by Marko Kloos
Halley opens the door of her stateroom after the second knock. She’s wearing a T-shirt, and the upper part of her flight suit is tied around her waist by the sleeves.
“Hey,” she says. “Take a wrong turn somewhere?”
“Nope,” I reply. “I’m off until the 0600 watch. What about you?”
“Same here.”
“So let’s spend some time together. Away from the chow hall.”
“In here? That’s against regulations,” she says with a lopsided smile.
“We’re going into battle against the Lankies again in three days,” I say. “We ought to spend the next two nights in the same stateroom together. Just in case they oversold us this hulking piece of Euro tech and we end up stardust. Fuck the regulations.”
“You rebel,” she says. Then she grabs me by the front of my tunic and pulls me across the threshold and into her stateroom. “Let’s be rebels, then.”
CHAPTER 18
AVENGER
“General quarters, general quarters. All hands, man your combat stations. Set material condition Zebra throughout the ship. This is not a drill.”
I finish fastening the latches on my vacsuit right before I get to CIC. Everyone in the ship’s command-and-control center is in a vacsuit as well, a visible reminder that we are about to transition into known hostile space and a possible Lanky ambush. We have spent the last three days on a high-speed run through the inner solar system, and now we are six and a half hours into our Alcubierre transition. I know that the reason for the vacsuits is a possible depressurization if we get perforated by a seed ship and that the vacsuits will keep us alive until the problem is fixed or we get the order to abandon ship in the escape pods. But the CIC is in the middle of the ship, in the most well-protected part, and if we have Lanky penetrators coming through this armored compartment, I know that the vacsuits will be mostly ornamental.
“Alcubierre transition in T-minus thirty,” the XO announces.
“And then seven hours to showtime,” Colonel Yamin replies. She’s studying the plot on the holotable with much more intensity than the display deserves. We are approaching the transition point, but there’s nothing to see on the situational orb except for the lone icon labeled “BCV-60” because all ships are blind and deaf during Alcubierre transitions. Ottawa has performed exactly as advertised, and we haven’t lost any parts, major or minor, on our full-throttle run through the inner solar system. Even the fuel consumption estimates were within half a percent of our actual use, and I hope that the ship’s flawless performance history so far will extend to her weapons systems and armor once the first shots are fired.
Colonel Yamin waits for the Combat Stations alert to fade out. Then she grabs a handset and opens the 1MC circuit.
“All hands, this is the skipper. We are thirty minutes from transitioning into the Fomalhaut system. It’s highly likely that we will run into a sizable Lanky presence around New Svalbard. Our job is destroying any Lanky forces threatening the colony and the safe evacuation of the civilian population if needed. This is the toughest and most well-armed ship in the Fleet. Let’s put her to good use and get our people out of there. And if we have to crack a few seed ships to get the job done, that is fine by me. It seems the Lankies didn’t learn their lesson from Mars. We will make sure it sticks this time.”
She hangs up the handset and straightens out the front of her tunic. The CIC is quiet except for the low whisper of the air-conditioning system and the soft hum of the consoles.
“Warm up the Alpha and Bravo mount reactors and set the particle cannons to standby mode. Energize the reactive armor and the active-point defense systems. I want us to be ready for a brawl as soon as we come out on the far side.”
I watch our progress on the display. Thirty more minutes, and we will be in hostile space, engaging seed ships in direct combat for the first time in three years. We have greatly improved our ship designs in that time, and I sincerely hope that the Lankies haven’t done the same and we don’t run into a seed ship that’s twice as large as the ones before it and five times as hard to kill. But it doesn’t even take a newer, tougher seed ship to kill us—if the Lankies have set up a patrol right at the Alcubierre point, they can engage us in the first few moments of our presence, when we are at our most vulnerable because we’re going from blindness to daylight again. And if they’ve parked a seed ship in the middle of our trajectory right outside of the transition zone, we’ll smack right into it.
I get out my PDP and dash off a message to Halley.
>I love you. See you on the other side.
>In this life or the next. If it’s Option B, save me a spot in the mead-hall.
I smile and tuck the PDP away again. We’re not religious, but we’ve discussed the idea of an afterlife before, and Halley and I concluded that Valhalla is the best afterlife of all the mythologies we’ve read about. Fight all day, feast all night, and only grunts allowed. Maybe you get to go to whichever place you like best, and maybe Odin has upgraded Valhalla to include automatic fléchette rifles.
Colonel Yamin walks over to the command chair and sits down. Then she straps herself in with the five-point harness every chair in CIC has installed. The XO does likewise, and the few personnel in the CIC who have not yet taken their seats follow suit.
“Combat illumination,” the CO orders, and the lights in the room switch from soft white to a low amber. If we get a hull breach and lose power, it will be easier for our eyes to adjust to the darkness as we head for the escape pods. Being trapped on a disintegrating ship has been one of my nightmares ever since Halley and I got stranded on the broken Versailles over eight years ago, so I know the route to the nearest escape-pod bank exactly by number of steps both running and walking. The likelihood of successful escape from this deep inside the hull is marginal, but I suppose the comfort of having the pods nearby is the high-tech secular version of a belief in an afterlife.
