The Jupiter War

by Gregory Benford

  Margaret kicked the circuit breakers, plunging Dasher into darkness and cutting all power from the batteries. The emergency lights snapped on, as did her helmet light, and Dasher was illuminated in the baleful red of a dying ship. Margaret hoped that the enemy would decide that the strains of Jupiter had been too much for the small courier, that all power was lost. She wanted them to think that Dasher was dead and not bother to fire on it. The superconducting magnets could contain Dasher’s antimatter forever, if need be.

  Decision made, Margaret went over to the airlock and used the emergency override to open the inner door. She checked the monitor and was glad to note that it showed no signs of leaks in the airlock. If the enemy’s blasts had hulled the airlock, Margaret’s plan would have been doomed. She went back to the galley, opened the refrigerator door, and pulled out the remaining eleven quarts of ice cream.

  “The things I do for the Service,” Maggie groaned theatrically, placing the transducers on the tops of the ice cream. She turned on each transducer and checked it for functionality. Satisfied, she carried the ice cream over to the airlock.

  She placed the quart containers one on top of the other just at the seam between the outer airlock door and the airlock itself. That done, she stood back in the airlock and inspected her work. Satisfied, she left the airlock, closed the inner door, and pressurized. Then she spent time overriding the standard airlock cycle. Instead of evacuating the air in the airlock before opening to space, the airlock door would pop open under the pressure of one atmosphere just enough to allow the quarts of ice cream to be forced out.

  “Of course the airlock’ll be useless after this, you know,” Maggie noted with the hurt tones of an engineer about to damage an artifice.

  Back inside the cabin she checked her suit’s chronometer: four minutes to go. Of course, the enemy could have accelerated to overtake her—in which case all her plans were useless. Relentless, Maggie tore off the cover to the propulsion control panel and started tinkering with the injector controls. There was no way that she could use the antimatter in its hyper-strengthened, shielded containers for offensive purposes, but she could rig a dead man’s button that would force the. MAM engines to full acceleration; even if the stresses did not splinter the courier all over creation, the resulting thrust would certainly kick Dasher well out of the Solar System.

  She checked the CFC controls and tied them into the dead man’s stick, so that not only would Dasher accelerate at inhuman speeds but the thrust chamber would be irradiating gamma rays in all directions instead of photons directed only rearward—making Dasher too “hot” for anyone to get near ever again. She was very pleased with the dead man’s switch itself; she had rigged it to monitor her heartbeat: a second after her heart stopped beating, the dead man’s switch would trigger.

  Satisfied but made even more apprehensive by her precautions, Margaret watched the seconds tick away on her chronometer. To take her mind off the wait Maggie worked out the thrusts she could use to get back to Earth; she was certain that Sinope had been infiltrated by spies and might even have been destroyed. Earth! With only twenty kilograms of propellant! No, she corrected herself, forty kilograms of propellant: twenty of matter and twenty of antimatter. Dasher was a light ship, massing only one thousand kilograms, one tonne. The destroyers behind her were ten times more massive. With forty kilograms of propellant, Dasher had a mass ratio of 1.040. Burning all that fuel between Jupiter and Earth would result in a measly 1.4 percent gee and take nearly fifty-two days.

  “Rats!” Margaret snarled. If the thrust efficiency could be brought up, if she could up the specific impulse, then she could get back to Earth faster. She knew a few ideas she’d been wanting to try but Professor Brenschluss had nichted her. She leaned back into the Chaotic Flow Controls and tinkered. Changing the beat frequency to just below the first resonant frequency of the thrust chamber should produce the same effect as twice the hydrogen damping, which would halve the hydrogen being kicked overboard merely to protect the chamber and increase the specific impulse accordingly.

  “Of course if you’re wrong, Maggie me dear, you’re going to get cooked for sure,” her engineering side warned her scientific self as she checked her handiwork. Her detached side wondered why she was always making food jokes. She glanced at her suit chronometer. “Cripes!”

  Ten seconds. She raced back over to the center control panel, one hand poised over the radar circuit breaker, the other over the radar gain.

