by Ron Collins
Colonel Dembu was wise enough to know that the U3 were like cockroaches.
They had to be exterminated in the trenches.
Dembu would grasp this all if Pinot gave him enough time to think, and Dembu would understand that Pinot was asking for a single black op—a jump of Orion, a jaunt into the backwaters of some remote star system that could leave a small force of specially chosen men and women to address U3 on their home turf where their guards would be down.
“Can you hold up your end?” Dembu finally said.
“I wouldn’t be here if I couldn’t answer that question with a yes.”
Pinot stood up and spoke as he brushed popcorn crumbs from his pants. He put his hat on his head and held his coat up by the collar for a moment before sliding it over one shoulder.
“If we find their home planet, are you in?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Pinot glimpsed Dembu’s hat move as the old colonel nodded.
“Just find the bastards.”
Pinot smiled as he walked away, already thinking about the air-conditioned confines of his office.
CHAPTER 30
UGIS Orion
Local Solar Date: July 15, 2206
Local Solar Time: 1112 Hours
The meeting was held in Flight Colonel Meeds’s office.
The man who sat at the desk was as nondescript as it is possible to get. Blue suit, pressed. Pale collar, with a UG pin at the lapel. His hair was dark, his skin a brownish mix of ethnicities from across the system. His face was clean-shaven, his lips average-thin, and his eyes standard-issue brown. He sat without great rigidity, but with a simple posture that would blend into the background at pretty much any event one might, or might not, find him at.
Nimchura took an immediate dislike to him, but Jarboe just brought up a chair and introduced himself as they sat down.
The conversation was short and crisp.
Would they be willing to volunteer for a new assignment?
Yes, they replied.
It would be hard work, and insanely dangerous. They may not return.
Fine.
It might require them to be away for a long time.
Would they fly?
Yes, the man answered, his voice almost cracking the monotone. They would need to pass a few tests, and they would likely never be able to talk about it to anyone, but it was important, and, after a time, it would require pilots with their skills.
Then, yes, of course, yes.
Sign us up.
Just like that, Jarboe and Nimchura were the first pilots assigned to the Galopar Mission.
Nimchura understood the assignment meant a lot of work that was not flying, too, but he was fine with anything that got him out of the press corps and into something with space all around it. He couldn’t help but smile, and the skin over his arms seemed to shiver with anticipation.
“I gotta go to the gym,” he said to Jarboe as they stepped into the hallway that led out of Officers Row.
“Blow off steam?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m pumped. You wanna meet there?”
Jarboe nodded, rubbing the back of his neck, then looked down the hallway. “Sure.”
“Don’t use up all that extra gung ho in one place.”
“Sorry.”
“Well?”
Jarboe’s grin carried all the enthusiasm of a parent dealing with a rambunctious kid. “I’m gonna grab something to eat first.”
“Good idea. Meet you there in thirty?”
“Deal.”
Nimchura’s smile was so wide he could feel it in his ears. The Galopar Mission was going to be brilliant, glorious even. It didn’t even matter than he wasn’t sure what a Galopar was.
CHAPTER 31
Galopar
Local Date: Masked
Local Time: Masked
A Galopar, it turns out, is a tiny shithole of a planet in the inhabitable region of Eta Cassiopeia B. Eta Cass B was the mate to the star system that Universe Three had chosen as its new home, and the smaller of the binary pair. The team immediately took to calling it Little Brother.
Unlike U3’s planning for planetfall, the criteria for the landing site was simple: Find an open area with nearby water.
The drop happened in a single pass.
Fifty shuttles ferried engineers, ground support, and construction workers in via a single massive drop from Orion.
They brought in equipment and material.
Electronic assemblies.
Computer systems.
Weapons.
They dropped in material and components that would let the camp quickly assemble skimmers, rovers, and scooters. They shuttled food rations for several months, but assumed the group would eventually become self-sustaining. Medical equipment included antibiotics, basic first aid material, and other simple items—have a complex problem on Galopar and you were a casualty, but you knew that going in.
The whole thing—an entire civilization dropped onto a tiny planet—took roughly two hours. Then Orion was gone, jumped back to the Solar System to return to its patrol mission.
When Todias Nimchura stepped off the shuttle and onto the vast grassland, he had to admit it was one of the slickest maneuvers he had ever seen.
It was a strange and dangerous place, Galopar.
Overgrown with vines and thorn-laden thickets, and roamed by enough strange-looking creatures that, in certain other situations and for certain types of people, it might have been considered a paradise. When it wasn’t cloudy, the sky was blue and carried a strange golden hue to it that made everything seem as crisp as a fresh dream.
It had been identified as potentially inhabitable years back, but dropped off the list of high-profile missions because other sites showed stronger traces of high-value metals. In other words, it wasn’t worth it. Which Nimchura thought was a shame because the animal life on the planet alone would keep biologists busy for lifetimes. Not that it mattered, he supposed. But he liked vid-clips about animals, and he hadn’t seen such a collection of actual wildlife since the schooldays when they saw clips of lions and antelope in the fields.
