Columbus Day (Expeditionary Force Book 1)

by Craig Alanson

  Rule Number Five was, simply put, no dropping rocks. No steering asteroids or comets so they impacted an inhabitable planet. This also meant no taking even a small rock, accelerating it to relativistic speed, and slamming it into a planet. Any planet with a decent population had systems that could detect and deflect rocks that were naturally on an impact course anyway, the rule was to prevent a combatant from saturating those defenses, or encasing a high-speed rock in a stealth field. What, you make ask, about railguns? Spaceships routinely used railguns to accelerate kinetic rounds up to relativistic speeds, and railguns were used for both space combat and planetary strikes. The key to using railguns for planetary bombardment was the effect on the planet; you had to limit the energy yield of a single kinetic impactor to less than a megatons, and you couldn't use so many railgun strikes that you affected the planet's climate. Pounding a planet with a lot of railguns could throw a thick dust cloud into the air and lead to rapid cooling, that dust could take a long time to settle out of the atmosphere, even leading to a mini ice age.

  So, those were The Rules. I wasn't capitalizing those words on my own, that's the way they were on UNEF's PowerPoint slides. The point of The Rules seemed to be that inhabitable planets within practical range of a wormhole are rare and precious, and the Maxohlx and Rindhalu could not allow lesser species to damage valuable real estate. The Rules weren't focused on protecting soldiers or civilians on either side, there was no alien equivalent to the Geneva Conventions for space warfare. The Maxohlx and Rindhalu had put The Rules in place to prevent their ancient war from getting out of hand. As long as lesser species conformed to The Rules, they could kill each other all they wanted.

  All of The Rules were Ok by me, especially as UNEF didn't have any nuclear, nano, biological, chemical or relativistic railgun weapons with us at Camp Alpha; The Rules meant such weapons wouldn't be used against us. Except maybe biological, if an enemy thought they could get away with it. There wasn't any point to us humans worrying about it.

  I didn't see Shauna running again in the mornings, and I didn't want to be creepy by pinging her via zPhone. So I was thrilled when we ran into each other in the DFAC, which is what the Army calls a dining facility. It was a big tent, with tarps on the ground to keep dirt and dust out of the food, and the pervasive acrid burnt smell to a minimum. I had a tray of sandwiches, one peanut butter and one was some kind of mystery meat, with mashed potatoes and what was supposed to be gravy. And green beans. Real green beans, they looked like, they weren't cooked to death. And a roll. With butter. After busting my ass all day, I was hungry and all the food looked good. I turned around to find a table, and almost crashed my tray into Shauna's.

  "Hey! Uh, Shauna, right?" I said as nonchalantly as I could.

  "Hey yourself." She looked at my tray. Her tray only had a sandwich, green beans and an apple. "You want to grab a table?"

  Did I? Not trusting myself to speak without saying something stupid, I simply nodded and followed her to a table that wasn't too crowded. "You know what I was doing on Columbus Day," I said as a way to open a conversation, only it may have come across as bragging so I added "did you do anything stupid that day?"

  "I was with friends in Phoenix."

  "You weren't out leaf peeping that day?"

  She titled her head and gave a me a sarcastic look. "People in Phoenix don't do a lot of leaf peeping."

  "Got it. My family doesn't need to go looking for leaves, by Columbus Day they're covering the lawn two feet deep."

  "You going to eat?" She looked at my still full plate.

  "Oh, yeah. Don't want to talk with my mouth full." I bit into a sandwich and swallowed quickly.

  "I went home first to make sure my mother was all right, my father was on a business trip in Houston, then I went over to check on my grandmother. She lives in a high rise, and without power she was stuck up there, I didn't think she'd be able it make it all the way down the stairs, she's got a bad hip. And she's, you know, old." Her voice trembled a bit, recalling that day was bringing up a lot of emotion for her. "She was so scared, she was so scared, and she told me not to worry about her, she told me that I was young and strong, and that I needed to get out of the city, get somewhere the aliens wouldn't find me. She kept saying it was the End Times, Judgment Day, and that I needed to leave her, and survive. In the city, we didn't have Ruhar assault ships landing in the streets, all we saw were lights and contrails in the sky, and pillars of smoke from sites they'd hit. The only way we knew there was an alien invasion was the emergency announcements on the radio. And I didn't believe it at first. " She ate the last forkful of green beans, then pushed her tray away. "Those hamsters frightened my grandmother almost to death. I hate them for that. That's why I'm out here. I don't want my grandmother, or anyone else, to ever be scared like that."

