Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “And still not enough to avoid being sent to their Indonesian beachhead as a glorified hit man.”

  “Trevor, lad, I’m sorry, but as I explained, you’re the only one the Arat Kur are likely to trust long enough to—”

  “Yeah. I heard the speech. I don’t need to hear it again.”

  He broke the link without saying goodbye: the next train was just pulling in.

  * * *

  FEBRUARY 3, 2120

  SPECIAL OPERATIONS COMPOUND “SPOOKY HOLLOW,” PERTH, EARTH

  The knock on the trailer door was unexpected and unwelcome. Trevor considered replying with the most satisfying response: “Fuck off.” However, during the last two weeks of post-Jarkarta debriefings, he had been in daily contact with, and therefore might still be visited by, plenty of top brass. Wouldn’t do to suggest an admiral or general should perform a biologically impossible act—no matter how much some of them might deserve being forced to try. So he settled on a compromise: “Have a good reason.”

  “Trevor,” said a muffled voice beyond the door, “it’s Ri—your Uncle Richard.”

  “Not a good reason,” Trevor replied, taking a swig from the long neck of the bottle of Canadian rye.

  “Trevor, don’t do this. Don’t make me pull rank.”

  “Oh, well then, I’m sorry, sir,” he drawled loudly. “Please do come in.”

  Downing pushed open the door, paused on the threshold—probably because he hadn’t been expecting to find the trailer unlit and all the blinds shut tight. Not that they could keep out pencil-thin bands of the punishing midday sun that should have, by all rights, beaten Perth back down into the barren near-equatorial ground from which it had arisen.

  Downing, a black cutout framed by the blinding daylight, murmured. “Sorry, but I can’t see a thing.”

  “Close the door. You’ll see better in a moment. Whether you come in or not.” Downing closed the door behind him. Ah, worse luck. “How may I be of assistance, sir?”

  Downing found his way to a chair. He squinted at Trevor. “Trev, are you drunk?”

  “No, sir. Sober and ready for duty.”

  “I wonder if a blood-alcohol test would agree with you.”

  “I am confident it would, sir. I take one sip every quarter hour. No more. And no less.”

  “Yes,” Downing affirmed as he stared at the four empties lined up on the coffee table like a firing squad, “I can see that.”

  “Excellent. Your eyes are adjusting. To what do I owe the honor of the visit, sir?”

  “I wanted to see how you’re doing, lad.”

  “Never better, sir. Thanks for inquiring.” Trevor picked up the rye again.

  “I thought you took one sip every fifteen minutes.”

  “When I’m off-duty, yes, sir. When I’m on the clock or have official visitors, I step up the pace. Helps ward off the boredom, you see.”

  “Well, I’m sorry I’m boring you.”

  “No apology needed, sir. I’ve been bored quite a lot, of late. I was bored by the weeks of fighting through the Javanese jungle. Terribly bored being caught between non-stop waves of friendly and enemy fire and missile bombardment during the liberation of Jakarta. Almost took a snooze when the already-surrendered threat forces turned and shot both Caine and Elena in the back. Yawned when the Custodians arrived and slapped them into medical cryocells in the hope of being able to operate on them eventually. And could hardly bear the dullness of watching Major Opal Patrone bleed out and die. To say nothing of several of my oldest, sweatiest friends in the Teams. To whom I dedicate this drink. Hooyah.” And he swigged from the bottle—longer than he usually did.

  Downing was silent for a long time. “Trevor, I know you’ve had a beastly run of luck—”

  “Luck, sir? I don’t believe in luck. I believe in facts and orders. You ordered me here. You ordered all of us here. And fact: here we all died. Or damn near.”

  “See here, Trevor: I had no control over—”

  “Yes, sir. I see, sir: you had no control. Although you’re the director of the most highly classified intel group in existence, you had no control. Very understandable. Hands tied from higher up, no doubt.” Trevor considered taking another swig; decided against it.

