Launch Sequence (Genesis Book 2)

by Travis Hill

  “I don’t like you,” he began, his eyes locked on Irina’s. “I goddamn sure don’t like being told I’m no longer in control of my own fleet. I don’t like being lied to, and I goddamn sure don’t like thinking you might be a rogue element, a traitor who plans to lead us right into the enemy’s jaws. However, the appearance of these two seedships with a decade on their transit clocks tells me that someone else is playing an even longer, more complicated game than the one they’ve sent you on.

  “I also don’t like thinking we’re in a losing war against an enemy who won’t ever stop until the last of us are ground into dust. As much as I don’t like thinking that, only a fool would still believe it. I was a fool when you first sprang this on me, and I’m sure I still am a fool for now believing that whatever we’re doing is the right thing. Because beyond all of that suspicion and disbelief is the absolute rage that our own people would risk extermination without having a backup plan like Nightfall. Worse, they risk extermination when they have a backup plan, choosing to ‘rally the troops’ with their bullshit propaganda instead.”

  The officers were silent once again, waiting to see if Admiral Huang would say more. When it seemed the admiral had finally run out of steam, Meyer spoke up.

  “I have no choice but to agree with Admiral Huang. This is a bullshit mission, one in which we’re all expected to die, but it’s less bullshit than not continuing, regardless of whether it’s legal or you’re just a puppet following orders from UCSF. Or whomever. It doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s a chickenshit thing to do,” Sawalha added. “I mean, even if we somehow won this war, even if we sent probes to find the seedships to tell them to come back home but never heard from any of them again, it’s twenty thousand lives versus tens of billions. I don’t think any of those seeders would mind being a casualty if it meant the rest of humanity got to live on.”

  “Is there anything else you’re not telling us?” Huang asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of, Admiral,” Irina answered, matching his intense stare.

  Meyer coughed. “Uh, have you told him what this ship is?”

  Huang glared at the captain, then back to the spook across from him. “What does he mean?”

  “I guess since we’re getting everything out in the open,” Irina said with a sigh.

  She glared at Meyer, then walked to the small storage cabinet to retrieve the flex screen.

  SIX

  “We’re nearing the entry point for launch, Admiral,” Lt. Hellewege said over the secondary command channel.

  “Sensor report?” Huang asked, pulling up the data at the same moment in his visor.

  “No contacts since we entered the system, Sir,” Lt. Aweke answered.

  “ALVIN has the course locked in,” Lt. Korrigar said.

  “Roger that,” Huang replied. “Sound the alarm.”

  Admiral Huang tightened his stomach muscles in anticipation of the upcoming acceleration. He watched the prediction model in his visor of the fleet reaching one-tenth the speed of light then leveling off as two green circles continued to accelerate, quickly leaving Silver Fleet behind. Tactical’s simulation runs estimated the seedships would require almost twenty-four hours of constant acceleration to enter a relativistic “pocket,” making it impossible for the enemy to intercept them. Huang checked the fleet’s ready list, hoping the fifty-two ships could hold off the Kai’s one hundred-plus ships long enough for Genesis-1 and -2 to enter the pocket.

  The bridge became a dark red chamber of buzzing voices blending with the soft tapping of fingers on control screens. Huang felt the shift in pressure as the fleet passed the 1g mark. Like Irina, he had tangled with the Kai on multiple occasions, and like her, he’d survived to fight another day. He knew he was one of the rarest humans alive. Admiral Mattias Khan Huang had lived through twelve fleet engagements, arriving back in human or neutral space four of those times in a lifeboat. Of the twelve battles, only two had any semblance of victory for the humans, while the other ten had resulted in his ship being completely destroyed or fatally crippled. He wouldn’t be surprised if the Kai jumped a light-hour ahead of Silver Fleet’s location and mined the entire area with some kind of black hole weapon.

  “2g and climbing, sensors are starting to gray,” Lt. Mikkelsen said from Tactical, referring to the distortion of time and space around the accelerating ships. “Zero contacts, Silver Fleet is green.”

