Jahandar: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  “These shields will protect from hypervelocity micro-contacts, and now canister spray, at 15,000 times the ratio of standard ultrasteel dodgers on most ships today. You’ll have them in a year at most.”

  LeClerc thinks: ‘That’s a real advantage. Though it won’t help against swarms of phantoms, and not at all if the war starts before then, as it bloody well most likely will. If the Blue Hammer is right, and he always is.’

  Adélaïde is also grateful for Admiral Maçon’s warning. ‘Now we know it’s not just theory, after what the KRN escorts did at Genève system. Who would have thought gravel could be used on offense like that? We need to seriously rethink everything we do. As the general says, no design or tactical assumption, no matter how basic, can be assumed in a real shooting war.’

  The NCU is the vital backbone of Union power and defense. No naval vulnerabilities can be allowed. One of the reasons LeClerc is on Argos today is to make sure that Maçon’s and other JCS priority orders are being carried. One of the reasons. Not the main one. Not the secret one.

  “Any other defensive innovations?’

  “We already use prefabs to shield from hypervelocity micro-meteorites and dust. We’re making lighter carbyne anti-missile shields. Small enough to mount on frigates and destroyers, warship classes that are just too small to use slabs of heterodiamond plating. They’ll make multi-layer shells of penetration redundancies in small ship armor. Now even your little warships will take a lickin’ but keep right on kickin!” Chan gives a kick as she says it, like a chorus girl. The motion lifts her skirt even higher up her thighs. She doesn’t push it back down.

  She surprises everyone with the ancient colloquialism. Except Adélaïde. She’s waiting for yet another persona switch. This one is from high tek specialist to Argos yokel, with bit of Chan’s original sex kitten act thrown in as garnish. Adélaïde’s been actively scanning for this threat, ready to protect her general like a destroyer escort circling a limping old battlewagon.

  Chan throws a hostile glance at Adélaïde. She knows she slipped, but recovers quickly. “It also works for soldiers, general. We’re thinking pre-form shield walls for mobile forces to umm, erect, in umm, whaddaya call it in the Army? Oh yes, positional warfare! Just cover up funk holes and bunkers with it, lie back and go all hard, and you’ll be totally safe from top fire.”

  “Another garbled speech pattern and double entendre! Bit much, that one. So, she’s not backing off. She knows the mask is looser but she still has to wear it or it’ll fall completely.”

  LeClerc simply says: “In combat, no position is ever totally safe, shielded or not.”

  They come to body armor next. Adélaïde thinks: ‘This is for the Army. No one wears personal armor on a warship. OK, maybe just a gossamer-light, old-fashioned liquid vest to protect from shrapnel when the hull takes a pounding and shatters from the inside, even while maintaining outer integrity. You don’t want to be sprayed with ultrasteel micro splinters. I’ve read navy medical reports from the last war. Gruesome!’

  She feels a soft bolt of cloth weave then consults the e-book again: ‘Armored cloth’ must be cut chemically. Metal cutters can’t break its carbyne-layers and lasers won’t cut soaked-in ceramics ... It stays soft until hit. Impact sends a current into a hexagonal sub-layer of carbyne, instantly rigidifying around the impact zone without hardening the whole combat suit, effectively paralyzing the wearer. An early problem. Localized rigidity also blocks the heat effect from a plasma round even as it throws back kinetic impacts, without allowing penetration of the suit.”

  The young soldiers and marines on LeClerc’s team are interested in body armor but they know most of this stuff. Not Adélaïde, she’s a navy lass. And she wants to goad Chan into an error. “It’s fascinating, Ms. Wèi. Maybe because we don’t wear armor onboard. If the hull of a warship is breached that badly you’re probably done anyway. Besides, unless you can get to a yawl pod in an emergency evac there’s no place to escape from a dying warship.”

  “How terrible for you!”

