So It Begins (Defending The Future)

by James Chambers

We high-fived. About time. Fleet had been floundering for a year, trying to defend far-flung worlds from the aggressive Aylin raiders, unable to engage the enemy in a meaningful battle while they scourged system after system. Rescue ships couldn’t pick up citizens fast enough. Refugees were piling up.

  My countdown timer reached one minute. “Don’t want to be late,” I said, and held my palm over the scanner at the captain’s conference room door. It slid aside and we stepped through.

  “Private Kirchov. Sergeant Conner. Please sit.” The captain pointed to two empty seats.

  The room was as small as a table with ten chairs would allow, and we had to squeeze our way down to our seats. Gunners Hong and Daljen were already seated, dress caps precisely positioned on the table in front of them. The other three faces I didn’t know.

  The door opened again and the admiral entered with his aide. We stood as one.

  “We don’t have much time so let’s get started,” he said.

  He was probably in his late sixties, and robust. I wondered if he took regeneration shots, or if he was naturally healthy. Decades of sitting behind a desk usually reduced the admirals to potatoes. He dropped into the seat at the head of the table and waved for us to sit. We waited for the captain to sit first.

  “Aylin raiders have taken remote Station BHB-12 in the Mirrim System,” he said.

  I met Hong’s eyes across from me. How could the Aylin field so many ships at once? How could they advance on so many fronts? We had to launch an attack—give them a reason to concentrate their forces where we could train our big guns on them. We had to find a system or a planet they cared about.

  “BHB-12 is lost,” the admiral continued. “The next target down the line is the Tarish System. We have a colony in-system called Bountiful, defended only by Upsilon Station and a few old carriers.”

  I wondered how he could be so calm, talking about losing ten thousand citizens on BHB-12, but then realized he must be used to discussing the loss of systems and planets by now. Stations were small by comparison.

  “As you may be aware, we can’t stretch our battle groups any thinner to protect the lesser systems. The fleet shipyards are running at one hundred and ten percent, and the mercantile shipyards are nearly all converted to military use, but we won’t see an upswing in new vessels for at least six months. The lesser systems don’t have that kind of time. They’re sitting ducks, and frankly we still can’t find rhyme or reason to the attacks.”

  I stared at him, cold. I had always thought the Aylin were trying to stretch us thin, but who was I to have an opinion?

  “Bountiful can’t be protected,” the admiral said. “We sent pickup carriers to rescue whoever we can, but there’s not enough time. We’re going to lose a lot of people. That’s where my group comes in.”

  He stood and walked to the vid screen and waved his palm over the ID panel. A still-motion image of a ship filled the screen. It wasn’t a ship I was familiar with.

  “It’s a gun cruiser,” the admiral said, turning to face us. “Light. Fast. Stripped down to guns and thrust.”

  It looked like a twentieth-century rocket, maybe one hundred meters long and fifteen in diameter. It bristled with guns—four double-barrel units crammed in between the attitude thrusters around the bow, four more at midships, and four aft. Communications arrays sprouted along the hull, ending just before standard drive pods at the back. The nose cone was obviously shaped for hyperspace bowshock.

  “We can make these quickly,” the admiral said. “A lot quicker than we can make the big ships. These will be the defenders of the lesser systems. We’ve already sent twenty to Bountiful to defend the pickup carriers. You will be in the second wave of thirty ships.”

  “Sir,” Sergeant Conner said. “A ship that size would be like a gnat against their cruisers.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the guns. They were external, like on the carriers I used to gun for. Only bigger. We were finally taking the fight to the enemy.

  “Think of it as a super-fighter, Sergeant,” the admiral said. “Fifty of these at Bountiful, six hundred guns, twelve hundred barrels. Enough to handle a raid. But we need gunners and pilots. I’ll take you to the rendezvous point.”

  I looked down at the three faces at the table I didn’t recognize. Pilots.

  “Sir, what’s the complement of those ships,” one of the pilots asked.

