A Sword Into Darkness

by Mays, Thomas A.

  The CO relaxed slightly and rubbed his own aching neck. “Lucky. And astronomically unlucky as well. Mr. Kelley, this is an inauspicious beginning for your space fleet, don’t you think?”

  “It’s disconcerting, sir, but I don’t think it invalidates what we’re trying to do.”

  Henson’s lip turned up on the threshold of a grim smile. “It doesn’t? We were just taken out of the game by an inanimate hunk of iron. Our hull is open to space and we’re practically in the dark here. We could have lost men’s lives. How do you think we’ll fare against your technologically advanced aliens?”

  Nathan held up his hands in protest. He was about to speak, but a sudden patter of dinks and bangs sounding from the hull gave him pause. They all listened to the meteor storm front sweep by them, worried and almost convinced that there would be another collision and another breach.

  Their earlier weapons fire had been effective, however. All that struck them was sand and pebbles, moving at a slow enough relative speed that the destroyer’s chromatic armor plate could successfully shrug it off.

  The noise faded after a few moments. Nathan lowered his hands and sighed in relief. “Colonel, this is a glitch, a bug, Murphy’s Law. Nothing more. I don’t know why that meteor was able to sneak through our defenses, but it does not invalidate what the rest of the trial showed. We investigate this, we make repairs, and we try it again. And then you fine gentlemen go make the Deltans wish they had never heard of Earth.”

  Henson and Torrance exchanged a look and a nod. Henson turned back to Nathan. “Fine. Now, what about repairs? Can we get the power and engines back online?”

  Nathan and Kris looked at one another, and she shook her head. He motioned for her to go ahead. She flushed and stammered slightly. “C—Commander, Colonel, we, uh, we can’t fix this here. Assuming the only thing that was damaged was the reactor itself, and that’s a big, bad assumption, we can go EVA and slap a patch on the hull and the reactor vessel. We can clear away the rad hazard and maybe re-pressurize with helium, but there’s no way to tell if the reactor safeties will even allow us to bring it back online, and we’re going to soak up a lot of REMs while we’re making the attempt. Also, if we can’t get it done in six hours, which we can’t, the air is gonna get awfully stale.”

  Nathan nodded. “Our only real option is to abandon the ship in the SSTOS and come back with a proper engineering team. It’ll take about three cramped, uncomfortable days to make the trip home. Then a few days to gather personnel and materials, another three to return, a week or two for repairs, and then … ? Figure on the better part of a month before we can get the Sword underway again and back to Earth orbit.”

  Henson punched his seat’s armrest in frustration. “Shit. There’s no other way?”

  Nathan shook his head. “Not with the resources we have out with us at the moment. I’m sorry, sir. This trial is over. You have to focus on getting your crew home now.”

  “I know that.” His tone was sharp, but he relented a second later. “It’s just … I had a lot riding on this mission as well, you know? Fine. Mr. Kelley, you’re sure the shuttle has the range to get us all home safely?”

  “Absolutely, sir. That was one of the safety constraints for the mission. It won’t be that pleasant, but the SSTOS has the delta-v and the resources to get us all back to Earth safely.”

  “Very well.” Henson slumped slightly in his seat, in so much as one could slump in microgravity. “Issue the order, XO. Abandon ship.”

  Torrance nodded and reached down to the comm panel. As he began to speak to the rest of the ship, relaying what has happened and what they had to do now, Nathan and Gutierrez worked in concert to shut down and safely power off all the charged weapons systems, using what computer control they still had while the various battery backups were still active.

  Kris unstrapped from her seat and floated up, her face stricken. “I’ll go pre-flight the SSTOS,” she said softly. The CO simply nodded, staring at the bulkhead. As she passed by Nathan, she reached out a hand and squeezed his shoulder.

  He reached up to catch her fingers and drew them to his lips. He kissed the back of her hand without any of his earlier self-consciousness. “It’ll be all right, babe. This is just a setback, but we’ll work our way past it. Okay?”

  She attempted a smile, but failed to pull it off. Kris nodded, her eyes limned with tears that could not fall, and then turned in mid-air and dove out of the room. Nathan went back to his work, refusing to notice the other three men watching him.

