The Blockade

by Jean Johnson

  Jackie’s headset sprang to life in her right ear again, coding-translation programs activating on her console. She held up her hand, cutting him off; the language was V’Dan, the trade tongue of the Alliance, but it was garbled and mushy. After a few moments, though, she nodded, getting the gist of the message; understanding heavily accented languages was merely part and parcel of her job as a translator. “. . . You’re right. They’re demanding all ships in this area stand down their weapons, and for the station to prepare to be boarded. They’re demanding to commandeer the fuel in exchange for our lives.”

  “Don’t believe them. Most Salik captains do leave refueling hostages alive and alone, but only around four out of five. We cannot risk being boarded,” Li’eth insisted.

  (Easy, Li’eth. I can see your anxieties streaming out of you like muddy-yellow ribbons,) Jackie warned him. (Now is not the time to panic.)

  (I am not going back.) He took two deep breaths, however, and struggled to let his fear go. (If they don’t see any sentients on the way to and from the fueling docks, they usually let people go . . . but they have had enough time pass potentially to learn about this ship. Or at least this shape of it. The crew of the G’pow Gwish N’pokk Chu-huu escaped with recordings of what the Aloha 9 looked like, and this ship is just like that one, only bigger. The moment they see it, they’ll come to claim us as a unique war prize.)

  “Ayinda, hurry up on disengaging the fueling lines,” Anjel warned into her headset, before raising her voice so she could be heard by the others. “Heads up, everyone. We can’t go anywhere just yet, and the bulk of it is between us and them. All my projections are based on whatever telemetry the station is feeding me, plus the comm satellite we dropped off a few klicks away. We also have that same huge tanker to hide behind, so even if we were armed heavily enough, we don’t have a clear shot just yet. On the bright side, neither do they.”

  “Great, just great . . . Once again, I am stuck in my underwear when the enemy attacks,” Robert cursed, pulling his floating body into his seat. All he had on were blue exercise shorts, technically not underwear, but near enough to make him feel embarrassed about it. “This is not how I wanted to be remembered in the history books.”

  “I could do without any excitement, period,” their backup navigator, Lieutenant First Grade Charlize Taan stated, pulling herself into place behind him. She wore shorts, tee shirt, and a pair of socks to keep her tanned feet warm, but otherwise was just as underdressed for the occasion. “I lost my place on the 17 from a little too much excitement.”

  “Mbani to Colonel MacKenzie, we have decoupled, boarded, and sealed the aft airlock,” Jackie heard in her left ear, while negotiations between the station and the Salik were under way. The station seemed to be choosing to risk that one-in-five chance of being eaten alive. “All personnel are accounted for. The fueling hoses are being autoretracted now. We have an estimated twenty-five seconds for the Alliance’s automatic systems to secure them and seal the hatches.”

  “Acknowledged, Lieutenant Commander,” Jackie replied. Her left earpiece came to life with a query from Mamani on board the Embassy 14. She switched channels and replied. “Sit tight, 14, but prep for launch just in case. I don’t want you out where they can see you unless we have no other choice. You’re docked inside the station, and the station contains the fuel they need, so hopefully they won’t attack it directly. You’re safer than we are right now.”

  Even as Captain Mamani sent back an acknowledgment, Jackie felt Li’eth’s emotions spike upward in a rising panic as his thoughts circled around the last time he’d been captured. This time, his subthoughts fretted, he wasn’t wearing that V’Dan concealer stuff to hide his highly valuable identity. To his credit, his fears were wrapped up in thoughts of her vulnerability, too, and the rest of the crew, but those feelings were starting to raise anxiety within her mind, too.

  (Calm yourself, Li’eth. We will get out of this,) she reassured him.

  “Hey, Jackie!” Robert called out. “I just had a thought—you remember that transforming robot-ship thing you did?”

  “The what I what?” Jackie asked him, confused.

  “On board that Salik ship! You did a holokinetic thing, beat them up telekinetically with a little light-and-dance show, remember?” he prodded her. “Turned the Aloha into a giant robot? Can you use your holokinesis to get us out of this?”

