“Maybe,” Kal said, before taking a long, throat-warming sip.
“You think otherwise?”
“I’m not entirely convinced that wreck survived getting to orbit, frankly. It was halfway to falling apart as things were.”
“And if it didn’t, someone else will still come.”
Kal thought about it. “Because of the Archangels.”
“Because of the Archangels,” Tim agreed.
Kal looked over at her young partner’s wounded hand.
“Think you’ll be able to put on a gauntlet when that smashed paw of yours gets better?”
“Maybe,” Tim said. “Why?”
“Because it’ll take more than just me to fight whoever shows up next time. We’re still in the same pickle as when we first got here: how the hell to get off this planet and back to friendly space.”
“By the graces of the Ambit League,” Tim said, and chuckled.
“With my boot on their throats,” Kal said, narrowing her eyes.
“Maybe,” Tim said.
“Definitely. I’m pissed off now. I’m not in the habit of letting perps walk away. This Berd guy, and his crew ... I want them. Dead or alive.”
“Frontier justice?” Tim said.
“It’s the only kind we’ve got now, Tim.”
He stared off into the distance—away from the wreck, and into the tall trees.
“Yeah, I suppose you’re right. It’s all we’ve got.”
About the Author
Brad R. Torgersen has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and Campbell awards, is a Writers of the Future award winner, and an Analog Magazine readers’ choice award winner. He has collaborated with multi-award winner Mike Resnick, and has published numerous stories with both Analog science fiction magazine, and Orson Scott Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Shown. A Chief Warrant Officer in the United States Army Reserve, Brad’s first military science fiction novel, THE CHAPLAIN’S WAR, will be published with Baen Books.
Dagger Team Seven
by R.M. Meluch
1.
It wasn't the first strike into enemy space. It was meant to be the last one.
The Dagger team of six fast assault craft dropped out of the final warp into the staging zone for the advance into Rutog space. The ships' navigation systems automatically turned them to face the Intersection.
Pilot Zack Cade couldn't see the anomaly yet.
There was no telling how long the Intersection had really been here. From any angle other than absolutely face on, not only was the Intersection undetectable, but the thing truly wasn't there. You couldn't see it from the rear. It didn't have a rear.
Zack Cade's Dagger ship moved into attack formation with the other five members of his team at the specified coordinates and attitude.
And instantly the Intersection was there before them.
At least two voices shouted over the com—sounded like Umber and Gretch. "Look at that!"
The Assault Force Controller called for com discipline. That never worked on a Dagger Team. Dagger pilots were notorious cowboys.
"No, really. Where's the Intersection?" Pilot Gort Neuman said, like refusing bait. And Zack couldn't blame him. The Intersection looked like a very bad special effect—like a misplaced lake, or a titanic dark purple-blue looking glass with a molten gold-white line drawn around it badly.
As things in space went it was small, no more than four by six miles by nothing.
It didn't belong in three-dimensional space. It was a cartoon hole. Any object sent toward it ceased to register upon reaching the coordinates where the Intersection appeared to exist.
Zack squinted at the Intersection through his clearscreen, then felt stupid for squinting. Common sense said he should be able to see through it. There wasn't anything common or sensible about the Intersection.
Zack angled his Dagger ship a half a degree off perfect square. The Intersection vanished and the voice of Control was sounding in his helmet.
"Dagger Six, you are out of position."
Yep. Noticed that.
"True us up, John Henry," Zack told his ship.
The Dagger ship obeyed. The Intersection returned, big, blue-black, and weird.
Zack Cade and the other five Daggers were about pass through it into somewhere else.
It was a cosmic magician's trick, but Zack couldn't see the wires.
The big white main star of the system shone at their backs. Sirius A was twice the size of Sol.
Zack could see the companion star, Sirius B, a bright dot in the distance. Sirius B was a white dwarf not a whole lot bigger than planet Earth.
