Armored Tears

by Mark Kalina

  Even Major Hafez looked awed, an expression Bannerman had never before seen on his aide's face.

  Dozens of Chinese Space Agency operators were monitoring the launches. Bannerman didn't understand a word of what they were saying, but it didn't matter. The huge screen showed him everything he needed to see; the huge Glorious Prosperity rockets rising on pillars of fire, full of his troops, ready to boost into orbit and rendezvous with the long-disused orbital Tannhauser gate leading to Arcadian orbital space.

  Compared to the surface gate, the orbital gate was far bigger, and needed far more power to generate. On the other hand, the generator station —re-tasked to this operation from its usual work of opening new exploratory gates— had no shortage of power. The real trick would be the complex dance of orbital maneuvers required to send the twenty-five huge cargo vehicles and the supporting orbital warship through the orbital gate. Once that was done, the huge cargo rockets would come back down... on Arcadian soil.

  At the same time, he would be supervising the transit of the rapid strike force though the Mojave gate. If he could seize the controls of the gate, his forces would be able to pour through to Arcadia, putting an end to the renegade Arcadian Government once and for all, and making an unmistakable point about the dominance of the UEN to every other colony and member nation; a mission worth the literally astronomical price tag.

  Of course, seizing the gate control system would not be easy. The Arcadians had been very clever, after they had seized it the first time. The power and control equipment had been moved hundreds of kilometers from the gate structure. It meant that a quick strike through the gate had no chance of capturing the gate controls. The Tannhauser gate generators themselves could be captured... or destroyed. But without the complex —and distant— control equipment, they could not be used to keep the gate open. Nor could new gate generator equipment be set up on the Earth side of the gate, so long as even a trickle of power from the Arcadian side was being fed into the actual wormhole. And anyway, setting up a duplicate gate generator on the Earth side would have brought in the corrupt FSNA, not to mention being an unmistakable threat to the Arcadians, which would have made surprise impossible.

  As it was, he expected surprise to work for him, despite the enormous scale of the mission. So long as no one on Arcadia connected the gathering of old Chinese boosters with the idea of using the long-shut down orbital Tannhauser gate, the Arcadians would have no idea what was coming.

  Bannerman did not doubt that Arcadian spies knew about the gathering of the Chinese boosters under UEN control. He suspected that they even knew that many Peace Force military units were being readied for some major mission. Plenty of false rumors had been sent out about the reasons; a new moon base; anti-separatist operations in Tibet. But he was confident that they would never connect it with an invasion of their world. It was, he admitted, a gamble. But he was holding all the good cards.

  The tone of the Chinese ground staff suddenly changed, becoming more and more shrill. That brought Bannerman's attention back to the here and now.

  "What is it?" he asked, looking at Major Hafez and the Chinese Space Agency liaison standing next to him.

  "A moment, General Bannerman," said the Chinese Space Agency official. "A moment, please."

  On the screen, the glare of rocket thrust seemed to be growing, and then Bannerman saw what looked like flaming debris striking the ground.

  "What is going on here?!" he demanded.

  "A... that is," the Space Agency man said, "there has been a problem."

  "I can see that."

  "We are still trying to find out what is happening," the Chinese man said.

  More and more flaming debris was coming down. The screen abruptly went black, and then flashed back to life, showing the field from a different angle. From the new angle, the sight of flaming debris raining down was even clearer.

  An alarm started to howl inside the control bunker. A single technician screamed and ran from his post, but all the others stayed put, though several looked at the running man, and looked scared.

  "What..." Bannerman began again.

  A massive crash and a jolt shook the bunker. Some lights flickered and several voices screamed, but the main lights stayed on.

  A man Bannerman took to be a senior controller began to shout to the other staff in a commanding voice.

  "There has been a terrible accident, General Bannerman," said his liaison. "We think that one of the Glorious Progress boosters suffered a total engine failure. Unfortunately, debris from this failure impacted a second booster. Very regrettably, both were lost. This facility is in the flight path and some of the debris stuck the top of our bunker, but of course, it was designed for such an eventuality, so we remained safe."

