by Marko Kloos
I love spending time with my wife, sharing food with her and making her laugh. I love our unhurried lovemaking, enjoying the act without having to worry about unwelcome visitors knocking on the hatch or overhead announcements in the hallway outside interrupting us. I love the sense that we are home for each other—that it’s not a fixed place on Earth or anyplace else you can find on a map, but where we both happen to be together.
But right now, most of all I love knowing that she’ll be next to me when I fall asleep, and she’ll be there still when I wake up in the morning. It means that I can go to sleep without dreading the shitty dreams that usually come in the middle of the night when I am alone.
CHAPTER 6
I haven’t been on a Treaty-class frigate in at least half a decade. When Halley and I step out of the drop ship and onto the scuffed and worn flight deck of NACS Berlin, it feels like I just went back in time. Berlin is one of the sister ships of my first Navy assignment, NACS Versailles, which went down over the far-off colony of Willoughby seven years ago, the first ship lost to the Lankies.
“Blast from the past,” Halley says as we get our bearings and look around. The drop ship we just arrived in is the only bird on the deck. “I didn’t think there were any Treaty figs left.”
“They must have put a few in mothballs,” I say. “I know Hidalgo ate it over Mars. I saw her beacon on the tac screen when we passed.”
We salute the colors on the aft bulkhead of the deck, a faded painting of the NAC flag above an equally faded ship’s seal. NACS BERLIN FF-480: FREEDOM’S DEFENSE. Then Halley, as the ranking visitor, asks the OOD for permission to come aboard.
“The skipper said to send you up to CIC,” the officer of the deck says when we have completed the traditional formalities. “Starboard gangway, to the main intersection.”
“Central elevator to Charlie Deck,” Halley says. “Thank you, Sergeant.”
“This takes me back,” I say out in the gangway. “Not sure it’s in a good way.”
“Yeah, last time we were on a Treaty class, things ended up with a lot of running and shouting.”
“And near-death experiences.”
“I liked Versailles,” she says. “And not just because that was the only command we ever got to serve on together.”
“You liked that relic?”
“Yeah, I did. It was my first ship assignment after Combat Flight School. And the flight ops were tiny. One drop ship and a spare. Three pilots on the whole ship. I was a big fish in a small tank.”
“And Versailles had a great XO,” I say.
“The best,” Halley confirms.
We walk up the central elevator and take it up to Charlie Deck, the central command deck on Treaty-class frigates. It houses the heavily armored combat information center right in the middle of the ship, where it’s most protected against battle damage. Seven years ago, I reported to her sister ship for my first assignment after tech school and promptly got an ass-chewing from then-Commander Campbell, who was the ship’s executive officer at the time. I smile at the memory as we step out of the elevator and onto Charlie Deck. He was wrong, and he apologized immediately when he realized his mistake, and that told me all I needed to know about my new XO.
Berlin looks tired and worn-out. The Treaty figs were in service for fifty years before they started decommissioning them, and this ship looks like it has been ridden hard for most of those five decades. The armored vestibule housing the CIC is painted the regulation Fleet gray, but the paint is scuffed and cracked in many places, and the polyplast of the CIC windows is a bit milky from all the surface wear over the years. We walk up to the SI trooper guarding the hatch and report in. He checks with CIC via an ancient hardwired comms handset, then opens the armored hatch for us and steps aside to let us enter.
Lieutenant Colonel Renner, the ship’s commanding officer, stands at the holotable in the pit that makes up the center of the CIC. She looks up when we enter, and I see the tiniest of smiles in the corners of her mouth. She’s almost a head shorter than Halley, with sand-colored hair she wears in a much closer crop than she used to have when I knew her on Indy. There are more obvious gray hairs in between the sandy ones now, and her face has more lines than it did a year ago.
“Captain Halley and Sergeant First Class Grayson reporting, ma’am,” Halley says, and we both give a proper salute. Despite the weary air about her, Lieutenant Colonel Renner returns it with precision.
