Launch Sequence (Genesis Book 2)

by Travis Hill

  Meyer began relaying orders over the tactical links. Irina hoped the Veridians would keep burning toward Silver Fleet without actually shooting at them. It was much more realistic than hoping the aliens would simply turn around and jump out. Over the next two hours, she watched the Veridian fleet steadily approach Gamma-Pi VI. She wasn’t a starship commander, but it seemed strange that the Veridian fleet approached from below the plane.

  “We have multiple weapon emission signatures, Captain,” Lt. Mikkelsen announced a few minutes later. “Some guided munitions, and looks like a shitload of energy beams.”

  “What the fuck?” Meyer asked, puzzled. He checked his display again, verifying that the Veridians were still more than a light-hour away.

  “Captain, trajectory indicates most incoming missiles will strike objects within the planet’s ring system. Ditto for their beams, though I don’t know if they’d even damage a snowball at that distance.”

  “Are those warheads hot?” Admiral Huang asked.

  “No signature, Sir,” Lt. Aweke answered.

  “Doesn’t mean shit,” Huang grumbled.

  “Looks like they’ll impact around the time we’re on the other side of the planet,” Meyer said, thinking aloud. “Lt. Ken, any change in comm traffic?”

  “They’re pissed we’re not on the Wire,” she answered. “Other than that, more of the same about how they’re going to destroy us if we don’t leave immediately.”

  Meyer scratched his chin, then checked the refueling clock one more time.

  “If those warheads are hot, we need to disperse,” Huang said. Irina heard the tinge of annoyance in his voice that he was a command observer instead of an active fleet commander.

  “I don’t think they’re hot, or if they are, they aren’t intended to detonate anywhere near us,” Meyer said.

  “What are you thinking?” Irina asked.

  “I think they’re telling us to get the fuck out of their system by making a lot of noise, but it’s like banging on a garbage can to scare away a bear more than anything.”

  Huang laughed. “Bears don’t lob nukes back at you.”

  “True,” Meyer said with a grin, “but they don’t really want to tangle with us.”

  Irina silently agreed. She’d studied the intel on the local interstellar neighborhood, and the Veridians were by far the weakest species of those humanity had come across. They reminded her of humans when mankind suddenly was no longer tethered to his home system. Except humans adapted technology faster than anyone thought possible, becoming a major military presence within fifty years of their first FTL translation. The Veridians had been wandering the stars for almost three centuries, but hadn’t felt the need for a powerful navy—or hadn’t been able to beg, borrow, and steal every last ounce of technology necessary to create one.

  The bridge became quiet over the next two hours, each officer engrossed in his or her task. Irina stayed glued to the tactical overlay, watching the guided missiles inch ever closer to the planet, even after ALVIN had predicted the warheads would detonate within the icy rings. Meyer, Sawalha, and Huang spent nearly twenty minutes discussing whether the Veridians were pretending to be aggressive in case the Kai were watching. Irina pitched the idea that the Veridians might be using the missiles to litter Silver Fleet’s orbital routes with ice and rock.

  The three commanders chewed on it for a few minutes before assuring her (and themselves, it seemed to Irina) every ship in the fleet could easily withstand an impact with all but the largest balls of ice. She didn’t bother to point out the fact that Captain Meyer conveniently left out the rocks part. Irina was sure they’d seen the tactical window which informed them that nearly one-quarter of GP-6’s ring system consisted of iron and nickel asteroids, ranging in size from a fist up to half the size of Raiden.

  ***

  “Captain,” Lt. Commander Anders said over the comm. “Refueling complete. Fleet is at one hundred four percent and awaiting orders.”

  “Roger,” Meyer said from his command chair. “Disperse on the final orbit and head for the exit point.”

  Irina checked the tactical readout again, watching the green dotted lines representing Silver Fleet slingshot around the gas giant toward the heliosphere twenty degrees above the plane. The secondary overlay displayed three dozen incoming red lines of missiles from the Veridian fleet. She had cycled through the overlay’s filters until the beam weapons were disabled on her visor after watching thousands of lines flare out and disappear every second. Admiral Huang had laughed and joked that the Veridians were excellent marksmen and would become rulers of the planet’s rings if they subdued enough of the population.

