by M. D. Cooper
“Everything looks good, Captain,” Cary said, and caught a scowl from Saanvi who liked everything by the book. “Fine. Engines, grav drive, life support, point defense beams, nav thrusters, all green.”
“Comm and scan?” Saanvi asked.
“Yeah, them too,” Cary replied. “Just put in for departure clearance and let’s get out of here.”
“I can’t get departure clearance until everything is done properly. Sam is going to check our request, so file your cross-checks properly in the logs,” Saanvi retorted. “I swear, Cary, I should have just let you do this on your own. There’s no way you would have gotten off the dock, and we’d be riding the strand down to the surface in no time.”
“Fine, Sahn, but I know you want to get out there and help, too. Don’t give me that load about doing this for me. Underneath, you want to be making a difference, not hiding in a bunker down under Landfall.”
Saanvi didn’t reply, but Cary could tell from the set of her sister’s mouth that she had hit a nerve. Good. Saanvi liked to take the high road whenever possible, but there was a reason she came with Cary whenever an adventure knocked—she craved it, too.
As Saanvi had predicted, Sam called in personally with clearance.
“Man, you’re a good liar when you want to be,” Cary said. “I always forget how smooth you are.”
“Shut up, Cary. Just release the clamps already.”
* * * * *
“Do you need a hand?” Saanvi asked as Cary searched through the data on the ships clustered at the L1 point of Carthage’s larger moon, a whitish-blue orb named Hannibal.
Cary scowled in response. She had to admit that determining which of the five thousand ships in Fleet Group 5 to choose was more work than she expected
“I’ve narrowed it down to these forty,” Cary said. “They all have engines, life-support, and functioning weapons, but there are nuances between them that make it hard to choose. Take a look,” Cary replied and passed the data to Saanvi.
“Hmmm,” Saanvi said as she ran through the ships. “Oh, it’s easy, pick this one.”
Cary looked at the ship. It bore the name Illyria and appeared to be one of the least complete in the final selection.
“Why that one?” Cary asked. “It doesn’t even have docking bays. We’ll have to EVA over.”
“You didn’t check its loadout, did you?” Saanvi asked. “The Illyria has a full store of RMs and kinetics. Its hull is full of holes, but that barely matters with a-grav and stasis shields.”
“I don’t know,” Cary mused. “There are several others with full life support. If anything goes wrong on that ship, we’ll have to fix it in EVA gear.”
“Cary,” Saanvi shook her head. “It’s a seven hundred meter cruiser that is only eighty percent complete. If anything goes wrong and we can’t fix it from the bridge, we’re screwed.”
“Good point,” Cary muttered. “OK, set a course for the Illyria, then. I’ll grab us a pair of EVA suits from aft storage.”
Cary walked down the passageway to the storage locker just aft of the airlock and grabbed two EVA-901 suits. They were bright white with reflective strips running down the sides—the better to find lost people in space. They had a slippery, rubbery texture, almost like grasping an eel in water. Though they appeared flimsy—no thicker than five millimeters, and as thin as one in places—they were sturdy and could even provide some protection from light beamfire.
The main advantage of the suits was that they provided one atmosphere of pressure across the wearer’s body, and could adjust that pressure as needed to prevent fluids from building up in extremities.
Cary quickly pulled off her shipsuit, and stepped into the EVA-901. It fit loosely as she pulled it on, but once she drew the fastener shut, the suit tightened and pressed all the air out from within. She gasped as the cold health monitoring sensors hit her body, and then raised her arms, shimmying side to side, to make sure the suit had a good fit. Cary opted for a clear three-sixty helmet and pulled one from the rack. Before donning it, she twisted her blonde hair into a tight bun to ensure it wouldn’t get in her face while the helmet was on. Once satisfied, she locked the helmet’s collar around her neck, where it sealed to the suit, and then grabbed the two halves of the helmet.
She hooked the top hasp of the two halves together and then closed it over her head. It made a suctioning sound as it sealed, and her HUD showed green for an air-tight connection to the suit. She did some more quick stretches and swung her arms around to make sure the seal still showed green.
The respirator on her back registered a five-hour capability for recycling her air, and the suit’s batteries displayed a full forty-hour charge. All squarely within nominal ranges. She switched the respirator to use external air, and grabbed a suit and helmet for Saanvi.
When she returned to the cockpit, her sister was deftly maneuvering the shuttle through the AI-controlled fleet, now only five hundred kilometers from their target.
Saanvi glanced back at her sister and shook her head.
Cary replied as she sat down.
Cary stuck out her tongue at her sister, but did as she ordered. Saanvi may have been a rule-follower, but Cary knew the rules were there for a reason, and there was no successful arguing with her sister about them—not with logic, anyway.
Saanvi stood and stepped into the passageway to don her EVA-901, while Cary leaned back in her seat—which had adjusted its configuration to accommodate the rebreather pack, and the bulbous helmet. Cary waved off the sanitary hookups, but did let the seat’s power cable connect to the suit’s power pack to top off the charge.
The message came in over the ship’s main comm channel and carried the tag of the Fleet Group 5 Commander. Cary did a quick check and saw that it was Symatra, an AI that was even more of a stickler for the rules than Saanvi.
