it later.”

  “Who is going to do that?” Heather asked.

  “Delores is sitting waiting on your go-ahead to do that right now. Then she will return and we’ll leave with Beta and Home together, since we start on a similar vector. Derfhome and Fargone are close enough in our sky we won’t have to diverge soon.”

  “Get her going,” Heather said.

  After just a few seconds Kurt said, “They’re gone.”

  “When she comes back don’t wait on my order. Go ahead and jump,” Heather said.

  “Yes Ma’am, Thank you. This is goodbye then, we’ll be busy.”

  * * *

  After April reported she was done with every USNA ship she could identify there didn’t seem to be any hostile action and Heather called her back in. She sat down well away from Central and had a jump bug bring her in to see Heather face to face. She was fearful to land there because they could lose the ship before they could board and lift it if there was a strike against Central.

  Heather shared the video of the robotic ship being destroyed and releasing its cargo, and the radar tracks of three other flying clouds of gravel they failed to stop sweeping where the Home habitats had orbited. It was an ugly try at murder, compounded with lies to try to catch them unaware.

  “You look really whipped,” Heather said, “you need some downtime and sleep.”

  “Is somebody overhead watching us?” April worried.

  “Captain Paulson and LaChance are orbiting the Moon with jump drones,” Heather said. “Captain LeChance destroyed a vessel aimed right at Central. She apologized for destroying it utterly instead of disabling it, but it was an obvious suicidal attack run and setting up for a disabling shot in the time frame available was questionable. I assured her she did the correct thing, but I think it is going to bother her for a long time. She never fired a shot in anger before, and we never did ID the vessel. Looking at the radar return near nose-on, it could have been either a destroyer or frigate.”