  Around the darkened, quiet ship, personnel began to make their way from their stations toward the dorsal interior of the destroyer and the large shuttle hangar there. They pushed their luggage before them or dragged it haltingly behind, struggling with their massive packs now that inertia had been divorced from the aid of either gravity or pseudogravity.

  Inside the hangar, the line of Navy and Air Force officers and crewmen drifted into the sleek, gray, single-stage-to-orbit-shuttle. A slender, lifting-body design, it had been adapted from NASA’s somewhat successful sub-orbital spaceplane. All that differed was the power plant, replacing the turbo scramjet/chemical rocket hybrids with a small thermoelectric fission reactor and a photonic reaction drive.

  While the skeleton crew stowed their gear and went back for several days’ worth of rations, the adapted shuttle came to life, its ventilation fans, pumps, and motors providing welcome white noise to the crew. It was not acknowledged among the uninitiated, but sailors of all stripes secretly feared the silence.

  At sea, at sail, silence meant a dead calm, awaiting a slow death while lingering in the doldrums. In later generations, silence meant the end of engines and power, forcing the tin cans and iron men of 20th and 21st century navies to negotiate with the capricious elements, at the mercy of forces they had long since conquered.

  Aboard the Sword of Liberty, the silencing of technology’s pervasive noise meant they were stranded on the furthest, most isolated, most inhospitable reef man had ever ventured toward. Out here, there was nothing that would not kill them, from the implacable vacuum to the impenetrable cold of space. Seeing the SSTOS come to life let many of them release bated breaths they had not even realized they had held.

  The last to go aboard, Colonel Henson allowed Commander Torrance to precede him into the shuttle. Nathan placed himself just inside the shuttle’s hatch, ready to close it and conduct his door check. Henson stood at the threshold, halfway in the destroyer, halfway aboard their forlorn lifeboat. He looked wistfully at the ship. “One month. I’ll see you in a month … I promise,” he said, his voice a whisper.

  He turned and pulled himself into the SSTOS. “XO, is everyone aboard?”

  “Yes, sir. LCDR Oneida and Major Keller are in the cockpit, and Ms. Muñoz is back aft, completing the reactor and engine checks.” Torrance began putting on his five-point harness, settling in.

  Henson pulled himself forward, drifting to his own seat next to the XO. “Very well. Mr. Kelley, if you would get the hatch, plea—”

  The hatch, firmly shutting on his request, gave him pause. He turned around, just as everyone else began to crane around in their seats to get a look. Nathan Kelley had indeed shut the hatch to the shuttle.

  Except that he was on the outside of it.

  A horrible possibility suddenly dawned on the colonel, and he jumped off and flew to the hatch. He tried the auto release, but it would not work. Fumbling with the manual release cover, he opened it to find that the operating mechanism had been removed. The colonel growled in betrayal.

  Henson spun around to glare at Torrance. “You said Muñoz was aboard? She’s back aft?”

  “Yes, sir! I saw her go back there myself.”

  “Is there another hatch back aft?”

  He had his answer when the XO went pale and began fumbling to release his harness. Henson cursed and jetted himself into the cabin and then flew up onto the flight deck. He jerked open the door and stared at the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit,
going over their checklists. “Oneida! Do you have controls? Is your board up?”

  The pilot looked confused and turned to his panel. He flipped a few switches, and tapped a few keys, but nothing seemed to happen. “That’s funny. It was working a minute ago . . . .”

  “Damn it! Get it back online! Do whatever you have to.” Henson turned and flew back into the main cabin, just as the XO emerged from his trip into the shuttle’s small engineering space.

  Torrance looked as if he did not know whether to be sick or to throw a fit. “She’s gone and the aft emergency hatch has been disabled.”

  Henson growled and sought out his Chief Engineer among the assembled, strapped-down crew. “Commander Marcus, did you actually see any of the meteor damage? Any at all?”