  Downing rose. “I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Now that you were finally out of debrief, and the dust is settling a bit, I figured I might stop by to see if—” He stopped, waited, restarted. “Captain, you might be interested in knowing that the intelligence you brought back from Barnard’s Star, both technical and cultural, proved to be decisive in ensuring the defeat of the Arat Kur fleet. You should also be aware that I will be leaving soon. For the Arat Kur homeworld. We have the means to carry the fight back to them, possibly force them to capitulate.”

  Trevor searched inside, tried to find a part of him that was concerned that his Uncle Richard might be going into harm’s way, and at a great remove from any possibility of relief or help. Nope: nothing. “Godspeed, sir.”

  “Yes. Quite. Before I depart, I must also relay your next assignment.”

  Ah, now we come to it. “Of course, sir. I am eager to be out of barracks, sir.”

  “Then you’ll like this assignment: it will take you very far away from your barracks. You will join a flotilla we’re dispatching to chase down the most distant Arat Kur unit of which we’re aware. You will provide our flotilla’s CO with tactical and cultural insight on the enemy and guide the pursuit until combat is joined.”

  Trevor sat up: strange duty for a ground-pounder such as himself. But hell; it was a change of pace. And this time, it wouldn’t involve watching his friends or family getting shot into bloody, flying pieces: that would be a bonus, for sure. “That’s an unusual mission, sir.”

  “Not really. Although the Arat Kur had some superficial contact with civilians during both the occupation and liberation of Indonesia, not many of them, or our experts, really got to know anything about them. You have, and familiarity with their mindset and behavior could be crucial to the success of the flotilla’s mission.”

  “How soon do I leave, sir?”

  “It will be several weeks, yet. The counterattack fleet, the one I’m shipping out with, has first priority for preparation and logistical support. Your group will go next.”

  “So I’m headed back to Barnard’s Star?”

  “And beyond to Ross 154, which is where you’ll rendezvous with the flotilla. The intelligence we’ve gleaned from captured Arat Kur hulls indicates that the force they left in Barnard’s Star itself will have fled back across their border by now.”

  “So the flotilla is heading further down the line, then?”

  “Yes. The same intelligence tells us that they sent a small detachment to commandeer the chokepoint at Ross 154 and then pushed onward to drop off Hkh’Rkh commerce raiders in Epsilon Indi. You’ll follow them along that presumed path, locate them, engage them, compel surrender if you can.”

  “And if we cannot?”

  “Then you destroy them.”

  “Sir, with all due respect: destroy them how? The Arat Kur were still vastly superior to us, ship to ship, during the battle for Earth. If the Custodians hadn’t helped us by disabling their C4I systems with a virus, you and I would be in a prison camp—or a mass grave—now.”

  “You will not need superior firepower to complete your mission: just an adequate understanding of why the Arat Kur were more willing to kill themselves than surrender at the end of the invasion.”

  “Yes; that was odd. They never struck me as the courageous type.”

  “Oh, they’re quite courageous, Captain. But not in the way we usually think of the word.”

  Trevor found that his resentment and desire for isolation were being nudged aside by growing curiosity. “I presume, sir, that an understanding of why the Arat Kur chose suicide instead of surrender is what you expect me to bring to the mission?”

  “Yes. I shall arrange for one of our experts to explain what we know and what we suspect about tha
t.”

  “If it’s not too much trouble, I’d appreciate it if you might explain it to me. Sir.”

  Downing hesitated, then sat again. “I shall endeavor to do so, Captain.”

  * * *

  MAY 6, 2120

  TRANSITING THE HELIOPAUSE, ROSS 154

  “Captain Corcoran, are you sure you wouldn’t be more comfortable in your acceleration couch?”

  Trevor shook his head, didn’t bother to look at the ensign who’d been assigned as his (thoroughly pointless) adjutant shortly after he’d boarded UCS Valiant a week ago. Instead, Corcoran kept staring at the stars on the main screen and enduring the constant two-gee acceleration.