The shot clock on the front bulkhead counts down with clinical precision. Twenty minutes, then fifteen, then ten. Finally, we’re just a few moments from transition, and it feels like everyone on the ship is holding their collective breath. As always, I spend the last few seconds of the Alcubierre trip thinking about Halley, because I want her to be the last thing on my mind if we end up disintegrating against a seed ship as we leave the chute.
“Transition in five. Four. Three. Two. One.”
The low-level ache pulling at my molars disappears, and I take a long breath. Coming out of Alcubierre is always like that feeling when your leg falls asleep and then wakes up painfully and slowly—not debilitating, but unpleasant enough to dread the experience a little right before you know it’s going to happen.
“Transition complete, ma’am,” the helm station reports.
“Astrogation, give me a fix. Tactical, full scan of the neighborhood,” Colonel Yamin orders.
I look at the situational display floating above the holotable. A few seconds later, a new 3-D grid with coordinate markers overlays the tactical orb.
“We are in the Fomalhaut system, ma’am. Right on the marker. The neighborhood is clear out to a hundred thousand klicks. No contacts.”
Colonel Yamin unbuckles her harness and stands up again. She walks over to the holotable and flicks the situational orb around with her finger. I release my harness as well and duplicate the situational display on one of my screens.
“Let’s float out the drones and get a full picture before we contact New Svalbard and make our presence known with radio waves,” the CO says. “Full spread, spherical coverage. Go active mode on the drones. We can’t afford to miss anything. If we have to engage, I want to be at the outer edge of our weapons envelope.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
We launch one flight of drones, then another, then a third and fourth. On the tactical display, forty-eight drone markers accelerate outward from our position in all directions, and the awareness bubble on the situational display slowly expands. With every passing kilometer the
drones put between themselves and us, I feel a little better about our odds. The more distance we have between the Lankies and us, the better our chances of survival. The electric reactive armor of Ottawa is supposedly designed to withstand the kinetic energy of the Lanky penetrators, but I’m not especially eager for us to put that specification to a test in a live-fire scenario.
Forty-five minutes into the drone run, the first contact pops up on the tactical display.
“Drones 8, 15, and 41 are within passive detection range of New Svalbard,” the tactical officer says.
On the plot, at the edge of our awareness bubble, a circular icon in a crosshair blips into existence. A second later, the computer tags it with the label “NEW SVALBARD,” and a dotted line marking the moon’s trajectory across our sphere of awareness appears on the plot.
“New contacts, bearing three-four-four by positive ten relative to drone 15. One . . . two . . . three bogeys in orbit around New Svalbard. Designate Sierra-1 through 3. Telemetry from drones 8 and 41 confirms hostile contacts.”
“Give me a direct feed,” Colonel Yamin orders. “Put it on tactical.”
A square window superimposes over part of the tactical orb on the holotable. It shows the camera feed from the nose array of drone 8, which is pointed square at New Svalbard. The moon is still almost a million kilometers from the drone, but the optics are so powerful that it looks like the drone is ten minutes from orbit. The computer has superimposed orange targeting brackets over three familiar shapes gliding across the backdrop of clouds and white-and-blue ice. The seed ships are flat black, almost impossible to spot in empty space, but against the light background, the drone camera has no problems tracking them from nine hundred thousand klicks away. The tactical display dutifully updates itself with three more icons around the one for New Svalbard. The new icons are signal orange, a color that no skipper wants to see on her ship’s tactical orb. But for only the third time since Mars, a Fleet unit is advancing toward those orange icons on purpose.
“Turn off the drives on drones 8 and 15 and let them coast in. Let 41 run out to the maximum telemetry range so we can get a picture of the dark side of that moon.” Colonel Yamin pans and zooms the display, then switches to the tactical view.
“We have three bogeys and six missiles. That’s not a bad ratio. Get me Orion firing solutions for all three bogeys. Let’s hope that’s all they brought to the party.”
The computer calculates firing solutions for our Orion missile battery and displays them on the tactical screen a few moments later. The Lankies don’t give any indication that they are aware of either Ottawa’s arrival or the presence of our drones. I’m still not used to seeing offensive firing solutions and target locks on Lanky seed ships. It feels like we’re out hunting, putting a crosshair on a dangerous predator on the prowl.
“Anything from New Svalbard?” Colonel Yamin asks.
“The drones are picking up low-power comms transmissions on the surface, but nothing distinct. From the signal strength and ELINT signature, I’d say they’re suit-powered transmitters,” the lieutenant at the electronic-warfare station replies.
“So we’re not too late. There are still people down there,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Bogeys Sierra-2 and 3 seem to be in geostationary orbit, ma’am,” the tactical officer chimes in. “They’re right above the equatorial temperate belt. Bogey One is in high orbit above the northern polar cap.”
“That’s a problem,” the XO says. Lieutenant Colonel Barry draws a rectangle on the tactical display and magnifies a slice of the live camera feed from drone 15. The two seed ships in orbit around the moon’s equator are no more than ten ship lengths apart, seemingly at a standstill in front of the snow-white backdrop.
