Endurance

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by Yoshiki Tanaka


  “Good grief, what a mess! How am I supposed to fight while leading boy scouts into combat?!”

  Looking at the shipboard monitor, Rear Admiral Attenborough grabbed his iron-gray hair through his black military-issue beret. At twenty-nine years of age, he was one of the youngest admirals in the Alliance Armed Forces and had been two years behind Yang at Officers’ Academy. He didn’t lack for broad-mindedness or courage, and the confidence Yang had in him was evidenced by his entrusting Julian to him, albeit temporarily.

  Commander Lao, chief staff officer for this division, frowned. “You’re saying you intend to take these raw recruits and trainees into battle?” he said.

  “Of course!” yelled Attenborough. After all, even the trainees had been assigned to this division in order to fight. They had to experience their first battle sometime. For most of the new recruits—nearly all, actually—this battle had come too early. However, avoiding combat was no longer possible at this stage, nor was it possible for the experienced crew by themselves to protect the newbies from all harm. Most importantly, without those new recruits positioned in every department, it would mean crucial shortages of combat personnel.

  “I’m going to have them fight as well. We don’t have the leeway to have them sitting in box seats watching the rest of us play war games. Mobilize them.”

  As he was giving that order, Attenborough couldn’t hold back a sense of gloom as he wondered how many of them would make it back to their beds in the Iserlohn Fortress barracks. At least until relief arrived, all he could do was try to hold casualties down to the barest minimum. The young commander decided to adopt a “rather than win, don’t lose” policy. Not that circumstances had given him another option.

  “The Attenborough division has made contact with and engaged imperial forces at Corridor Point FR—”

  When the communications officer gave that report, Admiral Yang Wen-li, mighty commander of the FPA forces, was not in the fortress’s central command room. He was hardly a man of such diligence as to hang around his workplace outside of regular working hours. Still, he had been diligent in communicating his expected whereabouts—even if in nothing else—so his aide Lieutenant Frederica Greenhill was able to find the young commander in short order. He was pretending to be asleep on a bench in a botanical garden.

  “Your Excellency, please wake up.”

  At the sound of her voice, Yang laid one hand on the beret that was resting on top of his face. Without moving from that position, he said in a sleepy, muffled voice, “What is it?”

  After his aide had reported, he took his beret in hand and sat up.

  “Not a day’s peace at the frontier fortress. Spring comes late to these northern climes, eh? This is gonna be trouble. Hey, Julian—!”

  Yang had called out for the boy out of habit. He looked around the park, rested his gaze on Frederica’s face, and then, with a little sigh, scratched his head with one hand. Then he rose to his feet, grumbling to himself as he put his beret back on. “I sent him out there ’cause I thought it’d be safe …;”

  “I’m sure he’ll come back safely. That boy has a lot of talent and a lot of luck, too.”

  Frederica spoke knowing full well just how powerless words were. Yang looked at her with a cryptic expression. He must have taken her remark as a mixture of both official and personal sentiment.

  “There’re a lot of raw recruits on those ships,” he said. “This won’t be easy, even for Attenborough. We’ve gotta get out there and reinforce them ASAP.”

  Even so, Yang’s scowl and his ill-tempered words were nothing more than a cover to hide the awkward embarrassment he felt at her concern.

  On Janary 22, fleets from the Galactic Empire and the Free Planets Alliance randomly encountered one another at coordinates closer to the empire’s side of that narrow, tunnel-shaped region of space called the Iserlohn Corridor. It occasioned the start of a battle that was, for all practical purposes, strategically meaningless.

  This was a textbook example of a chance encounter between hostile parties. Neither the imperial forces nor those of the alliance had expected the other to be out this far from their home base.

