“Roger that, Flame. This is Unfortunate Orchard, out.”
Gabby turned off the communicator and dropped it in a pocket. She stood and made for the nearest roof access door. When she got there, she cracked the door and peeked inside. Pythan soldiers walked by at the bottom of the stairs. She closed the door quietly and let out her breath. Another fine mess.
She moved the next door and found it locked. Gabby turned to move on when she heard grinding footsteps on the roof’s rough surface. She peeked around the edge of the riser and saw Harold Beemer. He was obviously trying to move quietly based on his almost comical way of walking, but he was failing at his task.
She watched him long enough to gauge which way he was going. Gabby backed away, keeping the riser between Beemer and herself. I had better move toward the front of the building, because I have a feeling I’m not going to make it to the shelter before show time.
She looked for something substantial to use for cover. A large air conditioning unit was not far away and she hoped it would suffice. She moved toward it, keeping an eye on the time.
She could hear Beemer, but he was still out of sight. She made it to the AC unit and went around the corner, putting it between her and the beam control building.
“I see you!” Beemer yelled. “Your ass is—”
Huge chuffs came from the neighboring building as mag gun slugs bore into the concrete roof and dug deep into the interior. Soon after came the shrieking freight train sound of the slugs.
They fired penetrating slugs, she thought. Any time now they will—
Explosions rumbled from the inside of the beam control building, shaking the buildings nearby. The building began to crumble when more slugs tore into the failing structure. More explosions sounded, the detonations hurling large pieces of debris skyward. An errant slug hit the administration building and exploded.
Gabby wrapped her arms around her head and hoped the admin building wouldn’t collapse. Dust blanketed the roof. She slowly stood and saw her communicator had dislodged itself from her pocket during the strike. She opened it and found it was dead. As the dust cleared she saw the beam control building was all but destroyed and the admin building had a large hole in the roof.
“You bitch,” Beemer said with a laugh. “You really pulled one off, didn’t you.”
Gabby knelt behind the AC unit and tried to locate Beemer. She could hear him walking and knew he was not far off. She stayed low and moved to keep the air conditioner between them.
“I know what you were doing. You know what the Pythans will do to you if they find out? I’ve got you cold. That pretty little ass of yours is mine, and I have a few ideas in mind about what we can do with it.”
Gabby listened to Beemer’s footsteps on the gritty surface of the rooftop. He was getting closer. She moved to the edge of the collapsed roof and hoped it would hold.
“I saw you talking with Carla Suzuki. I knew something was up. So I came up here. She’ll get chopped with you if you don’t play along.”
Gabby kept moving, skirting the edge of the broken roof until she came to a cluster of commo units. She slid between two of them and waited, listening. She reached up to her hair and removed the hairpin Levine made for her.
“Come out, Baby-cakes. I thought there was something odd about you from the get-go, but I guess I got distracted by that bod of yours. Get tore up by the Pythans, or become close personal friends with me. Those are the only choices you got.”
Beemer passed her hiding place, just a meter away looking the opposite direction. She stepped toward him, arcing her right arm toward his head, the grit under her feet making a light grinding noise. Beemer turned toward her at the sound and saw the strike coming at him. He started to pull away while bringing an arm up in defense, but it was too late.
Gabby’s attack struck him in the side of the head. His face went slack and as he fell, the weight of his body pulled the polycarb spike from her hand. He fell onto his side with the handle of the spike protruding from his head just above the ear.
“There’s another choice, Beemer,” she said.
Another fine mess, Gabby. She smiled without making a sound as an idea crossed her mind. I’m head of housekeeping, I know how to take care of a mess.
She pulled her weapon from Beemer’s head, then rolled his body to the edge of the collapsed roof and pushed it over. She stood and walked along the edge to a portion of the roof that sloped inward onto the fifth floor and slid down.
From somewhere not far away she heard a yell. “The roof, find a way to the roof. Someone targeted our sites and the broadcast we detected had to have come from there.”
They’re looking for the person who broadcast from here. Maybe they find the person responsible, maybe not.
A short walk led her to Beemer’s body, which had landed in a heavily damaged and debris littered hallway, the main hall on the fifth floor. Some of the masonry work from the roof rested next to him, in a crumbling but still somewhat intact state. She pushed the masonry over onto the body and it fell apart, a mortar-covered piece of reinforcing rod rolling free. She picked up the rod and placed the end of it against the opening of the wound channel her spike had caused. She grimaced and pushed until the rod would move no more.
Gabby took the broken communicator from her pocket and placed it next to Beemer’s hand, then scooped up several handfuls of dust and tossed each of them over the body and communicator.
She stepped back and looked at her handiwork, then cautiously made her way down the hall hoping to get by the soldiers and make her way to the ground floor. When she came to the administrator’s office she stepped inside to listen in an attempt to locate the soldiers. Much of the wall was down, exposing the office to the hall. She saw Hiro Vashnik on the floor next to his desk and overturned chair. Ceiling panels and a light fixture lay on top of him. She went to him, pulled the debris away and saw he was alive, but bleeding from a wound on the top of his head.