  “We get by, like you with the pink crystal vats. Trick is, don’t lose your ship in a fight. Tell me, since it protects against masers and kinetics, is there any way to defeat armored cloth?”

  “Reactive armor protects against plasma and kinetics reasonably well. Unfortunately, carbyne alone doesn’t protect against lasers.”

  “Why can’t carbyne stop a laser?”

  “A laser won’t trigger the reactive response. A beam of photons is too insubstantial to trip the impact pulse that rigidifies the cloth. Worse, a beam arriving at light-speed means reaction is always going to be too slow. We can bounce a laser around a little with a layered defense, but if it’s strong enough it’ll get through the hexagon into soft, heatable body tissue underneath.”

  “Is that why you cover the carbyne-weave with ceramic layers?”

  “Yes. To insulate from hole-boring by the laser, its main killing effect.”

  “How powerful does a laser have to be to get through ceramics?”

  “We can protect against most personal weapons, but a canon laser’s still going to fuck you up real bad, every time.”

  Adélaïde thinks: ‘She’s not really that funny! It’s all an act, and wearing as thin as that carbyne she likes.’ But she says: “How does the adaptive component work?”

  “What’s commonly called adaptive armor we here at Argos class only as sophisticated camouflage,” Chan answers chirpily, pausing somewhere between her personae to finally tug her very short black skirt back down below a chorus girl’s raised hem line. “Because metamaterials bend light at nano-levels, but don’t protect a target from being hit, they’re not really armor.”

  Adélaïde deliberately looks puzzled. She can smell Chan Wèi’s rose perfume now. She knows it’s expensive but decides to believe it’s cheap and tawdry instead. She really resents it.

  “It’s like a fast brook flowing over a stone, observers see the water but not the moving soldier standing in it, because adaptive armor bends light around her. We apply a surface layer of flexible polymer rods at 300 nanometers. That’s just a few billionths of a meter. All wavelengths perceived by the human eye are from 400-700 nanometers. The threshold is just small enough to allow manipulation of light to make the wearer unseeable from any angle. Unless you look through an artificial eye or vidscreen that reads spectrum distortions at nanoscales below 400. Sound waves are similarly diverted, muffling movement to inaudible ranges unless your hearing has been artificially amplified.”

  “Thank you. I think I understand. With everybody wearing light, sound, and huff-duff camo, everyone is also forced to use artificial vision and hearing that can detect below the 400 nanometer range. That’s why marine helmets are so rigid and bulky. They have to house all those optical and auditory amplifiers along with rigid HUD armored faceplates and vidscreens?”

  “Exactly right. Why, you’re a quick study!” The smile is radiant as Chan Wèi turns to face Adélaïde. The tops of her breasts are clearly visible in the “V” of her scarlet blouse, heaving with feigned excitement. Musk and rich perfume fill the air between them, all coming one way.

  Adélaïde isn’t susceptible to Chan Wèi’s sexual charms, even when she turns them on with so obvious a bisexual, come-hither overtone. She never succumbs to flattery by anyone, at any time. She just smiles neutrally. Unreadable, inscrutable, hiding her now pounding suspicion.

  The ACU aide who almost stumbled into LeClerc joins in. “This armored cloth is terrific stuff. But any armor ever made was overcome by better weapons. That’s how you win in war. In war the gods are always on the side of the guy with the biggest guns.” At least he’s sincere in his clichéd and quite wrong conclusion. He’s never been within a thousand parsecs of a battle.

  One of the marines ventures a contrary opinion. He’s been trying to make an impression on Adélaïde for weeks. He decides to sally out before his castle, seeking her favor to wear upon his sleeve. An armored one, as it happens.

>   “We know how good a weapon is when we take it into combat for the first time. Is it quick or slow in real hands? What are its psychological as well as physical effects? How easily does it break? How fast can it be repaired? The only way to learn is to use it in real combat. Just as the way to win a war is to fight one, without assumptions of the last one, which will be wrong. History is not prologue in war.” He’s quite pleased with himself, thinking he sounds intelligent, as well as profound and even original.