  I had been wondering that. With life support and oxygen generators and waste collection and food, there wouldn’t be room for more than fifty people packed shoulder to shoulder. The guns needed thirty-two people, if you just counted sixteen gunners and sixteen gun-techs.

  “Her complement is three hundred.”

  My breath caught. Stunned looks passed around the table. The captain broke the silence. “How could you possibly fit three hundred crew on that ship, Admiral?”

  The image behind the admiral switched to a cutaway of the ship. The space between the inner and outer hulls was mostly hyperspace batteries. Packed around an open inner corridor were lines of stasis chambers. “The crew will be suspended,” he said. “There’s no other way to do it. Pilots and gunners will command your crews through the common neural link.”

  “And if the link fails?”

  He waved his hands. “The link is decentralized. It’s redundantly generated in each of fifteen separate compartments. Each compartment will have a full skeleton complement of crew, and each skeleton complement will be mixed so that, should a compartment fail, we won’t lose an entire gun crew or pilot crew or maintenance crew. You can turn these cruisers into Swiss cheese and still man guns and thrusters. They are perfect for wearing down the Aylin cruisers, or even one of their destroyers, until we achieve killing shots.”

  I felt ill. The ships were too small to generate shields. We would be Swiss cheese after every encounter. I had to get out of here. The room was feeling very small and crowded.

  “Unfortunately,” the admiral continued, “the gun-cruisers don’t have much range in hyperspace. The batteries last about sixty hours, then we have to drop into realspace to recharge. We’re modifying a couple of our big carriers to cradle the gun cruisers, probably thirty at a time, for transport to far destinations. They’re not ready, so we’ll be taking the long way to Bountiful.”

  “When do you leave, sir?” the captain said.

  The admiral stuck his jaw out. “We need to do a few quick body modifications before we leave,” he said. Then he met our eyes. “The original complement of the ships was two hundred and fifty, but there wasn’t enough redundancy. The only way to achieve redundancy was to reduce the size of the stasis chambers.”

  “So what, sir?” Conner said. “We’ll be in the fetal position for the tour of duty?”

  “No, Sergeant, the Fleet has elected to remove your legs. They will, of course, be regrown when you return to Earth Base.”

  One week later, following a brief stop at a second battle group for more recruits, the admiral’s transport dropped out of hyperspace in the scheduled rendezvous system. We sixteen candidates sat, unmoving, in our transport slings. They had, as stated, removed our legs at mid-thigh. My raw stumps had been concealed under titanium cuffs. I scratched at the fusion point where my skin ended and titanium began.

  The flanges at the bottom of the cuffs were crowded with feeder ports. They explained that this would save them the trouble of sticking our arms and legs with I.V.’s and risking infection during the long suspension. Instead the feeders and blood cleaners and waste removers and regulators and injectors would all screw into sterile ports near our femoral arteries.

  I played with my stumps constantly. It reduced my claustrophobia a bit. When we were in realspace I stayed linked to the ship’s external sensors so I could watch the stars go by. The view in hyperspace can be nauseating, so for long stretches I took sedatives and comforted myself that we were the vanguard of the attack. We would be the ones to give the Aylin a bloody nose. They expected lumbering dreadnoughts and destroyers, not fast-
attack vessels.

  “Forty-five minutes to docking,” the pilot’s voice drifted through the cabin and we all looked up at the speakers.

  I lifted a cable from my pocket, inserted it into the cybernetic port behind my left ear and jacked in to the ship’s sensors. I linked to the forward visual feeds. We were sailing in toward a very yellow star, coasting on the momentum of our hyperspace exit. I dialed up the resolution on the feeds and caught my first glimpse of our titanium coffins.

  “They’re tiny,” I whispered to Conner on my right. He jacked in and I felt his presence join me in the bow.

  The gun cruisers, all thirty, were clustered in orbit around the star. Beefed up fighters was exactly what they were.

  “Hey, Lieutenant Valk,” Conner called over to one of our pilots sitting in a sling a few meters down the compartment, “They changed the attitude thrusters. Looks like you’ll have more kick.”