Little Brother was cooler than Sol, but at a distance of only .18 AU from Galopar, it warmed the planet well enough to keep its temperatures up both night and day. Its eighty-nine-day orbit around Eta B and its proximity to Big Brother Eta Cass gave Galopar an eccentric seasonal pattern. At about eight-tenths Earth’s mass, its gravity was pleasantly low.
Very little of that mattered to the mission planners at all, who merely saw that the planet looked like it should be inhabitable, and that it was both close enough to the U3 outpost to support operations, and far enough away that U3 shouldn’t be able to find it. The planners also didn’t care that the planet’s day was a weird, body-bending thirty standard hours and twenty-eight standard minutes.
Suck it up, they would say.
They were on Galopar to strike back, after all.
They were here to take possession of Einstein and Icarus, to show that no renegade group of terrorists would ever succeed in attacking the people of the UG. They were here with enough people and material to literally hand-assemble a set of Quasar transports to carry the platoons of UG Space Rangers who landed with them, and enough XB-25 Firebrands that they would also build themselves to support their raid.
It was the craziest thing Nimchura had ever heard.
He couldn’t wait to get started.
Building a secret outpost that can assemble spacecraft, it turns out, can be backbreaking work. Doing so quickly, on a foreign planet, and under strict rules is even harder work, especially when those rules include such things as: All work that required anything with electronics must happen only in the hours when the camp faced away from Atropos. It was good security, they said—don’t give the U3 bastards a signal to work with. But it was a pain in the ass, and it slowed things down to a crawl.
Vice Admiral Naomi Umaro, the officer in charge of the operation, was a hard-assed ice queen who expected e
ighteen hours of work a day and could manage to keep that pace up herself. She made it known immediately that violation of that rule was something you did not want to suffer.
Watching the base go together was like watching time-lapse photography. Generators were laid in a day. Command shack in three days. Mess shack in two more. Walls of corrugated composite laid against a wall one day were pinned to the bones of a training hall the next. Paths were cut, copses of trees cleared, roads pressed, foundations poured. The landing zone picked was mostly a flat grassland, which made securing the area against the indigenous predators relatively simple. The grassland fauna made dinner a time of interesting experimentation.
“I thought we were going to be flying,” Nimchura complained at lunch after a week—which everyone agreed was seven local days. He was already tired of the work, and his skin was raw from scratching at bug bites he had picked up pretty much every night on planet.
Jarboe gazed over the horizon as he chewed some kind of dried meat. Sweat poured off his forehead and grime marked his cheeks. His shirt blew in the breeze, but the breeze didn’t help.
The humidity here made an August day in Mississippi feel like a treat. It rained every day since they had arrived—usually in the morning when cloud cover traveled along a range of hills that were almost mountains, and dumped sheets of water for about thirty minutes before the sky opened to blue.
Jarboe finally replied. “Captain says we’ll start building skimmers and spacecraft once the perimeter is secure, and once she’s sure we’ll be able to keep everything safe.”
“To hell with that.”
“Still beats hell out of kissing babies,” Jarboe said.
“Yeah,” he replied. “I guess.”
Nimchura chewed on his own slice of crappy dried meat, watching Jarboe from the corner of his eyes. His wing leader sat like he was conserving energy. He ate with simple movements, a straightforward swinging of his hand to his mouth, then back to his elbow resting on his knee, the shrivel of dried meat hanging loose in his long fingertips. His expression was bland and unchanging. Jarboe’d been quiet since he got here, and in truth ever since they had agreed to come here.
“You all right?”
“I’m good.”
Nimchura waited, but nothing else came. Jarboe just stared out over the horizon and then at the walls of the shed they’d been assigned to build.
“Fine,” Nimchura eventually said, ripping a bite of his own lunch and chewing on it with pent-up fury. Screw Jarboe. It wasn’t like he was having any fun out here, either.
“Fine what?”
Nimchura gave an annoyed shake of his head. “Fine by me if you want to be an ass. I can take it. We’re both all dressed up with no place to go.”
“Hmm,” Jarboe replied.
That was as far as it got. Which was more strangeness as far as Nimchura was concerned. In the past, Jarboe had generally been harder to shut up than to shut down. Now he just shrugged and ate.
It bothered Nimchura, but he didn’t know what to do about it.
And in the end, it probably didn’t mean much.
Jarboe being an indifferent ass was probably nothing a day at the joystick of an XB-25 wouldn’t cure.
More than two months went by before the “assembly line” even started building spacecraft.
More than two months of constructing sheltered buildings powered by solar generators and combustion engines that ran on wood and other organic material that was harvested locally.
Two excruciating months before the nearby forests were cleared of the aggressive animals that everyone took to calling saber-toothed tigers, even though they looked more like a cross between a hyena and a stunted rhinoceros. They got their nickname from the low growl they gave, but mostly from the curved fangs they flashed as they stalked members of the outpost.
Nimchura, Jarboe, and three other teams of pilots spent days pouring concrete for barrack foundations, concrete for storage areas, concrete for assembly stations, and, finally, concrete for launch pads. The afternoon the first launch pad was finished, they etched their initials in the composite.
Nimchura’s back hurt, and his knees were knocky as he stood up that day, admiring the flourished T “Y” N that sat below and behind Jarboe’s A “D” J.
