Virtues of War

by Bennett R. Coles

  Irregularities down one bearing suggested recent activity at the jump gate back to Terra. The dark energy used to hold open that extra-dimensional portal emitted weak but very specific waves in the Bulk when a ship passed through. A shallow bending to starboard gave evidence of the large terrestrial planet Cerberus, detectable even at this distance, and the entire region was warped slightly by the background gravity wells of both Sirius and its tiny-yet-massive white dwarf companion.

  Jack paused the dipper at seven peets—the ideal depth for this particular place in the Bulk. In general, the deeper the probe moved, the clearer the spacetime curvature became, but Jack had to tread carefully. Targets on the brane were best tracked between five or ten peets, but stealth ships could move above or below a second brane in the Bulk—the “weakbrane.” By doing so they could mask their movements.

  The weakbrane varied in opacity at different locations, and could exist anywhere from eight to thirteen peets. Jack didn’t know where his target was resting, and standard procedure was to go shallow at first. Things started to get weird at sixteen peets, and only a very brave, desperate, or foolhardy stealth captain went even close to that far in.

  “Dipper steady at seven, confirm that you have my picture.”

  “Affirm picture. Report.”

  Jack studied his hunt controls carefully. His Hawk had uplinked its info to Stripes, and the senior pilot was looking at exactly the same information as he was. There would be no blaming the equipment if Jack missed something that Stripes could see.

  “Initial sweep is nominal—only contacts are Viking One and Longboat,” Jack reported.

  Mentioning Kristiansand’s call sign suddenly reminded him that the destroyer’s anti-stealth team was observing the exercise, as well. He breathed deeply. No pressure.

  He studied the curvature lines that traced across his 3-D display, and compared his own intuition to the hunt control info. Nothing obvious leapt out at him. There was a slight irregularity on a bearing low off his starboard quarter—perhaps an indication of stealth ship movement. He tapped in a series of quick commands and a red line stretched away from the center of his display along the bearing in question.

  “Viking-Two fishing true one-four mark one-two.”

  To navigate, all ships worked in a coordinate system based on two imaginary, perpendicular 360-degree circles fixed in space. Jack’s bearing line was 140 degrees clockwise in the horizontal by 120 degrees clockwise in the vertical. The coordinate system was anchored to the main star—in this case, Sirius—and gave all spaceships a common frame of reference. It was invaluable to navigation, and just as useful to anti-stealth warfare.

  No military term ever survived long without being reduced to a TLA—three-letter abbreviation—and anti-stealth warfare was no exception. Over the last two generations ASW, as it was called in official documentation, had grown from being a curious and confusing peripheral of Fleet doctrine to being the premier arena of space combat. Or at least, Jack thought wryly, that’s what the instructors at the ASW school on Pluto had preached.

  While no one doubted the deadly effectiveness of stealth ships, the pace of the hunt left most Astral Force members yawning and reaching for coffee. Fleet-wide, ASW was known as “awfully slow warfare,” and Jack often wondered if his surprise assignment had been due to his laid-back nature. As he started lowering the big dipper for a sub-weakbrane sweep, he wondered—and not for the first time—whether during his tests he should have adopted the arrogance expected of a fighter pilot.

  The dipper was just passing eleven peets when Jack noticed something. He halted the probe and let the picture sharpen.

  A shallow but unusually elongated knuckle was warping spacetime along a bearing 09-mark-10. It was moving fast enough for Jack to see the relative bearing as it shifted before his eyes, which meant that it was very close or moving very, very fast.

  His eyes darted to his flight controls, then up through the cockpit windows for a visual sighting. Nothing but stars.

  “This is Viking-Two. One fast-mover, zero-eight mark one-zero, drawing left. Investigating.”

  “Viking-One, rog.”

  Jack shifted in his seat, suddenly interested. Stealth hunting was based entirely on bearings. Distance was impossible to judge if based on one observation only. And while most normal contacts moved slowly enough to enable multiple bearings, this contact was tearing across spacetime.

