by A. D. Bloom
The debris field was thicker than it looked on radar or LiDAR. Some pieces of Khan that drifted next to them had been cut down to just bits of bulkhead, but others were large cross-sections, fragments of several decks that looked practically normal except for some charring and their twisted, melted edges and the fact they were open to space. They looked like cutaway dioramas you'd see in a museum with all the consoles still in place and safety-sealed hatches that led to nothing but vacuum on the other side of the bulkhead.
"Send in the SAR junks, Mr. Biko," Cozen ordered. "And remind them they're not getting paid by the hour."
Bergano said that Hardway heard transmissions on a dozen channels or more. "I've got lots of suit radio chatter. There's definitely some live ones out there, but I can't pin down transmission locations or transponders because of residual radiation from all the warheads and the breached reactor. How the hell are we going to find the survivors?"
"Can LiDAR pick up their suit lights?" Dana asked.
Bergano let their voices play over comms. Their static-fuzzed cries called for Hardway by name. "It's going to take us too damn long to find them all with eyeballs."
"Contact! Closing fast!"
"What? Where?" Ram almost didn't believe it, but there it was. It blinked red in front of Biko on the AT controller display. It looked like a piece of Khan was coming to ram Hardway.
"Closing from 031 degrees. Two o'clock low. Slaloming through the debris. It's so fast!"
By the time Ram got to the bridge's starboard side window to see what was coming up from below and off the starboard bow, it was almost on them. It cut high-g turns around a big piece of Khan's showers and then around a thick hull section before it flew down Hardway's battered length. Ram recognized it as it buzzed the launch bays and then passed the tower. "It's one of the QF-111s from the battle," Cozen said. "A surviving drone."
"No IFF. Malfunctioning transponder maybe," Biko said.
"Probably belonged to Khan." Bergano said. "Came home after the fight."
The drone flew all the way to the stern and then flew up the port side and circled Hardway's tower twice before coming to a complete stop in front of the bridge. It was kind enough not to point the guns at them. Cozen said, "Open bay 2 for it. Let's see what it does." But then it used maneuvering thrusters to rotate slowly in front of them and point its nose at the debris field. It did it again before spinning a third time to point at Khan's remains.
"I don't think it wants to land." Ram stepped to the windows of the bridge and waved his arms at it. It was thirty meters away on the other side of a meter-thick diamond-pane window stronger than the hull, but when the Dingo pulsed its maneuvering jets and turned to face him so Ram was looking down its cannon-barrels, he regretted getting its attention. The drone watched him through a dozen tiny, spider's eyes he now saw glinting, spread out on the curved front of the hull between the maneuvering jets and guns. Below it, bay doors opened, and the junks Katmandu and Elixir launched vertical out the topside bays along with Mohegan.
Cozen said, "You've never had a dog, have you, Commander Devlin. It's pointing, can't you tell?"
The fighter drone turned and pulsed its engines and flew into the wreckage slowly enough to be followed. "Biko..," he said.
"Got it." Biko thumbed comms to his pilots. "Hardway AT to all SAR junks, we've got a single Dingo 111 drone out here. Keep eyes on him to find Khan's survivors."
Cozen said, "Call down to Dr. Ibora and tell him he's going to have more casualties coming his way."
Hardway's junks pulled almost a hundred men and women back from the vacuum. Some five-hundred more had been killed by the warheads or particle beams or burning storms of plasma. Bodies drifted along with the rest of the debris. As it happened, Hardway had all the time it needed to recover them because after the Squidies' revenge ship savaged the Staas Yards at Deimos, it bombarded the domes of the Martian poles and continued on towards Earth.
UN Admiral Yantok's career-ending withdrawal of remaining forces from the path of the alien dreadnought saved what was left of the UN's fleet, but the battleship advanced unopposed. It bombarded the H3 extraction facilities on the moon's far side, blasted its way through the satellite defense network, and steamed into low earth orbit. It hung a human skull in the pale blue sky for an hour before breaking orbit and making for the outer system.
