by Dani Kollin
Charles Lee Park reminded J.D. too much of her past, and as such she did not much like the man. He’d been an up-and-coming GCI executive who was making a real name for himself in the outer planets. Given his career track, he would’ve been on the board in thirty years or so. But when the war broke out, Charles had stayed in Neptune as the rest of his colleagues took the fastest transports back to the Core. For the longest time, it had been assumed he was a spy for the corporations, but he’d volunteered, like Susan, at the lowest grade of spacer, and the needs of the war and his natural ability had pushed him very high up the chain of command. J.D. still didn’t trust him completely, but the truth was, his background was not that much different from hers. Besides, he was a devious son of a bitch whom J.D. used to test her theories. He’d been very useful in second-guessing J.D.’s battle plan for the latest victory at Jupiter.
David Paladin was one of the few fleet officers who’d started out as an assault miner and made the switch to spacer. It was an open debate whether the assault miners under David’s command were the best, but they certainly thought they were. J.D. knew many a person who would have loved to trip the commodore into a bunk. Deep in her thoughts, it had even occurred to J.D. But Paladin was famously loyal to his two husbands, one an engineer in Ceres and the other an agriculturalist who’d taken over soy production at thirty asteroids orbiting Saturn.
Her thoughts in order, J.D. began. “By now, you know that there is an asteroid swarm directly in our path.” She knew that everyone had seen the sensor reports. The creation of the vias in the outer orbits had created so much disruption in the debris of the solar system that old navigation maps were useless, and new ones had not been made due to the war. Normally this was not a problem, as the vias connecting the outer planets were swept clean and monitored with near religious devotion and no one would be stupid enough travel the outer orbits any other way.
“The odds of a swarm this big in just this place,” Maria said bitterly.
Susan Cho rolled her eyes. “Please, Maria. We’re the anomaly out here, not the random asteroid streams. We’ve got enough on our plates as it is to start second-guessing God.”
“Poor God,” Charles broke in, “getting blamed for this.”
“This has nothing to do with God,” protested Maria. “I’m merely pointing out the coincidence.”
“The question is,” asked David, “what are we going to do about it?”
“We have to change our course or our rate of deceleration,” said Francine with her characteristic practicality.
“We can’t.” It was Tawfik. There were bags under his eyes, and his shoulders were hunched. On all the displays in the six command spheres an image of the fleet with a line leading straight toward Saturn appeared in red and a smaller line in gold showed it leaving Saturn and intercepting Ceres. “Our course and deceleration were precisely planned to not only rendezvous with Saturn but do so in such a way as to make it possible for us to reach Ceres at a specified time. But our gas tanks are going to be empty when we leave Saturn. The Saturnians have already positioned all the hydrogen they had in orbit at just the right location and velocity for us to be able to fuel up and continue to Ceres without pausing. And we must get that hydrogen because we will have to burn our thrusters at full to slow down enough to intercept Ceres at less than hello/good-bye speeds.”
“Can’t they simply move the hydrogen blocks to match our new course?” asked Charles.
“They damaged most of the block thrusters moving that much hydrogen to where we needed it with such short notice. I doubt they have enough to move twenty percent of what we need in the time we could give them. We will be at Saturn in twenty hours. It’s just not enough time.”
“Then we go through,” J.D. said.
“Admiral,” implored Francine, “that’s suicide, and you know it.”
J.D. nodded. “Yes,” she answered, looking every bit as haggard as Tawfik, “I do. But I also know that if we deviate from this course and arrive too late, Ceres will be destroyed—and if it’s destroyed, we lose the war. End of story.”
“You have debris the size of softballs, Admiral,” said Francine. “It was a few of those traveling in a clump that destroyed the Pickax. That swarm has hundreds that size and thousands the size of baseballs and tens of thousands the size of golf balls. At our calculated speed, the swarm’ll destroy us. What good will it do the Alliance if it loses the fleet and Ceres at the same time?”