  Within an hour, Silver Fleet accelerated toward the edge of the system, the gas giant’s massive boost allowing them to quickly leave the Veridians behind. Raiden’s bridge was silent of voices, only the ghostly whispers of fingers tapping screens interrupted the soft hum of the CIC’s holo pit. Irina knew that unless the Kai translated in-system directly in front of them, the fleet would make the jump to their next destination.

  “Are you sure about this?” Admiral Huang asked over the comm on the command channel.

  “Nervous, Admiral?” she asked, her visor hiding the grin on her lips.

  “Translating into a gravity well is frightening enough, but translating while moving at six gees…”

  “This is one of those times I’m glad I’m a mudfoot, Admiral,” she said. “From what I remember in the Academy, if we hit anything, we’ll be dead before our brains can register pain.”

  “Jesus, Drazek,” Huang said. “You Special Forces spooks get off on taking crazy risks, don’t you?”

  Irina laughed. “Most of the time, no. However, in this case, the region we’re jumping into is dead space for the first two legs, so we’ll turn and burn through the first one, then slow down after the second.”

  “Dead space?” Sawalha asked from her quarters, disobeying Meyer’s orders to sleep.

  “We’ll need to be moving at just over 4g to sync with Genesis-3 and -4,” Irina explained. “Command planned for the Genesis seedships to travel for years, possibly decades, before receiving an abort or initiate command. The eggheads wanted to make sure Genesis could safely travel for up to fifty years through ‘dead’ regions, where there were no objects with any measurable gravity, allowing the seedships, and in effect, our fleet, to move through space approaching relativistic speeds.”

  “It’s like shooting a bullet to chase another bullet,” Meyer said. “It works in theory, but paper theory and reality have a funny way of not syncing at the worst possible moments.”

  “Have faith, Captain,” Irina said. “You survived GP-6. It’s a good bet you’ll survive at least the first translation. Besides, the rendezvous with -1 and -2 will be the easiest part.”

  “We’ll see,” Huang grumbled.

  Meyer grunted in agreement before yelling at Sawalha to shut down her comm and eat a sleep tab. When Irina removed her helmet to yawn, stretch, and rub her eyes, he ordered her to do the same. Both knew she wasn’t obligated to follow any order he gave, but she realized she was too mentally exhausted to argue. She made her way out of the bridge and into the temporary officers’ quarters across the corridor. The cots weren’t nearly as comfortable as the gel mattress in her personal quarters, though they were worth the trade-off in convenience.

  ***

  “Commander?” Sawalha’s voice said in her ear. “Commander Drazek?”

  “Go ahead,” Irina said, her voice slurring. She’d been in the middle of an intense dream.

  “We’ve got Kai contacts entering the system, Ma’am.”

  Irina sat up and rubbed her eyes. “How long was I out?”

  “Six hours, Ma’am.”

  “Captain, you don’t have to call me ‘Ma’am.’”

  “Roger that, Ma’—roger that, Commander.”

  “I’ll be there in five,” Irina said, closing the comm connection.

  She pulled the tab on a coffee
pouch, savoring the slightly sweetened taste, thankful once again she was an officer and not a grunt. Irina had suffered through plenty of the coffee that all enlisted crews were cursed with. She had never believed the waste coolant from a fusion reactor could be boiled down into concentrated form and put into a flexible sealed container until her unit had piggybacked with Blue Fleet and she’d slummed it with the NCOs. A quick brush of her short hair and a damp cloth across her face was all she allowed herself before making her way across the corridor and into the bridge.

  “Tactical,” she said after lowering her helmet’s visor. “Sit-rep?”

  “Definitely Kai contacts, unless the Veridians brought a second fleet in,” Lt. Mikkelsen reported. “Our speed is distorting the space around us, so we’re mostly guessing, but the Veridians don’t have a fleet that size that we know of.”

