For one thing, after a while I went blind—what they call a visual blackout. It’s the result of the blood being forced to the back of your head and temporarily starving the optic nerves, but there’s still enough blood flowing around up there to keep you conscious—if not particularly smart—so it’s not a full blackout.
It also felt like my eyes were going to collapse back into my skull, and like my ribs were going to break under the weight of the elephant sitting on my chest. Tweezaa, strapped in beside me, started crying, and I started getting mad. Maybe Gasiri had no choice but to make this long hard burn to overtake KZa-91, but I didn’t care. I was still pissed at her, because she was making Tweezaa cry. Now, how dumb is that?
When the burn was over, I didn’t feel a whole lot better. I had a terrible headache that wouldn’t go away. The pain killers the mess mates gave me made me groggy, and just reduced the pain from two red-hot daggers in my eye sockets to a dull pounding ache. And these guys did this for a living? A life of crime started sounding better.
A few hours later, Captain Gasiri sent word for Ping to join her on the bridge, and he was gone the whole time the actual “battle” took place. He told me what happened later, and so here it is.
Naval combat, he tells me, is like blindman’s bluff with sawed-off shotguns. Hitting someone with a sawed-off shotgun isn’t all that hard, provided you know about where he is. Figuring out where he is—that’s the hard part.
Gasiri knew where the uZmataanki cruiser—KZa-91—was: an inbound glide toward K’Tok. The enemy cruiser had a much more advanced sensor suite than the Fitz, and a better point-defense battery—one that could actually kill us if we got close enough. Its liabilities were that it was probably out of missiles and, much more importantly, it was convinced we were dead.
Gasiri needed to close the distance quickly, before we got in range of any orbital sensors around K’Tok, which were more powerful than anything carried by a ship, even the uZmataanki cruiser. It was also important that the burn be executed far away from the quarry, so its own passive thermal sensors wouldn’t pick it up—hence a very hard but comparatively short burn to kick our speed up. Then it was just a question of coasting with all of our active sensors turned off, until we were in a firing position.
Of course, with active sensors off, Gasiri couldn’t “see” the target until after they could see us, and that was too late to fire, so we had to fire blind, and hope they hadn’t made a course correction. Also, once we got closer to the uZmataanki cruiser, it occluded the direct line of sight to the transports, so we couldn’t get tight-beam updates from them without risking a tip-off. Gasiri could turn on the actives to make sure the target was there, but that would alert the quarry and they would go weapons up, and have a better chance of taking out the missiles. But if Gasiri just salvoed her missiles, the target wouldn’t have any hint of the danger until its collision-avoidance radars picked up the three overtaking objects, and by the time they were identified as missiles, it might be too late.
All well and good, provided the uZmataanki cruiser was exactly where it was supposed to be. If not, a blind three-missile salvo would just disarm us. A more cautious captain might have held back a missile just in case. Personally—and with the clear understanding that I don’t really know beans about all this stuff—that struck me as a lousy idea. If it was really as much of a hot rod as all that, then what good was one missile held back going to do? I figured better to “flood the zone” and take your single very best shot at killing him. Pay your money and take your chance.
Gasiri and I must have thought a little bit alike, because that’s exactly what she did—a blind three-missile shot once her astrogation officer told her we were as close as we could get without them picking us up on passives. Three missiles was overkill, as it turned out. KZa-91 may have been a technologically really advanced ship, but the crew wasn’t all that sharp. From what Ping told me, they never did get their point-defense batteries into action, and all three missiles hit; the third one just cut wreckage. We decelerated to search for survivors, and found seven Varoki Marines still alive in a troop module that had maintained its atmosphere. They were pretty shaken up and didn’t have much of an idea what was going on, other than they were at war with the uBakai, and they thought they’d won the first battle.