  He locked in the last thirty seconds’ worth of readings, then pushed forward both his control stick and throttle. The Hawk shuddered with the sudden acceleration, and Jack grinned. He sprinted forward for twenty seconds, then reversed thrust to kill his speed and stabilize on a new course.

  Within moments he was able to re-establish his spacetime picture. The fast-mover was still blazing across his scope, and his computer quickly compared his new readings with those from his previous position. The triangulation was rough at best, but Jack estimated the contact’s distance at somewhere between two and three million kilometers.

  His eyes went wide.

  5

  Even before he read the computer’s calculation, Jack knew what to expect. His hunt controls confirmed it—the contact was moving at one-tenth the speed of light.

  There weren’t any natural objects that moved that fast, and very few civilian ones, especially out in this neck of the woods. Jack immediately began comparing the gravimetric signature—allowing for the warping caused by its high speed—to known military contacts. The computer narrowed the search to less than a dozen, and Jack carefully scanned each “spacetime fingerprint.”

  “This is Viking-Two. Identify fast-mover as one Terran fast-attack craft, Blade-class. Speed point-one-c, distance between two and three million. She’s going somewhere in a big hurry.”

  “Viking-One, affirm—one Blade FAC. Longboat and I triangulate to make her distance three million,” Stripes confirmed. Then he added, “Not bad, Jack. I’m sure you appreciate us tossing a little bit of reality into today’s exercise.”

  Jack grinned. He watched as the fast-attack craft bent spacetime across his display, marveling at its speed. Normally such a small ship would barely register, and certainly not at three million kilometers, but her speed was high enough to affect her mass so that she exhibited the spacetime cross-section of a Martian mining platform.

  A new, female voice came onto the circuit. “This is Longboat. Based on spacetime signature, that FAC is Rapier. EM suggests that she stirred up quite a hornet’s nest on Cerberus. Longboat silent.”

  Jack wondered for a moment what kind of mission Rapier had been conducting on Cerberus. He’d only seen pictures of the Fleet’s fast-attack craft, but he’d heard that they were wickedly fun to fly. And they snagged some of the coolest missions around, getting into the thick of it while the rest of the Fleet conducted exercises and sovereignty patrols.

  He made a mental note to find out how to request a transfer.

  “Viking-Two, we still doing ASW here?”

  Stripes’ voice shook Jack loose from his thoughts. He did a quick sweep of the visual, of his flight controls, and then focused again on his hunt controls—looking for the faint disturbance he’d marked before Rapier’s sudden appearance. It was gone. Then Jack reminded himself that he had changed his own vantage point considerably since his first bearing line, and he shifted his focus.

  Sure enough, the disturbance was still visible down a new relative bearing. He typed in a second line. The red bearing popped into view on his display, intersecting the old bearing from his previous position.

  “Viking-Two fishing true one-four mark zero-niner.”

  He now had two lines on his possible contact, but there was still far too much uncertainty to start drawing conclusions. Despite the claims of the Fleet promotional material, his instruments were only accurate to within fifteen degrees either side of the bearing.

  Some contacts, such as attacking gravi-torpedoes—or fast-attack craft on full burn—were easy to pinpoint, but ships in gener
al were too small and too slow to nail down unless they were very close. It would take multiple bearing lines and a whole lot of time to prosecute a stealth contact.

  Since he couldn’t expect help from Viking-One or Longboat today, he was on his own.

  Loaded aft in the Hawk were fifty devices known as barbells. Like the big dipper, these barbells could reach into the Bulk to search for gravimetric readings while still maintaining a link to the brane. Disposable items, Jack could drop them at intervals behind his Hawk and leave them to listen at whatever depth he programmed into them. They could last for days before their batteries finally died, but he only had a limited number of them, so he had to pick carefully where he dropped them.

  “This is Viking-Two, I’m going to sow a barbell line to investigate bearing crossover two.”

  “Roger.”