“Good to see you, Sergeant Grayson. You too, Captain. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk at the ceremony day before yesterday.”
“It wasn’t really a social occasion, ma’am,” I say.
“No, it wasn’t.” She looks past us, toward the armored CIC hatch, as if she’s expecting someone else. Then she shakes her head lightly.
“Are you ready to go watch some fireworks?” she asks.
“Yes, ma’am. Provided that beast actually works as designed.”
“No shit.” Lieutenant Colonel Renner smiles wryly. “From what I hear, it took the engineering division three months just to figure out what all the switches did. Let’s hope we didn’t just piss all that manpower into the wind. Coulda used all those yard apes to get a dozen more cans from the mothball fleet into action.”
“Thank you for the invitation, ma’am. It’s nice to be able to get back up into space again,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says. “We have the space, and by God, you’ve earned an occasional VIP pass after last year.” Her expression clouds over briefly.
“Astrogation, plot a course to Perry Spaceborne Warfare Training Range. Let’s get underway so we don’t miss the party. It’s not like we get to see planet-killing weaponry in live fire every day.”
Perry, the Fleet’s main live-fire range, is a few hours from Earth orbit, laid out in space in a direction that points away from all intersystem shipping lanes, settlements, and Alcubierre nodes. Some of the stuff the Fleet slings from capital ship launchers can obliterate a deep-space transport or wipe out a settlement if it hits the wrong point in space.
Berlin burns her engines at military power for two hours, then flips for the turnaround burn in the opposite direction. There are several ships in the transit lane in front and behind us, all following the same precise routine. Space travel is nothing like the stuff I watched as a kid on the Networks—ships accelerating and braking on the spot in zero gravity, space fighters banking like airplanes. In reality, it’s a lot like trying to stop on a ten-centimeter bull’s-eye on a frozen lake precisely from half a kilometer away while on ice skates.
Lieutenant Colonel Renner makes some small talk with us in the CIC as Berlin’s icon moves along her computed plot trajectory on the holotable, but she’s not quite the same person I remember from my weeks on Indianapolis last year. She has never been chatty, but now she’s subdued, as if there’s a permanent storm cloud living behind those brown eyes now. The CO is perfectly courteous to us, but she keeps the chatter to the barest minimum, and she doesn’t bring up the events of last year again after her brief comment to me when we entered the CIC.
“Entering staging point,” the helmsman announces when Berlin has reached the last tenth of the trajectory line on the holotable’s display. “Deceleration complete. Coasting at ten meters per second.”
“Contact Perry Control and have them slot us into our gallery spot,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner orders.
“Aye, ma’am.”
I’ve never had the opportunity to watch a live-firing exercise out here. With the distances involved in space warfare, there wouldn’t be much to see without Berlin’s optical gear feeding high-magnification imagery to the holotable in the CIC. We move up to the section of space designated as the observation gallery, where half a dozen other ships are already lined up in ten-thousand-meter intervals, a silent audience of fleet-gray hulls, position lights blinking out of sync.
The star of this particular show is out on the range fifty thousand kilometers away. T
he massive bulk of NACS Agincourt is holding position out in the black, her bow pointed away from us, the lights on her hull flashing a steady rhythm. Further into space, at the far end of the three-dimensional wedge of space designated as live-fire zone, there are targets for Agincourt’s main gun, a small and forlorn-looking group of old ship hulls. The biggest in the center of the cluster is an old, heavy cruiser, a sizable ship at probably twenty thousand tons. The other ships are smaller—a frigate and a destroyer, and a civilian unit that looks like an ore hauler from the auxiliary fleet.
“Seems a waste to blow up those hulls when we have so few to go around,” I say.
“Those are from the breaker queue,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says. “They were all a few weeks away from the scrapyard. They already stripped out everything worth reusing. We couldn’t recommission those if we wanted to.”