  The border between these two states and their very different political systems was wherever their territories happened to collide. Since neither side recognized the other as an equal partner in diplomacy, no official border existed, and danger swirled through that region of space like a silent, formless cyclone of tension, unease, and hostility. It was a pipe dream to think that peaceful intentions were behind any eyes turned toward this region. Yet even so, moments did occur from time to time when people let their guard down. Caught up in the daily routines of their respective patrols, neither side had been expecting to run into an enemy force. Some might call it carelessness, and carelessness it was. But human beings were simply not furnished with such powers of concentration that they could stay fully vigilant all the time for such random occurrences.

  Julian’s supple limbs were enveloped in the combat suit he now wore as pilot of a single-seat spartanian fighter craft. He was waiting in the mother ship’s hangar, listening intently to the intraship broadcasts for his launch order.

  “Enemy force strength estimated at 200 to 250 battleships, 400 to 500 cruisers, approximately 1,000 destroyers, and 30 to 40 mother ships.”

  Not exactly a huge fleet, thought Julian. Still, there must be as many as two hundred thousand crew trusting their lives and futures to the space inside those vessels, just a few walls away from hard vacuum. Were some in that number heading into their first battle, just as he was? Julian looked around at the other pilots nearby. The confident—even cocky—expressions of the seasoned warriors were in sharp contrast to the pale faces of the greenhorns. Maybe it was all empty bluster. The new pilots, however, didn’t even have the confidence to spare for that.

  Suddenly, the voice of the space traffic controller came pounding on his eardrums through his headphones. “Sergeant Mintz! Board your spartanian!”

  His was the first name they called among the rookies.

  “Ja!” Julian shouted, and took off running for the spartanian engraved with the number 316—the one reserved for his use, and his alone.

  He pressed his ID card—imprinted with his name, rank, FPA Armed Forces serial number, DNA sequence, both ABO and MN blood type, fingerprints, and voiceprint—up against a certain spot on the cockpit. The spartanian’s computer read it and popped its hood open for the first time, welcoming its new pilot.

  Julian settled into the cockpit, fastened his safety belt, and put on his helmet. The helmet joined tightly to the combat suit’s neck with an electromagnetic seal. This helmet was connected directly to the onboard computer by two cords that transmitted the pilot’s brain wave pattern. If that pattern did not match the one the computer had on file for its pilot, the pilot would be rendered unconscious by a low-output, high-voltage shock. Unlike on some children’s action show on solivision, a real spartanian could not be stolen and piloted by an enemy soldier. It used a pseudo imprinting system created to allow only a single pilot to fly any given spartanian.

  With his helmet now on, Julian quickly checked his instruments and inspected the provisions inside his machine.

  Salt tablets—sodium chloride coated in pink fructose—along with plastic bottles of concentrated vitamin fluid, tubes of royal jelly mixed with gluten, and more. They were part of a set of nutritional supplements that could keep him alive for a week. There was also a resin spray that hardened instantly for use in the event of hull cracks, signal flares with a hand catapult for launching them, and even calcium injections. These were included because the human body lost calcium while in a weightless state, and calcium couldn’t be supplemented by food or oral medication. All these things, together with fast-acting painkillers, pills to lower body temperature and induce artificial hibernation, organic germanium pills, assorted other medications, and a compre
ssion syringe made up the complete set.

  Effective and beneficial items all, at least so long as the pilot didn’t die instantly. Through them, the FPA Armed Forces seemed to be loudly declaring that they did not view soldiers as expendable and always did their utmost to preserve them. But could that really be reconciled with the way they were always glorifying the idea of death in service to the state?

  Everyone feels a premonition when they’re about to die—Julian had heard that somewhere. Wondering if it was true, the boy had decided to ask Yang Wen-li, who had been inches from death on any number of occasions. This is what Yang had said:

  “Julian, don’t tell me you’re buying a bunch of hot air about death from some guy who’s never even died once himself.”

  The harsh edge in Yang’s voice at that time had not really been directed toward Julian, of course, but all the boy had been able to do was turn red in the face and withdraw.

  “Control Officer, I’m ready for takeoff. Instructions, please.”

  Following protocol, Julian spoke first, and then the reply came, giving him his instructions.

