By Other Means (Defending The Future)

by James Chambers

  “Lucky. And now rich. Must be nice. Your account will be credited with half of the agreed upon amount as soon as you fire your thrusters. Other half at the other end.”

  “Thank you, Captain. Let’s see how lucky I really am.”

  “Get my people back to me, Captain Tai. Show me you’re a patriot.”

  An hour later Craig fired his thrusters, pulling away from the battleship. The ‘medic’, Lieutenant Ryan, was strapped into the copilot’s seat. Craig acknowledged the Ronald Reagan, then set his coordinates for RO-312.

  “Do you know anything about flying?” he said to Ryan.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Since I’m the only pilot then, I won’t keep a regular eight-hour rotation. I’m generally sitting here, or sleeping, or fixing something. Since you can’t help with any of those, please keep out of my way until we get to the research outpost. I’m dead certain they’ll have need of your skills.”

  He needn’t have wasted his breath issuing edicts. Ryan did what he wanted, got in the way when he wanted, and generally seemed to be around when Craig was sitting in the pilot’s seat calculating fuel consumption or adjusting the solar sails. Fleet was sure to know him inside and out by the time this mission ended. He didn’t really care anymore. He was tired of the constant toll this war inflicted on the civilian populations.

  They called it the Starvation War.

  Mars had started it, or at least Mars had brought a conflict into the open that had been simmering for decades. Terribly overpopulated Earth pushed Mars around; underpopulated Mars flaunted her freedoms and territory, and supported a thriving piracy trade against Earth’s corporations.

  Finally the merchants pressured Earth’s governing council into voting up a trade embargo. It’s not like they feared the Red Planet. Mars had a military fleet, but nothing that could touch Earth’s. Besides, any attack that got through Earth’s defenses wouldn’t make a dent in the twenty-seven billion citizens filling her cities.

  Then some enterprising Martian general sent in seventy-five tactical nukes on small ships and bombed a chain across the farmlands of Siberia. The dust and smoke propelled into the stratosphere blanketed the planet in a haze and initiated nuclear winter. A hundred years of global warming was reversed in one year and the North Pole froze over. Food production collapsed. Greenhouses couldn’t support twenty-seven billion people, let alone Earth’s ships and bases scattered across the solar system.

  Perhaps Mars thought she was safe from reprisal since all of her cities and homes and farms were underground, or maybe their merchant collective was just stupid. Earth targeted the largest underground cavities across Mars with Richter bombs. Seventy percent of Mar’s Agro-domes cracked in the subsequent Marsquakes.

  But Mars got what she wanted, even as her citizens starved. Earth couldn’t support her vast merchant and military fleets without food. She mothballed most of the ships, waiting for the day the skies cleared and food grew freely again. Then control began to collapse as food-riots started. Governments lined up hundreds of thousands of greenhouses in the freshly fallen snow, powered by geothermals. The population kept falling, unsustainable.

  Meanwhile, Mars dug new bio-caves at a furious pace, hoping they could get their food production up before Earth’s skies cleared.

  Craig could only imagine that the chaos and despair of the civilians on both planets mirrored the despair that met him every time he docked with a research outpost.

  It took his ship about three weeks to reach RO-312. The rock appeared as a gray splotch in Craig’s long-distance scopes. He furled his sails and decelerated into their docking port. Lt. Ryan rode the copilot’s seat all the way in.

  “Get your kit, or whatever the hell you have,” Craig said to Ryan. “We should be able to push off in about four hours, so do what you can.”

  Lt. Ryan looked at him like he had two heads. “They’re civilians,” was all he said.

  Craig’s temper flared, but he tried to keep calm as he unbuckled from his seat and pushed up to the ceiling. “Unless you brought just enough supplies for the two people we’re bringing back from MO-226, get in there and do something useful. You have four hours to kill, so you might as well.” He pushed off of a foothold and flew down the central corridor.

  RO-312 Director Nancy Krzakian was practically leaning against the docking hatch when Craig cycled it open. A half dozen scientists and techs clustered tight behind her.