  In fact, that downward pressure felt good, was something to resist, something that unobtrusively reminded him that he was still alive, even as he devoted his full attention to the immobile starfield. In particular, he kept his eyes on the one irregular, and more luminous, speck that stood out from the smaller pinpricks of light: the Arat Kur shift-carrier which they’d been chasing for the past one hundred hours.

  Valiant had found her prey just three days after Corcoran arrived on board. Detecting a slightly more coherent particle trail that grew in density as they pushed deeper into Ross 154’s outer system, Valiant’s Aussie skipper, Steve Cameron, gambled that the fragmentary data from the system’s remaining microsensors was accurate: that the enemy ship had not stopped to pick up any rearguard elements. Instead, she had headed straight toward a refueling site.

  But since Ross 154’s port facilities had been the first targets of the attackers four months ago, taking on a load of deuterium now meant a long layover at a gas giant. Refueling at the inner system’s large gas giants was both more time consuming and more hazardous, due to their extremely high gravity and radiation levels. So after picking up Trevor from the temporary space station that had been deployed in place of the pre-war highport that was now a debris cloud, Captain Cameron had laid in a course for the small gas giant in the fourth orbit.

  As anticipated and hoped, they detected signs that the Arat Kur shift-carrier was there, hanging in the lee of the innermost of the six moons swinging around the blue-white sphere that was Ross 154 Four. Careful observation—largely by passive microsensors that had been lying dormant nearby—revealed thermal trails skimming along the outermost edges of the planet’s predominantly hydrogen atmosphere: tankers trailing drogue scoops to collect the fuel their parent ship would need for preaccleration and a shift to safety.

  Captain Steve Cameron was both competent and direct: he’d wanted to rail-launch the drone resources of his flotilla—Valiant and three destroyers—into an interception net which, remaining inert as they coasted closer, would almost be upon the enemy before they were aware of his more distant ships. However, Corcoran—who, despite equal rank, was holding special orders which made his the final word on when and how to engage—urged that Valiant and her escorts crowd gees immediately and startle the Arat Kur, forcing them to break off fueling and spend energy less efficiently by fleeing at their best speed. Which they would have to do, lest the humans’ smaller, swifter ships catch them. Cameron had been unconvinced that it was the best course of action, but relented when Trevor told him that, this way, there was an excellent chance that they’d be able to complete their mission without firing a shot.

  So the crew of Valiant was now in the fourth day of a chase that was roundly held to be more boring than drills. At least during drills, circumstances changed and there were unexpected situations requiring active response. In contrast, this pursuit was only exciting to the number-crunchers in Logistics, who were constantly sending estimates of how long the flotilla could maintain a two-gee pursuit, how much fuel their ships would have left when and if they made intercept, how much hydrogen the enemy hull might have taken on, and if Valiant could, in fact, catch her in time. The odds looked promising: the flotilla was slowly but steadily gaining on the Arat Kur shift-carrier.

  An hour ago, when Valiant finally neared the extreme edge of their own weapons envelope, Trevor had carried out the first of his orders from Joint Command: that the Arat Kur be sent a message, through one of their own translators, to stand down, deccelerate, and surrender. There had been no reply, and the deadline for a response was rapidly nearing.

  Trevor heard his adjutant step back just as the helmsman—it was always the helmsman—started yet another round of contagious yawning. Within three minutes, every crewperson on the bridge would succumb to the same, weary reflex, suppressing it as much as possible. Cameron did not approve of yawning and did what he could to keep the crew on their toes. But make-work was only a temporary solution to the monotonous reality of a chase in space: so very different from what movies and recruiting flats promised.

  Corcoran smiled at the stillness of the stars in the main viewer. If you hadn’t spent years in the Force, you could never completely understand how full of shit the space-navy action shows were. There, ships were perpetually flashing past each other (each near-miss would have been a navigation offense warranting a court martial), making dramatic whooshing sounds (not possible in the vacuum of space), firing bright-colored beams (you only saw a beam in vacuum if you were looking straight at its source, which meant you were dead before the image reached your brain), or launching missiles at perilously close enemies (if you decided to wait for visual contact before launching your missiles, you’d never get to do so).