  The pilots all jacked in and the forward feeds got crowded. I could see what Conner meant about the thrusters, and I called up a schematic. The forward and aft attitude thrusters, mounted at four points around the hull, were easily several meters longer than on plan. I heard groans.

  “You know what that means,” someone griped over the neural link we had established by all jacking in together.

  “They failed initial maneuvering drills so they welded on extensions,” someone else said.

  “Careful on those hairpin turns.” I recognized Valk’s voice. “The spot-welds might snap.”

  I tuned out the chatter. I only had eyes for the guns. I had never seen such guns on ships so small. They had to be 150mm’s. The barrels were ten meters long at least, extending between the attitude-thrusters. The engineers must have installed strong gravity dampers to keep the guns from rolling the ship while firing. It was good that we would be in suspension, because it would be a bumpy ride.

  I zoomed in tighter and saw the skeletal hulks of loading servos on either side of the breaching. Damn it! “Hey, Conner,” I said. “Those are manual load. We’re going to have Ordnance Jockeys in our crews, manning the servos.”

  “Why the hell’d they do that?”

  “Don’t know.” No one used manual loaders.

  We docked a little over forty-five minutes later, the first of seven dockings as our meager crew was distributed among ships craving experienced crewmembers. I boarded the Glory, my new home for a year or two, or three.

  I hauled myself through the docking hatch and waited to be inserted into suspension in the smallest, most constrictive space yet. The sound of waves crashed around my ears and I clutched at handholds. The central open tube, around which the stasis containers were wrapped, was smaller than it seemed on the schematic, maybe two meters across. I waited behind two others, a female pilot named Lieutenant Pordue and another gunner named Bell, neither from my former posting. They stripped us of our clothes, so now I was cold as well as claustrophobic, in exchange for 1mm skin suits. The suits were to protect our skin from suspension fluid. I noted that they bore a number in the center of the back, as well as our stripes of rank. My promotion had come through. I was a sergeant. I gripped the handhold tighter.

  The life support techs, both with missing legs and titanium leg-cuffs, strapped us into our containers and coupled multi-colored tubes and wires to the ports in our cuff-flanges. I held onto the open edges of the canister.

  “You been suspended before?” the tech asked, glancing at my white-knuckled grip.

  “A bunch of times.”

  “So you know the routine. Sorry to rush, but you’re the last ones in and we’re shipping out as soon as you’re secured.”

  I could feel the drive pods rumbling to life. We were moving already? “They’re not wasting time, huh?” I said.

  “No time. Let’s get your neural link connected.” He pulled a thick cable from the wall of the container, thicker than any I’d ever used. “Lean forward.”

  I leaned and he screwed the wire into the connection behind my ear. “That’s it. The sedatives are flowing. You’ll be accepted into the neural link as soon as your body’s asleep.”

  He slammed the container doors on me and I concentrated on breathing slowly while the sedatives took hold. I couldn’t see. I hyperventilated. Cold suspension fluid pumped in around my hips and I could hear displaced air escaping through vents. I panted faster and faster, willing the sedatives to creep their way through my veins to my brain.

  My world lit up with lights and I blinked rapidly.

  Where?

  I turned around. I was standing (standing? How did I get legs?), in a wide corridor with bright lights and a calm, beige carpet. I felt gravity. Lieutenant Pordue and Sergeant Bell stood beside me, both looking alarmed. We were dressed in shipboard uniforms.

  “This is amazing,” Bell said.

  “Welcome to the consensus-reality of the ship,” someone said, and we turned to face a Lieutenant who hadn’t been standing there before. We saluted.

  “I’m Lieutenant Roarke,” he said, “and we are underway. We’ll be jumping to hyperspace as soon as we get free of the star’s gravity well.”

  “This is all simulated, sir?” I said, looking around. I had used recreational holos before, but I had never used them in standard operational conditions.

  “We figured, since we’re all in the neural link, why not make the ship seem like a big one? It’s laid out like a standard Class B-6 Destroyer. Everyone gets private quarters, and all quarters have portals. There are complete recreation facilities you can use on your downtime. However, there’ll be little downtime in the near term. You will undergo a series of war simulations while we’re in hyperspace, designed to familiarize you with combat on this ship.

