by John Lumpkin
The Brazilians never transmitted a word, but, at last, the Gan Ying cut loose, and a small port tug pushed her away from the rock at a few meters per second before scurrying back to its dock. On four frigates, small maneuvering thrusters fired, rotating the ships slightly to keep their bow lasers pointed at the cruiser.
“Whiskey-12 at forty-five kilometers from the asteroid,” Apache’s sensor operator said. At fifty they would fire. Neil watched the camera feed of the Gan Ying in apprehension. Her gun turrets were angled forward. They should have been tracking the frigates …
“Commander, something’s wrong,” Neil said. He pitched his voice a fraction deeper than normal, trying to sound confident so Howell would listen. He described his observation on the gun turret. “The target isn’t acting like it’s going to fight.”
“But she buttoned up her cooling fins. Trying to ram one of us?”
“I don’t think so. She isn’t bearing directly on any of us, and she would have to get a lot closer to have any hope of damaging us, even if she lit off her antimatter,” Neil said.
Why would Qin come in stupid like this? It’s almost as if she is asking us to kill her. The thought triggered a memory, of a news story he read several years ago, about a guy who wanted to commit suicide, but couldn’t bring himself to do it, so he threatened some cops, and they did the job for him.
Neil said, “Commander, we should hold fire. I think Gan Ying is flying dead. We can board her, as long as we don’t blow her apart in the next ten minutes.”
The XO looked nervous. Come on, Howell, Neil thought. Something had changed in Lieutenant Commander Howell since he led the ship in battle. It took killing a bunch of Hans to make you believe in your crew. Now take a chance. Think of the payoff.
“Comms, kindly transmit the suggestion to the flag that we wait and see what the Gan Ying will do,” Howell said. “Tell them we suspect the ship may not be a threat. Mercer, make the suggestion to the intel people on the other ships.”
A flurry of transmissions between the frigates followed, ended by a curt order from Metcalf to wait. Lieutenant Kerr on the Ajax messaged Neil privately that the commodore was about to discard the idea, but Kiyokaze had sent something for Metcalf’s eyes only, and he changed his mind.
So they watched. For ten minutes, Gan Ying did nothing but coast. The wounded cruiser grew closer to Ajax, and Neil grew worried that he had made a mistake, that the ship would try to ram ...
“Seeing multiple streamers on the hull. The ship’s opening to space,” Neil said. “She’s dead, sir. Scuttled, but there’s a lot left. She must have been unable to light off her antimatter.”
“Message from the Ajax,” said the comms officer. “Commence boarding operations. Intelligence personnel accompany boarding teams for exploitation.”
Only the directed energy officer, Barrett, came down to see them off. Neil lingered on the flight deck as the Marines and techs boarded the jumper, and she approached him briskly, her magnetic boots clacking against the metal floor.
“Be careful out there,” she said, squeezing his hand.
Chapter 3
DAMASCUS – Arabic and Islamic Federation President Adnan Kilani affirmed his country’s neutrality in the war Thursday but rejected Japanese demands for independent inspections of African cargo transiting Federation territory into Asia. Tokyo and Washington have accused Federation officials of turning a blind eye to war materiel from factories in Kenya, Tanzania, and Mozambique transiting their territory with an ultimate destination of China. Kilani’s careful statement underscored ongoing tensions between the belligerents and various neutral powers who are struggling to maintain trade relations with all parties without following Canada’s path and becoming directly involved in the conflict.
San José, Republic of Tecolote, Entente
When Das arrived in Tecolote, the government gave him a few thousand in the nearly worthless local currency, enough for maybe a week of food from street vendors and grocery stores. He ate for three days before being robbed of his cash card by others like him – he recognized several of the young toughs from his transport from Earth.
Bleeding in the street, Das might have given up then, and killed himself, a common enough occurrence among some of the older transportees whose religion did not forbid suicide. Or he might have turned himself over to one of the unregulated biologics factories on the island’s western coast, which would be tantamount to killing himself, anyway, but with more pain.
