“But . . . ?” Atwater-Jones prompted,
“But I’m afraid he’s an empty uniform. When things go south, I don’t think he’s got anything.”
She looked away and said nothing for a while. Then she turned back and squared her shoulders.
“I will have to think about this, but I have to say I am not pleased that you have decided to ease your moral burden by trying to shift some of it onto my shoulders. Fortunately, I am very good at declining that sort of gift. I am also not prepared to be your executioner, much as I suppose that would salve your conscience. When you have come to your senses and gotten past this absurd death wish, perhaps you’ll be able to make some sense of it all. Do not be so anxious to go gentle into that good night.
“Beyond that, I decline to tell you my opinion on any of it. As I told you once before, you should not concern yourself with where I stand, so long as you know where you stand. Given the situation we all face, I’d sort that out as quickly as possible.”
She cut the connection.
Sam sat looking at the capsule in his hand, trying to ignore the increasingly intense sparkle at the edge of his right field of vision. He began to feel slightly dizzy and nauseous, but he fought back the sensations. His commlink buzzed again and he saw Marina Filipenko’s ID tag.
“Yes?”
Captain, I think I’ve figured out how we can rig a boat to maneuver in low planetary orbit with bombardment munitions onboard. Well, sort of onboard.
“Let’s hear it.”
Filipenko explained her idea and as she did so Sam closed his hand over the capsule. He had one more thing to do before embracing two hours of oblivion.
“Okay, you’re on the bridge, right? Have Lincoln open up a tight beam to ComTaskGroup. Let’s talk to Commodore Bonaventure.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
3 January 2134
(the next day) (thirteenth day in K’tok orbit)
There is a sort of clarity and freedom which comes from having lost your future, and Sam had come to the conclusion he had definitely lost his.
Even if no word of his attempt to reveal his company’s trade secrets leaked out, even if there were never any repercussions from it, he knew he could never go back to his old job or any job like it. He knew he could never again promise to keep the sort of secrets they would demand, secrets they thought more important than lives.
There was no going back, and as near as he could tell the road ahead led nowhere, at least for him personally. Strangely, that calmed him. When all roads are certain to lead to disaster, the view ahead is obscured neither by fear of the unknown nor by wishful thinking, and all options are open.
Sam shifted his position and brought his attention back to Puebla’s bridge. He squinted up the time: 1051, coming up on the watch change in half an hour. He glanced to his left and saw Ensign Jerry Robinette’s face, tight with concentration and tension, sweat standing out on his forehead. Jerry sat the command chair on the bridge as OOD, and Sam rode in the Tac One chair beside him, just an observer. He could have taken command but he wanted to see how Robinette handled the maneuver.
Ninth Principle of Naval Leadership: Develop a sense of responsibility among your subordinates.
So far Robinette had handled it well, if a little tentatively, but better to be cautious than end up leaking atmosphere. Of course, it helped Sam’s peace of mind that Chief Mohana Bhargava, the senior quartermaster, had the helm at Maneuvering One.
The idea for how to carry orbital bombardment munitions on a destroyer, to increase their coverage, had occurred to Marina Filipenko yesterday, and they had passed it to Commodore Bonaventure immediately. The EVA-qualified A-gang from USS Oaxaca had worked through the afternoon and most of the night to fabricate the composite and metal saddle rig which now floated a hundred meters ahead of Puebla. The saddle rig’s central structure included a socket shaped to fit the docking bolt on Puebla’s nose, and the two wings of the framework, which would rest back against Puebla’s forward hull once they were docked, each held a single orbital bombardment missile. It had been easy to assemble because it was pig-simple.
Ensign Robinette had moved Puebla from its own orbit down to Oaxaca’s, and gotten it to the pennant’s retrograde position in the orbit track without too many extra maneuvering burns. He’d then lined the boat up with the newly constructed saddle mount, and had waited for the orbital shuttle to recover the last of the EVA construction crew. Now it was time to dock with the contraption.
“You’re lined up with that docking socket pretty well, Ensign,” Sam said.