This was it. Cary took a deep breath before replying to steady her nerves.
Saanvi walked back into the cockpit, a worried expression on her face. She hadn’t yet donned her helmet—a testament to her level of concern.
Cary reddened.
Symatra sent an acknowledgement and closed the connection.
Saanvi shook her head as she donned her helmet.
* * * * *
Saanvi managed the final maneuvering, lining up the shuttle with the Illyria, while Cary programed a flight path for the onboard comp to follow that would take the shuttle down to Landfall. Under normal conditions, she wouldn’t have worried about a comp landing the craft, but with all the traffic around the capital at present, she prayed it wouldn’t cause some sort of problem.
Saanvi’s head nodded inside her helmet.
Saanvi glanced back at her sister, a nervous smile on her face.
Cary laughed aloud, the sound echoing in her ears.
Two minutes later, both girls were standing in the airlock, hands clasped as the outer door cycled open and revealed the ten meters of umbilical to the Illyria’s starboard forward airlock. It was already open, and they rushed across the space to reach it.
* * * * *
Cary and Saanvi floated onto the Illyria's bridge. One thing neither of them had bothered to check was whether internal gravity systems were functional.
It would be especially useful given that there were just the two of them onboard.
As Cary ran her systems checks, cognizant of Symatra’s looming deadline, she considered how the ability was unusual to say the least—something that no one else seemed capable of.
Saanvi was certain it was an ability Cary had inherited from her mother—some sort of technologically genetic trait. She had never told her mother about it, she didn't want to add to her mom’s concerns. Tanis never spoke of it, but Cary knew her centuries with Angela were unprecedented. To know it had possibly altered her daughter may not be welcome news.
When she was younger, Cary had asked her more than once why Tanis and Angela hadn't separated, but her mother had only responded that it wasn't possible.
The history lessons in her school had shed a bit more light on the subject, explaining that Tanis and Angela had the ability to spread their minds together across networks. It was how they were able to command the ISF fleets with such precision. The history books also made sure to point out that Tanis and Angela had not merged into one being, that they were not what the old stories from Sol referred to as an abomination. Though the assurances in the texts had always felt too forced to Cary.
Even so, Angela was like a second mother to her. When she was younger, and her mother was often away at the Capitol, she would wake alone and scared. She hated to wake her father and would lay in the dark with her blankets pulled over her head.
Without fail, Angela would come to her, projecting a form for her to see, but speaking to her over the Link.
She remembered the stories Angela would tell her about her mother, and the old days back in Sol, and in Victoria. She showed Cary where Tanis had grown up on Mars, near a sea called the Melas Chasma. She would speak of her first assignment with her mother, and the dozens of others afterward—probably leaving out details that a small child had no need to hear.
It had made her feel so much more connected to her mother—and it had also cemented in her mind that her mother and Angela were in fact two separate people, but not quite as much as the history lessons would have her believe.
Cary didn’t hesitate to reply.
Cary sighed and looked up the pattern in the ISF’s tactical databases. She hoped it was a simple grid in which the missiles could be deployed, but what she found was a shifting three-dimensional pattern based on the approaching fleet’s configuration. It also necessitated programming the RMs with an algorithm that could respond to shifts in the approaching fleet’s formation and still maintain maximum dispersal while still hitting targets of opportunity and not overlapping.
By the time Saanvi had brought to the ship to the designated area, she was just finishing the calculations.
Wi
th Saanvi taking the ship through her prescribed course, and the RMs set to deploy at preset coordinates, she had the time to review the analysis of the battlefield. The Fleet Tactical Net, which her HUD listed as the FTN, showed an unbelievable number of ships in various formations throughout the system.
Fleet Group 5, Admiral Symatra’s group of forty-five-hundred ships had taken up high orbit around Carthage’s larger moon, Morocco. Beyond it, the Illyria, and a dozen other mid-sized cruisers were all seeding missiles along the Trisilieds fleet’s approach vector. At their current rate of deceleration, the Trisilieds fleet would arrive at Carthage when the moon, and Fleet Group 5, would be between it and the planet.
She was glad to see that the system’s rail platforms were chipping away at the incoming fleet, but they wouldn’t wear down the numbers by any appreciable amount by the time it arrived. The Trisilieds fleet would still contain over twenty-thousand fully functional warships against Symatra’s barely operable group.
The FTN showed that Judith’s Fleet Group 6 was positioned at Athens, some four AU distant, a quarter of the way around the star from Carthage. Cary wondered why her mother hadn’t pulled Judith’s ships back to Carthage, but then she saw that the Hegemony fleet was still in a position where they could strike either Athens or Carthage.
A momentary fear swept through Cary as she realized that the goal of the invading fleets must now be to take and hold a world—effectively using its people as hostages to get the technology they so desperately wanted. But they only needed one world. All four of the terraformed planets in the New Canaan system had populations, some in the millions, all with friends living on them.
Her mother’s Fleet Group 1 was in pursuit of the Trisilieds ships, but with the Hegemony ships behind them, they were now coasting, unable to point their engines in either direction. At some point they’d need to brake, and that would expose their engines to the Trisilieds fleet, just as the Trisilieds ships’ engines were exposed to Symatra’s fleet and the stationary weapons on Carthage and its moons.