  "Yeah. I used to go out on clear nights, look up at the sky, and wonder what's out there in the universe. After Columbus Day, I look at the sky, and if the stars are twinkling, for a second, I think maybe it's an enemy ship jumping into orbit. "

  "Yes! Exactly!" She slapped the table. "Because of the hamsters, nobody can look at the sky again without fear. I hate those motherfuckers for that."

  "They stole our innocence?" I mumbled over a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

  "Yeah, something like that. Not you and me, we've seen combat, we saw some shit in Nigeria. But most people, just living their lives, they don't get to think they're safe again, ever." She looked away for a moment. "Ever. Now we know there's a whole galaxy full of enemies out there. Looming over our heads, all the time."

  We talked about what total bullshit it was, that we were expected to go into combat with basically the same gear the US Army had been using for decades, and exchanged rumors about what our first deployment would be, neither of us knew squat about where the Kristang would send us next. And we both wondered and worried about what was going on back home, while I finished my dinner and she ate an apple. Her family was much worse off than my folks; her parents had both lost their jobs and they, her young brother and grandmother had been resettled in east Texas, where her father was on a farm labor team and her mother was working at a day care. That was a big change for her parents, her mother had been a real estate agent and her father a sales rep for a IT company. Both of those jobs vanished when the economy crashed, and their condo in Phoenix had become unlivable without electricity to run air conditioners.

  My father lost his job at the paper mill, but he got by for the first couple months on odd jobs, logging, welding and auto repair. My mother still had a steady job as a teacher, especially with so many families moved from electricity-starved cities to the countryside. Late in December, someone had the idea that the big paper mill where my father had worked, which had a 'cogeneration' plant that burned basically leftover sawdust to make electricity for the mill, could be started up again to produce electricity for the region. That brought my father back to work at the mill, with the only problem being that there wasn't enough lumber being brought to the mill because there wasn't enough diesel fuel for trucks to haul the wood. The Great North Woods had plenty of lumber, and no way to get it anywhere. There was barely enough diesel fuel around for trains. The solution was to bring old steam engines from a tourist railroad in New Hampshire, with guys who still knew how to keep steam engines running, and how to make them run on wood rather than coal or oil. Good old American ingenuity in action, with steam engines hauling logs out of the woods to a paper mill that was now a power station. The entire US electricity grid was being rebuilt, slowly, as the 'smart grid' we should have had decades ago, and lots of smaller local power stations rather than one giant plant for a whole region. The Kristang weren't helping much with rebuilding electrical generation around the planet, except in industrial areas they deemed vital to the war effort. Our new allies were disdainful that humanity still relied on fossil fuels for energy, and they set up a couple fusion reactors around the planet for their own needs, but even though they had explained their fu
sion technology to our scientists, it was going to be a very long time before humanity built a working fusion reactor on our own.

  When I left, electricity was still spotty in my hometown, most of the power from the new power station in Milliconack went downstate to the Bangor area. My parents kept their house warm with wood stoves, didn't need air conditioning, and the garden we'd expanded over the winter should bring in plenty of crops to feed my family and the people living with them, plus food left over to sell. They had two cows now, and chickens for eggs, and when I left my mother had been bargaining for a pair of piglets. It was the same all over the world; people higher on the economic ladder before the Ruhar attacked were now sometimes worse off than those people who had been scraping by. If you were a farmer before Columbus Day, your life hadn't changed a whole lot, other than it being difficult to get fuel for tractors, since people still needed to eat, so there was plenty of demand. What did the Bible say, something like 'many who are first will be last, and the last, first'? Nobody ever expected scriptural prophesies to be delivered by alien invasion.

  "I'm busting my ass to qualify for combat duty," Shauna explained. "Almost qualified when I signed up, I fell on an obstacle course and sprained my ACL with two weeks to go, pissed me off! So I went into logistics. I want combat duty, Joe."