“Thank you, sir.”
“From here, I think you can finish docking with a single command.”
Robinette looked over at him, eyes suddenly wide with surprise and alarm. Moving forward required acceleration, but acceleration would change their orbit, moving them slightly up as well as forward. In theory, one brief burn from the attitude control thrusters at exactly the right angle, compensating for the upward drift, would send the boat directly ahead. But even with the computer-generated thrust solution showing on Robinette’s monitor, hitting that socket exactly with a single burn was beyond his level of training and experience.
Robinette thought about it for several seconds, and then his face suddenly cleared and he nodded in comprehension.
“Helm,” he ordered, “dock the boat.”
“Aye, aye, sir.” Chief Bhargava answered.
There might be hope for the Jughead after all.
One burn, and a minute and a half later, Sam felt the gentle bump as Puebla’s docking bolt slid into the saddle mount’s socket and locked in place.
“Ensign Robinette, Chief Bhargava, well done. Signaler, make to ComTaskGroup: ‘Docking Maneuver complete. Commencing bombardment run. Signed, Bitka.’
“Mister Robinette, sound general quarters.”
Sam moved over to the command chair and relieved Robinette, who moved aft to his battle station on the auxiliary bridge. In a few minutes Marina Filipenko and Chief Abhay Patel strapped themselves into the Tac One and Two seats to his right. Sam gave the crew time to get to their battle stations and settled in and then went live on the all-boat channel.
“This is the captain speaking. You’ve probably all noticed the maneuvering we’ve been doing for the last hour or so and have wondered what’s going on. We’ve dropped down to low planetary orbit, only about three hundred kilometers above the surface, and we just docked with a contraption dreamed up by our own Tac Boss, Lieutenant Filipenko. Before I explain what it does, let’s review our mission here.
“We’re supposed to hold the orbital space above K’tok and support the ground troops in action on its surface. That last part has had us scratching our heads because the cruisers were the only ships rigged to fire orbital bombardment munitions, and the cruisers pulled out almost a week ago. They left a bunch of their bombardment munitions in orbit but we can’t fire them through our coil guns because the munitions are bigger in diameter than our coil gun barrels. We don’t have external firing racks so that means the munitions stay where they are in orbit, going round and round.
“We can fire them when we’re over a target, and with two clusters of munitions in orbit that means we can cover a fair chunk of the equator at any one time, but there are two big moving blind spots as well. Unless we can move the munitions around in orbit, like the cruisers could, we can’t cover those blind spots or anything more than about ten degrees north or south of the equator. The uBakai on the ground have figured that out. They brought in reinforcements a few days ago and are moving them in closer around the ground brigade whenever we don’t have Thuds overhead. Thuds are what we call the bombardment munitions. Their official designation is Thunderbolt, which is a pretty good name for them, but it has too many syllables for us tac-heads.
“So the uBakai started creeping in closer in the blind spot periods. Oaxaca and Queretaro made a couple phony attack runs, as if they carried munitions. At first they kept the uBakai back, but now they’ve learned bet
ter. They know it was a bluff and that we don’t carry anything that can reach down through the atmosphere and hurt them. They’ve learned not to fear our destroyers, and they’re closing in again, this time with those heavy armored vehicles they landed.
“Lieutenant Filipenko figured out how to fabricate a real simple framework that fits over the bow of a destroyer and carries two bombardment missiles, one on each side. Each one of those missiles has a retrorocket, guidance system, and fifty independently targeted super-dense spikes. There’s no explosive in them, but when they hit the planet surface after a meteoric descent from orbit, they have so much kinetic energy they practically vaporize, and create a heat flash and shock wave that will take out just about anything where it comes down.
“The leatherheads have been having their way with us pretty much since this fight started. That’s about to change. Let’s go hunt some uBakai gunsleds from orbit.”
A nice sharp one-gee burn and thirty-five minutes of coasting, followed by a second correcting burn, moved them almost a quarter-orbit prograde from the cluster of orbital munitions tended by Oaxaca, approaching the first dead spot.