  “Eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . .” she counted. “Lights, camera, action!”

  She punched in the circuit breaker and. the radar screen warmed up. The test lights blinked on the radar display and then the central tube starting glowing brighter.

  “Come on, come on!” she implored. Finally the tube was fully on. She changed the gain, searching for the enemy ships. Twenty kilometers, fifteen kilometers . . .

  “Bingo! You boys stay tight and you’ll win the prize!” The two ships were close together and ten kilometers behind Dasher. She switched axes and took an azimuth reading. The angle between the top of Dasher’s control room and the ships was about one hundred and thirty degrees—forty degrees from the airlock. Margaret raced to the lock, counting seconds to herself. “Three . . . two . . . one—oh shit!” She was still rushing to the airlock when the time passed! Dasher’s airlock was not pointed at the enemy!

  “Count Maggie, count!” she exhorted, terrified that the enemy ships had noticed her radar. “You have to count down until the ‘lock is lined up again!”

  “Nineteen . . . eighteen . . .” A bright sear appeared in the ceiling to her right. The enemy was firing. A shiver of fear lanced up her spine.

  “Sixteen . . . fifteen . . . c’mon! . . . fourteen . . .” Another bolt tore into the hull to her left. Maggie jumped to the right. “Twelve . . . eleven . . .”

  The ship made a horrible groaning noise. “Please, not the left engine!” she shrieked, right hand poised over the airlock override, left hand coming up to her emergency suit vent—if they boarded, she’d blow her suit open and when the air ran out . . . well, hypoxia was a great way to go.

  “Eight! Seven!” Her voice rose in anticipation. “Six! Five . . . four . . .” Another bolt glanced on the hull. “Three . . . two . . . Now, you bastards!” She hit the lock override. Alarms flashed and klaxons sounded noiselessly in the vacuum. The airlock pressure blipped out to zero. Rushing to the control panel, Maggie started counting again.

  “Twelve . . . eleven . . . ten—oh god, what’s the frequency?” She stopped, horrified. “What’s the resonant frequency for the ice cream?” Terror and visions of cold death beat at her, her breathing doubled and her sweat turned to ice as she imagined the next bolt searing through her suit and her body.

  “Think, Maggie, think!” she shouted uselessly in brash military.

  “Time! Time!” she shouted scientifically. Her heartbeat was racing and she was hyperventilating.

  “No! No, Maggie not now!” she told herself. “Breathe slower! Control!” She took a deep breath, held it, and let it out again slowly in iron-tight control.

  “Again!” she ordered herself. The second breath was more controlled. She willed her breathing back to normal.

  “Okay, time,” she said quietly, desperately. She flicked the broadcast switch on the transceiver, linked in the input to her suit mike’s output.

  With a bittersweet grin Maggie remarked, “It’s not over until the fat lady sings,” and started singing.

  “ ‘Johnny could only sing one note and the note he sang was this: Aaaaah!’ “ Maggie checked the radar while singing: still two blips, closing fast. She peered a bit closer and thought she could just detect the smudges outlining the containers, but it might also be space dust. She switched songs, going to Wagner’s “Valkyrie,” tearing up and down the scales as fast as she could. There! The radar showed spots! They were getting brighter. She sang up
the scales, zeroed in, and held it.

  Blips—seven, eight, eleven—burst into brilliance on the radar screen. They were practically on top of the first destroyer.

  “Now!” she told herself, singing the word. She punched the controls, fired the left engine, spun the ship, countered the spin, and punched up a steady five gees.

  Looking back at the radar she watched the tiny blips disappear, merging with the first destroyer. Nothing had happened. She took several deep breaths to retain her calm. The two ships were pursuing.

  “Wait a minute!” she exclaimed, straining against the five-gee thrust to get a better view.

  “AlIlllll right, Maggie!” she yelled. “Way to go!”

  Her shrieks filled her helmet and resounded achingly, but she kept them up nonetheless. The two blips merged, became one larger blip, and separated again into many smaller blips.