And that was the question to which J.D. did not have a good answer. Without a good answer, J.D. knew she was going to have to order a minor course correction that would lose them the war. But she could not see what to do. Suddenly she felt tired to her soul and her mind refused to work. All the sleep she’d put off since she awoke in the hollow moon with her three hundred hidden ships was now extracting its price, and the three hours she’d gotten with Katy just before were not nearly enough to make up for the endless days of constant demanding decision.
Allah, I beg of you, she thought, don’t let me fail your children. They need me to lead and I have nothing. Surely it is not your will that we enter the swarm and die? Help us for their sake if not for mine!
“Admiral,” Tawfik said softly and seemingly from far away. “Blessed One, are you with us?”
J.D. brought herself to and realized that she must have dozed. For her head and shoulders tilted at a considerable angle in her chair. She froze, almost falling out of the seat, and saw the asteroid swarm from a slightly different angle than she had sitting upright in her command chair.
“Praise be Allah,” she said softly.
“To Allah, all praise,” responded Tawfik automatically, recognizing the change in J.D. at once. To the depths of his soul, he knew when the Merciful One breathed genius into his Blessed One, but he had never seen it so clearly before.
J.D. stood, now fully awake, and rerouted the fleet in the holo-tank. “The asteroid swarm is shearing across our path almost ninety degrees from our course. That means that the debris we have been running into is also being blasted out of our way. So we need to move the fleet ninety degrees behind the plow. We must maintain course and speed, just change our position.”
“The farther down the line a ship is, the more likely it will get hit by cross debris,” cautioned Maria. All heads nodded in agreement. “My flotilla will take the end position.”
“No. The Warprize will take the end position,” said J.D. firmly. She was met by a wall of silence. However, J.D. knew it was of the dangerous sort—that of firm rejection. “My orders will be obeyed,” she said with a throaty growl.
“Admiral, if Ceres is lost, we lose the war,” said Charles.
“I know, Charles.”
“And if you are lost, we lose the war.”
“No one person—,” she began
“Bullshit, Admiral,” interrupted Maria, “anyone else, maybe, but not you.”
J.D. looked at the convocation before her. “I cannot fight this war from safety. If I’m indispensable, we have already lost.”
“Blessed One,” Tawfik said, “if you must die for the Alliance, then you must. But if you die leading us to victory against Admiral Trang and all he fights for, your death will free us. If on the other hand, you die in the trackless wastes of the solar system, pounded by asteroids far from any battle, your death will doom us. Tell me I’m wrong,” challenged Tawfik, smiling with the knowledge that he was not.
J.D. pushed her lips up against her teeth and tried to come up with a better argument against the young engineer’s reasoning but could find none. “You know, Tawfik, your mother had that same annoying habit.” Tawfik, J.D. could see, was deeply touched by the public praise he’d just received. “Very well,” she said, “the Warprize will take up a position in the upper third—”
“Ahem,” was the sound of all six people clearing their throats loudly and simultaneously.
“Very well, the upper fifth to the plow.” And then she proceeded to give quick and concise orders tha
t were followed as always with dedication and speed.
* * *
The image of the ships forming three to a rank going back ninety-six ranks was done with a precision and skill that seemed effortless, however it was anything but. Twelve ships did not take part in the maneuver, being too badly damaged or, sadly, already destroyed. The surviving ships promptly altered course to avoid the asteroid swarm and would regroup at Saturn to repair and await further orders.
But for the rest of their lives, the spacers of “the Fleet,” as it was now considered even by their enemies, would remember that moment. A moment when they used skill, experience, and faith to brave the fury of the solar system and the cruelty of time—all for the merest hope of victory.
As the fleet entered the asteroid swarm, impact after impact struck the ice shield of the plow. The surviving crew would later describe these myriad collisions with a combination of awe and dread. It was as if the asteroids were not inanimate rocks flying through space but rather the enraged antibodies of a solar system deeply offended by what humanity had done to its formerly undisturbed and eternal movements. Over drinks at bars not yet created, told to spacers not yet born, the lauded veterans would swear that the asteroids knew the plow was the cause of the solar system’s consternation and had attacked the hated offender with glee. Then they would laugh and pretend they were joking. But the shadow of the memory would stay in their eyes even as their voices denied it. Behind a wall of ice, they’d braved the fury of space—and it did not come without a price.