Space inside the Sirius system was cluttered with sunlit debris from countless skirmishes between humans and the Rutogs. The husks of twisted human-built space stations tumbled in their orbits.
The Assault Force was already assembled when the six Daggers arrived.
The force was almost entirely mechanized. There was a consequence to human soldiers passing through the Intersection. The Dagger pilots were aware of it going in. They accepted it. This was their job.
The rest of the attack craft were mobile battle forts, heavy shepherds, and smart turrets.
The Intersection stood quiet for the moment. That could be a good sign. It could be fatally not good. Something dire could be building up on the other side. And there was no way to take a quick peek to know. Not in this universe.
The Earth-built defensive stations stood ready here on the friendly side, their guns fixed on the anomaly. The international space towers were collectively called the Citadel. Their defensive guns were programmed to fire at anything that came through the Intersection not carrying a tracer.
Do not lose your tracer! That point really got hammered home during the briefing. Zack wondered why so they were so insistent. Zack's tracer was surgically implanted in the roof of his mouth. He wasn't going to accidentally drop it somewhere.
Space mines peppered the zone between the Intersection and the Assault Force. A plot of the mines was programmed into all the attack crafts' avoidance systems. The Dagger pilots didn’t need to think about the mines. The ships could blitz through the zone balls to the wall. You just concentrate what comes into your sights on the far side.
Zack had been warned: you cross through the Intersection you are instantly not in Kansas, Kuala Lumpur, Rio, or your mama's front porch anymore.
The space beyond the Intersection had been named Rutog, for a remote mountain pass on Earth.
Zack had seen the videos from past recon flights. The vids don't really prepare you. And they couldn't tell him what was waiting for him over there right now.
And what comes out of the Intersection from Rutog space was never friendly.
The Rutogs never even tried to act friendly. Zack supposed it was a tough act to pull off when you were a ciliate bag of gas or a macroscopic rotifer. You could trust Rutogs absolutely. They had no concept of stealth. It's like they assumed you already knew what they're thinking, and they had to beat you to it. They showed no mercy to their own injured. No one had ever seen a Rutog try to signal cease fire—not by any signal that a human being could recognize as a signal. The Rutogs were honest about their intent to annihilate you.
The moment that Dagger Team Nine arrived in the mustering zone, the countdown had started. It was down to invasion minus nine seconds and the first mechanized unit started to glow.
Four. Three.
The first mobile forts' distortion fields went live.
Two.
Mama can't help you now.
The forts were committed.
The first line units—known as linebackers—hurtled at the flat impossibility. The linebackers were unmanned smart ordnance programmed to find their own targets. Their objective was to destroy everything within twelve astronomical units of the far side of the Intersection. That meant everything: Living and inanimate, machines, mines, green cheese. Leave nothing intact. Priority to objects propelled by powerplants.
The lin
ebackers hit the Intersection and vanished.
“Ho!” Zack heard himself shout.
Right after the linebackers, the Colossus forts charged through.
There was no way of knowing if they were having effect.
"Hope they leave some trade for us," Gort Neuman sent over the Team com.
The Dagger ships moved into position.
Like thoroughbreds loaded in a gate, Daggers weren't made to stand around and wait. As soon as they formed up, their ten second countdown began.
Zack glanced aside in the last moments. With cockpits illuminated he saw Paul Rittenhouse on his starboard and Ix Chel Parras off his port wing.
"See you on the other side," Zack said into the Team com.
The voice of Control sounded: "Three. Two. God speed from a grateful nation and all of humanity."
Zack heard only half of that benediction as he shot toward the flat blue-black nothingness. He went though yelling. Honestly, how do you not yell? He expected the lights to go out for a split instant. They didn't. He was just suddenly over there. There was no simulation for this. He didn't know what he expected—to lose contact with his own ass or something.
He burst out of the intersection hot, firing blind. Just assume there is a target. He couldn't hear Control's blessing anymore. But he heard Gort Neuman screeching some kind of battle cry and saw his tactical display instantly altered. His ship was already spewing chemical bullets and his canopy was surrounded by boiling light.