  “Nancy,” he said warmly, extending his hand. The relief on her face was palpable. The air wafting behind her stank of hydroponic vats and overripe vegetables.

  “Thank God you’re here. What have to you got?”

  “Potatoes this time, freeze-dried. Should help with scurvy. I brought seeds too—beans and peas for protein. I thought you guys were nearly stable. What happened?”

  The scientists were already pushing through the door, crowding him against the bulkhead. They knew the drill. They got what was in Hold A, and no more. If they tried to breach Holds B or C, he wouldn’t be coming back. Those holds were promised to others.

  “We lost a vat,” Nancy said. There were dark rings under her eyes, and if anything she looked thinner than last time. The skin was stretched across her facial bones. “We can’t afford to lose a vat. We were getting stable. Losing all that hydroponic juice has been...well, I don’t know what we’ll do. We’re experimenting with planting seedlings in boxes of biotic waste, but they’re growing so slowly.”

  Craig had seen this before—ultra-sanitary civilians reduced to shoveling shit into boxes to grow food, rather than cycling their waste out the hatch. The military was way ahead of them. Most of the MO’s had erected hydroponic vats, and then started shit-farms in whatever rooms were left. No sense in waiting for a bad day.

  “Between my Hold A and what you’re growing,” he said, “you should be in good shape for six months. More if you’re careful. That’s enough time to generate more hydroponic juice and get the lost vat going again.”

  The look on her face was close to ecstatic joy at renewed hope of survival. She cleared her throat and straightened her badly stained tunic. “Okay then. Okay. Good. Right.”

  “I have some good news,” Craig told her. “I got a fleet medic with me. He’s accompanying me out to MO-42.”

  “Fleet! Damned soldiers started this mess.”

  “I can tell the medic to stay on board if you want to stick to your principals.”

  “No, no. Please, I spoke quickly. We would love his help.”

  “Care to come to the bridge for a cup of coffee?”

  “That would be wonderful. Thank you.”

  Craig hauled himself down the corridor of the freighter on handholds, squeaking out of the way as the first of the potato loads came around the corner from Hold A. The skeletal young man pushing the sled had a bunched out cheek that he was trying to conceal. He’d already taken a big bite of dried potato.

  Lt. Ryan, a bag strapped to his back, pulled himself along after the young man. He nodded to Craig as he passed.

  In the bridge, shoulder to shoulder in the pilot and co-pilot seats, Craig twisted an auto-heat bag of coffee and handed it to Nancy. “With cream and sugar,” he said. She preferred it black, he knew, but she couldn’t afford to turn down free calories.

  She squeezed the bag from the bottom and took a swallow, her eyes closed. She took a second sip. “How’s the war going?” she asked him. “Any rumors not on the official news lines?”

  “Not really,” Craig said. “Earth bombed a new agro-dome that Mars was building deep underground, but that didn’t really affect anything significant. The Martians have distributed their hydroponics throughout the smaller domiciles.”

  “So the game plan’s still the same?”

  “Yup. Whoever gets a food-surplus first can get their destroyers and cruisers back in action. Earth atmosphere should start to clear in two, maybe three years. The glaciers have moved down near the United States border and into Europe now. It’ll be a while be
fore they can plant in Canada again. Siberia’s a total loss. Ocean levels are dropping, though, so that’s good. Florida’s almost back to its pre-2000 shore-line. They’re desalinating the recovered land and laying out greenhouses as fast as they can.”

  “What happens to us if Mars supplies their ships first?”

  Craig placed his hand lightly on her hand. “Nobody’s close to supplying destroyers and cruisers yet, so don’t worry. Earth and Mars are just trying to stop starving to death. Like you and me. Then when the fighting’s done and the merchants have sorted out who owns what, folks’ll be around to rescue us all.”

  “You’re a terrible bullshitter.”

  “Then I’ll come and rescue you. I promise. C’mon, let’s help with Hold A.”

  Within four hours, Craig and Ryan waved goodbye to the dismal rock that had once been a thriving research compound sequencing exo-biotic species. So many RO’s and MO’s had gone silent in the past two years, he didn’t know if 312 would make it. Nancy was a good director, and she seemed to have her people in hand. But it might be a decade before Earth defeated Mars and remembered to collect her scattered children. He’d probably have to make good on his promise to save her.

