by Trevor Wyatt
I hear Walker’s exhalation before I hear his voice: “Well, Flynn, it really doesn’t matter what misgivings you or any other person within the Armada or the Union think. We’re at the point of no return…You are at the point of no return. You are under obligation to see this mission through, after which I can take point if you wish. Just let me know.”
That does it for me. I stop pacing and stand at attention before the Admiral.
“How can you even say that, sir?” I ask.
He shrugs.
“The Armada is my life. How can I trade up my life?” I continue. “I have no problem with my current orders. I will carry them out to the letter.”
“Good,” Admiral Walker replies. “For a moment there you had me worried. Look, there are many who can sit in a room and begin to pick our decisions apart. I find that these office types are the ones who end up costing us more in war. When they are exposed to the horrors of war, when they have lost captains, friends, confidants, family…that’s when they realize that, when it comes to protecting all that you love and care for, boundaries must be crossed.” I find that I have been holding my breath. I let it out slowly.
“So, you agree we’re crossing a boundary?”
He makes a face. “Are you serious, Flynn? What do you think I am, a mindless beast? Of course. But make no mistake. This isn’t just a war for territory or dominance. This is a war for survival. We’re fighting for more than just the Union…we’re fighting for the human race. And I’ll be damned if I don’t cross every single line in the sand to see to it that we survive.”
“Get your mind and heart right, Flynn,” Walker continues. “Your captains don’t need you giving voice to all that tension.”
“Yes, sir,” I say.
He gives me a final nod. “Walker out,” he mutters, more to himself than to me, vanishes from my office.
I exhale aloud.
I have my orders, and they must be carried out. And that’s the end of it.
And still…
Jeryl
I am in my Captain’s Office, looking at the ceiling. I feel the steady hum of the FTL drive, a constant presence whenever you engage it.
Most of the repairs on the ship have been done. All systems are nominal. All weapons are ready. All officers are ready to engage. This is as ready as we’ll ever be. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever been this ready for a battle, even counting these five years of war. Yet, somehow, the closer we get to The Mariner Nebula, the closer we get to annihilating the Sonali planet…and the more restless I become.
I better get it together. We have barely a day left.
I haven’t spoken about it to anybody. Well, that isn’t exactly true; I once went to the sick bay to see my chief medical officer, Dr. Mahesh Rigsang. I suspected I was having a heart problem of some sort. Maybe I had ruptured a vein or something. After a thorough check, the CMO cleared me and told me I was perfectly healthy. When I told him I didn’t feel so healthy, he gave me some sleeping pills and told me to rest. I was just stressed, he said. I’d say that was putting it lightly.
I took the pills, but still no respite.
This goes way beyond stress; I am just afraid to admit it.
A little crack. This is what the enemy needs to win the war. Just a tiny little crack. I can’t allow for any cracks. I can’t second-guess myself. I can’t give in to doubt, even though it might wrap itself around my heart, squeezing it tight.
I can’t give in.
I won’t give in
I shut my eyes for a moment, allowing the darkness to swallow me whole.
There are a lot of people on this ship (not to mention all the others joining us at The Mariner Nebula), and they’re all depending on me.
Shouldn’t that be the exact reason to allow doubt in? A small voice in the back of my head whispers.
I grit my teeth and, before I know what I’m doing, I’ve balled both hands into fists.
As a captain, I can’t stand the thought of making a mistake that would cost the lives of my crew. And it’s that same thought that weighs me down—what if I make a mistake that doesn't cost me my crew, but costs the lives of…billions? Maybe I could’ve prevented all this.
But then, I ask myself—would any other Captain have handled things differently? If The Seeker hadn’t been the one assigned to that mission, would things have gone down the way they did? Sometimes, I think it would’ve happened the way it did. Others, well…
I've survived this long because of Ashley. She’s the anchor that holds me down and keeps me down. She is the reason I keep fighting. She is the light in the darkness. Whenever these doubts weigh me down, she’s the one I turn to.
But I can’t stop my mind from spinning endlessly. Never. And I’ve tried.
What if I was better prepared when I met the Sonali for the first time? I was ill prepared for it, and that because I always disregarded the possibility of alien life in the universe.
How about now? I ask myself. Now you are racing towards the Sonali to deal out a fatal blow to their species. Now you know ahead of time. There’s no excuse.
Realization hits me. Whatever actions I take, whatever happens here on out, I am fully responsible. There’ll be no excuses. History will judge me brutally. And with this realization comes a tidal wave of fear crashing down on me.
I leap out of my chair. I need to talk to someone. There’s only one person I can think of and she is off duty.
“Contact Commander Gavin,” I say, activating the ship’s AI.
“Ashley here,” her voice fills my office, and I find myself sighing with what seems like relief. For a moment, the darkness of fear recedes.
“Ash, where are you?” I ask her.
There is a pause. I never call her Ash except when we’re alone. I did it now because I want her to know that I’m not looking for the First Officer. I’m looking for my wife.