But he saw something odd, a cop giving money to a man sweeping the street.
The man’s gray clothes marked him as another transportee recently off the ship. He and Das didn’t speak the same language, but the man led him to a sign that explained everything in multiple languages.
Das stole a broom from behind a shop the next day, found a corner, and began cleaning it. He was chased off that one by a competitor, and then chased off from another, and then another. He spent several days at two more corners, not earning anything, before he figured out the system.
After President Conrad and his associates took power in Tecolote, they decided they couldn’t afford much of a public works crew, so they initiated a program aimed at keeping the streets clean at low cost to themselves. A few cops would be issued some money to provide to anyone they saw cleaning up a public street. It was a lottery, more or less, and many of the cops, not well paid themselves, found ways to pocket the cash. But those cops were watched by still other cops, so some money did make it to the street. Das deduced that the best spots were near government and police buildings, so he relocated to a corner near the presidential residence, and started cleaning. Enough cops and paramilitaries were around to prevent any fighting over territory, and while he didn’t make money every day, he ate often enough that he could sense his mind sharpening again as the dull animal ache of constant hunger receded. In time, he grew proud of his corner. He was intelligent enough to recognize its insignificance – his domain was the trash and filth on a section of street in a minor dictatorship thirty light-years from Earth – but it was his, and he was determined to keep it.
His corner was at the intersection of Zaragoza and 12th, behind the residence and adjacent to the six-story office building – the city’s tallest – that served it. Here he saw the real government at work, not the pretty veneer for the tourists and diplomats out front. The bureaucrats and guards walked this way every evening to get to their cars, and the delivery trucks came by at all hours. To most he was one reedy brown man among many in the streets of the capital, but a few grew familiar with his presence, and one of the restaurants even let him use their bathroom once a day.
But one Tuesday night the restaurant closed early, and Das missed his chance, so he went into an alley to urinate on a wall. He disliked doing so – after all, it was his job to keep things around here clean.
“I will not do this,” said a voice from around the corner, causing Das to clench, painfully, to prevent his discovery. “He has been good to me. It is a betrayal, and he has defenses against such things anyway. I would be caught, and my family and I will be just as dead as you threaten to make us.”
“Very well,” said a second voice, this one female. They were speaking English, which of course Das knew. “It won’t kill him. It won’t even hurt him. Here, I will take some to show you it is safe.”
“That means nothing. You could have tailored it for him.”
“Indeed we did, and his sensors won’t pick it up, either. But I promise you it won’t hurt him. It’s something that will help him. It will make him feel … better. Happy.”
“Happy?”
“Don’t you think he could stand to be a little more happy? Couldn’t that lead to this being a better place? Or, at least, a less terrible one?”
Only later did Das remember the first voice, which belonged to someone he had seen and heard at the loading docks behind the presidential palace, a man who always wore loose-fitting white clothes and a funny hat.
The Punjab, Ea
rth
“Are we sure this area is safe?” the senator’s aide said, his voice sharp and irritated. Now that they were here, flying over what many locals considered occupied territory, this wasn’t turning out to be the adventure he had envisioned when he reviewed the itinerary back in Washington. Mostly he felt tired and dirty, and his intestines were warning him they were considering forcefully ejecting something within.
His question didn’t draw any response from Senator Gregory, who was staring out the skycar’s window at the dark, rocky slope along the western bank of the Jhelum. So the aide stared pointedly at the only other conscious person in the passenger cabin, the NSS liaison to this expedition, who had the glassy-eyed look of someone reading text on his ocular implant.
Although the aide was more than twenty years junior to the liaison, he considered himself acting in the best interests of Senator Gregory at all times, and he thus believed he shouldn’t be ignored.
“Well, Mister Donovan? Are we safe?” he insisted.
The man who went by the name James Donovan tapped a button on his handheld and slowly focused his gaze on the aide.