She ran to the bathroom and retrieved a clean towel, and as she knelt next to Vashnik she heard the sound of people rushing down the hall.
“Find the traitor, find him.” Gabby recognized the voice of Archcolonel Tadashi.
“Is someone there?” she yelled in Pythan. “Administrator Vashnik is injured.”
A pair of soldiers entered the room and trained their weapons on her. They found her with the towel pressed to the wound on Vashnik’s head.
Tadashi entered, carrying a sidearm. “How badly is he hurt?”
“I don’t know, Archcolonel. He is unconscious and is bleeding.” Gabby saw General Pitrushkin and other soldiers rush by in the hall behind Tadashi.
“We will send for a medic. What are you doing here?”
“I am trying to help Mr. Vashnik.”
“Why are you not in a shelter?”
“I was going there when the building shook. I wanted to account for all of my section. There were still many people in the halls and I worried there may be injured. Someone said the administrator was missing, so I used the stairs and made my way here.”
“Did you see anyone else up here?”
She shook her head. “I saw some at the far end of the hall when I came up, but I couldn’t see who they were. Is there a problem?”
“Yes, but nothing you need concern yourself with.”
General Pitrushkin walked in the room carrying Gabby’s broken communicator. “There is a problem you might concern yourself with, Archcolonel Tadashi.”
Tadashi looked at the general. “Where did you find that?”
“That is what I would like to discuss with you.”
-(o)-
Part Two: Pushing Back
-(o)-
Interlude
Excerpt from: Straight Talk with Armando Rancon, an interview with General David Fancher.
. . .
“To put it simply, Armando, we’ve got the tech, they’ve got the numbers,” General Fancher said.
“That sounds catchy, but what does
it mean, general?”
“It means we can win, if.”
“If? If what?”
“If we can perform at a high enough level. Our tech is better, more advanced, than theirs by a fair margin. We are fighting on our turf, so the Pythans are forced to bring their kit farther than us. That’s all to our advantage, but as I said, they have the numbers, and that means something. It—”
“And that something is?”
“I was coming to that,” the general said with visible irritation. “It means they can grind us down if we fail to perform at a level that approaches our best. We think we can kill them efficiently enough to negate their number advantage. They think they can bury us before we do that.”
“So time will tell who is right?”
“That’s a bit simplistic, but true enough. Ultimately, it is who, as a group, wants it more. Can our people in the Coalition Forces do what is necessary to win? My bet is they can, and they will.”
“How can you know that, General?”
“I don’t know it. I am not a prophet. I believe it. I believe it because we must win. Our men and women in uniform know we must win. That is the only acceptable option.”
-(o)-
Among the high tech equipment the Coalition had at their disposal was the CFSSF Freya HMC-33. The Freya was a new vehicle of war for the battle in space. A new design in the Cuirassier class of Heavy Missile Carriers, the Freya was the largest, most powerful, most defensible, and most heavily armed vehicle the Coalition had ever produced.
While several sister vehicles were being rushed to completion, the Freya was just entering trials when the Pythan invasion occurred and would be the first to enter service, ready or not.
. . .
The Fat Lady
She was called the Freya. Officially the CFSSF Freya HMC-33. The Freya class Cuirassier Heavy Missile Carriers were brand-spanking new and the Freya was still undergoing testing when the war with the Pythans started. Space Forces chose to put her into service before the trials were completed.
A sizable portion of the Freya’s crew was new to the Space Forces, just out of basic, which was common with new vehicles. Most of us experienced crew were brought in from other duty positions, and other than senior leaders, we all went through crew training again, no matter how much experience or talent some of us might have had. Being selected to crew a new vehicle was an honor. It meant Space Forces viewed those of us chosen as competent and considered us as good crewmates. When selected, you had the option of turning it down, and there were compelling reasons someone might do so: friends, family, happiness in a current position, and things like that, but the chance to serve on a ride like the Freya made the decision easy for most of us.
The idea behind retraining experienced personnel was a sound one. We would act as mentors and shepherds for the new troops, and make their training easier and faster. For those of us that had already been through this once or more it could be boring at times, but it helped us to get to know our fellow crew and sometimes it didn’t hurt to get a refresher course on some training. Besides, the Freya had a lot of gear nobody had ever seen before and that was something we all had to come to grips with.
Many of the newbs had never been to space until they made the trip to Paladium for training. Space travel was a routine practice, something most of us took for granted, even though hardly anyone understood how it actually worked.
Basic space travel was not much different from most other forms of standard travel. If a person wanted to get from point A to point B, you could walk a trail or drive on a roadway on land, take a boat across water, or fly a plane through the air. In space, you could take a spaceship through the navigation lane system if you wanted to go from a planet in one system to one in another system, or even cross all of Coalition space in a month or so. But if you wanted to travel long distances through space rapidly, to cross Coalition space immediately, or make trips to points requiring months or years of conventional space flight, you had to use a Long Distance Transit Gate.