“Is everything okay?” she asks.
“Do you want an honest answer?”
“Yeah.”
“No, everything’s not alright,” I say.
“I’m in our quarters,” I hear her say.
“I’ll be there in two.” I cut the line and head out of my quarters. I order my security detail to remain on the CNC, and even though they don’t seem happy to obey, they have no other choice but to do it. I know I'm flagrantly disobeying Armada regulations, but so what? I want a moment of privacy with Ashley.
When I get to our quarters, I find her lying down on the bed. She sits up as I walk in.
I motion for her to remain in bed, locking the door behind me. I slip into the bed beside her, and she instinctively rests her head on my chest. It feels electric, being this close to her.
“Lights off,” I say, plunging the quarters into the state it had been when I walked in.
“What’s wrong?” she asks me after a moment of silence. Her soft voice wakes me up as I realize I must have fallen asleep.
I check for the struggle in my heart. It’s still there, but now it seems almost… insignificant. The fire blazing inside me for Ashley simply overpowers everything else. I’ve never been able to describe what I feel for her. I’m not a man of words, after all. But every cell in my being knows the truth: I love her, I really do.
“Remember how you’ve been having doubts about our commands?” I ask her.
“Yes,” she says, her voice setting off a vibration in my chest. During all our officer’s meetings, Ashley has never ceased to vocalize her misgivings about the current path that the Terran Union is following. Nevertheless, she’s always quick to ensure that the mission is a success—her commitment never requires a question mark.
“I think you may be right.”
I feel Ashley roll over until she has her arms folded on my chest, her head facing mine. I can’t see her, but I feel her looking at me.
“You’re kidding, right?” she asks.
“No. This mission doesn’t sit well with me,” I reply. “I’m telling you this not as your captain now… b
ut as your husband. This doesn’t feel right.”
She sighs and reverts back to her previous position, her head on my chest. Telling her I’m afraid relives some of the tension in my heart.
“You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about our mission,” she says. “The Wolf Offensive. Before the war, people can say all sorts of things about the morality of what we do or don’t do. But right after the war, none of that seems to matter. Only the results. Say we win this. Nobody is going to realize that we may have contributed to wiping out an entire intelligent space faring species. All they will think about is that we won, and that we’re free. What is this war turning us into, Jeryl?”
I remain silent. I know it’s a rhetorical question, but that’s not why I’m hesitating. I don’t answer because I don’t know how to answer.
“To think that all this started because of the destruction of The Mariner,” I say. “We have looked through the records. We have read the transcripts of their communication with Edoris Station. From all the evidence we’ve been able to compile, there is nothing that suggests that the Sonali were responsible for their destruction. It seems that they were being sincere, though rudely, when they told us it was their sector and that they didn’t know what had happened to The Mariner.”
“You’re saying that this entire war was based on an assumption that may have been false?” she asks, incredulity filtering into her voice.
“I don’t know what I’m saying,” I reply her. “I don’t know, Ash. No matter what the case is, one thing is certain. We’re fucked.”
In tandem, as though our hearts beat as one, we draw in a deep breath and let it softly out into the air. I shove all the thoughts into the back of my mind and let myself relax in the comfort of nearness to my wife.
We’re fucked, yes.
But at least we’re not alone.
Ashley
It’s 0800 hrs. I meet the tactical station on board The Seeker in CNC trying to rub the sleep out of my eyes. The fleet goes toward its end goal today. And somehow it seems like a bad omen to go into combat without my morning cup of coffee.
I scanned the readouts of the fleet that’s forming in the system with the ships coming in and meeting at the rendezvous point roughly half a light year away from the station. I double and triple check the readouts from engineering to make sure our FTL drives are fully aligned. I checked the manifest in sick bay to ensure that everything the doctor requested has transferred over. I checked her weapons complement to see if the upgrades went through. They have. I even checked the energy banks that power the molecular resequencer. Not because I think that we're going to want to have a meal in the middle of combat, just because I don’t know what else to check.
I’ve checked everything. The flurry of activity over the last 12 hours has been frantic. Everyone knows this is the Wolf Offensive. The single most important engagement to date in this war. An offensive that I can’t find myself agreeing with, but one that I know is necessary if we're to have a fighting chance to survive as a species.
“Everything okay?” A voice asks and I turn to see Jeryl standing next to me. I didn’t even realize he came by my side until he said something. I must’ve been engrossed in my readouts more than I realized.
“I’m fine, Captain,” I say. “All systems appear to be in working order, the upgrades have gone through, weapons are online, FTL drives are working, sick bay is fully stocked with anything that we could ever need, and if you want you can even go get a cup of coffee and not tax the energy banks.”
“Well, it’s nice to know that I can get a cup of joe and then go kill one billion Sonali,” the Captain says with an air of morbid resignation mixed with a humor that’s born out of hopelessness.
