by Trevor Wyatt
Admiral Walker sighed and closed his eyes.
“Yes, Flynn. I read the report. I read it five months ago. In fact, that’s the report that shaped this offensive. Why?”
He opened his eyes and Flynn saw his weary look. Walker expected his protest, so he just went ahead and gave it to him.
“I have my misgivings, Walker,” said Flynn, matter-of-factly. “A lot of people have been talking. A lot of our admirals, too.”
“They can talk all they want,” Admiral Walker replied. “They can debate all they want. This attack will happen. We are far down the line to begin to second guess our decisions.”
“I know, I know, but don’t you empathize with their misgivings?” he asked. “It doesn’t matter if these guys are humans or not. There are laws in war. There are certain things that are just inhumane and shouldn’t be tolerated during war.”
“These laws are the reason why four billion people are dead!” Admiral Walker snapped and right then and there Flynn heard the voice and anguish of all the death the war had caused. Walker was standing now and bristling with unbridled rage.
Flynn was rooted in the ground; he didn’t even dare move or speak—not while Walker was this riled up. Still, Flynn stared him down and refused to back down.
There’s enough white in my hair to give me that right.
Still maintaining his scowl and hardline voice, he spoke:
“Four billion people are dead because of laws, Flynn! Do you think a bureaucrat in New Washington or Earth knows how to win a war? They tell us what to do, and what not to do. Meanwhile, people are dying.”
With that, the Admiral ran one hand through his thinning hair and looked at him with a tired expression.
“I don’t need my point Admiral having second thoughts, going soft on me, and giving himself to the prejudices of what is right and proper.”
Admiral Walker sighed and sat back down.
Flynn continued to pace, his heart beating faster.
He was angry now. Angry at Admiral Walker. Angry at the Wolf Offensive. Angry at himself for committing and supporting such an act. And yet, he was also angry at himself for having second thoughts.
He heard Walker’s exhalation before he heard his voice:
“Well, Flynn, it really doesn’t matter what misgivings you or any other person within the Armada or the Union think. We’re at the point of no return…You are at the point of no return. You’re under obligation to see this mission through, after which I can take point if you wish. Just let me know.”
That did it for Flynn. He stopped pacing and stood at attention before the Admiral.
“How can you even say that, sir?” asked Flynn. “The Armada is my life. How can I trade up my life?” Flynn continued. “I have no problem with my current orders. I’ll carry them out to the letter.”
“Good. For a moment there you had me worried. Look,” Admiral Walker replied. “There are many who can sit in a room and begin to pick our decisions apart. I find that these office types are the ones who end up costing us more in war. When they’re exposed to the horrors of war, when they’ve lost captains, friends, confidants, family…that’s when they realize that, when it comes to protecting all that you love and care for, boundaries must be crossed.”
Flynn found that he had been holding his breath. He let it out slowly.
“So, you agree we’re crossing a boundary?”
He made a face.
“Are you serious, Flynn? What do you think I am, a mindless beast? Of course. But make no mistake. This isn’t just a war for territory or dominance. This is a war for survival. We’re fighting for more than just the Union…we’re fighting for the human race. And I’ll be damned if I don’t cross every single line in the sand to see to it that we survive.”
“Get your mind and heart right, Flynn,” Walker continued. “Your captains don’t need you giving voice to all that tension.”
“Yes, sir.”
He gave Flynn a final nod.
“Walker out,” he muttered, more to himself than to Flynn, and then vanished from his office.
Admiral Flynn exhaled aloud.
He had his orders, and they had to be carried out. And that was the end of it.
And still…
Jeryl
Jeryl was in the Captain’s Office, looking at the ceiling. He felt the steady hum of the FTL drive, a constant presence whenever it was engaged.
Most of the repairs on the ship had been done. All systems were nominal. All weapons were ready. All officers were ready to engage. This was as ready as they would ever be. Hell, he didn’t think he would ever be this ready for a battle, even counting those five years of war.
Yet, the closer they got to The Mariner Nebula, the closer they got to annihilating the Sonali planet…and the more restless Jeryl felt.
I better get it together, he thought. We have barely a day left.
Jeryl hadn’t spoken about it to anybody. Well, that wasn’t exactly true; he had once gone to the sick bay to see his chief medical officer, Dr. Mahesh Rigsang. He suspected he was having a heart problem of some sort. Perhaps he had ruptured a vein or something.
After a thorough check, the CMO cleared him and told him he was perfectly healthy. He gave him some sleeping pills and told him to rest.
He was just stressed, the CMO said. Jeryl thought he was putting it lightly.
He took the pills, but still no respite.
This went way beyond stress; he was just afraid to admit it.
A little crack. This was what the enemy needed to win the war. Just a tiny little crack. He couldn’t allow for any cracks. He couldn’t second-guess himself. He couldn’t give in to doubt, even though it might wrap itself around his heart, squeezing it tight.
I can’t give in.