  Huang slowly relaxed his stomach muscles, easing into the increasing pressure he felt from the gel material as it formed around his body. He thought of Irina, catching himself before thinking about her in ways that would end up with him in the infirmary if she ever suspected what had passed through his mind. Her story still didn’t add up completely, but he and Meyer had decided to continue on with the mission. Meyer was sure the Special Forces commander was telling the truth, but Huang was also sure he’d caught the captain staring at the spook’s face a little too long in a way that was just short of perfect professionalism. Huang had no doubt the captain battled the same dilemma of irritation, anger, and attraction.

  “Separation in six minutes,” Lt. Korrigar announced.

  Huang wondered why it was still protocol to announce anything anymore. He hadn’t been in a warship in two decades that didn’t have every single CIC crew member locked into a virtual or holographic command element, surrounded by more data than the human mind could consume in an entire week without becoming psychotic or comatose. He decided it had to do with tradition and protocol, something handed down over the centuries before electronic communications was even a concept.

  “Separation in five… four… three… two… one… We have separation.”

  Huang barely listened to the navigator’s voice. His mind drifted to the next leg of the mission, one which would see Silver Fleet sync with Genesis-3 and -4 while moving at just over 4g. He would have scoffed at the idea of such a plan if the pressure from the gel couch had allowed him to suck in a quick breath. Instead, he closed his eyes and tried to imagine the absolute nightmare of calculations required to pull off such a feat.

  An impossible feat, he thought, before remembering the fleet’s upgrades as well as the ingenuity of human desperation.

  A futile feat, then, he decided.

  Four hours later, with the seedships’ green icons moving beyond Raiden’s prediction range, the lighting throughout the ship switched to amber as the engines eased down until the fleet moved at a comfortable 1g. Within another eight hours, the seedships, now accelerating at over 15g, left Silver Fleet far behind. ALVIN supplied a random tidbit of information to the CIC crew that estimated Genesis-1 and -2 would reach the deep black within two thousand years under their current acceleration speeds, with that number being cut to under a millennium if the seedships could sustain a 25g run for two decades to reach .90c.

  Admiral Huang hoped the geeks who designed the ships and hibernation systems had been at the top of their game. He knew a thousand year journey at nine-tenths the speed of light could end before a thousand hours were up if the ships’ reactors failed. At the speeds they were moving, the lack of a charged deflection field extending almost one hundred thousand kilometers in front of the ships meant a grain of solid matter would result in the ships becoming little more than grains of matter themselves. After two decades of constant acceleration, the two main reactors in each seedship would swap roles with the two backup reactors. The backups, after running at less than one percent output, would keep the ships’ engines powered, which allowed the primary reactors to refuel while providing the necessary deflection fields.

  “Shift change, Admiral,” Captain Meyer said in his helmet.

  “What time is it?” Huang asked, keeping his eyes closed for a few seconds more. After staring into the virtual display for hours on end, he’d finally begun to feel the piercing pain slicing through his skull.

  “Oh-six hundred,” Meyer replied. “Anything interesting happening?”

  “Negative,” Huang said before remov
ing the tactical helmet. He switched his comm to the personal unit secured in an upper sleeve pocket. “The Kai must have gotten lucky back at GP-6.”

  “Maybe we finally did something they didn’t expect,” Meyer countered.

  “Maybe Drazek simply gave them our destination coordinates.”

  Meyer laughed. “You really don’t like her, do you?”

  “You know, I could reprimand you for not using a ‘Sir’ in there.”

  “You really don’t like her, do you, Sir?”

  “Smartass. And no, not really. I’m sure if she was just along for the ride, I’d actually enjoy her company.”

  “I’m sure she’s a sweet, innocent girl outside of those combat fatigues,” Meyer said with a laugh. “At least she’s provided us with the tools we need to try to see this clusterfuck through.”