  "... Allahu Akbar..." breathed Major Hafez, staring at the rain of fire on the big display.

  Some part of Bannerman's mind gibbered at the horror of two of the huge rockets, each with more than a hundred people aboard, going down in flames. I should not have pushed for the refitting of the twenty-fifth booster, he thought. Was that the one that failed? Did I do this?

  "And the other vehicles?" he said, "the other twenty-three?"

  The liaison was silent for a moment.

  "The others have successfully launched," he said at length.

  "They are to proceed to their planned orbits," Bannerman said. "The operation has not been canceled! Do you understand?! The remaining twenty-three vehicles are to continue the operation!"

  "Understood, General Bannerman," the Chinese official said.

  "I wonder which ones we lost..." remarked Major Hafez, calmly.

  14.

  Lieutenant Maria Rivers of the Arcadian Defense Force Aerospace Corps watched the barren ground unfold thirty thousand meters below her. From up here, sitting in the cockpit, at the controls of her RA-9 "Condor" combat-reconnaissance aircraft —her "ghost," as she and her crew called it— the curvature of Arcadia was obvious and the sky was black rather than blue.

  Ravi, Arcadia's sun, loomed like a huge ball of red-orange fire in the black sky; in fact the actual star, Luhman-16A, was tiny as far as stars went; much, much smaller than Earth's sun. But Arcadia orbited it very closely. Luhman-16B, a companion dwarf star called Ragyi —named for Ravi's mythological consort— was a reddish spot on the horizon. It was usually too dim to see in daylight, though it was the brightest thing in the Arcadian night sky.

  Far below the deep blue of her world's mineralized seas, toxic to Earth life, met the red of its parched, arid land. Thin tendrils of cloud formed minimalist patterns of white across the deeper blue and red of land and water. At night, the lights of humanity could be seen clearly, but in daylight, Arcadia looked as hospitable as Mars.

  "Daydreaming, boss?" asked her sensors operator, Sergeant Gupta.

  "Not much else to do," she replied. "Nothing interesting on your end, I take it?"

  "Not now, but a few minutes ago, I got what might have been a thermal trace from Delta-9. But then the thermal patterns changed and you put us into that left turn and I lost it."

  "Should have reported it, Gupta," Rivers replied, a bit annoyed.

  "What for? Command told us to stop playing tag with each other. So what if I saw him... or if he sees us? Not like back when we could score some points off a good track, or rattle his cage with a low-powered laser shot."

  "We're not up here for air-to-air combat training. We're on a surveillance flight. But you still need to report a contact."

  "Well, I logged it, anyway," Gupta said. "When we land, we can ask Sanchez for his flight logs and see if it was actually him."

  "Yeah," Rivers agreed. "Next time report it, though."

  "Got it, boss," Gupta said in a resigned tone.

  "Did I hear that Gupta just let a target go?" asked the weapons operator.

  "Yup," said Rivers. "Not that you can take a shot at it, Zeb."

  "I could still have run a track and set up a shot," Sergeant Zebadiah Jones said, sounding
annoyed. "Damn it, Gupta, don't keep that sort of thing to yourself."

  "Krishna as my witness, both of you are just out to bust my ass," Gupta groaned. "It's just our wingman. Nothing to get excited about."

  "You have a job to do, Gupta," Rivers said. "You can't blame us if we want you to actually..."

  "Just a moment, Boss," Gupta said, his tone suddenly hard and focused.

  "I'm picking up a heat signature, but it's an odd one. Real clear, coming in over the southern horizon, but it's above us."

  "How high?"

  "Wait, there's several. It's really fast. Krishna, it's fast. I think I've got a thermal track on an inbound meteor."

  "That's something new," Rivers said. "Show me."

  "Look. Yeah, there's more than one of them. Maybe breaking up?"

  "Is it big enough to hit the surface?" Rivers asked. "Is it going to hit anywhere we care about?"

  "Wait a minute," Gupta repeated. "This is strange. I've got multiple heat sources, all coming over the southern horizon, all headed for the wastes south of the Isthmus Highlands. I've got twenty... no, twenty three discreet sources. Really hot. Orbital reentry hot. And they're all coming down on the exact same trajectory."