  “Very well. Proceed to launch gate.”

  Already, more than ten fighters had launched into the void from the mother ship. Julian’s spartanian slid along the wall toward the launch gate. The wall itself was magnetized by an electric current running through it, making the spartanian’s chassis adhere to it.

  When it reached the edge of the gate, the current stopped, and the wall lost its magnetism.

  “Launch!”

  Julian’s spartanian cut loose from the mother ship.

  III

  All around Julian, the world was spinning.

  The boy swallowed his breath. He knew what was happening. In the instant he transitioned from artificial to zero gravity, his sense of up and down went haywire and he lost track of where he was. He had been through this countless times in training. Still, no matter how many times he practiced, he just couldn’t seem to get the hang of it.

  His breathing and pulse accelerated, and his blood pressure rose. His adrenaline-secretion reading was probably on the way up as well. His head started to feel very hot, both inside his skull and out. His heart and stomach felt like they had taken off running in opposite directions. The three canals of his inner ear were blaring out an anthem of rebellion. It took more than twenty seconds for that fanfare to soften, settle down, and at last fade away. That was when his balance and equilibrium were restored.

  Julian inhaled deeply and was finally able to spare some attention for his surroundings.

  He was right in the middle of a war zone. As the two sides struggled to seize the area from one another, lights were blazing in and out of existence by the second in the darkness. The darkness buried these lights in infinite depths, and the lights almost seemed to be fighting back in momentary bursts of life.

  One sight stole Julian’s eyes: a friendly mother ship took a hit just as it was about to release its spartanians, and all were engulfed in the explosion. The ball of light swelled outward, and after it had vanished, all that remained was an empty region of eternal darkness.

  A chill ran down Julian’s spine. Thank goodness I wasn’t shot the instant I cut loose, he thought, feeling grateful for the superb timing with which the control officer aboard his own mother ship had released him.

  Julian’s fighter raced through spaces filled only with death and destruction. The giant shredded hulk of a damaged battleship continued to pound the enemy with beams of energy from cannons that had escaped damage, even as it buckled on the brink of death itself. Scattering the faint white light of its remaining energy, a wrecked cruiser that had lost its pilot swam right past Julian, then disappeared into the blackness. Beams seared the darkness with flashes of brilliance, missile trails threaded their way across the battlespace, and the light of exploding warships formed stars of exceedingly brief life span that illuminated all around them. Silent bolts of lightning were crisscrossing everywhere. If sound had existed in that world, eardrums would have burst from the roar of those malevolent energies, and madness would have claimed every listener as its eternal prisoner.

  Suddenly, a walküre—a single-seat imperial fighter craft—swerved into Julian’s field of view. He felt his heart skip a beat. It was moving so fast that by the time he did a double take, all that remained was the ship’s afterimage.

  Its turns were so sharp—its movements so swift and savage—it was hard to believe that it wasn’t a living thing. Whoever was piloting it must have been an experienced veteran. Julian felt he could almost visualize the man’s eyes, glistening with murderous intent, with certitude of victory, at the sight of the inexperienced foe before him. Even while that thought was crossing through Julian’s mind, his hands were moving even faster than their owner willed. The spartanian responded with movements so sudden that its frame vibrated in protest. As abrupt, sharp changes in trajectory threatened to make him nauseous, Julian got an up-close look at the trail left by the high-power shell that had just slipped past him.

  Had it just been good luck? What else could he call it? Julian had just dodged the first shot fired by a far more experienced pilot.

  Underneath his flight suit, his whole body broke out in gooseflesh. He had no time for relief, however. He had to keep both eyes locked on the enemy’s position on his main screen, take in data simultaneously from multiple readouts displayed on subscreens to the right and the left, and “erode enemy fighting strength with the greatest efficiency possible.” Easy for you to say! What were the spartanian’s designers and technical writers thinking—that pilots had compound eyes, like bugs? Did the survival of the other pilots—and of the empire’s walküren pilots too, for that matter—depend on meeting their excessive demands? If that were the case, then all they could do was set themselves to their tasks knowing that it was hopeless.