  But he’s not being original at all. They’ve all heard this before, back when they were Academy cadets and had to sit through Castro’s military history lectures, with odd titles like “Artillery Through the Millennia,” “Gods, Guns and Orbital Gunships,” and “Illusions of Tek Superiority as Decisive in War: the Case of Agincourt and Castillon vs. Luna I and II.”

  Another aide, also trying to impress Adélaïde, pipes up: “To quote Professor Juan Castro, ‘shells fly as shells fly and battle moves.’ It’s fluid, emotive and intensely human. Reason does not rule in combat and fighting is more vital than mathematics.” It’s like he just crammed for an exam, his head full of answers in search of questions that may never be asked. Write them down anyway, and hope for some credit. Short-term memory confusion, be damned!

  A third male aide joins the sexual competition, strutting his intellectual feathers in an obvious mating display: “No one was killed in a war or won one by first solving the square root of Pi.” He’s too proud of that cleverness, which he misremembers as an original thought. It’s another one of Professor Castro’s.

  Chan Wèi is uninterested in so male and detached a debate. “Why, how very interesting!” Her real thoughts stay behind a flashed smile and sudden but-ever-so-slight thrusting upward of her chest that smites all the male aides as one, throwing them off balance, moving their eyes to her breasts. There the argument among them rests, unrequited. For an embarrassingly long moment.

  “Last stop! Bioweapon defenses are developed here, and living constructors.” The little tour nears a white building between rows of tall purple sycamores. Inside, teams of hundreds of bioengineers work on weapons based in life sciences. At Argos Labs, that means death sciences.

  “What’s a living constructor?” It’s one of the male aides, drawn ever closer by the siren in the red blouse. He can’t take his eyes off her panting breast tops.

  Adélaïde taps him on the shoulder and shows him the tek manual entry: “Many plants are precisely engineered on a microscopic scale for enormous relative strength. At the cellular level, bamboo and willow are as strong or stronger than artificial polymers. Arborescent palm stems found in common coconut trees are 100,000 times stronger than marble. Living constructors tap into the natural mechanics of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin…”

  “We can’t grow materials as hard or strong as carbyne, of course, but we think we can grow very strong reinforced bunkers and tunnel constructors with roots that make self-sustaining fortifications. They’ll use photovoltaics for power. We’re working on seeding whole continents with organics.”

  “Why would you ever do that?”

  “Our purpose is defensive, of course. Well, mainly defensive. Some think there’s offense potential in organics, too. For example, we might seed bomb an enemy city or continent or world, then we just sit back and watch it literally uprooted at greatly enhanced bio-speeds.”

  “Couldn’t defenders just kill the weeds? They’re only plants after all, not real bombs!”

  “I can’t discuss that. It’s classified, and anyway I don’t really know much about it at my security level. And I already said too much. But ‘no’ is the answer I heard once, when I asked.”

  “So, cities are our enemies now? What about all the civilians? Are they our enemy too? Are we going to make war against innocents, or just armies?” Adélaïde is genuinely outraged.

  “Figure of speech, that’s all. Of course, we would never do that. Yet the Imperium might. And we need to be ready if they try. That’s what we’re doing at Argos Labs, trying to understand how a tree bomb would work but only so we can defend against it.” Her eyes say something else.

  Adélaïde is sincerely disgusted. It just doesn’t seem right to target cities, even whole worlds, for indiscriminate attack by living weapons. Then she remembers Setubal and Lugo. ‘That was then. Nudger bombardment is illegal now. Surely not even Pyotr and his Kaigun...’

  She’s very young, to be in her profession and still be so shockable by the common things of wartime logic. Like everyone her age in Orion, she’ll soon learn very different lessons about Humanity and about the limits her own people will choose to obliterate. And about herself.