  Being in the infantry, and having been in combat, I wanted to caution her against too much enthusiasm. It wasn't any of my business how she wanted to serve, so I kept my mouth shut. We finished eating, people from her unit came over to talk to her, and then she left. If that could be considered a first date, it was a downer.

  The first war game on Camp Alpha was Operation Valiant Shield. Code names for operations were ideally supposed to be selected at random, so as not to give the enemy an idea of your intent. Like 'Operation Desert Storm' was a cool name, but it had been pretty easy for the Iraqis to figure that op was an offensive in the desert. Not that it had mattered back then. The problem with random words is that you could end up with ops with unintentionally funny or lame names, like Flaming Bunny or Limp Justice, so really operation names were dreamed up, or at least vetted by, the UNEF PR staff. The name Valiant Shield was probably thought to be inspiring for the troops, when I heard the name all I could think was we were supposed to die valiantly. Like he old Roman saying, where a soldier was supposed to come with his shield, or on it.

  I wish I could tell you that during our first war game, I dreamed up some incredibly brilliant tactic that no one else had thought of, and it led us, or at least my platoon, to victory. I could tell you that, and it would be an awesome story, right? Maybe I will tell something along those lines someday to my grandchildren, when they're complaining how uncool old Grandpa is. Or maybe I'll tell a story like that someday when I'm drunk and I think it'll get me laid. The truth, unfortunately, is that me, and everyone else in two platoons of our company, were declared dead from an orbital railgun strike, less than an hour after the war game started. We were hustling across a shallow canyon, going from cover to cover, when my zPhone beeped, and a squawking voice announced that I was dead. Then my zPhone stopped working entirely. Crap. How the hell was two platoons of foot soldiers worth a railgun strike? The company had split up to avoid providing a juicy target, and that didn't work.

  Protocol called for us to sit or lay down where we were, and wait for an all clear signal, which could come the next day, depending how the war game was going. The sun was over the horizon and it was getting hot already, our officers decided we could cheat a little and walk back across the canyon to shelter under a rock overhang. That's where I spent the rest of that day, all night, and half the next morning. We were running low on water, it was a six hour walk back to base, because we'd been dropped off by Buzzards before the start of the war game. Somebody at HQ took pity on us and sent trucks, they didn't have air conditioning and although we grumbled about that, we appreciated not having to walk the whole way.

  One lesson that had gotten hammered into our heads by the war game is that the key to surviving ground combat in this war, in a situation where the 'high ground' is above the atmosphere, is like surviving combat in situations where the enemy might use tactical nukes. Avoid concentrating your forces, and keep cover as much as possible. In a potential nuclear war situation, do not give the enemy a target they might be tempted to hit with a nuke, like battalion-size forces, large ammo dumps, fixed airfields, vital bridges, that sort of thing. The Kristang didn't use nukes against ground targets, you might think that was a good thing, however it actually made the situation more dangerous. Deciding to use a nuke requires a whole lot of high-level leadership handwringing over an enormous nuclear escalation of the conflict, an escalation you can't step back from, a genie you can't put back in the bottle. Using railguns, which can accelerate rounds to a significant percentage of lightspeed, and can have the destructive energy equivalent of a tactical nuke, is so easy that it's a given in interstellar warfare. To us grunts on the ground, that means getting hit with a railgun from orbit is a matter more of when, not if.

  Overall in the war game, UNEF Blue forces got crushed by the opposing simulated Ruhar Red force. The Kristang were reportedly very pleased with the outcome. Not pleased that UNEF troops had 'died' by the thousands, pleased that UNEF troops had held on long enough to delay the Red force's occupation of the surface. Scattered UNEF forces had used guerrilla tactics to attack Red forces after they landed, and our Zinger MANPAD teams had 'shot down' an encouraging number of Red dropships. And our Airedales had done well for themselves, too. Sure, by the time the Kristang halted the war game, the UNEF Blue force had less than a hundred aircraft capable of flying. If you think that's bad, the Kristang had expected all our air assets to be depleted within the first twelve hours. Modern combat is high intensity, especially once your feet get off the ground.