Ceres
Near the Cerean Sea
Hour 31
Rabbi waited patiently, scratching his foot at the now hardened sand of Tabor Beach. He was dressed in his best Sabbath garb, which consisted of a black, calf-length silk jacket tied neatly at the waist by a black, buckle-less belt. He also wore a traditional fur-rimmed hat known as a shtreimel. Sergeant Holke and Agent Agnes Goldstein were also in attendance, having taken up positions near him, turning from time to time to scan the various horizons. And lastly, Holke’s TDCs. Rabbi had always found the Cerean Sea to be a strange duck. He’d spent the overwhelming majority of his life on the seven small asteroids of Aish Hatorah and never saw a body of water bigger than a lake. To see an actual sea with all that water had been both exhilarating and terrifying. But what he’d cast his eyes upon now was out of a dream, or a nightmare.
The Cerean Sea was frozen solid. It had been done, as with all large open sources of water, to prepare for the battle. Instead of the warm, almost tropical ocean with the inviting sandy beaches, groves of trees, and verdant flower beds Rabbi was used to seeing, all that lay before him was a frost layer spreading out for miles, and all he felt was the cold. The air was filled with tiny glittering ice particles dancing around large multifaceted chunks of floating sea jarred loose by the recent bombardments. The blocks would detach from the frozen sea, hang in the air for a few seconds, and then, by force of Ceres’s natural gravity, be pulled toward its center, mountainous region at ever-increasing speeds. Once blocks hit the mountain range, they’d explode into thousands of smaller shards, creating a short-lived plume of ice crystals. It was oddly wondrous, thought Rabbi, how something so oneiric could come from so much devastation. And it also made perfect sense why the site had been chosen for a wedding that Rabbi was soon to officiate.
Taffy and Claude were part of a hundred-person-strong unit of assault miners from the Spirit of America. They’d been detached from Omad’s flotilla after three months of active combat to refit and integrate new members to replace combat losses. Much to their annoyance, they missed the opportunity to join the main fleet and were bumped from rejoining Omad’s flotilla when he had to take a hundred mystery passengers aboard the Spartacus at the last moment. In order to make room, Omad had been forced to transfer a hundred of his assault miners to the Spirit of America, which resulted in the leaving behind of a highly decorated and experienced combat battalion with no one to fight and nothing to do.
That didn’t stop Captain Claude Brodessor from keeping his Unicorns busy. They’d received the nickname from their fellow assault miners because of the little square boxes the men in the mostly male unit wore on their heads while praying. As the moniker had been chosen with as much respect as jest, the name soon stuck and the captain’s unit wore it proudly. Brodesser was one of those people who viewed every setback as an opportunity, and he seemed to love the opportunity to train his unit in the varied environments of Ceres. They learned how to move in forests, both temperate and frozen. They learned urban combat in the warrens of Ceres and waterborne combat until the seas froze. And if by some small chance some of his assault miners got bored, he’d make one round in five hundred live. After a couple of his assault miners had to have their limbs regrown, the rest learned to take the exercises quite seriously indeed. Even with the regrowth ability, the agony of having an arm or leg blown off was not something any of them ever wished to repeat.
In the midst of the combat training, it was decided that Claude and Taffy, the medic he’d been seeing of late, should admit what the rest of the unit already knew and tie the knot. As it turned out, the impromptu wedding was becoming a focal point of sorts. The punctilious captain was very cautious about things like fraternization, and though he loved Taffy, he’d decided to make that love official only after the war. But with the very real possibility that they’d all be dead in the next few days, Claude’s concerns seemed less important. Besides, Taffy could be very demanding—a fact Rabbi discovered when she barged into his busy office and demanded to see him. Rabbi had her wait, but was not so foolish as to make her wait longer than necessary. In fact, he’d sooner have gotten between a UHF cruiser and its target than get in the way of a bride seeking her groom. But after her impassioned plea that Rabbi talk with her “stubborn mule of a man,” Rabbi acquiesced and so, in the end, had the captain.