One thing that I’d wondered about through all of this was why they all had so few missiles. I asked about it. Missiles are big and expensive. Cruisers could carry more, but why? There wasn’t anyone to shoot them at—most of the time—and the primary mission of the cruisers was to transport security personnel, so they were mission-configured for that. Most of their extra space was taken up with attached troop modules instead of more missile packs.
Here’s another question: why had Gasiri asked Ping to the bridge? I figured it was just professional courtesy, but that wasn’t it at all. By the time we made it to K’Tok orbit, three days later, all of us knew. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. As fouled up as everything had gotten, Gasiri wanted an independent witness of her decisions in that last fight—someone who knew something about how spacecraft work, and who was outside the chain of command.
You notice things about people in small places, and a guided missile cruiser is pretty small. Well, it’s really big on the outside, but there’s a lot of stuff that sort of fills it all up. It has a maneuvering crew of sixty-three, of which about twenty are officers and the rest enlisted personnel. There are a variable number of Marines, since the troop modules are detachable and can be configured different ways, but the Fitz was rigged to carry one hundred twenty at that time, of which forty-four were down on K’Tok and seventeen had been killed by the missile hit, which meant there were fifty-nine still on board. That made it pretty crowded, even though the Marines spent a lot of time on their own in their troop modules, which doubled as platoon bays.
You’d see the Marines early in the morning, running PT in formation in the big open corridor around the outer level of the wheel. That’s what the open corridor was for—running. People have to stay in shape, although the Marines were more serious about it than most of the rest of the crew. The mess hall was only set up for about seventy, so they usually fed the Marines in two shifts, but now they fed them all at once. The Marines were subdued in the days following the battle—shaken, actually, but trying really hard not to show it. Marines are a pretty tightly knit group, in my limited experience of them, and the price they pay is that loss, when and if it comes, cuts deeper.
The men and women of the maneuvering crew, on the other hand, were so excited they could hardly stay in their skins. Of course, they were all professionals, and so they tried to maintain a calm businesslike façade, as if they did this sort of thing all the time. But they didn’t. Nobody did. No Terran spacecraft had ever destroyed a hostile spacecraft in combat—ever, like . . . in history. And now the Fitz had two kills. When they got back home, even the Exec was going to get laid. A lot.
Watching the emotions fighting for control on the faces of the kids in the crew—I thought of them as kids anyway—was like watching a sack full of cats: you knew there was a lot going on inside, but it was hard to make out exactly what.
On one hand, of course, there was the thrill of the kill, and along with it the huge adrenaline rush that comes from just surviving something like that—surviving when the smart money says you haven’t got a chance. Take it from me, nothing in the world feels like that. Nothing. An orgasm is real close, which I guess is why sex and violence get all tangled up so often. But I’ll tell you, if you could put those two sensations—the kill, and the survival rush—together in a spike, everyone would be a junkie.
The day after the fight, I was in the crew’s mess when the astrogator came in, and the dozen or so crewpersons around the mess tables—men and women alike—started barking like dogs, whistling, and banging their coffee mugs on the table. The astrogator had called the timing of the shot, and she’d been right on the money. She was a lieutenant, m
id or late twenties, and I suppose you’d call her plain—not ugly by any means, but not someone you’d pick out of a crowd, either—and if I’d seen her in civvies and subjected to this sort of reception, I guess I’d have expected her to blush. Instead, she flashed everyone in the mess hall a big, wide, toothy grin—exactly the way a hunting cat shows you the teeth it’s going to use to kill and eat you. They were killers, and they were alive, and it felt really good.
That’s one side of it. But then there’s the baggage.
I’d see a couple crewmembers punching each other on the shoulders, high as a kite, and then one of them would remember something, and he or she would get this faraway look, and then the other one would get embarrassed. Some of them were remembering the seventeen crewmen who hadn’t made it, and they were getting a taste of survivor’s remorse. I guess some of them—not all of them, but enough—were thinking about those Varoki that had died in the two ships they’d killed, too. All the super-macho chest-beating meat puppets on the news vids, who’d never fired a shot in anger, would howl down anyone who said there was any reason to feel remorse at the death of an enemy, but military sailors through history have always had ambivalent feelings about the deaths of their opponents—probably because most of them considered their real enemy the sea. Well, if you think the sea’s a bitch, try deep space.