“No,” he said. It was sort of a lie – odds were heavily against a Punjabi guerrilla taking a shot at their car, but the aide had annoyed him, so he decided to scare the kid in retaliation.
Senator Darren Gregory of New Jersey, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, looked up at that. He didn’t like his aide much – his hiring was a bone to one of his chief supporters in Morris County – and enjoyed Donovan instilling a little fear into him. Gregory’s brief smirk was an uncommonly honest expression for him, as had been his placid countenance as he watched the dawn-shadowed countryside roll by. Shortly, he would dial up his political persona, smiling and back-patting and making anyone in view feel like they were important. It worked well with individuals and crowds: He had a sharp, youthful face, jet black hair and a gringo complexion, but he lacked the firm jawline that had been associated with male politicians and newscasters for so long, to the point that people had begun to distrust such pretty-boy visages. He was a little bit imperfect, and that made people like him all the more.
They landed forty-five minutes later at an Indian Army fort on the Indus River, the western border of “occupied Pakistan” or “restored Greater India,” depending on one’s politics. Their State Department briefers had reminded Gregory and his entourage to use only the latter term to keep favor with their hosts.
They were met on the tarmac by a thickly muscled Indian Space Force wing commander, who introduced himself as Ramesh and cordially refused to be called anything else. As he led the senator’s party across the tarmac, Donovan stole glances at the assemblage of combat gear around them. He was no military analyst, but he recognized Kawasaki fighter and surveillance drones, Kartsev main battle tanks, and homegrown wheeled LAVs. Surprisingly few soldiers were in view; when questioned, Ramesh explained that many of them were out in the nearby communities.
He led them to the base’s busy operations center, where dozens of officers and enlisted soldiers hunched over their consoles, watching shaky helmet camera feeds and barking orders into comms gear. Well put, Ramesh, Donovan thought, seeing someone’s front door splinter on one of the monitors. “Out in the nearby communities” is a nice euphemism for “raids.”
They were there to meet Lieutenant General Tyag Bahadar Singh, who was regarded as the most influential military officer in India, and widely thought to be considering a career in politics. He was the senior Indian Army officer in occupied Punjab, overseeing a large if low-intensity counterinsurgency operation, as well as keeping the frontier fortified against those bent on restoring Pakistan to its former borders. And so much of India’s energy has gone into this and places like it, into maintaining a terrestrial empire at the expense of an interstellar one, Donovan thought.
They were taken to a Spartan conference room. The general kept them waiting for only a minute – a short enough delay that Gregory couldn’t regard it as disrespect. He came in, wearing fatigues and a holstered sidearm at his right side. He was tall and thin, wearing the salt-and-pepper, well-trimmed vandyke that he had made so stylish in the Indian military.
Pleasantries in English followed, while an orderly served tea. When she departed, Singh said, “You’re here because you want India’s help.”
“We’d like your support in the war,” Gregory said agreeably.
“What do you mean, ‘support?’” Singh said.
“You join us as allies against China. You fight with us.”
The easy out, Donovan observed, was for Singh to protest he didn’t have the authority to approve such an alliance, which was technically correct but functionally wrong. But Singh simply nodded, and said, “What does India have to gain?”
“Worlds. You’re on the edge of the desert, just as we are, and India needs more than a single colony planet to ensure its future in space,” Gregory said.
“We can bargain with China to stay out of the war,” Singh said. “They have offered us a wormhole chain already.”
I wonder if we know that, Donovan thought. It was news to him, and it would be the first sentence of his report.
Senator Gregory showed no surprise and said, “You could get more if you fight.”
“Or we could lose everything. Your control of Earth orbit hasn’t won you the war.”
“We would support your claim on both South Tibet and Aksai Chin.” The latter was the region of Kashmir still in Chinese hands.
“At long last. Yes, you certainly would,” Singh said, grinning. “At a minimum. We would want plenty more.”