“Look,” Halley says and points to one of the icons on the holographic display. “That’s an SRA can.”
The icon she points out has the marker SRAS HANOI next to it. The color of the ship icon isn’t the customary red we used for SRA contacts until very recently, but the pale blue of a foreign but allied friendly unit.
“One happy human family,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner remarks, the irony in her voice more than a little thick.
“Something like that,” I say.
“The Russians are mostly all right. The Chinese are hard to figure out. They never give you a direct answer to anything, not even when you just ask them for directions to the head.” Colonel Renner shrugs. “Doesn’t matter much, as long as they help us kill Lankies.”
The line of ships on the holotable orb grows steadily longer over the next ninety minutes as more ships arrive in the gallery section of the firing range and take their holding pattern slots to get a good view of the action. Under normal circumstances, a live-fire weapon test would be an unremarkable routine event, but the stuff that usually goes downrange at Perry consists of light rail gun projectiles or ship-to-ship missiles with half-ton warheads, not plasma bursts moving at near light-speed velocity. The main dorsal cannon on Agincourt is by far the most powerful armament ever put on a warship, and the assembled crowd of observers is hoping for some spectacular footage for their data storage modules.
“Red flag, red flag. Range is hot. I repeat, range is hot,” Perry Control announces over the general comms channel. “All ships, hold positions as assigned. Live-fire test commencing in t-minus ten minutes. Level Two radiation protocol is in effect.”
“Here we go,” Halley says. “This thing better be the freaking Hammer of Thor.”
“I concur,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says. “’Cause if it isn’t, we’ve wasted a whole lot of scarce resources on a light show.”
For something as theoretically exciting as the first test of a city-killer weapon, watching the huge battleship getting ready for the shot is about as exciting as watching paint dry. The Agincourt and Perry Control are in a constant chatter involving directional instructions, reactor output levels, and arming procedures. Then the engineering crew members on Agincourt are satisfied that all the lights and gauges on the dash look right, and a simulated range horn blast comes over the general comms channel.
“Tracking target, range 125,000 kilometers,” the weapons officer on Agincourt transmits. “Target locked at point five meters per second, good lock.”
“Reactor to pulse afterburner.”
“Reactor is at pulse afterburner, output steady.”
“Weapons free. Alpha mount, ten-shot burst, fire for effect.”
“Firing Alpha in three, two, one. Fire.”
We are watching the optical feed trained on the Agincourt in high resolution. When the main gun of the battleship fires, nothing spectacular happens. There’s no muzzle blast dissipating into space, no launch trail, no fireworks at all from the sending end. For one brief moment, it looks like the space in front of the cannon mount on the ship’s centerline distends a little, like a heat shimmer on concrete on a hot day.
A millisecond later, a small, new sun blots out the optical feed momentarily.
The filters of the optical sensors kick in to protect the electronics from the searing intensity of an explosion fireball out in space over a hundred kilometers in front of Agincourt. In Berlin’s CIC, everyone present utters some declaration of surprise or amazement.
“Direct hit on target,” Perry Control sends after a few seconds, quite unnecessarily.
“Holy shit, that thing is gone,” Halley says next to me.
“Ten- to fifteen-kiloton range,” the tactical officer of Berlin says from behind his console. “Target One is stardust. X-ray readings are off the charts.”
Where a few seconds ago the sensor feed showed an old thirty-thousand-ton hull floating in space a hundred-odd kilometers away, there’s only an expanding cloud of superfine debris and the plasma glow of a high-energy release. There’s nothing recognizable left in the part of space where the target hulks used to be. The main gun on Agincourt just did to an entire group of target vessels in a millisecond what even a Hammerhead cruiser would need five minutes of concentrated salvo fire and her entire ammunition load to do.
“That, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a game changer,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says with a satisfied-looking smirk. “Ten times the energy release of an Orion missile, and seconds between shots instead of hours.”