  No, thought Trevor as he folded his hands behind his back and let his eyes wander out into the motionless stars, this was the reality you saw standing the eyeball watch on a genuine, working navy ship. Minute after minute, hour after hour, of the same uneventful view. Dramatic shifts of perspective were rare. Usually, they occurred only when, in order to deccelerate, you tumbled the ship (which, incongruously, films often depicted as taking place in ultra-slow motion). The other possible cause for a 180-degree attitude change, and much more infrequent, were emergency maneuvers—which you did not want to experience. Ever.

  Emergency maneuvers meant that something was wrong: a navigational error, unexpected debris, a thruster failure, a possibly hostile contact. The great irony of naval service, reflected Trevor as even Cameron succumbed to a slight squirm as he sat the conn, was that most servicepersons had enlisted for the “excitement” of wearing the blue, and kept hoping for excitement as they endured one uneventful patrol tour after another. But once they found themselves in a real shooting war, they rapidly came to have a deep and abiding appreciation for every passing day of the same unremarkable routine. Because when something went noticeably, dramatically wrong in space, it usually went very wrong indeed. Particularly during wartime.

  But Valiant’s war had been uneventful. Originally part of the reserves posted to Delta Pavonis, she was one of the few ships which had been left behind when the Relief Fleet had come out of hiding and dealt the Arat Kur invasion a mortal blow at Earth. Only after the great bulk of the enemy fleet had been destroyed or chased back through Barnard’s Star had Valiant been tasked to track down this final straggler.

  The portside lift toned, opened, and revealed a tall young woman wearing civvies and an eyepatch. She waited for Cameron’s acknowledgement, and, at his nod, stepped on to the bridge as if she was making a stage entrance, her gait suggesting she had spent a lot of time moving en pointe.

  Trevor glanced at Cameron. “Who is she?”

  “Reporter. IINS.”

  “Okay. But why is she on the bridge? And why now?”

  “Because in ten minutes, if the Arat Kur have not responded, we will be moving to battle stations.”

  “So?”

  “Ms. Thiri Za has been given clearance to witness the resolution of this engagement.”

  “And who gave her that clearance?”

  “Joint Command.”

  Trevor looked back toward the stars. “So now our engagements are being recorded for the tabloids.”

  “On the contrary,” Thiri objected, a bit too brightly. “I’m here to record even
ts for posterity. This is the last major engagement of the war that will take place in our territory. It’s a historical moment: the last of the invaders are being repelled.”

  I’m glad you’re so sure of that. “Forgive me if I don’t roll out the red carpet for you, Ms. Thiri, but I’ve had some bad experiences with embedded journalists.”

  “You mean we get in the way?”

  “I mean that you get dead.”

  “I’m sure you also believe that we put your forces at increased risk. But I suppose I can understand that, since so many of us probably look just like the enemies you’re used to fighting.” She leaned her face aggressively towards his, winked with her one eye.

  Trevor turned back toward her, and glanced at the eyepatch again. “Just because I’ve fought against enhanced insurgents doesn’t make me cybigot, ma’am.”

  “No? Then why did you order the removal of—how did your intellience officers put it?—my ‘hackable cybernetic enhancements’ for the duration of my assignment?”

  “I didn’t order it. And I’m not your enemy, Ms. Thiri.”

  “Really? So what makes you so much more ‘understanding’ than everyone else on board this ship?”

  “Because I’ve spent time in your part of the world.”

  “And what part is that?”

  “The part where there’s never enough food, never enough clean water, never enough electricity, never enough bandwidth.” He glanced at her tailored clothes, manicured nails, finely coiffed hair. “And here you are, far away from all that. You did what you had to. To get out.”

  She seemed marginally mollified. “And yet you at least approved the removal of my eye, didn’t you?”