So you mix that incredible high with that incredible low, and before you know it you’re puking jambalaya into a little wastebasket with pictures of elephants on it—and that’s if you’re a heartless thug like me. These were kids.
The only point I’m trying to make is, the crew’s feelings were complicated—because they were Human beings, and Human beings are complicated, and anyone who tells you all this stuff is simple is either a liar or a fool, or more likely a bit of both.
But all that having been said, the crew was pretty high most of the time. The officers were a different story. They were high the first day, too, but after that, it started looking more like an act than the real thing. What did they know that I didn’t?
Were we in trouble? Maybe so. We were “bingo missiles,” as the crew put it—which meant the hard points were all empty. We were the only warship left in-system, and who knew if the next warship to show up would be friendly? Who knew what was even going on anywhere else? Gasiri had ordered one of the transports back to Akaampta to report and ask for reinforcements, but you can’t just stop and turn around in deep space. Everything was already committed to an inbound glide toward K’Tok, so the transport would finish its fall, slingshot around K’Tok, head out-system again, and then jump. That would eat the better part of a week right there, and who knew how long it would take for Akaampta to respond—assuming they were even able to.
I’d rather have been on that transport bound for Akaampta, but it was about a day ahead of us inbound, and orbital mechanics are spectacularly uninterested in the affairs of people.
My problems aside, it was a potentially unsettling situation for the crew. But the officers didn’t look worried. To me, they looked sort of sad and depressed.
What would make them feel that way? They were all going home heroes. Right?
So I reverse engineered the problem. I started with the assumption that they weren’t all going home heroes and backtracked from there. If someone were going to paint this in the worst possible light, what colors would they use?
The Fitz had stopped the first attack on the flagship—sorry, the “pennant.” The second one got through, but they’d killed the attacker. Looked to me as if they’d done everything they could. Then they’d got hit by surprise by the second uZmataanki cruiser and disabled. Once they repaired the damage, they’d rescued all the survivors there, had gone after the second cruiser, and killed it. They were in a clear state of hostilities, so legally there didn’t seem to be much problem with the Fitz’s actions.
I went over it again. On alert, responded quickly, successfully engaged enemy, reassembled task force, searched for survivors, caught by surprise . . .
Caught by surprise.
Three hours after the initial attack—three hours—the Fitz had been caught by surprise by the second cruiser. Gasiri had known there was a second uZmataanki cruiser in the system, and she’d been caught by surprise anyway. She hadn’t known the attack was part of a deliberate, coordinated operation—but she hadn’t known it wasn’t, either. Could she have known for sure a second attack was coming? No. Should she have anticipated the possibility of a second attack?
Yeah.
And because she hadn’t, seventeen of her Marines were dead, along with most of the crew of the uHoko cruiser, which she’d assumed command of—and responsibility for—when she took over the task force.
Hard telling how tight-assed the navy was going to be about this; I didn’t exactly rub elbows with high-ranking navy types back on Peezgtaan—wouldn’t have even if Peezgtaan had a navy—and every country’s navy has a different organizational culture. But even if they were the most reasonable guys in the galaxy, it was hard to make this look like a completely successful command. People had died. That’s why I figure Captain Gasiri wanted an independent witness on the bridge during the second fight.
Gasiri had done pretty well—in my purely amateur’s opinion—as a ship’s captain. As a task-force commander—not so much. So what would they do? My guess was—best case—they’d give her a nice big medal, send her to some academy to teach ship tactics, and right before she retired, they’d give her a bump to admiral, so she’d have a nicer pension. But she’d never command another task force, or probably another ship. And a lot of people would claim that was a raw deal, but I’m willing to bet she wouldn’t be one of them.
Her Marines.
