by Rick Partlow
“Like how?” That had been Coronado, a smooth-talking, handsome young officer who seemed like he considered himself God’s gift to whichever sex he favored. I did know the answer to his question, though.
“Our cutters carry dual capacitor banks,” I told him. “Theoretically, we could pull off multiple Transitions in a fairly short period of time.”
“We could use the Transition drive tactically,” Ash mused, eyes unfocused in thought, “not just strategically.”
“What about the Transition lag?” Vinnie asked.
“Not relevant for a jump that short,” I corrected him.
“And speaking of Transition lag,” Ash put in, pointing at Vinnie, “we need to stage out of the edge of whatever our target system is, set up there and then jump in. That would give us more time to get an idea of what we’re facing and it would eliminate the time slippage when we do head farther into the system.”
“These are the sorts of things we’ve been talking about.” Burke sounded encouraged. “If you could get Captain Keating to adopt them…”
I looked at Ash and he shrugged. I could tell what the forlorn tilt to his eyes meant, though.
“I’ll suggest it,” I told Burke and Ngata, shaking my head. “But he’s a Captain and I’m a Lieutenant Junior Grade, and from only meeting the man once, I already have some idea how it’s going to go.”
***
And I was right.
I was the third pilot hauled into Keating’s office, after Ash. Keating’s XO, Commander Ekeke came to the break room and told me in a tone that brooked no argument and wasn’t asking for discussion, to follow her and keep my mouth shut. I made faces at her back as she led me to the office; she was a severe woman with a grim frown that could have been weaponized and declared a war crime with little effort.
Ash was leaving as I was heading in and I saw a barely-controlled anger in the set of his face that I hadn’t seen more than once or twice before in the four years-plus I’d known him. One of those times, he wound up beating the shit out of a Senior Technician who’d tried to assault one of our classmates during a summer survival course. I think he only did it to keep me from getting to the guy, because he knew I’d kill him.
Ash shook his head at me ever-so-slightly as we passed, and I took it as a warning not to push things with Keating. Then he was gone and I was in the Captain’s office. It was the normal sort of office for senior brass, with the rotating holograms of the current President, Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in the holotank; an “I love me” wall full of plaques and certificates and photos and looped videos of Keating with important people; and a small display beside his desk with a photo stream of what I took to be his family. The woman with him in most of the photos was of indeterminate age and could have been his wife, mother or sister for all I knew. I didn’t see any children.
The only unexpected thing in the room was a photo, a print-out of a photo, fastened to the wall with adhesives. It was of a Tahni male, a warrior. I don’t know where he got it, but it was jarring in its incongruity. The Tahni were at once too human and too inhuman. They were much like us: warm-blooded bipedal vertebrates, stereoscopic vision and hearing, bilateral symmetry… Hell, on a dark night, from a good distance, you could mistake one of them for human. Not that I ever wanted to meet one on a dark night.
But closer up, you could see that their faces were flat, their jaws shovel-like and their joints differently arranged than ours. They’d evolved in a similar fashion in a similar ecosystem and it had produced similar results. That’s what most scientists thought. Others had crazy ideas that involved the Tahni being genetically engineered by the Predecessors, but that seemed too far-fetched to me.
However they’d come to be, they were the enemy and had been for a hundred years. Maybe Keating kept the photo there as a reminder.
I’d taken all the surroundings in during the half-second it took me to enter the room and close the door behind me. Once that was done, I snapped to attention and gave him a parade-ground salute because I knew he’d expect it.
“Lt. Hollande reports, sir.”
Keating let me stay there at “present arms” for about ten seconds, cementing my conviction that he was a huge asshole. He tried to stare at me with a hard, intense glare, but his face was saggy and dour and reminded me of an old hound dog my father had kept out at his ranch. Finally, he returned the salute and I was able to release it.
“At ease,” he said grudgingly. He nodded at the chair across his desk. “Sit down.”