  "A big rock breaking up?" Zeb asked.

  "Not with identical sources on the same trajectory," Gupta replied.

  "Hold on," Rivers said, nosing the plane down and shutting down the engine; "ghosts" spent a lot of time gliding, and if this was what she thought it might be, she wanted to cut her own emissions as close to zero as possible; to become a "hole in the sky."

  "I've got the trajectory. Twenty three contacts, inbound to grid 72-42, south of the Isthmus Highlands," Gupta interrupted. "Boss, I... I don't know how it’s possible, but I think... the signatures look like re-entering space-craft. Like one of our Vimana-class orbital boosters... but a lot bigger. And... and there's twenty three of them."

  "Holy shit," Rivers breathed. "Holy shit."

  "What's it mean?" Zeb wanted to know.

  "It's... I don't know how it's possible... but I think it's an invasion," Rivers said. "We need to report this. Gupta get all your data encoded for transmission. Zeb, set our laser for communications pulse. Line it up with Receiving Station Two, and as soon as we have a lock on the receiving station, send this out. All of it. All of Gupta's sensor logs. Everything."

  "Got it, Boss," Zeb said. "How low should I keep our output?"

  A pinging alarm went off before Rivers could answer.

  "Targeting laser!" screamed Gupta. "It's coming from above. It's coming in from orbit!"

  "Launch decoys, now!" screamed Rivers, triggering a burst of anti-laser aerosol munitions and putting the plane into a sharp, evasive dive.

  A sound like thunder sounded through the plane's cockpit and a sudden jolt of turbulence shook the airframe.

  "DEW line!" shouted Gupta, but Rivers didn't need to hear him say it. A line of vapor, like a razor-edged contrail, had been traced through the sky, missing her "ghost" by a fraction of a meter; a directed energy weapon line; the ionized track left by the beam of a high power combat laser.

  "Gupta!" Rivers shouted. "Send it in clear! Send the message by radio! Maximum transmission output!"

  "That'll broadcast our position!" Gupta shouted in horror.

  "Do it!" Rivers screamed. "That's an order!"

  "Sending," Gupta said, softly.

  Two seconds later, another high energy laser pulse flashed out, this time intersecting the fuselage of the "ghost." Composite and alloy shattered and burned under the shock of the sudden burst of thermal energy, and the burning fragments of Lieutenant Maria Rivers' aircraft tumbled down towards the barren Arcadian ground.

  ***

  Two hundred kilometers above, inside the spherical command module of the UEN Orbital Security Vehicle-11-Yang Liwei, a weapons officer confirmed the destruction of an Arcadian combat-scout "ghost" aircraft.

  "Deploy the weapons system radiators. Cool and recharge the laser and stand by to engage further targets on our next orbit," the Yang Liwei's commanding officer ordered.

  "Shall we return to a higher orbit, sir?" asked the executive officer.

  The commanding officer released the straps that held him to his command station couch and twisted to meet the executive officer's gaze; the executive officer's crew station put the man upside down from the commanding officer's frame of reference, but both men were veteran spacers, and used to the quirks of orbital free fall.

  "No," the commanding officer replied. "Maintain this orbit. We have destroyed their satellites already. What's left is their aircraft, and we cannot engage those as effectively from a high orbit."

  "Sensors," he added, "have our deployed mini-satellites continue scanning for high altitude atmospheric thermal contacts. The enemy are likely to have more than one 'ghost' in the air. And keep our own systems scanning as well, in case they have dispersed more widely than expected. Find them."

  In a featureless patch of desert, a buried navigation beacon, placed there a few weeks earlier by UEN Special Operations agents, suddenly flared to life. High above, twenty-three huge orbital cargo rockets plummeting down from orbit detected the signal. Almost as one, they oriented their engines and began to descend to the flat desert basin below, wreathed in the thunderous fire of their retro-rockets.

  15.