The meeting broke up shortly after that. Gregory and Singh went into a private conference, and some junior officers took Gregory’s staff on a tour of the base. Donovan and Ramesh picked each other out for some back-channel diplomacy and walked over to the flightline. It was a crystalline January morning, calm and clear.
“Which wormhole chain did they offer you?” Donovan asked.
Ramesh shook his head. “It’s largely in Eridani.”
Donovan grunted. “They want you as a buffer between them and Japanese space. Europa is grabbing stars in Eridani, too. They will all crowd you out as time goes on.”
“We know.”
“You’ll also have to go through somebody else’s space to get there from Earth, so they can cut you off whenever they please.”
“We know that, too. Not much different from our current situation, routing through Japanese space in Barnard’s Star.”
“What would it take for you to join us instead?” Donovan asked.
“I’m not sure, exactly, because the general isn’t sure,” Ramesh said. “Some of it depends on whether Russia and Europa join you as well, which would make our job easier. If the Chinese empire is collapsing, we want to ensure we are positioned to take advantage of it. Certainly we would insist on being full partners, with a full share of the spoils.”
“A full share? Your fleet is smaller than ours, and that of the Japanese.”
“You might recall we have a border with the Chinese here on Earth,” Ramesh said. “Much of our army will have to be redeployed to deal with the threat, leaving us vulnerable here in Punjab. As for space, you are correct; however, unless I’ve miscounted, we do have significantly more construction docks in Earth orbit at the moment than both you and Japan combined.”
Donovan chuckled. “Yes, it’s no state secret that one is indeed greater than zero.”
The whine of a siren cut off Ramesh’s reply. Donovan looked at him to see if the alarm was something to take seriously. Ramesh appeared impassive, but he slowly walked under an aircraft canopy with a thick roof, motioning with his head for Donovan to follow. A few aircraft techs began jogging for a bunker.
They heard a whistle. Several whistles.
“The rebels are attacking!” Ramesh said, grinning. “They try this every so often, but it never works. Hope springs eternal, eh?”
In front of them, fo
rty meters away, was a laser cannon, mounted on a truck trailer. It looked like a searchlight. It rotated, pointing up, and fired an invisible beam. Donovan craned his neck and saw several puffs of smoke high overhead – some sort of rockets or mortar rounds being destroyed. Radars tracked the trajectory of the incoming rounds and calculated their origin at an area in the nearby mountains, and he heard a series of chuffs as mortars on the base fired back.
Donovan saw more bursts in the sky, some of them closer than the prior ones. The sky grew foggy, and he knew a moment of animal terror, wondering if the rebels were attacking the fort with chemical weapons.
A mortar round landed off to their right, square atop a large bomber drone, which went up in flames. Other mortars fell randomly around the base. One landed near a squad of running security troopers; several went down, screaming.
Ramesh had his hands over his ears. “They’re not supposed to be able to do that!” he shouted.
Donovan was from the world of political intelligence and no military analyst, but he had learned fast since the war with China started. Some of the incoming were missiles that dispersed a plume of laser-scattering material as soon as a laser hit them. The net effect was a cloud spreading over the base that prevented lasers from working with any effectiveness. Such weapons, Donovan knew, were expensive and difficult to manufacture – far out of reach of the Punjabi guerrillas, or, for that matter, the revanchist Pashtuns on the other side of the border.
And now, with the defenses suppressed, regular explosive mortar rounds were falling on the base.
Ramesh waved and pointed toward a bunker fifty meters away. Donovan nodded, and they ran, as another whistle crescendoed.
USS Apache, Wolf 359
Apache’s directed energy officer, Lieutenant (j.g.) Jessica Barrett, was a direct and willful woman, unafraid to make her desires clear, sometimes in a way that inspired backbiting from other women within earshot. She didn’t care; she viewed many of the social rules some women enforced upon one another as silly obstacles to her satisfaction, and she often preferred the company of men, who of course had their own set of social rules, but they rarely enforced them on her.