  “Jeez! Have they got egg on their face!” she cackled. “What are they going to tell the base commander?”

  Then she sobered up. “What am I going to tell the base commander?”

  * * *

  The office was cool but Margaret Trudeaux was hot as she finished retelling her story. Captain Poindexter had stopped his irritable finger-drumming somewhere through her account and was now scribbling numbers on his notepad.

  “So I shaped orbit for Earth and got here as quickly as I could,” Maggie finished. “I rigged up a simple com circuit on the way back and called in as soon as I was near base.” She made a rueful face. “They had to cut away the airlock, it was so badly warped.” He looked up momentarily when he realized she was silent, then returned to his scribblings. Margaret started to feel more uncomfortable. She could not tell that Poindexter was using those moments to regain the calm, detached manner of an investigating officer—her account was pure naval history. Finally, Poindexter laid down his pen.

  “You got here in a little under six days?” he asked. When she nodded, he continued: “That’s a specific impulse of just over forty-two percent of the speed of light.”

  “Well,” Maggie began slowly, “I explained about the changes to the CFC, didn’t I?” For the first time, Poindexter noticed how hoarse her voice was. He nodded sharply for her to continue.

  “Well, sir, I did figure out another way to get more thrust from the chamber.” She hastened to add: “It would have been a long trip unless I could figure out a way to get better performance, so I tinkered a lot.” She had hummed to herself quite a bit after her victory over the destroyers, and had quickly decided that she wanted to hear other music than her own. The audio-video gear was still functional but the speakers had no air to vibrate.

  “So I rigged the speakers to the hull and then I got the music from the vibrations through my suit,” Margaret explained.

  “What does that have to do with increased performance?”

  “Everything! The vibrations traveled through the hull to the combustion chamber and influenced the chaotic flow. I experimented a lot, tried everything. Finally, I found that if I sang along with one particular song, I got a tremendous boost in performance.”

  When it became apparent that the lieutenant would have to be enticed, Poindexter raised an eyebrow encouragingly. Maggie swallowed before saying: “Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’: the soprano line. I’m afraid that only a woman can sing it.” She added hastily: “Though doubtless further experimentation would allow a mere recording to suffice.”

  “Doubtless,” The captain agreed. He turned to the tape recorder and flipped it off. “Lieutenant, as you know this was a preliminary investigation for your court-martial. “

  “Yes, sir.” Margaret’s voice held neither hope nor regret.

  “I have reached my conclusion.” With elaborate motions, Poindexter collected the papers listing the charges against her, and tore them to bits.

  Then, to Maggie’s great surprise, intense elation, and overwhelming joy, he solemnly rose from his chair, held his body rigidly erect, and with steel-precise movements brought up his right hand into a perfect salute and held it there for a long, long, long time.

  NOTHING is more useful in a war than neutral ground. Jupiter Station had been the first orbital scientific station orbiting the gas giant. Established as a joint project by both alliances, it was also the first permanently manned station outside the asteroid belt. By 2056, after thirty-five years of service, Jupiter Station had grown far beyond its original structure. It now housed almost a quarter of the non-military population of the Jovian system. Its value and erratic orbit enabled the platform to maintain a very uneasy neutrality throughout the Jupiter War.

  The shape of Jupiter Station’s elliptic orbit meant that this unique facility passed near each of the planet’s moons at least once per Earth month. This made it the ideal location for the refining units that were necessary to purify the ore for the long plunge back toward Earth. Since both sides needed the Jovian rare earths, the station was able to parley this dependence into a form of independence from both combatants. Both the U.N. and the Feds maintained “offices” on the Station, but neither dared claim jurisdiction over it. Whenever one side exerted too much pressure on the station’s administration, the other was appealed to.

  Even at the peak of the war, neither side was willing to risk attacking Jupiter Station. To do so would likely have resulted in the platform’s destruction, either in the assault or by the other side if successful. Doing this would have alienated the hundreds of independent miners who were less concerned with politics than accumulating riches. This also would have destroyed the only location they had for R & R within two months travel. Eventually the station also served as the location of the truce talks, but not before the war had run for five years and cost fifteen thousand highly trained lives.

