Cloak of War

by Casey Calouette

  I picture the AI like an old Turkish boxer past his prime that constantly chews on an unlit cigar and has a massive bushy mustache that contains his wisdom. Silly maybe, but it’s hard to believe in an iron box.

  The navy tried to automate ships, and for the simple ones they still do, but there’s only so much a robot can handle. Recon mission? Send in a robot. Combat duties with damage and the need to survive? Best use humans. So instead, the AI is our little commander. He tells us where to go and what to do and lets us figure it out.

  Hallverson presses a thumb, then Yao, then me.

  The orders screen pops up with a set of simple instructions. All I can see is a portion of a star map rendered in two dimensions with a set of lines marking our path.

  Hallverson sniffs and grabs the tablet with both hands as if it’s heavy to hold.

  Yao sets down his drink. He can see it better than I. His fingers shake, and the blood drains from his face.

  “Well,” Hallverson says. He looks up and runs his fingers over three-day stubble. “This is unexpected.”

  “Sir?”

  Hallverson doesn’t respond for a second. “We’re going deep. Yao, get with Engineering, do a full work up on the drive. Prep for long-running cloak. We’ll do it like we did last time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Yao says in a whisper. He stands and almost runs from the room.

  “Karl. We’ve been ordered to attack an iridium production facility deep inside Tyrolean space. It’s not Tyrol Prime, but it’s damn close. We’ll have one more rendezvous for supplies, and then we take the back door.”

  No one has struck near Tyrol Prime in a very long time. Every jump closer to the Tyrolean home worlds is better protected. At a certain point, it becomes pure suicide, even for a cloaking ship. Eventually, someone will catch us at a bounce and corral us with weapons fire.

  “Prepare to take on supplies and do a thorough rundown with Maintenance. Now go.”

  I stand and grab Yao’s glass. He hadn’t finished his entire drink, and I need just a bit of liquid courage about now. It doesn’t burn this time when I drink it.

  “And, Mr. Jager, there is no time for indecision where we’re going. Either do as I say, or get the hell off my ship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now get out and lock the door. I feel a headache coming on.”

  As I leave, I realize what he said. The only way off is as a dead man.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  For the next four days, the captain is laid up in his quarters. His headache has turned into a full-blown migraine that leaves him curled into a ball in the darkness. The entire ship talks in whispers and walks on tiptoes. No one dares to bring his wrath.

  Yao and I take six-hour watches. In those long, quiet watches, I have plenty of time to think. The stress is obviously getting to Hallverson. Every time he has a kill or a new mission, his “episodes” return. At any moment I expect to hear him shout and bellow for his dead children.

  Dr. Mohammad makes his vigil at the captain’s door. He tries to look like a concerned medic, but I see the bulge in his medkit that can only be a stun gun.

  Henna is right. This ship is run by a madman and staffed by the dead. They just don’t know it yet. But I can’t bring myself to abandon them. As time goes by, I convince myself that it just might be me that saves them all. What if I am the voice of reason and logic? What if I’m the one who helps them all survive? What if they have hope instead of anguish?

  It gives me a new sense of purpose. I can’t argue every order with Hallverson, but maybe if I make a stand on the right ones, we’ll get out of this alive. So here I am, the angel, the watchful spirit, the voice of logic.

  Now is the time to change all of this. Hallverson is down in one his episodes. If ever I can convince them they have lives to live, this is it. But how?

  First, I find Hartford. His concern for the crew is evident; whenever someone is particularly down, he will bring them something special from the galley. He cares.

  “Hartford,” I say as I sit on the footrest next to his bunk.

  He looks up over his spectacles. Wrinkles crease into a smile. “Mr. Jager. What brings you to my fine abode?”

  “I need your help.”

  “Anything.” His eyes almost smile.

  “Hartford, everyone here is living a perpetual nightmare, always remembering the past. The only thought for the future is revenge. I want to give them hope, show them that there’s more to life than just this. They can serve with honor and distinction, not guilt and anger.”

  Hartford’s smile fades, and he looks like an old man again. His eyes drift. I see my chance slipping away.