  “Let me show you the external feeds.”

  The corridor vanished and we entered one of the attitude thrusters. Ship status outputs scrolled behind one of my eyes as I looked out of the visual feeds down the curved hull of the Glory. The feeling of a vast ship around me vanished.

  “You can go to external feeds any time you want,” Lieutenant Roarke said. “You can access shipboard status reports from inside the simulation. You can even visit your body if you want to.”

  We returned to the corridor.

  “Where is everyone?” Sergeant Bell said. “Things are quiet for a ship-wide neural link.”

  “I was giving you a moment,” Lieutenant Roarke said. “I’ll connect you to the link now.”

  I shielded my mind, something I’d been trained to do during battles when busy neural cross-talk could grow cacophonous. The Glory opened up around me and I felt the consciousness of the other two hundred and ninety-nine souls on board. The chatter was loud across fifty bands. I damped all the private bands, and then the official bands that didn’t relate to guns, until only the Command Channel and the Fire Control Channel remained. The lieutenant nodded when he saw that we’d all adjusted.

  “Import ship’s time and on-board schematics. Remember, we have no intraship transports. If you’re aft and want to get to the bow, just move your avatar there. It’s not necessary to walk.

  “Here are your commanding officers. Sergeant Bell, you have been assigned to Forward Gun #3, on the port side. Go with Lieutenant Amadio.” They vanished. “Sgt. Kirchov, you have been assigned Aft Gun #11, also port. Go with Lieutenant Burkett.”

  I followed Burkett’s avatar, reading his destination via the neural link we shared. Ship’s schematics pinpointed our final location at Gun #11, Aft.

  “Meet Annie,” Burkett said. “She is your girl while you’re on the Glory, so take good care of her.”

  I entered Annie’s processing node and looked down the length of her twin barrels through her targeting feeds. She was so new that her paint hadn’t even been scratched. Stars glimmered in the black beyond.

  “She’s beautiful,” I said. I wanted a target to shoot.

  Burkett threw a virtual arm around my shoulder. “She’s special and requires far more concentration than you ever gave to those
great banks of guns on your dreadnought. There you could fire at will. Here, you have one gun and limited ordnance. Every shot counts. That means you will have to assign importance-levels to your targets. You have two targeting techs in your crew, and they’ll feed you vectors and proximities. They’ll interface with the guidance computers and suggest priorities, but you’ll be pulling the trigger.”

  “And . . .?”

  “You’ve got to choose your ordnance for each shot. Homing rockets to find the weak points in their shields, warheads to follow them in. High-yield, non-nuclear rockets for close targets, low-yield, high-velocity rockets for their fighters. That’s why we’re using human loaders instead of automatic conveyers.”

  “You couldn’t get the loading computers to coordinate cleanly?”

  “We couldn’t get you gunners to coordinate cleanly with the loading computers. Your two ordnance jockeys will direct the loading servos and the conveyors from the armories. They’re fully integrated into the loading computers, and you’ll be integrated with them. It makes it easier on you.”

  I continued staring down Annie’s barrels. If I had been able to feel my heart I’m sure it would have been pounding. I was King of the Cannon. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “No one has. We’ll run simulations on the way to Bountiful to bring you up to speed.”

  “When do I meet my gun crew?”

  “Right now.” Four presences entered the gun, my two targeting techs and my two ordnance jockeys.

  “The simulations will begin when we enter hyperspace,” Lieutenant Burkett continued. “You’ll start by yourself. Later you’ll link with the other guns and learn to coordinate with Fire Control.

  “The pilots will be running their own simulations. Eight attitude thrusters and four drive pods. You should see these ships bob and weave once the pilots get integrated. Final simulations will involve coordination between the gun crews and pilots. Not only will your targets be moving, but so will the ground beneath you.”

  “I can’t wait,” I said.

  “We’re going to put you through your paces. Think of rescuing Bountiful as a dry run for the future. When the go-ahead finally comes to penetrate deep into their territory, we’ll be ready.”