  “Oh. Oh!” She considered it, blinking. “I . . . I’m not sure if I’m strong enough to cloak any of the ships out here without several more psis, even with Li’eth’s help. I don’t know the surface of that gas giant well enough to get an illusion of invisibility right . . . and I certainly don’t know enough of the other vessels to convincingly project an attack robot onto the space they occupy.”

  “Stop thinking hide, sir, and start thinking fight,” Taan countered. “With respect to your station as an Ambassador, you are still a soldier in the Space Force, sir. No offense, but . . .”

  “No, no, you’re right, Lieutenant,” Jackie agreed, staring at her screen projections, trying to wrest an answer out of what she was seeing. “I don’t want to go down without a fight, either. I just need to think of a way to back them off. If I knew what their cultural demons were, I’d shove one of those in their face, fifty kilometers high . . .”

  “Can you actually project anything that high?” Anjel asked, twisting in her seat to look at Jackie.

  “No, but it’s a pleasant thought, isn’t it?” she murmured. “Okay . . . I think I know what I can do to scare them off. Anjel, prep and launch two hydrobombs, authorization Juliette Mike. Give me a one-minute warning before you launch both, so I can cloak them holokinetically. I also want you to plot a debris vector for the explosions that will do the least amount of damage to the station and our allies, and send me a view of the paths involved, so I don’t lose track of what I’m cloaking. I’m not the expert at out-of-body that Heracles is, so get the projected paths right the first time. And I want to know exactly how long to the second it’ll take to get those bombs to their point of no return, either to continue on to target or to get them navigated off to the side.”

  “Sweet Mary, Mother of God,” Anjel muttered. “You don’t ask for much, do you, sir? Charlize, I’ll take launch number one; you prep and project launch number two. How much time do we have, Colonel?” their chief gunner asked.

  “Five minutes to launch,” Jackie decided, eyeing the projected arrival of the incoming single Salik ship.

  “Shakk,” their engineer and backup navigator swore. “I’m going to need your help, too, Robert—I can’t do on-the-fly calcs and prep the weapon! I don’t have those kinds of specs in my head!”

  “Unless the boss says so, I’m not goin’ anywhere,” their chief pilot quipped back. “Are we going anywhere, boss?”

  “With luck, no, but I am going to have to wing this a little,” she murmured, thinking quickly through all possible choices.

  “I’m on it, then,” Robert promised. “ETA on that inbound ship, nineteen minutes, and it’ll be in docking range.”

  “We should’ve grabbed that Flying Auk fellow for this ship,” Li’eth quipped. At Jackie’s quick blank look of confusion, he flapped his elbows a little. “He’d have wings, yes? To ‘wing’ it?”

  Robert snorted, hands flicking switches and tapping controls. “Your sense of humor is almost there, meioa, but not quite far enough. Still don’t quit your day job just yet.”

  Jackie adjusted her headset and spoke in Terranglo, since part of her broadcast had to reach the 14 inside the fueling station. “Attention all hands. We are about to run a big giant bluff on the encroaching Salik forces. Get to your stations as soon as you can.”

  A chorus of affirmations reached her, both in the cabin and through her left earpiece. Ayinda’s voice followed. “Permission to enter the bridge when ready, sir?”

  She switched to internal audio only. “Per
mission granted, Mbani. Just be quiet about it. Additionally, I am going to need silence in the cabin for broadcast. I don’t want even a hint of what you’re doing to be heard on my audio ’cast. Send any information to my screens, text only. You can still speak for now, but I will give you a twenty-second warning for silence before I open a channel to the incoming ships.”

  Watching the chronometer at the lower right edge of her central screen ticking down, Jackie breathed deep and let it out slowly, centering herself until it was time to give the twenty-second warning. As she waited, she eyed the closest approaching ship, captured from three different angles. The others were hanging back, gliding slowly into an excellent parabolic cross-fire position, silent threat and testament to how badly the station and its visiting ships were outgunned.