TWENTY
Our ears popped a lot on the way down the Needle, and the four-hour ride was time enough to gradually accustom our bodies to the higher atmospheric pressure at the surface. K’Tok was nothing like Peezgtaan. We got a good look at it, riding the Needle down, and it was beautiful—deep blue water oceans, thousands of miles of lush green rain forest, with brown and gray and white mountain ranges bursting out of the jungle canopy. There were probably deserts and savannah and badlands and all that other stuff as well, but near the equator we mostly saw open ocean and dense rainforest. Life didn’t have to hide down in a crack here—it turned its face up to the sky without fear and gave it a great big grin. Made me grin, too.
Oh, yeah, one more interesting difference from Peezgtaan—there was no Human enclave. I’d scanned the planetary profile when we got the word we were heading down, and I’d been surprised to see the population breakdown by race and nationality: 61% Varoki of uZmataanki nationality, 32% Varoki of uBakai nationality, 5% other Varoki of various nationalities, 2% Zaschaan and Katami of various nationalities. Not one Human permanent resident.
You had to wonder who fenced all the stolen goods. Or stole them in the first place.
There were scattered clouds down below, thicker right underneath us, so that the Needle seemed to disappear into them. We passed through the clouds, and then rain lashed the view ports when we broke through, no more than a couple thousand meters above the surface. K’Tok Downstation was in a broad valley, surrounded distantly on three sides by jungle-covered mountains and, more closely, by sprawling habitation—industrial parks mixed with residential areas, commercial centers, and a clot of stately, official-looking buildings fairly close by Needledown.
The plantary profile listed T’tokl-Heem as the name of the city sprawling around Needledown—it was the main commercial center on the planet and also the administrative capital of the uZmataanki colony. Judging from the extent of the settlement’s footprint coming down from orbit, T’tokl-Heem was a fair-sized city, for a colony world; I’d guess there were upwards of a hundred thousand folks living there. As we got lower, I couldn’t help but notice that, the rain notwithstanding, there were scattered columns of thick black smoke curling upwards from a couple neighborhoods in the city. Other than that, though, it
didn’t look too bad.
Things look different from the air than they do on the ground.
We stepped out of the capsule’s air lock and right away got a nose full of K’Tok. It was hot and wet, the air filled with that earthy smell of growth and decay that’s common to the tropics everywhere. It didn’t stink like I remembered Nishtaaka had, though. There’d always been a smell of sour milk, rotting meat, and something else unpleasant I couldn’t put my finger on. I should have been used to it, because you get a whiff of it on Peezgtaan often enough as well, that odor of alien proteins and funky chemical reactions that your body instinctively knows just aren’t right. It was funny, but I didn’t get that here—maybe because the smell was laced with a hint of burning synthetics, and in my experience that’s the odor of trouble.
The thing is, we weren’t outside. We were still inside K’Tok Downstation, and the air conditioners should have lowered the temp and humidity as well as filtered out a lot of those smells. So that meant the environmental system wasn’t working, which the big tower fans scattered around, hooked up to snaking, tangled temporary power lines, confirmed. I saw a lot of portable terminals, so the central data systems must have been down as well. The downport staff looked short-handed, sweaty, and flustered. Some of them looked worried, and a few were outright scared.
There was security everywhere—more guns than data clickers, that’s for sure. Security was provided by a mix of folks—downstation corporate rent-a-cops with AZ Kagataan corporate logos on their jump suits, uZmataanki troops from the local colonial authority, and some of the imported Co-Gozhak MPs Gasiri’s task force had brought. All of them were Varoki, of course, the different groups distinguishable by their uniforms and, to a degree, by their attitudes, although they were all pretty edgy looking. I wouldn’t have minded seeing a bunch of Gasiri’s Marines right about then—or even a platoon of Zack dirt soldiers, when you got right down to it. Zacks may not be great conversationalists, but they don’t spook very easily. These guys were spooked.
How Dark the World Becomes Page 19