At an apparently unremarkable point in space just beyond the orbit of Saturn, a few million kilometers above the ecliptic, the line of brilliant, rosy plasma the alien dreadnought spit out its engines went dark. It stabbed out at empty space with three different particle streams, and the three streams of fast-moving, high-energy nuclei collided in front of it. The release of energy at the intersection of the streams was so great that it blinded nearby arrays for the next seconds. When they could see again, they were stunned to witness the beams still firing and even more stunned at how the radius of the reaction at their intersection grew brighter and hotter and blossomed and bloomed hellish until all at once, it ceased to grow, no matter how much more energy they threw at it. Then, it looked as if the ball of hellfire they'd made fell into a hole at its center, leaving only a thin, spherical membrane across which never-before seen exotic particles danced in spiral arabesques. Radar and LiDAR and IR couldn't make sense of it. It was as if the Squidies had ripped a hole in space.
The dreadnought ceased fire from its three particle streams and within seconds, the tear that had begun as a patch of blackness fringed in fire opened wide at its core like a hellmouth until you could see the stars through it, but they were the wrong stars.
Surveillance drones tracking the alien battleship all read the stars inside that breach and reported errors. Those were the stars as seen from the Procyon system, they insisted, light years away.
The dreadnought fired its engines again and ten seconds later, when it entered the spatial breach it had made, the lines of that alien ship and the human skull on its side waved and faded. Then, it vanished in a red-shifted blur before reappearing minutes later, far-off and small in front of foreign stars. A second later, the edges of the breach it tore in space pulled inward and dimmed. Last licks of plasma flickered before the passage closed and the alien dreadnought was gone.
Epilogue
Hardway sailed into the shipyards at Sagan Station to a hero's welcome. The press had a million pictures of the carrier from the approach, but as Hardway came in to dock, the proxies and camera drones and even reporters in exosuits buzzed the command tower and collected like flies around the ship's giant battle wounds.
Harry Cozen said the images of Hardway would be projected live over stadiums and parks around the globe. After the little camera drones began to flock in front of the bridge to take a vid record of the company officers, Ram ordered Dana to make the diamond-pane windows one-way so they couldn't see in. Cozen stopped her. "Be generous, Mr. Devlin," he said, turning so only they could see his lips. "Remember: you and everyone else here – we're the face of victory – the only victory of this war so far."
SCS Hardway was the only ship that had fought them and won. After the routing of the UN capitol ships at the Battle of Deimos Lagrange, the world media sold Hardway's image as the symbol of the victory that was possible. Cozen told him to stand tall and stick his chest out like Mickey in front of the cameras and imagers buzzing around outside the window. "They need to see it," Cozen said. Ram knew he was right, but he wanted to go to the ship's operations console and open bay 13 to let out Khan's surviving drone.
Sagan Station was a small city traveling with the moon, riding its L5 Lagrange in a stable orbit. It had grown to accommodate the expanding shipyards, adding towers to the city section and berths to the docks almost constantly. Three Staas mining carriers had put in there. Like Hardway, SCS Araby and Sheeba would be converted to privateer warships as quickly as possible using fast-printed modules.
Ram knew some of the crewmen from those ships and some of the officers, too. They were there, on the other side of the locks
in Sagan Station's bays after Hardway's longboats and junks landed. When the air-locks opened, they cheered the heroes of Hardway. The cameras were there, too, of course. Eight and ten-eyed spheres hovered over the heads of the crowd, scanning them. Ram thought Harry Cozen would parade the dead past the cameras, but he was wrong. That would come later.
The memorial service for the fallen wouldn't happen right away. It would take a week or more to accommodate all the VIPs' schedules. Presidents and CEOs and the Secretary General herself would be coming to pin medals on them and to pay their respects to the fallen, the victims of alien aggression.