Most experienced space travelers have never used LDTGs. The navigation lane system works fine for them, but Space Forces vehicles use them often, often enough that it became routine for those of us that served aboard space vehicles. It was common enough that most of us didn’t question how it all worked, and even if we had, we wouldn’t really understand it. Still, they made an effort during training to drill it into our heads.
When they would introduce the concept to trainees, they’d run out this doctor that headed up a theoretical research team on Paladium, in what field of study I could only guess. The rumor was he liked teaching young people, but I think he just liked to freak them out a little bit.
“It’s like drawing a point at opposite ends of a sheet of paper,” he’d say about jumping. “The shortest distance between them is a straight line, but that takes time to travel down that line if you wanted to transit from point to point, say get from point A to point B, where the points are at opposite ends of the paper. A faster way is to fold the paper so the two points touch, shortening the distance to next to nothing, effectively making A and B directly adjacent to one another for a moment so a vehicle moves from one to the other.
“That is fine in theory. Theory is not the real universe however, no matter how much we in research wish it were. In reality, we cannot be that precise. What we do now is more like wadding the paper up into a ball. Both points are closer than they are when the paper is flat, but we don’t know how close, or exactly where they are in the wad of paper. The longer the jump, the larger the piece of paper, and the larger the margin of error. That is why the LDTG operators set the coordinates for jumps to known points in open space, like the pioneers of space flight millennia ago did with returning space capsules landing in an ocean or on a steppe. It provides a margin of safety.
“By doing it this way, vehicles don’t pop up inside a planet, or an asteroid, or another vehicle… at least it rarely occurs,” he’d say with a twinkle in his eye. “Besides, on those rare occasions when it does happen I am sure the end is most sudden. I’d guess that it hardly hurts at all.”
I never pretended to understand how it all worked. I was a Missile Targeting Specialist, that was our official job description, but most everyone called us targeteers. Other than riding in a space vehicle, we didn’t deal with the details of space travel except the kind that would get our missiles onto a target.
What I did know was that in practice it seemed pretty simple. The operators of the Long Distance Transit Gate would set the coordinates before a vehicle flew into the hole. They would signal when they were ready, then the vehicle would move into the Jump Hole and an instant later they’d show up somewhere in the neighborhood of the spot they were aiming for.
For us targeteers, that was all we cared about: get us where we need to be and let us go to work.
The Freya was the first of her kind, and the only one anywhere near ready to go to war. Under normal conditions, a vehicle just out of a construction station would have several months of static trials and tests followed by many more months of space shakedowns, but the Pythan attack required an increase in the pace of some of those tests and trials and the outright elimination of others.
Our training was nearing its end when the war started, and we were required to step things up as well.
For those of us who worked in the missile field, our mission was the same as it was on any other missile-equipped vehicle. There were some differences of course. The missile bay crews had some new tackle and gear to manhandle missiles from magazine to launch tube. The launch tubes on the Freya were supposed to be absolutely recoilless when the missiles were fired and have little or no effect upon Freya save for the change in mass, but the launchers were trickier to load and would require more effort and expertise from the loading crews. For we who were targeteers, we had a new console to learn.
-(o)-
For most of the training cycle, each occupational specialty trained separately, usually at a
training site devoted to each job or field.
Missile crew was no different. Since the Freya had so much new gear, they had to create a completely new area devoted to the new stuff, and just as we would be the first soldiers to crew the new class of heavy missile carrier, we were the first to use the new facilities. Like all things new, there were bugs to work out, with both the training center and the Freya herself.
One of our training NCO’s liked to say, “Beams got their uses, don’t get me wrong. Sewer workers, theater ushers, folks like that use beams. They’re decent enough people, but they ain’t meat eaters like missile crew. Missile troops steal the prom queen from the star quarterback. They send fire-belching, death-dealing destruction downrange. They win wars in space. Every job in the Space Forces exists to help us missile troops do our job. So when you walk, wherever you walk, you walk proud.”
He was right. Getting missiles into battle and using them to destroy enemy vehicles was the whole point of Space Forces, well that and getting Land Forces where they needed to go. That’s not to say there were not other important functions for other classes of vehicles, but heavy missile carriers were built to win battles—and wars—in space.
Missile crew had a reputation for being a little cocky. That was true enough. We were confident in our abilities and realized the importance of our specialty. Cockiness went with it. Which would you prefer to defend your planet, a confident missile crew or a pensive, I’m-not-sure-I-can-handle-it crew?
At one time, it was thought beam weapons would be the dominant weapon on the battlefield, whether that battlefield were in space or planetside. During the first war with the Pythans, beams were heavily used alongside missiles, but that was three hundred years ago. Missiles proved to Coalition command to be both the more reliable and effective system. Maybe someday, when someone finds some technological breakthrough to make beams powerful enough, reliable enough, and energy efficient enough to overcome the Goireas field, Wilder gel, and the current hull armor, they’ll return and achieve that hoped-for dominance, but by then there will likely be other counters as well.
Conflict: The Pythan War, Invasion Page 18