  “Anything else. Are we done with all the theology?” It’s LeClerc, eager to prevent his aides starting a never-ending argument over the ethics of “absolute war.” LeClerc dislikes theory as much or more than his friends Admiral Gaétan Maçon and Colonel Juan Castro.

  It’s one of the things that drew them together at the Academy and that keeps them together as lifelong friends. It only adds to their ongoing conspiracy as secret military supporters of the civilian War Hawks in cabinet.

  “Oh, I didn’t see you standing there! I was afraid we lost you back at Building Nine.” It’s a silly lie, given all the attention Chan pays LeClerc at every station and bend of the guided tour.

  “No, Ms. Wèi, I’ve been here the whole time. Tagging along, learning of all the good work you’re doing here on Argos.” She beams at him. He smiles wanly back.

  “We’re investigating silification in plants and bacteria to mimic with ceramics. I know it’s not popular among civilians, or even some military,” she darts a look at Adélaïde, “but we must research living weapons because they do. We do it here on Argos to defend our noble Union against terrible future weapons, before our enemy discovers and uses them against us.”

  “I’d like to see this bio-research. Sounds intriguing. That building over there?” He starts to stride toward the sealed bio lab. He does it urgently, provocatively, knowing what’s coming.

  “No sir, I apologize. We can’t go in there. Putting on bio-hazmat suits takes too long and re-securing afterward, well, that’s even longer! Sorry, but I know you’re leaving soon. Also, all life-weapons are classed strictly off-limits, even for you, sir. I just don’t have authority to clear you in. Heavens, even I don’t even have a personal clearance to go in there! I’m truly sorry, general.”

  She actually makes a little curtsy, which he thought should be impossible in that tight, short skirt. “At least you won’t be in quarantine for a month after! You wouldn’t want that!”

  “You’re right. In any case, I already have what I want. I think we’re done here.” LeClerc came to Argos to take Chan Wèi’s measure, not to hear her prattle about the basics of arms and armaments, like a backward-walking college tour guide showing frosh and their parents around the local campus, pointing out all the good bits while hurrying them past the grubby and the bad.

  “Keep up your good work at Argos Labs, Director Wèi.” He throws her real title and revelation of his knowledge of her dishonesty like a hard slap to her face, instantly establishing moral distance and higher authority. “It was necessary to take you briefly from your real and important job. Thank you, Dr. Wèi, for your valuable time and the highly informative tour.”

  Adélaïde beams openly. ‘Checkmate! You played HER!’

  LeClerc shakes Director Chan Wèi’s manicured hand. Her shake is firm, her jet-black eyes intently boring into his. Arrogant. Defiant. Far across the border of insolent, all the way to insurrection. He looks down with plain brown eyes that have a twinkle they didn’t have before.

  “I’ve seen reports on your interim results on the Special Project. Contact me if there’s anything that you need. Go through Ensign Sauvageot, here. I have a feeling that the two of you will be seeing a lot of each other. You and I will talk soon. Anon.”

  With that he spins away. Dr. Chan Wèi’s hot-coal eyes widen with an
ger as he turns his back on her. Then they slowly cool off to a warm and even homey glow as she reverts to wry laughter. The senior research exobiologist and Director of Argos Weapons Labs is impressed.

  Few men resist her when she makes a deliberate display of her physical charms. Never one so hot and rare for her as the remarkable blitz she just put on today. She did it at real cost to her very conservative image and reputation among fellow scientists, and even more among her more than thirty thousand Argos Lab employees. She saw it in dropping jaws and long stares that followed her as she pranced through her facility in a too-tight red blouse and clinging black skirt and red heels and lipstick. She has no intention of ever wearing any of the ridiculous outfit again.

  It’s all going in an incinerator within the hour. Though she must admit to herself that she enjoyed it just a little. ‘The play-acting and even the red kitten dress-up role. It’s been awhile since I exposed my breasts to play seductress.’