I sat stiff-backed, like I was in the Commandant’s office back at the Academy getting dressed down for talking back to an upperclassman, just because I didn’t want to give this prick an excuse.
“Lt. Hollande,” Keating began, “I’ve gone over the recordings from your ship’s logs and I’ve decided that, although you violated official procedures, I will not make a note in your record this time, considering the circumstances.”
I have to admit; I blanked on that one.
“Sir?” I asked, confused.
He frowned, seemingly displeased that I didn’t already know what he was talking about.
“You channeled both capacitor banks into a single shot from your proton cannon, Lieutenant,” he reminded me sternly. “Not only did this violate doctrine as it left you without a charge to enter Transition space, it also risked destroying or damaging your only remaining weapon.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” I acknowledged. I had forgotten about that. It hadn’t seemed important in the wake of the deaths of Weisz and Gomez. “Thank you, sir,” I added because I knew he’d expect that, too.
I kept myself calm by imagining how satisfying it would be to punch him in his stupid face.
“But I’m afraid we will have to go over the events of the battle in some detail, because there were obviously mistakes; people died and an accounting has to be made.”
“Yes, sir,” I said cautiously. It sounded suspiciously like he was going to take responsibility for the poor tactical decisions, but I knew in my heart that was an unlikely scenario. “It seemed to me that the time slippage was a big problem for the mission. We were out there alone for a good while.”
“The Transition lag is unavoidable, unfortunately.” He waved a hand dismissively. “We just have to live with it and make do. My question is, were the losses on this mission solely Lt. Warner’s fault or does Commander Gomez bare some portion of the blame?”
This time I just know my mouth must have dropped open.
“Umm…,” I stuttered. “Lt. Warner? I don’t understand, sir.”
“That’s right, you weren’t in a position to see what occurred with that part of the battle,” he said, smiling slightly as if he were being merciful somehow by granting me that ignorance. “Lt. Warner was in the same position as you and Lt. Carpenter, one-on-one with a single Tahni corvette, but his response was slow and ineffectual and one of their missiles went off close enough to damage his ship. I am of the opinion that it was not damaged badly enough to completely put him out of the fight, but remove himself from the fight he did, nonetheless.”
He steepled his fingers, leaning back in his chair. “His poor decision-making allowed the enemy,” he jerked a thumb at the picture of the Tahni warrior, “to gang up on Lt. Weisz, which brought Commander Gomez in to aid her and led to both of their deaths.”
“I…wasn’t aware of that,” I admitted, a bit more subdued than when I’d walked in. Damn. He was an asshole, but even an asshole is right sometimes.
“The question is,” he went on, “should Commander Gomez have sat back and waited to join the fight, or should she have committed sooner?”
“We’re all new to this, sir,” I said carefully, trying to think how Ash would put it. Shit, Ash just told me not to say anything. “And none of us had much time to train together, so maybe she hadn’t been able to get a feel for who was going to need help.”
“A fair point, Lieutenant,” he conceded. Why was it every time he sai
d something reasonable, I felt disappointed?
“Sir, with regard to us all being new to this kind of warfare…I was wondering if there might be room for a small adjustment in our tactics?” I didn’t wait for permission, just pressed on. “I think we could do away with the Transition lag problem if we all entered the system together, maybe at the edge of the safe zone for a wormhole to form. Then we could send the attack elements in separately and not have to worry about time slippage.”
“That would remove the element of surprise, Lieutenant,” he snapped, and from his tone and the way his face clouded over, I knew Ash had to have brought up the same thing. “The enemy would have time to organize their resistance!”
“That’s possible, sir,” I admitted, “but if we could time it so that our system entry was disguised by one of the outer planets, like an ice giant, we could still come in unseen…”
“You and Lt. Carpenter think you’re pretty hot shit, don’t you?” He interrupted and I was left with my mouth hanging open again. His face had gone from pale to florid in about a tenth of a second, and his dark eyes seemed to have sunk into their sockets.