“We don’t have to go kill one billion Sonali,” I say. “There are other ways around how we can go about achieving victory. We’ve been pushing back on Sonali lines the last two months. It’s not inconceivable that we could target some of their main command-and-control stations. Push them back into their planetary bases. Take out their shipping lines. Create a war of attrition.”
I look to the captain and see him staring at me. He knows what I’m saying is correct and he knows that what I’m proposing would be a much longer, much costlier, much more brutal war. He knows that I know that this plan would never pass muster.
The Terran Union was never prepared for conflict. We went into it full of bluster. We didn’t analyze the consequences of prolonged years of warfare on our population.
Our democratic institutions will begin to crumble if we don’t end this war. We’ll need strong leadership—much stronger than what we have now. I’m talking autocratic leaders who consolidate all the power among a few people. They’d need to direct fleets, move massive groups of men and material, dictate that the individual—all 44 billion within the Terran Union—dedicate their lives to the state.
I mean, we’ve seen that before in our history. Nazi Germany. Soviet Union. The caliphate of the Middle East that arose in the mid-21st century right before the Third World war. The Asian Bloc. The Empire of Oceania. The Outer Colonies. We could go down that route, but we would’ve lost the war much, much before then.
The Captain knows this. He knows I know it. He knows that we’re probably 3 to 6 months away from open rebellion in the core worlds of the Union. We both realize that we are maybe a year away from a breakdown in government where Earth won’t be able to maintain clear lines of control and communication with the Armada.
And we both know that if we keep facing defeat or even stalemate, the situation will eventually wear down on us until there's a collapse from the inside. And we leave the Sonali to mop us up as they progress further and further toward the cradle of humanity.
“This is the only way, Ash,” Jeryl says. “We gonna have a problem carrying out your mission?”
“I know my mission,” I say.” You will have no problems from me, sir.”
“Good,” he says. I sigh. I wonder what happened to the man who expressed his doubts and his fears about this mission just a few hours ago. But I know he’s most probably burying that side of him right now. He can’t let it show. Not for me, not for anyone. He needs to present the picture of a leader in charge—a commander of the Terran Armada. Any doubts, any misgivings, any sort of second thoughts would be detrimental to the morale of the crew. Once they know what we're about to do they need to see a strong and confident leader who is willing to go in and make the hard decisions and carry out the final orders.
And a billion Sonali lives will be the price that needs to be paid because of that composure.
“There’s something you should know about the ship and its upgrades,” I say trying to change my mood. “Our weapons have been upgraded, but our shielding has been upgraded with the latest technology that the Armada is putting into new starships. We’re able to last in a firefight much longer and that may come in handy if we need to be the ones to start the orbital bombardment of the Beta Hydra III planet. Preliminary readouts tell me that our weapons damage effectiveness have been increased by nearly 75%. Our shielding has been increased by close to 150%.”
“That’s impressive,” he says to me raising his eyebrows. “How did we get such numbers?”
“Apparently, we’ve been busier than I thought capturing downed Sonali starships,” I say with a smile. “War may be the mother of all invention but you can never beat good old-fashioned stealing.”
I try to give him a smile to cut the overhanging tension in the air that’s caused by this mission. If I can lighten the mood for just one moment, distract his thoughts for just a second it could mean the difference between life and death when we go into battle.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you by the way,” he says as he turns to face CNC from my tactical consul. “Can you get me all of the data and telemetry that we collected from the debris of The Mariner?” Jeryl asks.
“Sure,” I say. “You can have that in the next few minutes.”
“Thanks,” he says. “I
also need all of the data that we have on that nebula, any sort of data that was sent back by The Mariner, and all data from first contact as well as any active and passive scans that the ship was running at that time.”
I nod and start to input the commands that will get all of the information to the captain. I know that any Armada starship normally runs passive scans in the background of the surrounding space. This is standard operating procedure. It allows some of the routine scanning that needs to be done in order for course corrections and any sort of star charting for the navigator to engage in to be done without having to go through any sort of CNC officer approving and keeping track of it. The scans themselves are very low energy and not an intense power drain on the ship's energy sources so they run continuously—even while in space dock.
“With that kind of data it’ll take at least 20 minutes to get it all compiled,” I say. “You want it routed to your tablet?”
“No,” he says. “Send it to my workstation in my office. I plan to do some reading about the circumstances that started this conflict. We have at least a few more hours until we get to the nebula. I might as well start going through that information.”
My ears perk up and my sixth sense starts tingling.
“Jeryl,” I say slowly keeping my voice low. “What’s going on?”
Jeryl shrugs and looks away. It’s like he’s thinking of what to say.
“I’m not sure yet,” he says his voice lowering even more so that no one in CNC can hear us. “But it’s something that’s been at the back of my head and I need to go over it. Something I thought of last night. Somethings not right about this. Something wasn’t right from the very single day that we met the Sonali. And if we have this time I’m going to actually finally use it after all these years to try and see what it could be.”
I smile and nod. “You’ll have it shortly,” I say.
Jeryl nods and thanks me before turning and walking into his office.