  Julian had slipped past the walküre’s surefire kill shot, and its pilot, now driven by an amplified bloodlust, raced to challenge him again. Beams raced toward Julian like white-hot fangs. There were no direct hits this time either, though. Had he missed …; or had Julian dodged?

  Insofar as it was possible, Julian had to avoid moving in straight lines. Whether moving or at rest, the basic shapes of things in space were circles and spheres.

  Pitch upward, pitch downward. Imagine the void as an invisible curved surface, and race along that surface as fast as possible. Though Julian didn’t necessarily move according to the path he had calculated, that had the unexpected effect of throwing off the enemy’s predictions as well. The two craft passed close enough to graze one another, and in the next instant, Julian was looking down on the walküre below him and pulling the trigger on his neutron beam.

  Direct hit! Really? Yes, really!

  White light flared out in the blackness, and chromatic splendor erupted across his whole field of view. Fragments of the destroyed walküre were thrown clear of the fireball and glittered with reflected light, turning one tiny corner of space into a kaleidoscope of rainbow hues.

  Julian Mintz had just sent his first enemy pilot to the grave. Most likely, that pilot had been a warrior forged through many battles, on whose sword many comrades had no doubt fallen. Most likely, he’d never imagined that his life would be cut short by some kid who was out on his first sortie.

  The rush of agitation was intense—it was like the cells in his body were being burned up from the inside. But in the same way that masses of solid rock stick up from a flow of lava, parts of Julian’s heated mind felt chilled. The pilot he’d just killed—what kind of man had he been? Had he had a wife and family? A girlfriend …;? That single walküre had been tied to a particular human life, from which innumerable ties must have branched out into every corner of his society.

  This was not sentimentalism. It was something that ought to be etched in the mind of anyone who took it upon himself to end a human life, and remembered unti
l the day came when the same was done to him.

  Aboard the Imperial Navy vessels, people were starting to cock their heads sideways in bewilderment. At present, they had the advantage. That was a thing to be welcomed, but at the same time, they couldn’t shake the feeling that something was amiss. An imbalance had appeared on the enemy side. Word had it that the Iserlohn Patrol Fleet was the cream of the FPA’s crop, yet among their spartanian pilots, many were piloting their craft so poorly that their deaths seemed almost voluntary. What could be the reason? Rear Admiral Eichendorff, commanding officer of the imperial force, had been considered a first-rate tactician when he had served under Admiral Kempf, but right now he was avoiding any sudden charges, trying to secure his advantage while pressing the battle forward cautiously. This was partly because Yang Wen-li’s reputation was putting him on his guard, but this stance—praiseworthy under normal circumstances—would soon be faulted for indecisiveness due to the result it led to.

  Yang’s executive staff had gathered in the meeting room at Iserlohn Fortress. “Admiral Yang sure loves his meetings,” they often griped. But Yang had to hold meetings; if he didn’t, people would say he was acting arbitrarily, had dictatorial tendencies, and so on. From Yang’s standpoint, he was just giving an ear to his subordinates’ opinions—he liked to think it was less trouble to do so than not.

  In this case, though, there was no disagreement about the need for a swift, smooth deployment of reinforcements; the sticking point was about how large a force to send. After listening to everyone’s opinion, Yang turned to Merkatz, who was working for him as an advisor.

  “And what does our guest admiral have to say?”

  A palpable tension filled the room, though its source might have been the executive staff, rather than either the questioner or the questioned. As a senior admiral in the imperial military, Wiliabard Joachim Merkatz had made his living working for the enemy until just last year. When Reinhard von Lohengramm, a young and powerful vassal of the empire, had crushed the confederated forces of the aristocracy, Merkatz had been talked out of suicide by his aide, Lieutenant Commander von Schneider, whereupon he had fled to the Free Planets Alliance and was named advisor to Admiral Yang.

 

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