  Irina pulled up the tactical overlay. The Veridians were nine light-hours behind, still lobbing missiles toward Task Force Nightfall. A ball of red triangles with question marks inside them morphed from a loose blob of icons after translation to a dispersing mass of trajectory lines when she played back the last few hours. ALVIN’s best guess put the Kai’s fleet at close to one hundred ships that were destroyer-class or larger. She felt her stomach begin to do a slow burn of worry, knowing the enemy would eventually catch up to them unless they were extremely lucky.

  We need some luck for once, she thought.

  Admiral Huang arrived half an hour later and commanded Meyer, Sawalha, and Irina to leave the bridge and hit Gold Deck for a few hours before the acceleration maneuvers forced everyone to retreat to their couches. Meyer tried to protest and was immediately cut off by the admiral, who stared at Irina during the short argument as if daring her to override him. The thought of a hot meal and enough gravity to soak in a tube was enough incentive for her to second the command before dragging Meyer by his arm, Sawalha on their heels to keep him from returning to the bridge.

  ***

  “I could sit in this thing for hours,” Irina groaned before submerging herself in the steaming water.

  “I wouldn’t want to be in it when we translate,” Sawalha said from her tube a meter away.

  “Why not?” Meyer asked, sitting on the edge of his tube, his skin reminding Irina of a lobster fresh from the pot.

  “I don’t know,” Sawalha answered. “I just don’t like the idea of being surrounded by water and making a jump. Like… what if somehow my guts translated to the outside of my body and the water to my guts?”

  Irina laughed along with Meyer. “You wear clothes during a jump, and you’re sometimes asleep when making a jump, right?” she asked.

  “I know,” Sawalha said, looking away. “It’s a stupid superstition. The pukes in Psyche found out about it during Command training and gave me hell over it for three whole years, so stuff whatever you’re going to say. I can’t help it.”

  “My worry,” Meyer said, taking a sip from a beer pouch he’d sneaked in from the bar, “is that we’ll translate and find a couple hundred cubic meters of asteroid has replaced a couple hundred cubic meters of our ship.”

  “Mine is that the Kai will somehow guess what we’re up to and beat us to the punch,” Irina said darkly.

  “Are you always this depressing when relaxing?” Meyer asked with a smile.

  “My other worry is that I might be losing my sense of humor,” Irina added.

  “I thought you Special Forces types had to trade in your humanity for the ability to kill an alien a thousand different ways with your bare hands?” Sawalha asked, getting another grin and a nod from Meyer.

  “I used to do this thing when I first boarded a ship,” Irina said. “All the enlisted crew, they act like I’m a psychopath with a plasma sword and I’m looking for victims. So whenever the opportunity presented itself, I’d mess with them. Sometimes we’d be riding a lift and I’d just sort of freak out like I was having a meltdown, or I’d simply start giggling until everyone else couldn’t help themselves.”

  “God,” Meyer said, staring at her, “I’d pay top credits to see that.”

  “I can’t even imagine such a thing,” Sawalha agreed.

  “I’d do other stuff, like freak them out by showing up to Gold Deck and act like a normal person, buying rounds, even dancing with some of the better-looking ones.”

  “I’d pay double to see a Special Forces op on a dance floor,” Meyer said.

  Irina sighed. “These days, even my darkest, most morbid humor centers have shut down. According to Psyche, the loss of humor is a serious warning symptom of psychosis.”

  “Are you feeling dangerous to yourself or others?” Sawalha asked.

  “Hell yes. I’m leading fifty-two ships to an unhappy ending. The only thing more dangerous than me is the Kai fleet tailing us.”

  “I’m okay with the unhappy ending part as long as it isn’t you standing over me with a smoking plasma pistol or a microblade,” Meyer said.

  Sawalha laughed in agreement. “Did Command really only give us a twelve-percent chance to succeed?”

  “That was a cherry-picked number by me,” Irina admitted. “It was the best prediction out of around two million simulations.”

  “Figures,” Meyer said. “What was our median chance of success?”

  “You don’t want to know,” Irina said, avoiding his eyes.

  “Come on, we’re big kids even though we’re in the little kids’ pools,” Sawalha said.