“Perry Control, Agincourt. We just lost main reactor power.”
We all look at the section of the screen showing the massive battleship. Most of the illumination on her hull has gone out, and the fusion engine on her stern is no longer glowing with an exhaust plume. She’s slowly drifting backward at maybe ten meters per second, with only her positional lights blinking slowly.
“Uh-oh,” Halley says.
A flurry of hectic messages between Perry Control and Agincourt follows. Agincourt has lost all reactor power and is coasting on emergency auxiliary juice, a bad status for a warship. Without her weapons, sensors, or main propulsion, she would be dead meat in actual combat, regardless of how much power her main armament packs in theory.
“Guess they have some bugs to work out,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says wryly. “Hope they included tow hooks for the tugs.”
The end of the live-fire exercise is entirely anticlimactic. Several deep-space tugs and maintenance ships coast out to the helpless Agincourt to render assistance. Thirty minutes after the firing of the main gun, the battleship is still under emergency battery power, unable to arrest her slight backward drift.
“Show’s over, I guess,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner declares. “Helm, get in touch with Perry Control and request departure pattern instructions.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
On the comms station, a discreet alarm chirps. The comms officer on duty looks at his display and frowns.
“Priority One flash traffic on the emergency channel, skipper.”
Lieutenant Colonel Renner frowns.
“Out here? Put it on speaker.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
The overhead speakers pop to life with a terse and harried-sounding voice.
“All Fleet units, all Fleet units. This is AEGIS.”
Halley and I trade glances. AEGIS is the new umbrella acronym for the international planetary defense network. They would only send emergency flash traffic for one specific emergency. The air in the CIC feels like it instantly dropped five degrees in temperature.
“We have a picket breach from the Mars approach. One confirmed bogey coming in at high speed. Time to Orion engagement range is t-minus two hundred minutes. All available units, make emergency speed to Fleet Assembly Point Golf and contact Antarctica Approach for defensive formation assignment. I repeat, we have a picket breach . . .”
Lieutenant Colonel Renner does not wait for the full repeat of the message.
“Plot me a course to AP Golf for a maximum-burn least-time trajectory. Comms, announce our departure to Perry Control. Bring her about
and get the reactor up to max. I want every last watt out of that plant.”
The CIC crew springs into action, every person in the room attending their duty stations with a sudden urgency. Halley and I look at each other, and I know she is feeling just as anxious and useless in this spot right now as I do.
“Ma’am, I request permission to go down to flight ops and make myself useful,” Halley says to Lieutenant Colonel Renner.
“Go ahead, Captain,” Lieutenant Colonel Renner says. “See if they can warm up the spare bird for you just in case.” Then she looks at me.
“If this blows up and the Lankies make footfall on Earth again, we will need all boots on the ground. Why don’t you report to grunt country and see if you can scrounge some armor and a rifle.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I reply. “Who’s in charge down there?”
“We only have a short squad on board. Sergeant Quinones is the senior NCO.”
“Understood.”
Halley and I leave the CIC and head to the main elevator at a brisk pace. I eye the hatches for the CIC escape pods on the wall of the passageway.
“You don’t think she’s going to follow Colonel Campbell’s lead, do you?” Halley asks when she sees what I’m looking at.
“I don’t know. Let’s just say I’m glad we’ll be in suits and with a drop ship nearby if the Orions miss.”
Before we get off the elevator on the flight deck level, Halley pulls me close and kisses me briefly, but with intensity.
“Watch your six. All goes to shit, I’ll get us off this thing.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Let’s,” she agrees.
The SI ready room has a disconcertingly small group of troopers in it, all suiting up in battle gear and cross-checking equipment. I count six troopers, one and a half regular fire teams, not even half the normal SI detachment on a frigate. They all turn and look at me when I step through the hatch.
“You Quinones?” I address the trooper wearing sergeant-rank insignia on the chest plate of his battle armor.