That had been six hours ago. The compromise had been that the ceremony not interfere with the Unicorns’ training schedule and so had been set during one of the unit’s brief fifteen-minute downtimes. Rabbi turned around when he heard the company jogging over a frozen dune. He also heard the captain’s thunderous voice shouting the words, “C’mon, you laggards, I will not be late for my own wedding!” The team, with Taffy in the lead shooting arrows with her eyes to her six-hour fiancé, flew over the hill and within a minute parked their gear near Rabbi. Rabbi raised his brow slightly and tapped on his empty wrist with an accusatory look toward Captain Brodesser. The captain, tapping on his wrist—covered in battle armor—returned Rabbi’s look with one of his own, indicating that it was Rabbi who was holding things up. Private joke completed, they both smiled broadly and then embraced.
Sergeant Holke knew everyone because he’d taken advantage of having a fully experienced combat unit on Ceres to train with his TDCs. It had meant that the thirty members of the President’s protection squad had to give up all their free time to train in groups of ten with the combat unit, but there had not been even the hint of a complaint. In fact, it had been more along the lines of a growl of pleasure. But if the training had been hard—and between the captain and Holke, it had been exceedingly so—the two units did not seem to have left any grudges behind. Though the TDCs had not been allowed to socialize with the Unicorns, both the captain and the sergeant turned a blind eye to some of the fraternization that naturally resulted from good camaraderie.
Rabbi viewed with concern some of the sidelong glances thrown by the Unicorn women toward the ten TDCs in attendance. I wonder how the TDCs feel about conversion?
Some religious articles were procured from a rucksack and a line quickly formed with crossed assault rail guns for the bride and groom to walk under. At the end of the line, four of the assault miners created a tentlike structure by holding up the four corners of a traditional Jewish prayer shawl with the tips of their rail guns. The unit’s gear was left in place; however, it had been set up for a defensive operation. To the captain, the ceremony had been all business, no
table by the way he inspected everyone’s stance—to Taffy, it was anything but. That much was evident by the large smile plastered across her face, letting everyone know she’d gotten what she wanted—even if at the end of a grueling hike and a less-than-romantic ceremony.
Rabbi took his official position beneath the impromptu tent, otherwise known as the chuppah.
The sounds of klezmer music wafted over the frozen seas as Claude and Taffy, donned in full combat armor, came down the column of heavily armed soldiers. Taffy was wearing a veil that she’d borrowed from a Muslim comrade who’d bought it as a gift for his niece. Rabbi took great joy in performing this ceremony. Lately, he’d been a Cabinet secretary of the Outer Alliance far more than a Rabbi of the Jewish people, and even when performing duties as the latter, they tended more often than not to be funerals. This wedding was tonic for a burdened soul, and even the normally taciturn captain seemed to finally relax, cracking a blissful smile as his bride circled around him seven times. Taffy was being “guided” by Rivka Dyan, the unit’s explosives expert. Rabbi held a silver chalice filled with wine from his personal stock, actually grown from grapes he’d planted himself. He said the traditional prayers, made the abridged traditional speech, and then bade both the captain and his bride to take a sip from the wine. Once satisfied that the two had been wed according the letter of the law, Rabbi took a small glass from his pocket, put it in a cloth napkin, and placed it on the ground. “Though today is a day of joy, we must never forget the destruction of the Temple in our holy city of Jerusalem and the destruction of faith in the fires of the Grand Collapse.” Rabbi tipped his head toward Claude, who promptly brought his combat boot down on the napkin. The sound of the shattered glass echoed across the Cerean Sea, followed by the much louder sound of a hundred happy, healthy voices shouting, “Mazel tov!”