“Sir?” Was all I could come up with.
“You both think since you got those damned medals, you’re suddenly experts on fighting the Tahni.” His voice was a snarl and he was leaning towards me across the desk like he wanted to hit me and was barely restraining himself, though perhaps that was projection on my part. “Your fucking medals don’t mean shit to me, Hollande, and neither does your mother. I am your commanding officer, and I will tell you what tactics you’re going to use, Lieutenant, and what doctrine you’re going to follow and how you’re going to wipe your ass when you take a shit!”
His voice seemed to be rising in volume with each word, and by the end, he was nearly shouting.
“And your next words had better be ‘clear, sir,’ or you’ll be flying bulk food shipments between here and the moon base for the rest of your fucking career!”
I stared at him, carefully keeping my face neutral. I don’t think I ever wanted to kill anyone, even the Tahni, as much as I wanted to kill him at that moment.
“Clear, sir,” I said, enunciating the words very carefully.
“Do you know what you are, Lieutenant?” He stood up and walked around the desk, staring down at me. At first, I thought what I saw in his eyes was fury, but after a moment, I decided it might have been desperation. “Do you know what all of us here are?”
“No, sir,” I rasped.
“We’re fucking expendable.” His face seemed to fall at that, and I wondered how much of what I’d seen was him being an asshole, and how much was him just being desperately afraid. He slumped back into his chair and stared at the wall.
“Get the hell out of my office.”
I stood to attention, did an about-face and walked out. Commander Ekeke was waiting there with Vinnie and wearing a disapproving scowl. Apparently, the Captain’s office door wasn’t soundproofed. I stalked back to the break room and found the others still gathered there, except Burke and Ngata, who had made themselves scarce. Every eye turned to look at me. Ash seemed worried, and he jumped up when he saw me.
“How’d it go?”
I breathed out a sigh and leaned into him, feeling incredibly tired.
“We’re so fucked.”
Chapter Nine
For reasons that I’d never really been able to understand on an intuitive level, despite the attempts of multiple physics instructors to explain them, the Teller-Fox warp field can be used to create artificial gravity, but only in T-space. There’s something about the interaction between the field and whatever Transition space is that makes it possible, and if I can’t understand it, I can at least appreciate the hell out of it because I hate zero gravity. My head is always stuffed up, my stomach is always churning and the food never tastes right.
The only good thing about zero g is that it’s easy to sleep, and I could have used some of that. I was tossing and turning in the tiny, fold-down cot in my dollhouse-sized cabin on the Huntress, too keyed up to sleep and too bored to get up.
“Jesus,” I moaned, finally giving up and throwing off the covers.
I checked my ‘link and saw that we were scheduled to Transition in about an hour anyway. The cot folded neatly into the bulkhead, making the cabin seem about twice as large, but also making it nearly useless. I grabbed a towel from the cabinet built into the bulkhead above the cot and pulled open the hatch.
Chief Burke was sitting at the galley table, already in her flight suit, minus the helmet, sipping sedately at a steaming cup of tea. She didn’t drink coffee, which I thought was idiosyncratic for a career NCO. Mom once said that the military runs on coffee on-duty and beer off-duty.
“Good morning, Lieutenant,” Burke said. “Sleep good?”
“Slept like a baby,” I muttered. “By which I mean I was up every three hours crying and pissing myself.”
She surprised me by laughing at that.
“When you’ve been in the military as long as I have,” she said, “you learn to look at the bright side of things. For instance, we only have seventy hours in T-space this time.”
I grunted noncommittally, pushing open the hatch to the head and hanging my towel on the hook just inside.
“And they did change things a little,” she reminded me. “We’re all Transitioning together, at least.”
“Right on top of the target,” I agreed. “But yeah, at least we won’t be leaving the suppression squadron with their bare asses hanging in the wind again.”