  “Hartford, you tend to the crew, see that they can function. We’re a family, right?” I’m almost pleading. “Isn’t it time to get past revenge?”

  Hartford sighs and looks troubled. “I…I signed on to die once. The only thing that kept me going was…well, keeping this crew going. But…I…I suppose you’re right. It’s been five years now since…”

  His voice chokes up a bit. One hand comes up to his face. He straightens his spectacles and wipes a tear at the same moment.

  I feel it. He’s coming back from the edge, stepping away from the ledge. He sobs twice and nods, a mourning smile on his old man’s face. “I’ll speak with some others. But…why, Mr. Jager? Why this change?”

  “So we can all get out of this alive and get on with our lives. You don’t have to throw your life away. You can do more alive than dead.”

  And so we set off to speak with some others. Raj is easy enough, as is Katzen. They went along, because…well, it was their life. There seemed to be no alternatives to them. And in reality, I doubt Captain Hallverson ever gave them alternatives. It is his will.

  I’m nervous to speak with Yao or Colby. Yao I figure will be the closest one to Hallverson, so instead I find Colby.

  She’s half-asleep in the tiny rear galley, sipping on a cup of thin coffee.

  “Colby, got a moment?”

  Colby doesn’t open her eyes. A slight smile cracks on her face. “You’re fucking up, Jager. This isn’t your ship. You’re a guest at a funeral.”

  I took a misstep and walked right into that punch. She wears a bitter smile on her face that borders on smug.

  “Maybe it’s time to end the funeral and get on with living. My uncle said every funeral is an excuse for a good drunk.”

  She shakes her head slowly, brown hair gliding across her forehead. “What do you get out of it, huh? What do you care about us?”

  Her tone is beyond cynical. How do you argue with that sort of logic? So I go the cynical route.

  “I want to get out of this alive, not as a martyr. You can shit on your own life, but don’t shit on mine.”

  She opens her almond-brown eyes. “Don’t shit on my revenge.”

  “I—”

  She stands and pushes me out of the way. “Once the captain wakes up, he’s going call this a mutiny.”

  “I’m giving them hope.”

  Colby laughs a dry laugh. She turns and walks back into Engineering.

  And that is the range that Hartford and I find. Some people seem eager, ready, like all they need is the encouragement, while others give us nothing but bile. Word’s out on the ship. Yao finds me and gives me a shrug and a faint smile. He goes where he is told. Yao is no Captain Hallverson.

  The ship starts to feel different. Conversation is back. The gray cloud that seemed to hover over the crew finally starts to break.

  Our course takes us away from the shipping lanes and into deep space. Not far off, but far enough to keep us away from prying sensors. Already we’ve gone through one-fifth of our cloaking gas. We’ll need to ration it to get where we’re going.

  It’d be easy if we could just transit deep space the whole way, but it’s much more efficient to bounce between stars than to try and traverse the curve between gravity wells. Think of it like climbing one hill and then going down another. If you stay in deep s
pace, you basically ski on moguls the whole way. Up-down-up-down. You’d burn through a metric shitload of reaction mass, and it’d take forever.

  On the fourth day, Hallverson comes out of his quarters and takes over Yao’s watch. When I come onto the bridge, I’m more than a little surprised. A part of me wants to tell him what I’ve done, that I’m bringing hope to his crew. If anything, they’ll function better.

  “Are we ready for transfer?” Hallverson says, his voice hoarse. From the look on his face, he hasn’t slept in four days.

  “Yes, sir.” Of course we are, but what exactly we’ll transfer I don’t know. Yao just keeps telling me to watch and see. “What are we transferring, sir?”

  Hallverson yawns and nuzzles into his chair. “Torpedoes, gas, supplies.”

  “From who?”

  “Another Orca. Now sound the alarm. We’ll be at the rendezvous on the next bounce.”

  I stay on the bridge, and the ship goes to battle stations. This time it goes right: there’s a briefing of the chiefs, a discussion on methods, and word passed on what to expect.

  “No second-guessing my orders, Mr. Jager. Do you understand?” Hallverson says. He looks at me with sullen eyes.