*****
From the first day the carrier arrived at Sagan, anyone wearing a Hardway patch drank free. There was no shortage in the station's bars of people who wanted to buy the returning heroes a drink. The officers were supposed to go to one of Sagan's former executive clubs, now renamed as officers' clubs. Ram did a lot of that while they waited for the yardies to finish fitting Hardway with her new modules. So did Biko and Dana and the officers of the other carriers and even Bergano. But Ram made a point to pass by the doors of the enlisted bars where everyone else drank and every time he looked in, he saw some redsuit maintenance crewman or ex-miner from Hardway standing over a rapt crowd, telling the story of the engagement with the Squidies with his hands describing maneuvers and punctuating descriptions of hits and detonations with suddenly spread fingers.
It was only a little ship. It wasn't like they'd hulled the alien dreadnought, but like Cozen said, it was the only victory they had.
*****
Ram saw a news feed. Someone got hold of the bodies of the aliens they'd killed on Moriah and stretched all of their impossibly long, spindly limbs and bodies out to their full length and took pictures. They released them to the world press networks with the word 'SQUIDY' underneath.
Ram couldn't remember who was the one on Moriah who'd said it first – the one who'd called them 'Squidies' and put real hate into the word. It was Biko or him or Mickey. Maybe it was Dana.
With alarming rapidity, that word, that name, took on not only the tone of every hate-filled racial slur ever to pass human lips, but also the pervasive ease with which those words are spoken. Ram used it all the time. So did everyone else.
It was easy to hate them. Even for Ram. Maybe it was because of the one that killed Mickey, the only family he had. Maybe it was because he remembered the image of Dana, mercilessly gutting one on Moriah. And there was the memory of the flames in a Squidy's helmet and that thing it called a face before it popped.
Ram imagined that if he'd bothered to show up for the company's scheduled psychological evaluations, the Psych would probably have tried to tell him that what he hated so much about the Squidies had nothing to do with them. He'd heard that one before. Ram skipped those appointments.
Harry Cozen would make sure they didn't ground him. Cozen didn't want Ram talking to a Psych any more than Ram did.
*****
The first step in turning Hardway into a warship was the removal of the ore carrier module on the bow that took up the forward 40% of her length. With that much space for naval architects to build on without even having to move the other modules, Hardway was going to be getting some serious teeth. When they were done adding the military modules, she'd have railguns more powerful than Hannibal or Khan, tubes for warspite torpedoes, batteries capable of defending her, and a pair of launch bays modules with a total of 48, seventy-meter bays. The junks that used to carry ore containers would now carry gunnery modules, warspite torpedoes, or other custom hardware to fit mission requirements.
Hardway would get new personnel, too. Between more redsuit crews, gun crews, more pilots, engineers, and company marines, and support, the number of souls on-board Hardway would practically double.
*****
Bagpipes' keening filled the dome. The first kilted, conscripted Scots forced to fight for the British had led their regiments into battle with that sound.
The dead are gone and Ram knew the memorial service was meant to serve the needs of the living, but the speeches and the pomp that came after the bagpipes went on for too long. To make it worse, they set Hardway's bridge officers on the stage with the VIPs. Ram and the rest of them spent most of their time trying not to move or stare down a thousand floating lenses and imagers pointed at them.
After speeches, the VIPs gave medals to the dead. Most of them had family to receive the medal for them. Ram was the one who rose and received and kept the medal for Mickey Wells. He tried to receive it for her with all the dignity she would have exhibited no matter how many questions filled his mind. She got the full Navy Cross. It's not awarded to civilians, but somehow, the Corps managed to find paperwork that said she was still an active reservist after 28 years. Harry Cozen made that happen somehow.
They decorated the living for meritorious service and for valor with commendations, distinguished flying crosses and purple hearts. And when it was over, they saluted their dead and fired them at the sun. The 'spam gun' was what the miners called it. The caskets got magnetically accelerated down a barrel like on a railgun. It must have been five-thousand gees or more inside that casket on launch. That kind of force turns bone to powder and flesh to a densely-packed mixture of crushed cells and fluid.