  “In almost two-thirds of the sims, we were wiped out before even reaching Genesis-5. The other third, we reached Genesis-5 but the Kai destroyed all ships before we could refuel her and get her underway.”

  “How many times did we survive in all?” Meyer asked, his face scrunched into a severe scowl.

  “You don’t want to know,” Irina answered. After a few seconds under the withering glares of the two captains, she sighed again. “Eleven times.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” Meyer swore. “Eleven times in two million runs?”

  “What makes Command think this will work at those odds?” Sawalha asked.

  “This is the part where I’m supposed to say ‘because they hand-picked us to ensure success,’” Irina said in a low voice. She raised her head up and looked each of them in the eyes. “The real answer is that we have no choice. Command, including me, is adamant that the Kai are going to win. That leaves us to make sure we get the last laugh, even if it’s twenty thousand years from now, or twenty million.”

  “How many other seedship missions like ours?” Meyer asked.

  “None.” Their disbelieving looks made her feel even worse inside. “The Coalition and the Assembly rejected the plan outright, and fought it for years behind closed doors.”

  “Wait,” Meyer growled. “Our own government tried to kill the plan?”

  “Not tried. Did kill it. It was pushed through just over a year ago after Orange and Violet fleets were snuffed out at Korbin.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Meyer said.

  Irina understood his anger perfectly well. “Believe it. Nightfall was proposed two decades ago, more of a backup plan to a backup plan, a just in case sort of thing.”

  “Back when we were still kicking the shit out of the Kai,” Sawalha said.

  “That’s what everyone was told,” Irina said. “The truth is, we were barely holding on even with The Seven and the Hanura helping us. Or more accurately, they held on a few years longer than they would have without our supply lines. Command and even The Assembly knew the outcome the day the Hanura collapsed into their home region. Yet they refused to believe we were in real trouble. To the point they deluded themselves into believing we were winning—or would win if we just kept at it for another couple of decades.”

  “It’s not surprising,” Sawalha said.

  “Why not?” Meyer asked.

  “Who the hell would be stupid enough to tell their entire species that the lights were about to be turned out for good? Total morale killer. Better to lie and k
eep feeding the populace some bullshit that we were winning, and if not winning, at least in a stalemate that couldn’t be broken for the foreseeable future. Fucking politicians.”

  “Amen, sister,” Irina said, dunking her head back underwater to block out the world for a few more seconds.

  FIVE

  Irina watched the jump timer fall under five minutes. Silver Fleet moved though space at just over 6g of acceleration, forcing most of the crew to take shelter in their gel couches. The holo pit was empty, the hand of gravity far too strong to allow the tactical officers to stand for more than a few seconds. The Kai had immediately turned and accelerated toward Task Force Nightfall. ALVIN calculated Silver Fleet would have twenty-two hours to maneuver and jump to the next coordinates before the Kai translated in-system behind them.

  Irina was worried the enemy would see the fleet’s exit point and easily plot a course to follow. She’d been frustrated by the Kai numerous times before for not playing the game as humans believed it should be played. She had no idea how the Kai had been able to find the task force, though the astronomical odds of somehow nailing the correct system seemed to mean nothing when fighting the strange aliens. In space, they made very few mistakes and seemed to have a sixth sense about every strategic move human fleets executed. On the ground, they were sometimes comically inept, though the Kai usually had overwhelming numbers once they knocked out the orbital defense networks and mopped up any remaining or counterattacking Coalition ships.

  “Two minutes to translation,” Lt. Hellewege announced, his voice strained by the extreme weight of Raiden’s acceleration. “Kai contacts now at thirty-six light-hours, prediction variable of fourteen hours.”

  Irina put her eyes back on the tactical overlay showing the two pursuing fleets. The Veridians had fallen far behind, no longer in the chase according to Raiden’s last information update before the ship’s sensors became too unreliable as Silver Fleet accelerated to relativistic speeds. She worried the Kai had their own “Special Forces” fleet capable of surpassing 30g, far beyond anything humans could withstand without retiring to the emergency creches and going into semi-hibernation while ALVIN was left to fight, run, or fight on the run.