  “The only tool I need is alcohol,” Huang said through gritted teeth as he stretched after being locked in an acceleration couch for hours. “Then sleep.”

  “We’ll sleep when we’re dead,” Meyer said before tapping into the CIC’s main command channel.

  ***

  Irina replayed the time-lapse footage of the seedships’ launch in her command visor. She had spent the shift in her quarters locked into the acceleration couch. A dose of neural relaxer helped her body and mind cope with the stress of heavy gravity, though it never seemed to help with the groggy, cramped feeling that had to be exercised away after being swallowed by the gel material of the couches.

  “Looks like everything went off perfectly,” she said over the command channel.

  “Thank you, Commander, for your approval,” Huang’s said, his voice dripping with sarcasm in her earbud. “I wasn’t sure if we could handle it alone, but we managed somehow.”

  “Your annoyance is noted, Admiral Huang,” Irina replied, imagining the man’s facial expression screwing up into a scowl wherever he was.

  “What’s our next move?” he asked.

  “Once ALVIN has finished his navigation plots, we’ll begin jumping toward the Rathala outback to rendezvous with Genesis-3 and -4.”

  “And we’re supposed to link up with them at .33c without either of us connected to the Wire,” Huang said, the disbelief obvious in his tone.

  “Have some faith, Admiral,” Irina said. “We launched -1 and -2 without issue. That’s a one hundred percent success rate so far.”

  “Until the Kai fiddle with their own math to translate in close enough that we can’t escape so easily.”

  “Your Psyche eval forgot to mention that you’re a dark cloud of defeat who uses fantasies of impending failure to drive your decision-making process,” she said dryly.

  “Yeah, well, my Psyche eval interviewers never asked me to fantasize about something as insane as this plan.”

  Irina laughed. “If that’s what motivates you to keep making sound tactical decisions, then by all means, let it rain.”

  “I’m glad you’re thoroughly enjoying this,” he grunted.

  “I’d be lying if I didn’t admit it. But I’d also be lying if I didn’t admit that I am only getting half of my normal sleep because all I do is worry about what can and probably will go wrong each step of the way.”

  “Go on…” Admiral Huang said after a few moments of silence. He was interested to hear what a spook was afraid of, though he knew she’d never admit to fear so much as worry. To him, they were practically one and the same.

  “Each time we translate, I’m sure there will be a Kai task force—or ten—waiting for us. Silver Fleet might be the best crew humanity has ever assembled, but we’re little more than children against the Kai in space.”

  “So we have no strengths?” Huang asked, curious as well as pleased the spook was capable of at least pretending she still had a sliver of humanity within her.

  “The fact that we’re all crazy in the right ways—according to the Coalition geeks who dumped everyone’s records into the computer that spit all of our names out—means we’re likely to surprise the Kai at least once. The fact that we know the stakes of this particular endgame, combined with our desperation, means we’re almost guaranteed to surprise them twice. At least one of those surprises will be either sheer luck or on accident.”

  “I guess we better hope the encounter at GP-6 didn’t use up one of those surprises.”

  *****

  The next two weeks took their toll on Irina and the rest of Silver Fleet. No one complained openly, but she noticed more than a few narrowed eyes and curled lips as the days dragged on. She couldn’t blame them. Even her own exceptionally fit, healthy body felt as if it were being ground down under the sometimes days-long confinements to the acceleration couches as Task Force Nightfall made their way across multiple neutral territories toward their destination.

  Most of the neutral species looked the other way, with only the Veridians once again sending out a fleet in aggression. Everyone else pretended the humans never set foot inside their territory. Irina was well aware of the fact most aliens couldn’t detect a ship moving at relativistic speeds until long after the ship had pass through the region.

  Every interstellar civilization could easily detect FTL translations, though none were as accurate as the Kai. Humans had been second best at that technology—yet another second place finish against the insectoid enemy. The Kai’s ability to pinpoint FTL jump entry and exit locations made it dangerous for human fleets to navigate safely in contested areas, and impossible to penetrate more than a few hundred light years into their territory.