  He set off on a course perpendicular to the bearing of interest where his two red lines intersected on his display. He dropped a barbell every two thousand kilometers on a dead-straight run. This cautious approach took thirty agonizing minutes, but as the fifth barbell deployed Jack was able to come hard right and increase speed to separate his own sensors from those of the drones. If he’d calculated right, his five barbells would offer a good radial cross-section of the target.

  After a short sprint to remove himself from the barbell line, Jack slowed his Hawk to give the big dipper maximum clarity.

  At first, the signals were unclear. His hunt controls gave a separate readout for each drone, and it took time for Jack to interpret the slight fluctuations. He lifted his helmet an inch and ran his fingers through short, sweaty hair, breathing deeply. It took about a minute per barbell, and when he finally looked up at his 3-D display, he sighed in frustration.

  The “crossfix” was a mass of red lines, all pointing in vaguely the same direction.

  He checked his big dipper, focusing the search down a bearing that went through what best approximated the crossfix of barbell bearings. There was something out there, but whether it was natural or man-made, on the brane or in the Bulk, there just wasn’t enough information to tell.

  “Viking-Two, what’s your status?”

  Jack seated his helmet properly again and stared out through his windows at the stars beyond.

  “This is Viking-Two…” He struggled to think of a suitable report to give, considering he’d probably just wasted an hour of his time.

  Then a star blinked.

  Jack froze, any words dying in his throat. Something had passed between him and the star. Something had passed close enough to actually eclipse a fiery ball of gas bright enough to be visible thousands of light years away. Every space pilot appreciated the inconceivable distances involved in space travel, and every military space pilot knew this one simple rule.

  Stars don’t blink.

  Jack kept his eyes frozen in place, dropped his visor, and tapped the visual lock button on the side of his helmet. A red square appeared on the inside of his visor, marking the bearing and relaying the information to the vessel’s computer. He transferred the image to one of the hunt screens, replacing the barbell data.

  Then he activated the Hawk’s long-range camera and pointed it down the bearing. The live image just showed the usual starry background. He switched to infrared. The picture became even more confused as the residual heat from thousands of suns mixed together in the cosmic background. He started shifting the viewer through the EM spectrum, looking for something that might stand out.

  “Uhh, Viking-Two… Say again your status?”

  “Viking-One, stand by. I think I’ve got something.”

  The view revealed nothing in the ultraviolet. It was only when it reached microwaves that the mystery object emerged. Everywhere in the universe there is a background murmur of microwave radiation—a remnant of the Big Bang visible in all directions. Stars and other celestial objects outshine this backdrop, but only two things actually make the microwaves dim: the coldest of deep space debris, and spaceships trying to hide.

  “Uhh, Viking-Two, roger… Jack, we’re getting a little low on time here. I suggest you start your search again down a bearing from you of one-seven mark zero-eight.”

  Ignoring Stripes, Jack recorded the microwave image.

  “This is Viking-Two, tally-ho, one viper bearing three-five mark zero-eight. No duff.”

  “Say again?”

  Jack repeated his report of a visual sighting, and forwarded the image to Stripes and Kristiansand.

  Several moments of silence followed on the circuit, but Jack was already rushing to gather more information on this mysterious ship he had spotted. He had little doubt that it was a ship. Although the microwave silhouette was fuzzy, there was no mistaking the symmetry of form found in man-made objects.

  More than likely this man-made object was up to no good, considering how hard it was trying to hide itself. No EM emissions, no artificial gravity, no speed of note. This ship was moving in the brane, but it might as well have been a stealth ship, for its lack of signature. Civilian ships routinely blared across the full EM spectrum, and those with artificial gravity dug huge wells in spacetime. Even military ships maintained an ID beacon during peacetime.

  Jack grinned.

  Those Gaians could hunt their asteroids all they wanted. He’d just bagged himself a bad guy.

  6

  It took an hour to ensure that the strike pods were re-powered and serviced, and to confirm that each of her troopers had stowed the gear properly, secured their weapons, and made the appropriate ammo-free declarations.