  “Hydrobomb one programmed and ready to launch,” Ramirez announced, with half a minute to spare on her five-minute window. “I’m aiming it to swoop in from the side on the Salik ship closest to our zero dead ahead, so the debris field will hopefully hit the other enemy vessels. I just need to input a projected speed. When do you want it to impact, sir?”

  “And . . . my Fat Man is ready to launch, right on the heels of your Little Boy,” Taan added.

  “Lieutenant Taan, that is historically insensitive,” Jackie chided softly. She felt Li’eth pulse her a subthought inquiry following Taan’s subdued apology, and sent him back a Not right now pulse of her own. “I want Taan’s to strike the lead ship, then yours to hit its target one to two minutes after. Prep a third for launch, while we’re at it, and aim it at the next in the hexagon.”

  “Sir, that still doesn’t tell me when,” Anjel protested.

  “How soon can all three hit their targets, one-two-three, over a two-minute span?” Jackie asked.

  “Approximately . . . eight minutes from now at the earliest,” Robert answered. “It’ll take me one minute to finish prepping the third for launch, and the rest is all acceleration versus travel time. Anjel, the program?”

  “I’m on it. Adjusting target coordinates . . . Do you want a fourth one launched?” she asked. “We only have four, but we could send all four if you just want them launched at regular intervals.”

  “Oh, sure, why not?” Jackie quipped. “But be prepared to pull it off trajectory if it isn’t needed. Someone give me a countdown to the first impact on my screen. I’m going to have to time this—lightwave lag time to the farthest Salik vessel is . . . huh. Negligible. Good. I keep thinking they’re farther out than they actually are. Gunners, you may launch when ready.”

  Silence filled the cockpit until the door opened, and Ayinda pulled herself through, exiting the low-gravity deck of the central corridor. “Everyone is strapped in.”

  “. . . Launching hydrobomb number two in forty-five seconds, sir,” Anjel reported. “It goes first because it’ll have the farthest to travel of all four hydrobombs, since it needs to circle around to hit the far side—position east, as it were. Once it launches, we’ll have one and a half minutes to launching numbers three and four for targets on the north and south rims, and then four minutes seventeen seconds to launching missile number one to hit the west side, sir. It’s all programmed in.”

  “Confirmed, Lieutenant Commander. You may launch when ready, again under authorization Juliett Mike. I am Colonel Jacaranda MacKenzie, and I take responsibility for the decision to launch hydrobombs at our enemy outside of a formal declaration of war. Let us hope we don’t have to use them to get the Salik to back down.”

  A set of timers appeared on Jackie’s screen, each one bearing a corresponding number. Beside her, Li’eth forced himself to breathe. He reached out for her mind again, tightening his grip a little on their Gestalt. (I do hope you know what you’re doing, love . . . and that you’ll explain the “historically insensitive” part. The names you used are familiar, but I can’t place them.)

  (Feel free to search the onboard archives for information when this is over. Keywords, World War II, the Manhattan Project, Fat Man, Little Boy, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. And don’t feel bad you can’t remember them. They’re not your man-made disasters.)

  Feeling the chunk of the first, or rather, bomb number two launching, Jackie sent her senses outward, found the metal, and wrapped a pod of bent light around the projectile. To her surprise, she felt Li’eth joining his efforts to hers, then, (. . . Got it. I can shield this one, and . . . that one, too,) he told her. (Can’t talk for long, though . . . must concentrate . . .)

  Grateful, Jackie handled the third and fourth launching with one corner of her mind and estimated when to begin her broadcast with another corner. She gave the twenty-second call for silence on the intercom, then set up a broadcast using the Alliance standard lightwave-communication equipment the V’Dan had given to each of their ships. Eyeing the chronometers to try to time things just right, she spoke into her headset, audio broadcast only.

  “Attention, Salik vessels,” she stated crisply and clearly in V’Dan. “Our allies, in their alarm at your presence and your threats, have forgotten that we, the members of the Terran Empire, have pledged to lend our aid and protection to their people wherever we may travel. While we admire our allies’ willingness to cooperate with your demands, we have been informed that in roughly one out of every five such attacks of this sort, your race lies to its hostages and slaughters or takes prisoners anyway. We do not care to cooperate with the demands of treacherous liars.