  It was a shame that the Galilean colonies weren’t helping. They could have all the scientists, researchers, and stations they could stomach if they would just fly around and rescue people. But they were religious fanatics, deeply suspicious of Earth research and Earth bases. The Ganymede captains had a reputation for executing station personnel. That kept the RO’s hunkered down and the MO’s oiling their guns.

  “How’d it look?” Craig said to Ryan.

  Ryan took a moment to answer. “A couple of cuts that had gotten infected. A broken leg. A whole lot of malnutrition.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I brought them the seeds. They lost several lines in the beginning, and they’ve been relying too heavily on cabbage and beets.”

  MO-42 was less dismal that RO-312. The commander in charge briskly ordered his men to fetch the potatoes from Hold C. His uniform was clean, though frayed, and he seemed to have more meat on his bones than Nancy. He too welcomed Lt. Ryan and ordered him to attend the surviving crew. He didn’t turn down a chance for a cup of coffee either.

  Craig brought up the new mission to MO-226. “You ever hear of an MO with a designation that high?” he said as they sipped.

  The commander laughed. “If I was on fire and chased by a Ganymede heavy, a 200-level base wouldn’t acknowledge my hail. Don’t ask me what they do, because I don’t know.”

  “I’ll need to fuel.” Craig handed over the orders from Captain Routan.

  “All right,” the commander said. “Next time you’re through here, you’ll have to tell me what a 200-level does. You think this is something to do with the war?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “I sure as shit hope so. Let’s get this war over with and get the hell home. I’m on my eighth tour of duty out here.”

  “Amen to that.”

  Fully laden with fuel and fresh water, Craig pushed off the ice-bound asteroid a scant six hours later. He and Ryan had taken an extra hour to sit in the mess with the crew—fourteen men and women just as home-sick and information-starved as their civilian counterparts. They had the basic information on the war from the continuous military broadcasts, but little in the way of rumors. Military broadcasts kept bad news to a minimum. They would have pumped Ryan for information for another twelve hours if the medic hadn’t declared loudly it was time to go.

  And from there they boosted out into the outer bands of the main asteroid belt heading for the Trojan asteroids clumped in a trailing orbit behind Jupiter.

  Craig furled his sails about two weeks out from MO-226, but didn’t ignite his forward thrusters and start normal deceleration. There had been no signs of Galilean ships, but he wanted to run quiet for as long as possible. He knew that without gradual deceleration, he’d really have to punch the brakes on final approach. The multi-g’s would be torture on his zero-g muscles, but then so would a Ganymede torpedo.

  “If I detect any ships in the vicinity,” he said to Ryan, “I’ll have to coast by and do a long loop back in-system.”

  “That’ll burn a lot of fuel, won’t it?”

  “This is a rescue, Lieutenant, not a suicide mission. I’ll do everything I can to slip in there, but if it can’t be done it can’t be done.”

  “It can be done.”

  Craig was about to argue, then looked at the lieutenant and shut his mouth.

  His luck held, and he detected nothing as the solitary rock loomed larger in his scopes. It was a fairly small member of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, maybe eighteen kilometers across and six high, shaped like a gnarled root. It was spinning on a fixed axis, so someone was generating gravity in there. He couldn’t detect a docking port.

  Scanning, he found that it was iron-rich and he could gauge little about the interior. There were density anomalies where they’d probably burrowed and hollowed it, but if he didn’t know it was an Outpost, it wouldn’t have registered.

  Deceleration was as bad as he feared, even in a shock cocoon, laying flat against the forward bulkhead. He would have sworn a blue streak up down and sideways if his teeth weren’t clenched together. But nothing broke, and his internal organs remained in their correct spots. Panting hard, he and Ryan struggled out of the netting of their cocoons.

  “You want to hail them, or should I?” Craig said.

  Ryan pulled himself over to the communications array. “I’ll do it.”