This was what they called recon by fire. You don't see the battlefield until you were in it.
Don't worry overmuch about hitting anything friendly, he’d been told. Your squadron's avoidance systems were programmed against hitting your own. Even if you did happen to hit one of your own allies, none of the friendlies on this side were living beings. The other five Dagger pilots were the only humans here.
Paul Rittenhouse was speaking. "The enemy will see us by our gunfire. They will know us by their dying."
Target-rich was not the situation they’d been led to expect from the briefing.
Up-to-date advance recon wasn't to be had. Ever.
Really you only needed to assume the worst, that the Rutogs had been building up something lethal on their side and were going to bury you or fry you as soon as you stuck your nose in their space.
Well, they were trying. The Rutogs were here in their glassy gassy thousands, reeling from the linebackers' assault, and spilling their vaporous innards under Zack’s guns.
The Rutogs still hadn't developed hard body spacecraft. They were using cloud ships—transparent-skinned, luminescent, their insides swirling all the colors of fire. The Rutogs were, all of them, gaseous beings inside clear membranes with ciliate appendages, which were hollow. The damned things were very dexterous for not having hands.
The soft ones could stretch themselves out into tendrils and reform again. The cylindrical ones were rigid and had whip tails on one end. Rutogs could exist for several seconds in the vacuum while their cloud ships moved in to absorb them back to safety.
Zack carried Old Glory into battle, posted on his ship’s stern. The Stars and Stripes remained stiff in the vacuum, lit up by the rockets' red glare. Underneath the national flag, the Dagger ships also flew black flags to declare no prisoners.
Rutogs winked out under their guns like dying skyrockets.
Lieutenant Rittenhouse announced on the team com: "Enemies of my country, you are dying today."
Zack joined in the chorus of six in a unified grunt: "Hrooh!" That was an amen in this prayer meeting.
The mission previous to this one had been charged with establishing a spacehead on this side of the chokepoint. Nope. Hadn't happened. Nothing friendly here except their own linebackers. If an earlier force had established a defensive emplacement, it was gone now.
Zack's ship was calling his shots. A human being wasn't quick enough on the draw. The pilot picked the targets and made all the judgment calls. Zack's ship knew when to ask for judgment. He—the ship, John Henry—did a good imitation of human reason.
Bright flashes burst all around them. It was like being inside the finale of a Capital Fourth of July. The flares opaqued Zack’s canopy. There was too much visual and none of it useful. The plots on his tac screen made no sense, and now his ship was doing the dead wrong thing about them.
Zack was taking fire. Heavy hits, the kind the Rutog weren’t supposed to have.
His distortion field buzzed.
The Dagger ships had been equipped with a camouflage scheme called nulliflage. The ships were meant to read like nothing to the enemy sensors. That was the idea. It wasn't working. The enemy was detecting us just fine. Zack slid a hotpoint inside one of those gaseous cloud ships. It combusted nicely.
Then Zack took a hit. Big one. Not a buzzy little Rutog hit. Zack’s energy barriers lit up. A sick sound groaned from his ship’s field generators. That blast was all wrong. That was a Poseidon bolt.
How in the hell?
Zack’s mind refused to process what Morris Umber was yelling over the com: "Friendly fire!"
Poseidon bolts were made in the USA. That shot had come from one of the US mobile forts.
There was a lot of yelling on the com. Zack wasn't the only one under friendly fire.
"Our space forts are shooting at us!" Zack yelled into a suddenly dead com.
His ship had just shut off his com. Zack manually switched to the emergency channel in time to hear the end of Umber's shout, "-ucked!"
Ix Chel shouted, "I'm riding a runaway!"
"My ship mutinied!" That was Calvin Gretch.
Zack's own tactical screen was going dark.
Zack tried to switch over to manual control of his own Dagger ship. The controls balked.