  By 2057 each side had replaced most of their lost ships, and ship-to-ship combat changed from an exception to the rule. Two attempts were made to occupy enemy land bases by force, one by each navy. The attack on the Tirner compound on Ganymede proved a major embarrassment to those U.N. SEALs involved in that fiasco. The Fed attack on the Europa mining complex never even reached the defense perimeter due to their loss of control of the space over the moon during the action. Isolated and bombarded from space, the Federation marines were eventually forced by a lack of oxygen to surrender or suffocate.

  During the Jupiter War the social climate of the orbital station resembled that of any neutral city, if that city were a wide-open mining camp as well. Jupiter Station had always been wide open, a place where money spoke louder than morality. Most of the regular residents, many having been born and raised on the station, saw the war simply as an opportunity for quick profits. It soon became a hotbed of espionage and counterespionage. This situation resulted in the arrival of so many intelligence officers from each side that the Jupiter Station actually gained population during the most violent periods of the war. This is not to say that life on the station was without hazard, Agents tended to have a short period of usefulness and no need for a pension plan. Disposing of a body when surrounded by vacuum and so close to Jupiter was never a problem. Nor was identifying the opposition—not that the opposition was always from the other side.

  MYESSA Rosarita Casales y Fuego watched as the stevedores unloaded the crates of her possessions from the vast freight container out onto the loading dock inside Jupiter Station. Inside those crates were the mattresses for twenty-six brass beds, the frames for ten airbeds, a gross of lamps, mirrors, desks, futons, roll-away couches, works of art, fifteen crates of costumes and other clothing, and a hundred cases of the best liquor to be found anywhere in the Confederation capital of Buenos Aires. There was more; cases of gourmet provisions were down being vetted by the Agriculture Bureau, and would be delivered later. They were—Myessa smiled—for the only officially commissioned regiment of hookers in the entire Confederation military.

  “Where shall we put these, ma’am?” one of the boys a
sked, easing a handcart of priceless brandy through the service door of the Club Mardi Gras. His voice was respectful, but his eyes considered the possibilities of what was before him. The club’s proprietor was wearing a skin-tight dress of silver-trimmed midnight blue, which reached to her ankles but provided a pretty good topographical map of what was inside it. The young man and his companions certainly found the package appealing. Myessa counted on that little extra oomph from workers who found visual aids helpful, and always dressed accordingly when she was having repairs done in her establishments or moving from one place to another. It was one of the little bonuses that made her memorable as an employer, the next time she needed work done.

  Myessa had had a successful business on Earth, in her native Argentina. Her impulse to move to Jupiter Station came at the same time as the letter from the local authorities urging her to move along out of their district. The next elections were coming up, and a government that permitted, or rather winked at, a house of prostitution in the constituency stood little chance of reelection in this day and age of renascent morality. Myessa knew them all, and knew them for hypocrites, but she understood that it paid her nothing to antagonize them. Before she told them of her plans she wheedled out of the Council a promise not to make her go until she was ready, as long as she wasted no time.

  Relieved to have their problem solved without legal proceedings, they agreed, and Myessa considered the matter settled. Now openly, she sent out queries to her real estate agent, a charter service, and suppliers of food and drink, as well as those seeking official sanction for her journey. To her surprise, her applications for space travel, conveyance of personal property, business permits, and purchase of residential space on Jupiter Station began to come back to her marked REFUSED. Puzzled, she resubmitted the paperwork, and instructed her lawyer to bring the documents to the right authorities in person. She was once again denied permission for everything except the permit to convey personal household goods, but only if they are accompanied by the owner or owners.” That was no good to her without the other papers, so the forms went back a third time. One more document, that applying for a permit to purchase and occupy residential space on the station, arrived marked “APPROVED,” this one in the company of the tax man, who wanted a form filled out detailing the source of the money with which she would be paying for it. This was another annoyance; Myessa kept her tax records well up to date, because that was the first thing that crusading politicians always brought up to try to run her out of town.