  "I'm afraid this isn't much help with your biotech story, Ulla, but I really appreciate you coming along," Aran said with an apologetic smile at his lover.

  The two of them were packing for what Aran was calling their "field trip" with the Arcadian Defense Force Infantry Corps' 9th Frame Infantry Company.

  "Well, no, it doesn't" Ulla agreed. "On the other hand, it helps you out. And... I might be able to learn things that are useful to me. Not about biotech... but, well, I was going to be debriefed by EuroFed Intelligence when I got back anyway. Maybe by UEN people as well. If I have something interesting to tell them... A reporter can always use more government contacts."

  "True enough," Aran allowed, "but I'd be very careful of this sort of thing if I were you. Once you get involved in that sort of thing, it can be hard to get uninvolved, if you know what I mean."

  Ulla regarded him coolly for a moment.

  "I forget, sometimes, that you're from a Pacific Alliance country," she said. "You're used to a lot less interaction with your government, aren't you?"

  "You mean Indonesia or Australia?"

  Ulla smirked slightly. "That proves my point, if they're still separate enough from the UEN, and from each other, that you can meaningfully ask that question. You know," she added, frowning slightly, "I have to wonder if that makes you more... sympathetic to these Arcadians."

  Aran frowned in turn. "Sympathetic. I suppose I am, sort of. They're settling a frontier, here. Very Australian thing to do, really."

  "And the poor refugees are being shunted aside, like the Australian Aborigines were?"

  Aran raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  "No, I'm sorry," Ulla said. "I didn't mean to try to start an argument."

  "Well, I can think of things I'd rather be doing with you than fighting," Aran said, smiling.

  Ulla grinned. "When I get back to Germany, I'll be able to brag about my exotic Australian-Indonesian boyfriend. I'm looking forward to that. I guess we have time. If we hurry. One thing I do like about how hot this place is," she added, reaching to pull off her shirt. "I'm never wearing too much."

  ***

  "I didn't expect so much green," Ulla admitted as Bernie pointed over the wheel of her little Toyota, down into the valley ahead of them.

  "It's all farmland for about the next fifty klicks," Bernie said. "We set the irrigation system up in the early '60s. Since then, this has become one our most productive agriculture zones."

  Spread out on both sides of the road were field after field of vivid green crops. In places, rows of narrow greenhouses with solar-panel roofs broke up the carpet of green. Out further from the road, glittering fiel
ds of solar-panels flashed in the unrelenting sun. Here and there, clusters of low houses with solar-panel roofs stood out, starkly white against the green.

  "How long did it take your government to set this up?" Ulla asked, unable to keep the tone of admiration out of her voice.

  "Government?" Bernie asked. "What's the government got to do with this?"

  "Why, to set it up. The power, the irrigation, environmental and food-production regulatory oversight..."

  Bernie let out a short laugh. "Government didn't do any of this. The Sunny Valley project's a cooperative. The owners got together the money and set up the power stations and the irrigation filters and pumps in the '60s, like I said. After that, they ran the first farms.

  "Lots of new farmers there now; they pay back the co-op for the power and water. And since it's a co-op and not a corporation, every new farmer has to buy an ownership share within a few years of setting up. That way, no one's working for anyone else.

  "We've got corporate structure farms too, but these co-ops seem to be more productive. My brother's wife's family has a patch a few klicks east of here, along this road; we'll be driving by it pretty soon. If we weren't in a hurry, we could stop by. Anyway, my brother's father-in-law says you work harder, farming your own patch instead of working for someone else."

  "But..." Ulla said after a long pause, "how... how can you organize it, without..." she let the words trail off. Then asked again, her tone sharper, "what about food and dietary regulations? How do you make sure the is safe to eat, or that people won't over-produce the wrong sort of food?"

  "Wrong sort of food?" Bernie asked. "What do you mean, wrong sort? Farmers grow what will sell. As for quality, can you imagine what would happen if they started trying to sell bad food? The entire co-op's reputation would be shot. People pay attention to that sort of thing. If someone claimed they got bad food from the co-op, people would hire investigators to prove it... and if it was true, who'd ever buy from them again?"