  Colby comes onto the bridge in a dirty spacesuit. Henna follows a moment after in a thermally shielded radiation suit. Yao takes his station last. The bridge is so tight that a sardine wouldn’t fit.

  We bounce on Hallverson’s call. The Orca is about in the middle of nowhere. The temperature display shows almost absolute zero. The only things on scan are a few stray bits of deep space hydrogen.

  “Are we early?” I ask.

  Hallverson straightens himself up. A little grin grows on one side of his face. “Star occlusion scan now.”

  Astrogation and Sensors coordinate, and they run the visual display through the AI. The goal is to match up the stars we see with what we should see.

  “Nothing, sir. Scan is clear,” Raj replies.

  “Hmm. Where are you, Kat?” Hallverson says to himself. “The tsar is going to miss you.”

  “Sir?”

  “Baroness Ekaterina Pishkov the Second of the Tsarist Combine. Was supposed to marry the tsar. Or that was the rumor last time I heard.”

  I peer up at the display along with Hallverson. The Tsarist Combine is the breadbasket of the human worlds and excels in bombardments and invasions. They aren’t known to be starship tacticians.

  “They have Orcas?”

  Hallverson nods slowly. “I believe all of the member states do. Except Salem, that is.”

  Yao doesn’t say anything. I give him a glance to see his emotion. Nothing. Before the war with the Tyroleans started, Salem was quite content to let the rest of humanity go on its way while they focused on their own profits. Rumor is they were paid to stay out of the war by the Tyroleans and only joined when the rest of the ConFed paid them.

  “Occlusion!” Raj calls out. Yao leans over and verifies.

  Hallverson grins. “Ping them with the laser please, Mr. Katzen. Ten percent burst.”

  The laser zips out, and the more volatile bits of cloaking gas burst into a green phosphorescence. A massive chunk of garbage is revealed off our port bow. Seconds later, an Orca-class ship decloaks a kilometer off our starboard bow.

  Clever girl.

  A comms request comes in. “Take it,” Hallverson grumbles.

  A woman’s face comes on the screen. Her raven-black hair is tied back tight and accentuates the sharp lines of her face. Her cheeks and chin are all sharp like granite, cut by a sculptor. The top of her uniform is unbuttoned and shows a rather ample bosom.

  “Captain Hallverson, you’re not dead yet?” Her voice has a silky sound punctuated with a Russian accent.

  “Captain Pishkov. The reports of your wedding are greatly exaggerated,” Hallverson replies with a cocky smile.

  “If only the tsar was that lucky. For you, we have eight torpedoes, two thousand liters of cloaking gas, and enough borscht to keep your plumbing happy.”

  “How kind of you,” Magnus says with a mock bow. “Have you seen the Queen?”

  “Magnus, you still hunt for that old ghost? It’ll be the death of you.”

  “But have you seen her?” Hallverson says.

  “No.” Ekaterina’s eyes look almost hurt. “Have you anything to transfer to us?”

  “We’ll come alongside. Prepare to transfer please, Captain Pishkov.”

  The Orca takes up station twenty-five meters off the side of the Pishkov’s ship, Donets. Henna and Colby leave the bridge to supervise the transfer. The Tsarist Combine ship is almost identical to ours except it bears the ducal crest of the Tokalov family. It looks to be in even rougher shape than our ship was before the refit.

  Hallverson talks shop with Captain Pishkov.

  “We were with the Bengal on our way out, but she got caught. Hunting has been mixed, Magnus. They’re holding tight to that border. The only traffic is headed after that fleet.”

  “We saw it. They’re chasing Roberta.”

  “Godspeed to her,” Pishkov says and crosses herself in the old Orthodox manner.

  Colby calls the bridge. “We’re topped off. Torpedoes are being stowed, reactor transfer is complete.”

  Hallverson gives a nod to Pishkov. “Thank you.”

  Pishkov laughs. “Now I can go home. Thank you!”

  “Goodbye, Baroness.”

  “Dosvedanya, Magnus.”