Which was nice since Ash and me were in the suppression squadron again. It was a full squadron this time, and we had a new squadron leader, Lt. Commander Hideyo, who’d been transferred in from another wing to take over. I’d talked to him once, for a grand total of ten minutes, before we’d had to leave on our next mission. He’d seemed pleasant and nervous and totally unprepared mentally to deal with the situation.
This one was another of the staging systems the Tahni had used for the attack on Mars, a Transition-line hub with a habitable moon where they’d established both an orbital station and a ground base for growing food and shipping water. Intelligence indicated they’d left a small contingent of corvettes behind to secure the system, which meant that they intended to use it again. We couldn’t let them do that, of course, so we were going to stop them in the least competent way possible.
Our primary target was the orbital station, and the strategy was to overload their defenses by launching one missile strike after another. As each ship launched, they’d theoretically Transition back out to the edge of the system, and the suppression squadron would, again, try to keep them too busy to shoot down the missiles. Once the orbital station was destroyed, our secondary objective was to take out any ships stationed there and, to that end, the ships that had launched their missiles were supposed to Transition back closer and re-engage.
To me, it seemed at once needlessly complicated and overly simplistic.
I pushed the hatch shut behind me and began stripping off my shipware shorts and T-shirt, trying to ignore the mirror on the wall opposite the shower closet. It drew my eye against my will, and I noticed that my hair was getting longer; I needed to have it trimmed around the ‘face jacks again. Maybe I could do it on the way back, if we didn’t die. With it getting near shoulder length, I looked more like Mom than I was comfortable with. She’d given me the brown hair, and the chin and the cheekbones, but I’d got the blue eyes and short nose from my father. That and a lifetime’s worth of neuroses, according to my last therapist.
I was getting skinny. I needed to make some time to hit the gym. I’d been spending too much time in simulators or on board this boat lately, and I was beginning to look like a half-starved teenager. I snorted at my own thoughts as I turned the water on in the shower stall.
It's not like I was in the Recon Marines or anything; I didn’t need to arm-wrestle the Tahni, just fly rings around them. But I didn’t like being weak.
I felt like I’d spent too much of my youth being weak.
The water was warm and the pressure was good, which sort of made up for the fact that the shower was about the size of a footlocker. I battled a tinge of claustrophobia and stayed in longer than usual, and still felt like I couldn’t get all my nooks and crannies clean. The head was full of steam and the fan couldn’t keep up with it, so I yanked the hatch open and sucked in a lungful of cool air as I wrapped the towel around myself.
Burke was already in the cockpit, so I walked back to the utility bay and pulled my flight suit out of the locker. We didn’t bother with them in T-space, since if you had a catastrophic failure here, you wouldn’t have to worry about surviving a vacuum; you’d simply cease to exist. I took my time, making sure the suit was tight in the right places and not pinching anything painful, then I pulled the gloves on, grabbed my helmet and headed back up the passageway.
Burke sat silent, waiting for me to strap into the pilot’s seat. I powered the acceleration couch around to face front, then began unspooling the interface cable from my helmet, carefully brushing aside my hair before I plugged into the jacks.
“You and Lt. Carpenter,” she said to me, just as I was getting ready to put my helmet on, “you two are…involved?”
I eyed her sidelong. I didn’t exactly have anything to hide, since I wasn’t breaking any rules, but it bothered me that she’d spotted it. I thought we’d been discreet.
“That doesn’t seem like an appropriate question for an NCO to be asking an officer,” I pointed out.
She rolled her eyes at that. “Do you think you two can make it work?”
“Would it surprise you to know I haven’t thought that far ahead, Chief?” I asked her, slipping on my helmet.
“Not a bit, ma’am,” she assured me, her voice muffled.
I laughed inside the hollow stillness as I sealed the neck yoke, then plugged the exterior cables into the control console. Knowledge assailed my consciousness and I made an effort to hold it back, to not get lost inside it yet. I didn’t want to be fully engaged with the interface during the Transition this time.