It was good work, he thought.
Flat as a table. Solid as a…uh…rock.
When they finished the last launching pad, he looked up into the sky and could almost imagine a Firebrand taking off.
Four weeks after the assembly line started production, the outpost rolled out its first vehicle that could actually achieve orbit, a knockoff Firebrand that the gang called the XB-25 TriplePlus because they wanted the goddamned extra credit. They did their first equipment shakedown while the site was in its winter phase and Eta Cass B completely blocked its view to Atropos.
Jarboe got the first seat, using its maiden voyage to prove its orbital capability, a mission he accomplished in his normal, straightlaced fashion, with a stoic expression of duty on his face that didn’t really surprise Nimchura at all, though maybe it should have.
Then it was Nimchura’s turn. He nearly cried when he got into the cockpit.
His heart thumped as he sat in the seat and wrapped his hand around the joystick. He toggled the engines and lifted off from the pad. He was flying. Flying for what felt like the first time in all of eternity. And then he did cry, tears of joy flowing from the corner of his eyes as his head pressed back against the seat and the blue sky turned crystalline, and then black. He whooped and hollered inside the confines of the cockpit. He ran loops, like the flight plan called for. Then, rather than return directly to the post, he corkscrewed, followed by a sharp four-point compass roll. He dropped a quick competition turn, then a space-eight with a twist—which was his own version of the old Cuban eight—yelling out loud as he held the line on the opening and hollering like his aunt taught him when he finished it off.
It was only then that he saw the fuel gauge was drawing down.
A click of the system prepped the outer hull for reentry, which had the blazing brilliance it always had.
He set the Firebrand down just as its engines were sputtering.
Umaro, of course, grounded both their asses for three days.
Which they spent doing construction, joking, and stewing over the fact that they weren’t flying. At least that’s what Nimchura thought they were doing, until the third day when he realized Jarboe hadn’t even reprimanded him for getting them dropped off the flight schedule.
“I’m surprised you’re not saying anything about my dumbass move,” Nimchura said.
They were building a pathway between buildings, and the sun was hot. Sweat rolled off their bodies and soaked their shirts, shirts they kept on to protect against sunburn and against the “mosquitoes” that were suddenly as thick as soup.
“You already know you screwed up,” Jarboe replied. He wiped a grimy hand over his shirt. Then he picked up a trowel and got to work.
And that was it.
Nimchura focused on the work for the rest of the day, like Jarboe did, letting the idea that they were going to be truly flying soon keep his thoughts focused.
It was his fault they weren’t in the air now.
He got that. Consequences, and everything.
But every time he tried to get angry at himself for it, he remembered his astrobatics and wound up smiling. And every time he smiled he realized the work they were doing felt good.
When he thought about Jarboe, though, the smile dimmed.
Something was definitely different about him, now.
Something wasn’t right.
Three months.
That’s how long it takes a small, dedicated crew of support specialists to build, test, and validate four Quasars and eight special Firebrands.
Now they knew.
Tack on another month for shakedown and testing of the pilot-craft interface, and you’re about set. All total, the span from drop-off to mission rea
diness added up to nearly eight months on Galopar.
Nimchura was not going to miss it.
Especially now that they had been briefed on the plan.
The attack profile was ballsy.
The order of battle consisted of four Quasar troop transports, each carrying forty rangers, and each essentially ferried by a pair of XB-25 TriplePlus Firebrands.
The Quasars were stripped-down spacecraft, simple rockets that were throwbacks to an earlier time—launched into space on a set of powerful boosters, but not capable of complex flying. The Firebrands would lift off after the Quasars, be their primary guidance correction leaders on the subsequent flight, and escort them on the three-day, radio-silent burn that would take them to Atropos, where they would commence to whaling upon the U3 colony, a place they had started to call Atropos City. The satirical name felt right. Nimchura figured the U3 terrorists were probably living in grass huts, at best.
The Quasars would serve to refuel the Firebrands in a way that was similar to the old Supertanker in the Sky systems that had been so effective in the early days of primitive flight.
When they reached the target zones, the transports would enter the atmosphere, engage their stubby wings, and drop their Space Rangers on the surface while the Firebrands provided cover. The Quasar transports themselves would become bombs of a sort. The rangers would take out the ground crews, capture whatever Universe Three settlement existed at the time, take as many prisoners as they could, and use them to reacquire the Excelsior ships.
It was a one-way jaunt, succeed or die trying, dangerous from the minute it launched, a daredevil mission that, like the concept of refueling tankers, also harked back to the earliest days of flying.
Intense training had started over a month ago, and included three flights a day that were intended to create muscle memory for the act of jettisoning the Quasars—a maneuver made tricky because the transports were closer to gliders or old-time rockets than truly modern spacecraft in that they had only limited ability to control their own flight paths. The Quasar had been selected, however, because it was designed with stealth in mind, meaning each transport presented only slim cross sections that made them difficult for enemies to find. In addition, the Quasars’ forward surfaces were lined with particle processors that took almost every form of energy its profile encountered and either reflected them away, or funneled them along its outer shell to exhaust away off the back.