  The moment the comms console closes, Hallverson drops his eyes and seems about to fall asleep. He stands on shaky legs. I take a step closer, but he waves me off. “Send for the doctor and continue on our course. Halt fifty AUs from the next system.”

  Hallverson shambles off the bridge.

  Yao takes position at the captain’s chair but still doesn’t sit. He speaks in a slow, steady voice, like someone praying or delivering a eulogy. “They hold the border with minefields, energy towers, ablative launchers, clouds of active laser drones, pickets of second-rate destroyers and hunter killers. The last time we went this far, eight Orcas went in. We were the only ones to get out.”

  I look up at the astrogation chart. A narrow ribbon winds its way into the heart of Tyrolean space. That is our path. At every step, we’ll have to pray that our wits and our skills are enough.

  From this point on, we are no longer the hunter.

  We are the hunted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  We end up taking cover in the shadow of a chunk of ice the size of a boxing stadium. It’s just on the edge of where a warship would bounce into a system. Luckily for us, it’s also far enough out to offer some cover along with an opportunity to watch and study without using up more gas.

  Even at fifty astronomical units out, we can tell that this system is the edge of the Tyrolean frontier. A dozen large defensive structures are obvious. Bounce signatures register from all over the system. It is actively patrolled, well defended, and, worst of all, filled with minefields. They don’t need to be much to puncture our hull; a small explosive charge is all it will take.

  Those nasty minefields are mostly just balls of iron fabricated from nearby asteroids. Cast enough about and every so often toss in an explosive charge. All they have to do is wipe off the sauce, and then we’re done.

  “Impressive,” Colby mutters as she leaves the bridge.

  I have to agree with her. We’ve taken to remaining on combat watches as we have no idea when we’ll be engaged. The longer we sit, the better the data quality. But the longer we sit, the more the dread sets in. We have to go through that mess.

  Hartford enters the bridge and stands at my side. His fatherly figure exudes a calming effect. “Briefing in ten minutes, Mr. Jager.”

  “Thank you,” I reply. I can smell the borscht on him.

  The Tsarist Combine crew wasn’t kidding. They’d sent over all manner of goodies. Red-and-white candies and little cakes, along with the borscht and, comically, enough a half-meter-tall dancing robotic bear. It teeters down
the hall drunkenly and says random phrases in Russian. No one knows what the hell it’s saying.

  Raj and Katzen take turns telling bad jokes. Not funny, not vulgar, just bad.

  “Knock knock,” Raj says.

  “Who’s there?” Katzen replies back. A smile grows on his chubby cheeks.

  “A broken pencil.”

  “Broken pencil who?”

  Raj shakes her head and frowns. “Never mind, it’s pointless.”

  Katzen groans.

  “How can your jokes be so terribly bad?” I say to the pair.

  Raj looks up as if deeply offended and places a hand on her chest. “Your words stab so sharply, sir.”

  Katzen grins. “Well, you get cooped up together and kind of run out of jokes. I mean, sometimes it’s a good joke.”

  “Or not,” I mumble.

  “It’s the stress, you know,” Raj says. She runs his hands through hier dark hair. There is a nervous smile that drifts away.

  “The crew of the Orca, nervous? Really?” I say in a tone of mock jest. “You guys are fearless.”

  Katzen looks back to the weapons console.

  Raj shrugs. “We haven’t been this deep in a long time.”

  I leave it at that as I sense the tone going to a dark place. They are surprisingly cheerful for a shipload of protosuicides. How many of them would just go on with their lives and recover if only given a chance? I’m sure revenge seems like one hell of an idea, but you can’t live like that forever.

  A tone sounds on the intercom, summoning me to the captain’s quarters. I leave Katzen in command.

  The captain’s quarters are extra tight. On one side sit Yao and Colby, with Henna, Sebic, and Hauptmann on the other. Everyone tries to scoot over, but there isn’t room to sit.

  “Just stand,” Captain Hallverson says without looking up from his console.

  I clasp my hands behind my back and wait. There isn’t any conversation going on, anyway. Colby looks cocky as ever. Henna seems out of place, like she’s wedged into a situation she doesn’t like. Sebic and Hauptmann both rest with their eyes closed.