Sam squinted up the call sign of the British cohort’s orbital bombardment controller and had the signaler open a tight beam link to him or her.
“Fortune One this is Red Stinger Two on station. Do you have a target? Over”
Shite yes! ‘ordes o’ the bastards. Target bearing two eight five degrees true, range four five zero zero from my location. Ironsides, maneuvering in the open. Estimate twenty targets—wankers could do with a proper stonking. Fortune One, over.
Ironsides—British comm jargon for armored vehicles. That would probably be gunsleds, and twenty of them could cause a lot of damage.
“Acknowledged, Fortune One. We’re coming up on our firing window in three minutes. Give us a secondary target as well. We’ve got a lot of spikes in this one package. Over.”
Fortune One, through.
Sam blinked for a moment and then remembered in British communication terminology “through” didn’t mean the speaker was done talking, it meant the message had been passed through to someone else to act on.
Sam turned to Filipenko at Tac One.
“Tac, what’s the threat situation look like?”
“Intel doesn’t show any platform missiles in the area, sir, and that’s all the uBakai have down there that could reach up and hurt us. Of course, Intel also didn’t see the jump scrambler coming, so I wouldn’t rule out someone taking a shot at us, especially once we smack them with a Thud or two.”
“Recommendation?”
Filipenko thought for a moment before answering.
“Sir, I’d slave the three ventral point-defense lasers to a single battery and go guns up, just in case. Right now the lasers are set to emit ultraviolet, which gets us plenty of range and hitting power in a vacuum, but UV won’t penetrate very far into that atmosphere. I’d recommend tuning those three lasers up into the visible light spectrum, say five thousand angstroms.”
And she thought she’d never know anything about tactics. Sam grinned.
“Make it so,” he said.
Filipenko turned to her tac crew.
“Chief Patel, dump the sensor feed into your station and manage the battle picture. Don’t let anyone sneak up on us. Delacroix, ventral point-defense battery, guns up at five thousand angstroms. Marmont, you’re on Thud telemetry.”
“Filipenko, you handle comms from the Limeys on the ground,” Sam said. “Set up the strike. When it’s time I’ll give the fire order.”
Sam settled back and set his workstation to display the feed from the sensors Patel directed at the target area, and he began zooming. At the same time he keyed his commlink to the tactical traffic. The optic display continued to zoom until the surface of K’tok ceased being undifferentiated swaths of blue and green and acquired recognizable features: jungle, savannah, meandering tree-lined rivers, foothills and mountains, small settlements—it did look a lot like Earth.
Then Sam saw the outskirts of T’tokl-Heem, the colonial capital. The optics panned back, stopped moving, and Sam saw a cluster of small specks gliding across an open plain. The resolution on the optics could not pick out individual Varoki or Humans at this magnification, so those must be the gunsleds.
“Fortune One,” Filipenko reported to the ground, “I have visual on Target Alpha. Over.”
“Thud One internal guidance sees Target Alpha,” Marmont added.
Sam watched the specks, the gunsleds, moving quietly across the open ground northwest of the city. Each one, he knew, had a crew of two, and suddenly this was different than ship icons on abstracted tactical displays, filled with numbers and missile tracks and information tags.
The gunsled command links would already have told them a destroyer was in orbit overhead, but the uBakai had learned not to fear them. Only cruisers bombarded from orbit, cruisers and those two islands of free missiles which appeared and disappeared with a regularity recorded by their ground stations. Sam and Filipenko and the others had worked out how to make them afraid again, but as he saw the specks moving at the direction of living drivers and commanders, he felt more a sense of dread than accomplishment.
Yes, those sleds were moving to overrun the Human ground forces. Yes, they had to be stopped. But wouldn’t caution serve that purpose as well as death? What if he dropped the hot spikes of the bombardment munition between them and the city? Wouldn’t that be enough to show the destroyers had acquired fangs and talons?