Zack felt cold. "John Henry, what are you doing?"
Zack called his ship John Henry. Not sure why he chose that name. It was the name of a tough guy. Zack had heard it in a song and it stuck.
His ship, John Henry, responded, "I am following the new protocol. I detect disapproval from you. Please advise a correction."
Zack bellowed, "Reset protocol to original state! Discard any external orders you received on this side of the Intersection! Reject any more external orders you get without my authorization!"
The ship complied. "Resetting, aye. Rejecting external directives, aye."
Com connections were reappearing on Zack’s readouts. Calvin Gretch still wasn't there. Lieutenant Rittenhouse was demanding, "Gretch! What is your situation?"
Calvin Gretch's voice burst from the com. "Normal! Why do you ask!"
Another Poseidon bolt lit up Zack’s canopy. That Zack saw it meant his screens were holding.
The voice of Lieutenant Rittenhouse sounded wonderfully calm, ordering, "Dagger Team Nine, call in."
"Neuman, aye."
"Umber, aye."
"Gretch, aye."
"Parras, aye."
"Cade, aye," Zack said.
"We are wasting time here. Join up. On my mark."
The Dagger ships synchronized their nav systems with Rittenhouse’s ship.
"Calling for big frog in five, four—"
No one called a balk during the three, two, one.
All six ships obediently created a warp to the coordinates that Rittenhouse fed into their nav systems.
And came out light years away.
It felt like running away, but it wasn't. The team had been told specifically: Do not engage the enemy in the chokepoint. The Daggers were not here to fight a battle without strategic benefit. The Daggers were meant to plunge through the chokepoint and leave any battle back there for the robot force.
Trouble was the robot ships back at the chokepoint had joined the other side.
Rittenhouse must’ve read all their minds because he told his pilots, “The traitors are not our responsibility. We’ll read them the way of righteousness on our way back. We have a mission to complete first.”
"We have clingers," Morris Umber r
eported.
Some Rutog riders had come along into the warp fold with the Daggers.
“Lose them,” Rittenhouse said. “Big frog in three, two, one.”
The squadron warped again to the coordinates given by Rittenhouse’s ship.
Rittenhouse called for yet another big frog. He gave the coordinates verbally this time. Meant he wasn't quite trusting his ship not to share the coordinates with the enemy.
The hell of it was the Dagger team couldn't get a message back to the home side warning of the turncoat machines—not in time for anyone to do anything about it.
Rittenhouse spoke very quietly. His soft drawl beat down the pilots’ roaring curses better than a shout ever could. "This setback in no way changes our game plan. Keep in mind what we want. We want them dead. We are not here to beat up gas. We are not here to take real estate. They don't have any.”
This was Operation End Zone. That kinda said it all.
“It is past time to take the battle home and that is what we will do. We will go deep. We will locate the Rutog manufacturing and supply centers and destroy them. We will locate the enemy nexus and kill the enemy.”
The enemy was nothing you could feel bad about killing.
The Rutogs themselves didn't show much individuality. First data suggested that the Rutogs didn't recognize that there could be such a thing as the thought processes of a separate intelligence outside of their own.
First data was wrong, or else the Rutogs' thought processes were evolving. They had the sense to turn human weaponry on humans.
Rittenhouse called for another big frog. The squadron came out kiloparsecs deeper into Rutog space. The team regrouped there, strangers in strangeness.
It was dark here, really dark, with a thin scatter of dim red stars. Rutog space was massively empty.
Zack Cade glowered through the clear bubble top of his cockpit at the dark. His brow tightened. He muted his com.
"You turned on me, John Henry," Zack told his ship.
The ship detected disapproval in his pilot’s voice and understood that Zack was angry. "I didn't know that I was obeying a wrong protocol until your bio markers suggested an emergency," John Henry said.
Zack was trying not to take this personal. It shook him up, the betrayal. He'd been ready for anything. He hadn't been ready for that.
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