  Craig stared at the rotating rock as Ryan sent down some sort of passcode. Craig’s throat was tight. What was in there? What did the Series-200 represent? 0-99 were military research facilities. Someone had once told him that the 100 series were strategic gun placements with skeleton crews. What was left?

  A response came back from the rock almost immediately, text only: “What are your orders?”

  Ryan slid into Craig’s captain’s chair and pulled the old-fashioned keyboard from deep inside the console. Craig hadn’t used it in a long time, only when the ship’s harddrive crashed and he had to access base systems without the interface.

  “Your message was received,” Ryan typed slowly with two fingers. “We can retrieve max-two individuals for return to fleet.”

  Coordinates were sent up from the rock, and Craig nudged his ship until he was rotating in synchronous orbit above the point they wanted.

  Text was sent again: “Approach to 30 meters +/- of surface and hold.”

  Craig descended gently, staring at the dusty, boldered surface. This is crazy, he thought.

  And there he sat for four hours, locked in orbit over nothing. The ping of the incoming message system woke him and Ryan from mild dozes. “Open outer access door,” it read.

  Ryan quickly shoved up from his seat and pushed down the central corridor. There was a floor hatch to the freighter’s belly docking port.

  “Acknowledged,” Craig typed, then leaned close to his small portal window to peer down at the surface. There were two individuals there, wearing mottled gray/black vacuum suits so that they blended with the surface. They had a box between them, about two meters long and maybe a meter wide. It looked like a coffin.

  Where the hell had they come from anyway? Minor disturbances in the dust indicated their tracks. They had come over the asteroid’s horizon. They must have hopped a fair distance to keep him from seeing their docking hatch.

  “I’m ready,” he called to Ryan. “Let ’em in.”

  As Ryan dropped down through the floor hatch, Craig opened a secret door at his left and checked his pistol. It wasn’t much of a defense against trained soldiers, but if they tried to rush him he might get it out. He’d bought it on the more populated asteroids. Cops called it a junk-hurler—and it was used for combat in tight quarters. It held a cache of sharp-edged shrapnel, and was screwed to a nitrogen canister. The barrel was flared out like a funnel to aid spread. Not much range and only on
e shot, but you could maim a room full of people and not puncture any walls.

  Motion. The two below were rising on tiny puffs of compressed air—angling for the access hatch. “They should be on you in a couple of minutes,” Craig called over the intercom.

  He watched the indicator lights as the outer access door cycled open and then closed again. He pumped in air, then waited as Ryan pushed himself back up through the floor hatch.

  One of the newcomers climbed into the corridor after Ryan, and helped guide the box through the hatch. The second newcomer squirmed through and helped angle the box carefully around the turn down the corridor. Only then did they twist their helmets off to reveal a healthy, well-fed man and woman. They had buzzed hair favored by low-g military. The woman had lieutenant’s bars drawn on her cheek.

  “Welcome,” Craig said. He didn’t move from his seat.

  The woman nodded to him. “You’re our pilot?”

  “Civilian pilot, conscripted for this mission. I’ll get you home if there’s a way.”

  “We’ve got a battleship waiting for you on the inner side of the asteroid belt,” Ryan said.

  “There are a couple of Galilean ships in the area,” the woman said. “We have some intel on them, some guesses as to their routes. I’ll upload what we’ve got.”

  “Please do,” Craig said.

  Without another word, the new lieutenant, Ryan, and the new man guided the box into one of the empty holds.

  “All right, then,” Craig called after them. “I’ll be up here plotting a course.”

  Lt. Ryan turned back. “One of us will ride shotgun at all times.”

  “Wouldn’t have it any other way. No one touches the stick, though. We’ll be taking a bumpy ride back in-system.”

  And a bumpy ride it was. Rather than riding the thrusters and traveling in a straight line, the quickest route back home but the method most likely to leave a neat little ion trail for anyone to follow, Craig fired the thrusters hard over and over again, at variable durations, drifting in between for hours or even days. He changed their vector each time. It took a long while, but they gained velocity. More importantly, he didn’t detect any signatures of Galilean ships.