I won’t give in
He shut his eyes for a moment, allowing the darkness to swallow him whole.
There were a lot of people on this ship (not to mention all the others joining them at The Mariner Nebula), and they were all depending on him.
Shouldn’t that be the exact reason to allow doubt in? A small voice in the back of his head whispered.
He grit his teeth and, before he knew what he was doing, he had balled both hands into fists.
As a captain, he couldn’t stand the thought of making a mistake that would cost the lives of his crew. And it was that same thought that weighed him down—what if I made a mistake that didn’t cost him his crew, but cost the lives of…billions?
Maybe he could have prevented all this.
But then, he asked himself—would any other Captain handled things differently? If The Seeker hadn’t been the one assigned to that mission, would things have gone the way they did? Sometimes, he thought it all would’ve happened anyway, regardless of the mission assignment. But for others…
He had survived this long because of Ashley. She was the anchor that held him down; she was what kept him down. She was the reason he kept fighting. She was the light in the darkness. Whenever these doubts weighed him down, she was the one he turned to.
But he couldn’t stop his mind from spinning endlessly. Never. And he had tried.
What if he had been better prepared when he met the Sonali for the first time? He was ill prepared for it; he had always disregarded the possibility of alien life in the universe.
How about now? He asked himself. Now you are racing towards the Sonali to deal out a fatal blow to their species. Now you know ahead of time. There’s no excuse.
Realization hit him. Whatever actions he took, whatever happened here on out, he was fully responsible. There would be no excuses. History would judge him brutally. And with this realization came a tidal wave of fear crashing down on him.
Captain Jeryl leaped out of his chair. He needed to talk to someone. There was only one person he could think of and she was off duty.
“Contact Commander Gavin,” he said, activating the ship’s AI.
“Ashley here,” her voice filled his office, and h
e found himself sighing with relief. For a moment, the darkness of fear receded.
“Ash, where are you?” he asked her.
There was a pause. He never called her Ash except when they were alone. He did it now because he wanted her to know that he wasn’t looking for the First Officer. He was looking for his wife.
“Is everything okay?” she asked.
“Do you want an honest answer?”
“Yeah.”
“No, everything’s not alright,” said Jeryl.
“I’m in our quarters.”
“I’ll be there in two.”
He cut the line and headed out of his quarters. He ordered his security detail to remain on the CNC, and even though they didn’t seem happy about it, they had no other choice but to do it. Jeryl was fully aware he was flagrantly disobeying Armada regulations, but so what? He wanted a moment of privacy with Ashley.
When he arrived to their quarters, he found her lying down on the bed. She sat up as he walked in.
He motioned for her to remain in bed, locking the door behind him. He slipped into the bed beside her, and she instinctively rested her head on his chest. It felt electric, being this close to her.
“Lights off,” he said, plunging the quarters into the state it had been when he walked in.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him after a moment of silence. Her soft voice woke him up as he realized he must have fallen asleep.
He checked for the struggle in his heart. It was still there, but now it seemed almost…insignificant. The fire blazing inside him for Ashley simply overpowered everything else. She had never been able to describe what he felt for her. He wasn’t a man of words, after all. But every cell in his being knew the truth: he loved her.
He really did.
“Remember how you’ve been having doubts about our commands?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said, her voice setting off a vibration in his chest. During all their officer’s meetings, Ashley never ceased to vocalize her misgivings about the current path that the Terran Union was following. Nevertheless, she was always quick to ensure that the mission was a success—her commitment never required a question mark.
“I think you may be right.”
He felt Ashley rolled over until she had her arms folded on his chest, her head facing Jeryl’s. He couldn’t see her, but he felt her looking at him.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asked.
“No. This mission doesn’t sit well with me,” he said. “I’m telling you this not as your captain now… but as your husband. This doesn’t feel right.”
She sighed and reverted back to her previous position, her head on his chest. Telling her he was afraid relieved some of the tension in his heart.
“You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about our mission,” she said.
“The Wolf Offensive. Before the war, people can say all sorts of things about the morality of what we do or don’t do. But right after the war, none of that seems to matter. Only the results. Say we win this. Nobody is going to realize that we may have contributed to wiping out an entire intelligent space faring species. All they will think about is that we won, and that we’re free. What is this war turning us into, Jeryl?”
He remained silent. He knew it wasn’t a rhetorical question, but that wasn’t why he was hesitating. He didn’t answer because he didn’t know how to answer.
“To think that all this started because of the destruction of The Mariner,” he said.
“We have looked through the records. We have read the transcripts of their communication with Edoris Station. From all the evidence we’ve been able to compile, there’s nothing that suggests that the Sonali were responsible for their destruction. It seems that they were being sincere, though rudely, when they told us it was their sector and that they didn’t know what had happened to The Mariner.”
“You’re saying that this entire war was based on an assumption that may have been false?” she asks, incredulity filtering into her voice.