“How so, XO?” Colonel Yamin asks. She steps next to him and looks at the window he just magnified.
“These two bogeys are geostationary almost right above the colony,” he says. “If we launch Orions at them, they’ll break apart, and we’ll have deorbiting wreckage all over that stretch of the continent. And that’s only if they hit.”
“I see what you’re saying,” Colonel Yamin says. “That’s a shitty backstop for a thousand-ton block of Pykrete moving at a few ten thousand meters per second.”
“If one of the Orions misses and hits the continent near our colony . . .” The XO leaves the sentence unfinished.
“Megaton-level surface impact,” Colonel Yamin continues. “I see your point.”
She studies the tactical display with a frown.
“We could take a chance and close to knife-fighting range,” she says. “Hopefully they’ll turn toward us when they see us coming, and we’ll have clear shots with the particle cannons.”
“Three fast-moving hostiles at a range of twenty thousand klicks or less,” Lieutenant Colonel Barry says. “That’s shaving it too close. If the mounts fail to recharge fast enough or break down on us, we’ll be rubbing shoulders with the Lankies while our pants are down around our ankles.”
“I’m open to other ideas,” the CO replies.
“We can cut down the odds a bit,” the tactical officer says.
“How so, Captain Baye?”
The tactical officer walks from his station into the command pit, picks up a light pen, and points at the holotable display.
“Bogey Sierra-1 is giving us a perfect broadside shot right now. Last time we hit them, above Mars, we launched from stealth, right? If we show them we’re here before we launch, they’ll start maneuvering, and the Orions aren’t that nimble. But once the first Lanky goes up, they’ll know we’re in the neighborhood. So we take out”—he marks the bogey’s position above New Svalbard—“Sierra-1 with an Orion first. Cut down the odds. If that one misses from this angle, it’ll go off into space or hit the northern polar region.”
“If we blow up Sierra-1, the other seed ships will turn our way and come sniffing us out,” the XO says.
“They may give us a bow-on shot away from the colony,” Captain Baye says.
“We will have five Orions left for the other two bogeys,” Colonel Yamin muses. “And if they start to bob and weave too much for the Orions, we have the particle cannons. We have two barrels ready to go. We can take on two seed ships at once.”
She expands the tactical plot in front of her and highlights the red track leading from the icon labeled “BCV-60” to the Lanky seed ship above the northern pole.
“No point giving away our advantage. We drop the first Lanky from long range, we cut the odds down by a third before the main event even starts. We’ll deal with the other two as the situation dictates. Warm up the Orion launcher and get one of the big birds ready to fly.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
I am monitoring everything through my console screens, but this is not my part of the action. TacOps only comes into play once the drop ships and attack birds are out of the clamps and on their way down to the moon. It’s hard to be a spectator right at the cusp of battle, but at least I know the CO knows her job. Still, there’s always an element of uncertainty in war. I want this battle to begin because I know that once I am busy, I have no time to be scared.
“Tube six, fire.”
Ten minutes later, Ottawa fires the first war shot of her service career. When the expeller charge launches the nuclear-propelled three-thousand-ton Orion III missile out of one of the preloaded launch tubes, the vibration makes the deck under my feet rumble. I watch the launch on the external camera and find myself wishing that this won’t also be the last war shot of Ottawa’s service career.
“Tube six is clear. Bird away,” the weapons officer announces.
On the plot, a light blue icon in the shape of an inverted V appears right in front of Ottawa. It accelerates away from the ship at three hundred meters per second squared, following the red line that leads from Ottawa to the Lanky seed ship above the north pole of New Svalbard.
“Bird is running normally. Nuclear pulse propulsion initiating in
five. Four. Three. Two. One. Ignition.”
The expeller charge, a simple solid rocket booster, serves to get the missile out of the launcher and to a safe distance from the ship so the nuclear propellant can take over. When the Orion III is thirty klicks away from the ship, the first of hundreds of small nuclear charges lights off right behind the missile, and the Orion III starts its acceleration run, picking up speed faster than any spaceship or conventional missile could hope to match.
The Orions are a brute-force method to get a heavy payload to fractional light-speed velocity in a very short amount of time. With the particle cannons of the battleships, we have another weapon that can crack a seed ship’s hull reliably, but the particle mounts have very short range, and they draw a lot of energy. The Orions don’t have a range restriction—they will accelerate until they run out of nuclear charges and then stay at their velocity until they hit something. Their only limitation is the fact that they’re minimally guided and that the target needs to be visible to the launching platform before the launch.
Right now, three of our stealth drones are functioning as forward observers, feeding optical targeting data back to the ship. It’s the same tactic we employed in our successful strike against the Lanky fleet at Mars, only with a single ship performing the tasks of the entire strike force.
For the next eleven minutes, I can’t do anything but watch the track of the Orion as it races across the gap on the plot between our blue icon and the orange one labeled “SIERRA-1.” The image from the drone cameras is even better now because the drones coast ever closer to New Svalbard even as they are keeping the seed ship locked from three different vantage points.
“Thirty seconds to impact,” the tactical officer says. “Bird is running true.”