  The Navy astronaut looked around at his men and then shrugged, embarrassed. “Well, no, sir. The cameras were offline and the doors to that section were sealed for a vacuum and rad hazard. I thought we would at least do an EVA and survey, but the Muñoz woman said there wasn’t enough time. We had orders to spend the time shutting down and evacuating.”

  “Good god, I’m an idiot.” Henson ran a hand over his face. Everyone else in the cabin stared at him, unsure of what to do, of what to say.

  Pilot Oneida’s voice called out from the cockpit. “Colonel! You’re going to want to get up here.”

  Henson re-entered the cockpit and saw Keller manipulating his controls to absolutely no effect. It was easy to see his fruitless efforts because the lighting in the hangar was fully on, no longer on battery backup. A red flashing light strobed over their heads. The two immense, armored hatches that separated them from the vacuum had each begun pulling away, revealing the stark black of empty space. Ship’s power was restored and the hangar had already been fully evacuated. In a few moments, he felt sure they would be left stranded in space.

  Oneida held out a communications headset to his CO. Henson grabbed it and put it over his head, positioning the microphone in front of his mouth. He keyed the mike. “Kelley, this ship was never hit, was it?”

  Nathan’s voice came back instantly. “I’m truly sorry, Colonel. Did I neglect to tell you about the rather robust damage control training simulation program the ship has? I really should put that in the next familiarization course.”

  “I saw that meteor. I felt it strike the ship.”

  “No, you saw a meteor test track overlaid on the actual tactical feed. You felt the engines pulse to provide the tactile simulation of a hit. And then the system closed off the appropriate locks and gave the expected alarms for this type of casualty. If we had gotten partial power restored, I could have even shown you video of the damage. But, no, we were never hit.”

  The SSTOS lurched slightly, and Henson saw them float slowly up, out of the hangar and into the infinite void. “Kelley! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m doing what I have to do. I’m fulfilling a promise I made to a man who endured the doubts of an entire planet to prepare mankind to defend itself.” The SSTOS cleared the hangar doors, revealing the trapezoidal armor plates of the destroyer’s forward dorsal hull. It looked stark and unreal out there, all alone, without the enveloping protection of the hangar in which it had been born, without the comforting proximity of the Earth’s broad horizon below it.

  Nathan’s voice came over the headphones again. “Oh, look, Colonel. You seem to have abandoned your perfectly good ship for no reason at all. I’m afraid I’ll have to claim her as salvage before some ne’er-do-well absconds with her.”

  Henson growled in frustration. “You can’t steal back your ship, Kelley. It’s not only petty, it’s treason!”

  “I suppose I’ll have to rely on the vindication of history.”

  “You have no crew, no shuttle. And what about the ammo and reactor power you expended thus far? I can guarantee you that you won’t be visiting any filling stations between here and the Deltans.”

  Nathan’s voice was vaguely disappointed in response. “Let’s try to proceed on the assumption that I’m not a complete idiot, okay? This ship is fully stocked and has enough reactor power and delta-v for four years of continuous operation. As for the ammo and crew, trust me. I won’t be going off half-cocked or ill-prepared.”

  Colonel Calvin Henson screamed with rage. Oneida and Keller stared at him, joined by Commander Torrance who appeared behind the CO to stare agog at the blackness of space surrounding them. Henson gripped the mike, as if to force his words into the instrument and through the ether. “What gives you the right, Nathan? What makes you think you’re entitled to first contact? What makes you believe you can do it better than we can?”

  There was a long pause. Then, “I suppose it’s faith, faith in someone who had faith in me, faith that I’ve been tried in the crucible once already, and I’m tempered for whatever comes next.”

  Below them, the Sword of Liberty began to pull away, acceleration building quickly to a full g. The wedge of the forward hull moved forward, followed by the dully glowing radiator panels laid out in front of the reactor vessel, and then the brilliant blue thrust of the photonic drive, boiling away with corpuscles of light so intense they seemed to be physical objects in and of themselves.

  Nathan’s voice called back over the increasingly widening gulf. “Your controls should unfreeze in the next thirty minutes. Then, just follow the recorded flight plan to Earth and reentry. You should be there in about three days. Farewell, Colonel. Don’t take this personally, please. I hope to see you in command of the next Sword when we get back from our mission. You deserve one of these.