“I don’t know what I’m saying,” he replied to her. “I don’t know, Ash. No matter what the case is, one thing is certain. We’re fucked.”
In tandem, as though their hearts beat as one, they drew in a deep breath and let it out softly out into the air. He shoved all the thoughts into the back of his mind and let himself relax in the comfort of nearness to his wife.
We’re fucked, yes, thought Jeryl. But at least we’re not alone.
Ashley
It was 0800 hrs. Ashley met the tactical station on board The Seeker in CNC trying to rub the sleep out of her eyes. The fleet went toward its end goal today. And somehow, it seemed like a bad omen to go into combat without her morning cup of coffee.
Ashley scanned the readouts of the fleet that was forming in the system with the ships coming in and meeting at the rendezvous point roughly half a light year away from the station. She double and triple checked the readouts from engineering to make sure their FTL drives were fully aligned.
She checked the manifest in sick bay to ensure that everything the doctor requested had transferred over. She checked her weapons complement to see if the upgrades went through. They had.
She even checked the energy banks that power the molecular resequensor. Not because she thought that they were going to want to have a meal in the middle of combat, but just because she didn’t know what else to check.
She had checked everything. The flurry of activity over the last 12 hours had been frantic. Everyone knew this was the Wolf Offensive. The single most important engagement to date in this war. An offensive that she could not find herself agreeing with, but one that she knew was necessary if they were to have a fighting chance to survive as a species.
“Everything okay?”
A voice asked and Ashley turned to see Jeryl standing next to her. She didn’t even realize he came by her side until he said something. She must had been engrossed in her readouts more than she realized.
“I’m fine, Captain,” said Ashley. “All systems appear to be in working order, the upgrades have gone through, weapons are online, FTL drives are working, sick bay is fully stocked with anything that we could ever need, and if you want you can even go get a cup of coffee and not tax the energy banks.“
“Well, it’s nice to know that I can get a cup of joe and then go kill one billion Sonali,” the Captain said with an air of morbid resignation mixed with a humor that was born out of hopelessness.
“We don’t have to go kill one billion Sonali,” she said. “There are other ways around how we can go about achieving victory. We’ve been pushing back on Sonali lines the last two months. It’s not inconceivable that we could target some of their main command-and-control stations. Push them back into their planetary bases. Take out their shipping lines. Create a war of attrition.”
She looked to the captain and saw him staring at her. He knew what she was saying was correct and he knew that what she was proposing would be a much longer, much costlier, much more brutal war. He knew this plan would never pass muster.
The Terran Union was never prepared for conflict. They went into it full of bluster. They didn’t analyze the consequences of prolonged years of warfare on their population.
Their democratic institutions would begin to crumble if they didn’t end this war. They’d need strong leadership—much stronger than what they had now. He was talking autocratic leaders who consolidate all the power among a few people. They’d need to direct fleets, move massive groups of men and material, dictate that the individual—all 44 billion within the Terran Union—dedicated their lives to the state.
They had seen that before in history, Ashley was sure of it. Nazi Germany. Soviet Union. The caliphate of the Middle East that arose in the mid-21st century right before the Third World War. The Asian Bloc. The Empire of Oceania. The Outer Colonies. They could go down that route, but they would had lost the war much, much before then.
The Captain knew this. He knew, Ashley knew it. He knew that they we
re probably 3 to 6 months away from open rebellion in the core worlds of the Union. They both realized that they were perhaps a year away from a breakdown in government where Earth wouldn’t be able to maintain clear lines of control and communication with the Armada.
And they both know that if they kept facing defeat or even stalemate, the situation would eventually wear down on them until there would be a collapse from the inside. And they would leave the Sonali to mop them up as they progressed further and further toward the cradle of humanity.
“This is the only way, Ash,” Jeryl said. “We gonna have a problem carrying out your mission?”
“I know my mission,” said Ashley.” You will have no problems from me, sir.”
“Good,” he said.
She sighed. What happened to the man who expressed his doubts and his fears about this mission just a few hours ago? She knew he was most probably burying that side of him right now. He couldn’t let it show. Not for her, not for anyone. He needed to present the picture of a leader in charge—a commander of the Terran Armada.
Any doubts, any misgivings, any sort of second thoughts would be detrimental to the morale of the crew. Once they knew what they were about to do they needed to see a strong and confident leader who was willing to go in and make the hard decisions and carry out the final orders.
And a billion Sonali lives would be the price that needed to be paid because of that composure.
“There’s something you should know about the ship and its upgrades,” said Ashley, trying to change her mood. “Our weapons have been upgraded, but our shielding has been upgraded with the latest technology that the Armada is putting into new starships. We’re able to last in a firefight much longer and that may come in handy if we need to be the ones to start the orbital bombardment of the Beta Hydra III planet. Preliminary readouts tell me that our weapons damage effectiveness have been increased by nearly 75%. Our shielding has been increased by close to 150%.”
“That’s impressive,” he told him raising his eyebrows. “How did we get such numbers?”