*****
After the funeral, when Dana came to Ram's quarters, everything went bad. It couldn't help but go that way. The secret he kept from her made him a different person than he had been before. There was no way for her to know who he was now and no way for him to tell her. Ram didn't much like who he was now either. She thought he was distant and drank too much and she was right. And he didn't see that changing any time soon either.
Mostly he felt like he was lying to her every second they were off-duty together. After the funeral and too much drink, Ram made up an anxiety he confessed to her about how one of them might get killed and how he couldn't bear it and for that reason it had to be over between them.
She told him that was crazy and the fact that they might die was all the more reason it was imperative they enjoy every minute they had. But that wasn't the real reason, of course. And he couldn't tell her that, but she was smart enough to figure it out. He told her that the real reason was because he treated her differently than he treated the other officers. He'd tried to keep her from going in first when they'd breached and boarded the Squidies' scout ship on Moriah. He'd purposely selected Bergano instead of her to board the crippled Squidy warship because he'd wanted to keep her safe. Every time he did that, Ram told her, he put another person at risk instead of her.
Dana was too smart to believe that lie either. She knew there was another reason he refused to tell her and it pissed her off enough that she walked out.
After she left, all Ram did was stare at Mickey's Navy Cross while he got purposefully drunk – sailor drunk – the kind that takes some real willpower.
Two hours later, Ram pulled the transponder out of his exosuit and went outside. He jumped hundred-meter gaps between Sagan's towers like a superhero with Mickey's gun strapped to his leg. Had anyone asked, Ram would have sworn he wasn't going where he ended up.
After crossing a third of Sagan's breadth with his lights off and heater set to minimum to make his exosuit as stealthy as it would get, Commander Ram Devlin clung to a strut on the side of a tower near the edge of the shipyards, brooding not more than twenty meters from the suite and the office they'd given Harry Cozen for the duration of Hardway's stay.
Cozen's floor to ceiling window was currently set as translucent so all Ram saw was a silhouette inside. The diamond-pane it was made of was too tough even for Mickey's gun maybe, but if he turned up the discharge and hit the seal around that window, then he'd probably vaporize it. The window might blow out if he was lucky. If Cozen wasn't wearing a suit, then he'd die in the vacuum. It would be a quicker death than he gave the men and women of Mohegan.
But Ram wasn't there to kill Harry Cozen. He was there to do exactly what he was doing
– to cling to that strut with Mickey's gun in his hand and to watch Harry Cozen's shadow and not kill him. He was there to have the opportunity to do it and to say no. He couldn't really say no to the idea in any meaningful way unless he had the chance to actually end the man.
While Ram tried to burn through that window with his stare, the stars out in his peripheral vision rippled. That's the only way to say it; a patch of them rippled out over the carriers in the yards. At first, he could only see it out the corner of his eye and he thought his vision had gone wiggy or maybe his suit's rebreather had taken a bad turn, but then, he saw how the distortion was moving like a ripple. It was an object of some kind actively refracting light (and probably radar) around itself. It did it almost perfectly, but as it flew between Ram and the mossy milky way, it seemed to shift the starry carpet behind it a hundredth of a degree. The stars shifted back after it passed. The moving distortion in the stars' expected position made Ram's suit computer question the navigational fixes it took off them a hundred times a second. 'NAV error' blinked in his helmet's visor.
With no points of reference at all, he couldn't tell how big it was, only that it was getting bigger – coming closer. His first thought was that it was some kind of stealthed security patrol keeping an eye on the VIPs using a kind of tech he'd never seen. With VIPs around, they probably wouldn't buy any story about why he had a good reason to be out there, so Ram molded his body to the strut and the tower and did his best to hide. He thought if they weren't looking too hard, then he'd be okay, but when the patch of rippling stars came in his direction and then puffed gas out one side and stopped, he thought he'd be spending some time behind bars for sure.
Ram listened to himself breathe in his helmet as it just sat out there. It was closer to the top of the tower he clung to than he was, but he watched it pass through the shadow of that spire. That meant it was close – less than thirty meters close. That meant what he was looking at, this stealthed craft wasn't much more than four meters long and only a meter wide if that.