  Coalition techs assured her that the strategy of high-g acceleration during FTL translations would negate (or at least dampen) the enemy’s ability to translate a fleet on top of Task Force Nightfall. FTL jumps were almost exclusively done at very low speeds since no one could predict what was on the other end of the translation point. Ramming an asteroid at .25c that wasn’t there six weeks ago wasn’t a risk anyone wanted to take—especially without a Wire link to ping the beacons and receive real-time navigation updates.

  Captain Meyer, along with a begrudging Admiral Huang, agreed with the Coalition’s assessment. This was mostly due to their intimate knowledge that for the briefest of attoseconds during a translation, the charged deflection field that kept the ship safe from debris was disabled. Meyer shuddered at the unspoken estimation of damage should they hit anything larger than a molecule at a quarter of the speed of light. Instead of a fist-sized rock striking a ship’s hull after a low-speed collision without the deflection field and leaving a scratch or small pit at most, the entire ship would be instantly vaporized by the kinetic energy. Even with the deflection field active, anything larger than a marble would be catastrophic at best.

  ALVIN kept the fifty-two ships of Task Force Nightfall in line. Sailors who gave Irina the stink-eye for her plan typically reserved the worst of their insults for the ship’s AI. Commander Drazek was at least human—according to a small percentage of the fleet’s human members—and had to suffer the same crushing pressures. ALVIN, on the other hand, was a quantum machine that had no concept of being squished into a singularity.

  ALVIN especially didn’t understand the need to urinate, nor did it understand that the extreme pressures almost always forced human bladders to close down even with catheters and relief tubes inserted. Irina had spent almost six hours having to pee so bad she wanted to scream, but couldn’t even do that without fear of breaking her jaw or being unable to close it for hours until ALVIN slowed the fleet down. The AI had at least been programmed to ease up during refueling operations, giving the entire fleet a mini-vacation for a few hours before climbing back into their creches.

  By the third refueling break on day nine, Irina began to worry that the stress of spending eighteen hours or more at a time wishing for her own death to end the discomfort might be affecting her judgment. Twice she’d been sure a group of enlisted sailors looked at her with murder in their eyes. Raiden’s crew looked like she felt, and she knew if most were like her, they’d barely sl
ept, even with full doses of tranquilizers flooding their systems.

  “Christ, Drazek,” Captain Meyer said when she entered the bridge. “If they didn’t hate you before, they goddamn sure hate you now.”

  “I hate me,” she mumbled, her jaw and brain still sore from almost thirty hours in the tank. “I’ll show myself to the airlock if that will end it.”

  Meyer laughed. “Oh no, there’s no way we’d let you off so easy. Much better to torture you along with us. But at least you have one redeeming quality.”

  “What’s that?” she asked after plopping into the XO’s command chair.

  “You’re a mudfoot, so we’re all happy enough that you’re suffering more than anyone. It’s probably the only thing that has kept half of 1st shift alone from sabotaging your couch.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Admiral Huang growled before she could reply. Huang stood just inside the bridge’s entry. “This is the worst trip I’ve ever been on.”

  “Complaint noted,” Irina said, too tired to care.

  “The only goddamn thing worth enjoying is the knowledge that you’re a goddamn mudfoot and probably hate this more than we do.”

  “You’re a little late, Sir,” Meyer said with a chuckle.

  “Late for what?” Huang asked in confusion.

  “Captain Meyer already covered how everyone loves that I’m getting the worst of it,” she answered. “Literally ten seconds before you arrived.”

  “Good,” Huang said and sat down. He donned the tactical helm and immediately reviewed the logs.

  “How much more of this?” Lt. Aweke asked as he passed by the ship’s commanders.

  “How badly do you want a promotion?” Meyer asked. Aweke’s frown made him smile. “Nine more days. No more refuels until we have Genesis-3 and -4 with us. Average of nineteen gravities for almost all of it until we slow down for the rendezvous.”