  Two days after the war game, my fireteam was watching a basketball game in the evening, our battalion against a British Army team, us enjoying hot dogs and popcorn, when an Army lieutenant still wearing a flight suit sat down next to us in the bleachers. "Hey, you're a pilot, sir?" I asked, stupidly.

  "Uh huh," he said over a bite of hot dog, "used to fly an Apache, now I fly a Chicken."

  "How'd you do in the war game?" I asked eagerly. I'd heard a lot from ground pounders, but nothing from our Airedales so far. In my enthusiasm, I didn't consider the guy might have just finished a long flight, and wanted to relax and watch a ball game instead of telling me the same story he'd already told a hundred times. There wasn't need to worry, because a pilot never got tired of talking about flying.

  "Did all right," he said while watching the game, "shot down a Dodo and a Vulture."

  "Damn, sir, you Da Man!" I offered him a high five, and I was thrilled when he slapped my hand.

  "Thanks, soldier. Course, I got popped by a missile from a Ruhar cruiser two minutes later. Felt good anyway, I lived longer than I expected."

  "You shot down a Vulture?" Ski asked. "That's a gunship?"

  "Yeah, it is. The Dodo had landed troops, a formation of six Dodos with Vulture escorts, they were headed back to orbit when we attacked from two directions, came in fast and low, right on the deck. It was a massive dogfight, a real furball, we got all the Dodos, simulated, of course, and we lost half our aircraft. That last Vulture, I had to chase the stinking thing up above seventy thousand feet, that's the max altitude for a Chicken, we're not rated to operate out of the atmosphere, I was on internal reaction mass and was barely able to control the ship with the secondary thrusters. The Vulture was way above me, it was pushing two gees and climbing away, while I was about to lose control and go into a flat spin. I ripple fired my last four missiles and my gunner hit the Vulture with the particle beam, the beam is defensive only, but it tied up the Vulture's defenses enough for one missile to get through." He turned back to watch the game. "Their active stealth doesn't work as well out of an atmosphere, they didn't tell us that, I figured it out." He took another handful of popcorn out of the paper b
ag and ate it slowly, thoughtfully. "You know, the sky up at that altitude isn't bright blue, it's almost black, and you can see the planet stretched out below you is round. That Ruhar cruiser that got me? I could see it. Not as a ghost on the headup display for the war game, this was a real ship, right there, hanging in the sky, it was spooky. The image on my HUD showed a Ruhar ship superimposed over the real Kristang ship for the game, when I clicked the HUD off, I could see the real ship. A real star ship, hanging in low orbit above me. It was awesome, for a moment, until it hit my starboard nacelle with the edge of a laser, I flew right through it. Put me into a spin, I was busy trying to hold the ship together when their missile crawled up my ass. Simulated, it felt real enough. I wouldn't have been able to recover, either, the autopilot took over and guided me down to angels thirty, that's, uh, thirty thousand feet."

  "Shit," Ski said, "I thought us grunts on the ground had it tough."

  "You do, for sure. We're more exposed up in the sky, we have countermeasures that help a lot with missile threats, it's funny, kind of, we're almost back in WWII days, before guided missiles took over air combat. The stealth and countermeasures mean getting a reliable firing solution on the enemy isn't a lock that it is in air combat on Earth, a missile only gets a hit maybe fifteen, twenty percent of the time, the Kristang aren't telling us for certain. We're guessing at the twenty percent number based on the tactics we're taught." He laughed. "It's funny, they sent me out here because they figured a helicopter pilot would have an easier transition to flying a Chicken or a Buzzard. When they're in hover mode, sure, true enough. Thing is, a Chicken can go supersonic, and climb higher than our jets. I wasn't ready for that, last time I flew fixed wing was a little turboprop in training. My Chicken can out climb and outmaneuver an F22 easy, most of the time you're flying it, the thing is a jet, not a helo. A Buzzard is more similar to a V22 Osprey, it isn't supersonic." He shook his head. "The techniques we learned flying rotorwings on Earth don't apply here, I have to keep reminding myself not to worry about dynamic stress on the rotor blades, and I don't need to keep the tail rotor clear when I land, because we don't have one."