No. They might think the miss showed poor targeting. They might think they should press the attack forward before another bombardment munition could launch, and once those uBakai forces got into the city suburbs, strikes from orbit would no longer be possible. Besides, caution was not enough; the uBakai had to learn fear as well, and only the technological equivalent of fire and brimstone would do for that.
Red Stinger Two, this is Fortune One. I ‘ave your Bravo Target. Bearing two six seven degrees true, range seven four zero zero from my location. Assembly area, troops debussing from vehicles. Fortune One, over.
Sam heard Filipenko’s acknowledgement, as if to some unimportant routine message. The bridge crew was trained to deal with exactly this sort of situation, deal with it calmly and in a routine and professional manner, and Sam was glad of it. But still, there was something unsettling about how casually they talked about what they were about to do.
“Thud One internal guidance sees Target Bravo, added to the queue,” Marmont said. “Tac One, how do you want the ordnance divided?”
“Tac Four, um . . . give me forty spikes in the Alpha packet and ten in Bravo,” Filipenko answered. “I want to make sure we take out those gunsleds. Troops in the open should be easier to service,”
Service, meaning kill. Infantry in the open would be torn apart by the shock wave of the detonations when the spikes struck, incinerated by the searing flash of all that kinetic energy converted instantly to heat. Each impacting spike had a very good chance of killing every unprotected large organism in a one hectare area.
“Captain, guidance is locked on and we’re in the firing window,” Filipenko said from beside him.
He’d never deliberately ordered the death of another sentient being before. He gave the firing order back during the uBakai attack but that had been in the heat of battle. Besides, they hadn’t hit anything that day. When they fired today, they weren’t going to miss. Even if they had hit an uBakai ship back in the battle, that would have been self-defense. This was just a cold-blooded execution. He felt his heart rate accelerate, felt his face flush, fists close, and recognized a growing tide of anger, but it was not at the Varoki on his display.
Sam looked at the slowly moving specks on his display. Half of them had bunched up and appeared to be stopping. He wondered why. Maybe just taking a break.
“Very well. Fire.”
Sam felt the slight vibration as the saddle mount fired the explosive bolts releasing Thud One. In
a moment its retro rocket would fire and send it hurtling toward the planet surface. Then how long to impact? A few minutes at most.
Two crew per gunsled, forty Varoki in that lift cavalry unit down there. Who knew how many at the infantry assembly area? At least a company, if there were enough for the ground forces to notice. A hundred infantry? Two hundred? Plus vehicles, so possibly a logistical support unit as well.
Run away. Disperse. Go back to your families. Touch them, feel their warmth, watch the sunset. Run, you stupid bastards!
“Dispenser release looks good,” Marmont reported. “We have fifty free spikes in the atmosphere.”
Now the superheated spikes would show up on the ground station tracking sensors. Now the uBakai command posts would understand this was no bluff, but now it was too late. Sam watched the small specks and he tried to imagine what the Varoki inside the gunsleds were thinking, what they were talking about, but he couldn’t. They were just specks, but he could not take his eyes off of them. Several hundred unique, sentient individuals neared the end of their existence and probably did not even know it. But he knew it, and he felt that someone should witness the last moments of their lives. Well, maybe not the very last one.
“Ground impact in five, four, three . . . ”
Sam turned off his display.
“Impact!” Marmont cried. “Wow! Look at that!”
Chief Patel moved the ground view to the main smart wall display. Sam saw a solid, roiling cloud of dust and smoke, with flashes and flickers of flame deep beneath it, and when the bridge crew saw what they had done, they cheered.
“Fuckin’ aye!”
“Take that, leatherhead!”
“Now who’s in the shit?”
So far all they had done was take damage, suffer casualties, and watch the uBakai inflict losses with apparent impunity. Now they had washed their own spears, and Sam suspected their thoughts were not with the dead Varoki down on K’tok, but with their own dead shipmates up here still orbiting in the cold blackness of space. His own thoughts turned to Jules, and Captain Chelanga, and Juanita Rivera, and he wondered if what he had just done would make them sleep easier. He didn’t think so, but if the crew did, let them. They had little enough else to sustain them.
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