  “However, all of our actions so far have been defensive. We have only reacted to your nation’s aggressions,” she continued in a neutral-pleasant tone, while data streamed in from the station, picking up lightwave transmissions in what was presumably Sallhash, the Salik main language. Not aimed at her, just yet, but definitely some cross-ship communications going on. “With that in mind, if you agree immediately to withdraw, and actually do so within the next five mi-nah V’Dan Standard time units, we will not harm you. If you continue on course to steal fuel from this station, or attempt to attack anyone, we will destroy you. One ship at a time, to give you a chance to reconsider and withdraw. This broadcast will be your only warning. You will not see our weapons until it is too late.

  “You can stay to fight, and die today, or you can run away and maybe survive for some other fight another day. The choice is yours. You have exactly five V’Dan mi-nah in which to decide to live or die . . . starting . . . Now.”

  A message popped up on her screen from Ayinda even as she closed her end of the link and awaited the Salik’s response. Colonel, we are coming into firing arc for two of the widest-spaced ships in that cross-fire dish. Orders?

  She felt the chunk of the last probe launching, and wrapped her mind around it carefully, juggling the need to protect the missiles with an illusion of invisibility versus typing a reply to both her and Robert. Keep behind the water tank for cover.

  Aye, sir.

  A ping came through for a visual link. Jackie set it up to be one-way. Showing her face would not be wise, in case the Salik had learned by now the identity of the Grand High Ambassador of the new family on the Alliance block. Sure enough, the muddy beige alien with a frog-like face, stubby thick eyestalks, and whistling nostril-flaps was the same type of alien as those she had seen on that very first ship several months ago.

  The perspective of that camera view disturbed Jackie a little bit; the camera had been placed up high, and looked down at a steep angle on the alien, giving her a touch of vertigo from trying to reconcile it with the much more level view she was accustomed to seeing when speaking with the other races.

  “Hhheww are bluffing,” the alien scorned. “Surrender, or we will desstroy efferyonne!”

  “My people have a saying. ‘It takes one to know one,’” Jackie quipped dryly, one corner of her mind tracking two missiles, another keeping an eye on the timer for the first impact. “You cannot attack this station because you need the chemical fuel it holds. Those chemicals are exp
losive. They will burn. Attacking the station would therefore destroy what you need. More than that, it would ruin your chance to return at a later time to attempt a second theft, or a third.

  “I repeat, the Terran Empire does not wish to damage any Salik person, settlement, or vessel . . . but we will destroy you if you choose to attack this facility and its allied ships. Really, I don’t see what advantage there is in this for you. I’m even giving you multiple chances for your survivors to retreat . . . but my patience is not infinite. Neither are your ships. I would consider that carefully if I were you.”

  The Salik on her center screen vanished, replaced by the image of a circle of rippling lines spewing up and out, depicting a fountain. That was the symbol of the Salik Empire, whose founding homeworld name meant Fountain. Medium lavender on a beige background, it looked oddly soothing compared to the aggressive nature of its owners.

  Their ship swayed a little under faint, thrumming pulses from the attitude thrusters. As requested, their chief pilot trimmed their position relative to the large V’Dan tanker containing the purified water they needed, keeping it between the Terrans and the Salik as much as Robert could. It meant hovering rather close to the bulky, boxy pod, but that pod loomed ten times as big as the Embassy 1, adequate cover in close proximity. Maybe.

  Jackie still wasn’t completely sure how strong Salik weapons were; the last battle she had participated in, she hadn’t paid the slightest bit of attention to the actual damage capacity of Salik lasers and munitions. She hadn’t been in a position to pay attention. But water—at least, without a catalytic conversion—was not prone to explode, unlike the petrochemical-style fuels used by the Alliance. Even if a rupture occurred, when it spilled out into space, water would merely freeze, harmlessly sealing over any hull breach. A superior fuel from a safety standpoint, as well as a caloric one.