  Katja took direct control of the evolution, carefully inspecting half of the assault rifles before they were locked up. She personally surveyed each pod for damage that might compromise its hull integrity. She even double-checked the emergency supplies.

  Eventually, however, there was nothing left to check. Her troopers and their ships were ready for the next strike. Finally, she ordered Chang to get himself cleaned up.

  He floated ahead of her in the passageway, the other troopers already dismissed. His broad, dark face was unreadable as usual, but she saw that he was looking at her with an expression she hadn’t seen before.

  “Ma’am, do you want to do a debrief?”

  The very thought made her stomach turn. “Not yet, Sergeant. Give the troopers some time to unwind.”

  “Yes, ma’am. But do you want to do a debrief?”

  She suddenly felt like punching him. Her suit was very hot, and she was close to throwing up.

  “What the fuck did I just say, Sergeant!”

  Chang nodded, but continued to look at her in that odd way. “Yes, ma’am.”

  She turned herself awkwardly, then pushed off down the passageway to her own cabin.

  The door slid open. Breeze was still in her spacesuit, helmet floating within arm’s reach. She was just beginning to strip down to her coveralls, and looked up as Katja entered, her face severe.

  “Hey, Ops,” she said. “Congratulations on avoiding friendly casualties.”

  If this was Breeze trying to be nice, Katja wasn’t in the mood. “Thanks.”

  She floated past her cabin mate, fiddling with her suit controls. Breeze was squeezing her spacesuit down to fit it back into the warbag clipped to her belt. She seemed to notice Katja’s trouble.

  “Do you want me to get someone to help you with that?”

  Katja waved her away, and tapped again at her controls. Finally, the uncouple command took. With a soft hiss her suit cracked open and she began to worm herself out. Breeze said something while Katja still had her head inside the suit. When she emerged she looked into the hard eyes of her cabin mate.

  “Did you say something?”

  “Yeah,” Breeze said, her glare scathing. “I asked if you had a good interrogation.”

  Katja felt her temperature rising again. “Not really, no. I don’t have any additional intelligence to report.”

  “I hope not, considering you didn’t do anything with the intelligence yo
u had.”

  “What?”

  Breeze crossed her arms, her anger clear.

  “I don’t appreciate risking my life—or the lives of our field operatives—for a complete waste of time.” Before Katja could respond, she continued. “Do you have any idea how much effort it takes to gather intelligence on Cerberus? Do you have any idea how long it took us to find leads like we had today?”

  “And I suppose you just expected us to waltz in and find the Centauri sitting at a picnic table cleaning the weapons?” Katja grabbed the edge of the bunk to steady herself, squeezing hard. “If you don’t like how we conduct strikes, then pick up a rifle and join us on the ground next time.”

  Breeze rolled her eyes.

  “Any monkey can go down and start shooting up the place,” she replied. “We actually had a location for a fucking Centauri agent! And you couldn’t be bothered to search the place before you started shooting the locals.”

  “This isn’t training, Breeze,” Katja gritted. “Real shit goes down. It gets messy.”

  “Not as messy as it’s going to get for our operatives. They’re going to have to go underground, and we’ll have to start all over again!” Breeze collected her helmet and attached it to her belt, along with her other warbags.

  Nor as messy, Katja knew, as her punching Breeze in the face, either, which was perilously close to happening. The last thing she needed right now was a lecture from a staff weenie.

  “Next time,” Breeze said, “I’ll have to give you more precise orders before you go down.”

  “I don’t work for you.” Katja’s fists clenched.

  Breeze stopped and stared.

  “Actually, you do,” she said flatly. “I decide our missions based on Astral Intelligence. You carry them out according to my instructions.”

  Katja felt her cheeks burn. “No. I decide our mission based on your reports. How I carry them out is between me and the captain.”

  “Listen,” Breeze said, “when you’ve been working this star system as long as I have, we can discuss a sharing of responsibility.”