  “But this one is mine.”

  BOOK TWO: “TEMPERED”

  12: “ECCENTRIC ORBITS”

  “And we’re back!”

  “Hey, all of you out there on the drive to work, welcome back to Pat—”

  “And Terry—”

  “In the Morning!!”

  “If you missed the first hour—”

  “Ya lazy bums.”

  “Terry! Anyway, if you missed the first hour, we’re talking about what everyone seems to be talking about—namely, the unprecedented surprise launch of the Sword of Liberty off the coast of California yesterday. Now, I don’t care if you’re an old-timer and you remember the hey-day of the space shuttle, or maybe Apollo and the moon landing, or hell, perhaps you’re ancient and you remember Sputnik, Gagarin, and Shepard, but this is seriously the coolest thing to happen to space in maybe ever. I’m totally geekin’ out.”

  “Yes, you are a total geek.”

  “Terry! Well, I think our devoted listener-ship is with me on this one. This thing is big. This thing is fast, powerful, and sexy. It’s the answering call to all the dashed dreams of generations of enthusiasts and starry-eyed hopefuls. This is sci-fi made real! Forget multi-month missions to Mars to pick up rocks. Forget robot probes and halting, tentative steps into space. This is Space with a capital ‘S’.”

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s cool, Pat. It makes those fragile little NASA rockets look like bush-league amateurs. But while you’re having a geekgasm, think about what this really is: they didn’t call it a space-explorer. They don’t call it a solar system surveyor. They called it a destroyer. Think about that!”

  “What are you trying to say, Terry? Who cares what they call it?”

  “I care! And you can bet your sweet wife’s fanny that the Chinese and the EU care. Our government, who only has our best interests at heart of course, has just weaponized space to a degree unheard of before now. Hell, I couldn’t even count the number of international treaties violated if I used both my fingers and toes. Why? C’mon, there’s gotta be a reason for all those missiles and lasers. And what’s with that little speech Colonel Henson gave? ‘—ready to face whatever may come … in defense and support of our planet, but against no man or terrestrial power.’ If it ain’t against no man or earthly power, who the hell is it against?! Is there some non-earthly enemy they haven’t let out of the bag yet?”

  “Ha! Ter
ry, I’m the Trekkie, but you’re the first one to jump on the ‘aliens from space’ land mine? Listen, there are no little green men on Mars. The balloon people of Jupiter aren’t coming to steal your cable or drink your beer. And the grays are just a bunch of society-influenced collective hallucinations by some sad little lonely-heart crazies. The Sword of Liberty is up there for the same reason we put up any new combat system—to defend the red, white, and blue against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We put up the first one, and I’m sure we’ll find out within the year that it was in response to something the Chinese or the Algerians intended to put up.”

  “Yeah, Mister The-Flag’s-Never-Dirty? What about the Deltans?”

  “Conspiracy theories, Terry? Please! That’s worse than a simple garden-variety belief in UFOs.”

  “Hear me out, Pat! Who’s the major contractor on the Sword? Windward Technologies Inc. And who was the founder and former CEO? Gordon Elliot Lee. And who was the guy that first claimed the Pavonis comet wasn’t a comet at all? Gordon F-ing Lee. You’re trying to tell me there’s no connection between the company that built the first interplanetary star destroyer and the conspiracy whack-job that’s been warning us about an alien invasion for the last twenty years? Come on!!”

  “You folks out there in radio-land can’t see it, but Terry just put on a tinfoil beanie, propeller and all.”

  “That’s it, Pat, laugh at the crazy man wearing his underwear on the outside, but mark my words—there’s aspects to this whole space-based destroyer thing that the administration hasn’t told us about yet. The other shoe? It has yet to drop, my friend!”

  “I am happy to concede the point that our beloved military-industrial complex has not been completely forthcoming—not that I would truly want them to be, but that’s the difference between us. Now, are you willing to put away the conspiracies for a minute and just agree with me that this is cool and that if anybody has to have such a thing, at least it’s our own dedicated, honorable military?”