First Strike

by Eric Nylund

  Back in the artificial gravity of the tug, Oliver was greeted by the waddling figure of Mabel, his three-legged dog. Mabel was a miracle of sorts. While scouring the wreckage above the planet Dwarka, he had discovered an abandoned but relatively untouched colony ship from another era, the CAA Butterworth. Oliver wasn’t certain how or why it came to be there—or even how it had survived the Covenant’s attack on the planet—but when he found it, it was empty, save for one creature: a hungry, nervous, but ultimately happy three-legged golden retriever.

  “Easy there, girl,” he said, walking around the base of the drive, his eyes and hands inspecting it simultaneously. “Let me give it a quick look and then we’ll head out. I promise.”

  Time hadn’t been an issue before Oliver received notice from his contract handler, a guy who he only knew as Steve. Their client this time around was the Office of Naval Intelligence and apparently they needed the Dresden’s slipspace drive a week ago. This complicated matters because in the meantime he’d somehow managed to square away a date with an incredibly beautiful, yet challenging woman from Tribute—a Ms. Gretchen Navarro.

  How exactly he would make it back to both Cygnus for the drive handoff and to Tribute for his date with Gretchen, he didn’t know. All he knew was that the date was in fifteen days and he didn’t have enough time to do both. But as his hands ran across the truck-sized angularity of the Dresden’s translight engine, he realized something—this wasn’t a standard military FTL drive. This was something else.

  The serial number and its general shape and size indicated that it was a ’44 model made by the Oros Trading Company based out of Mars. But this drive wasn’t a ’44 model and it most certainly was not from Mars—and its shape, though extremely close to a commercial drive, wasn’t an exact match. He scanned the serials to double-check and snorted in triumph. This particular drive was what fetchers referred to as a “saddle box.”

  Saddle boxes were never commercially produced or civilian-issued. Not ever. They were made exclusively for military experiments with slipspace travel and they were extremely rare. So rare that he’d only seen two in his lifetime.

  Slipspace was a rare scientific commodity—a technology and science that were loosely understood, frequently used, and mostly controlled. But like early theories of gravity, most of the understanding was inference and conjecture. There were significant unknowns. This might have been one reason that Oliver, despite having acquired a doctoral degree in quantum electro-dynamics, had decided to become a fetcher and not a physicist. That and because it paid damn well and working in labs wasn’t his really idea of fun.

  Giving the saddle box one last look, Oliver finally knelt down and tenderly scratched the fur at the base of Mabel’s neck. “In fifteen days? I don’t think it’s ever been done before. But with this thing, maybe, just maybe…”

  Mabel let out a small huffing sound that ended in a whine. Oliver didn’t speak dog fluently, but he took it as a plaintive plea for him not to chicken out this time around.

  “All right, all right,” he said, standing up. “Let’s do it.”

  Gretchen Navarro was incredibly good looking. She wasn’t mediocre in any way, shape, or form, and she knew it. She was confident to the point of arrogance and perhaps just a little bit vain. The chances he’d ever meet another girl like Gretchen were next to nil, but even those chances paled in comparison to the possibility of any girl like her saying “yes” to a date with him ever again. Apparently, their long talk about fetching had intrigued her—why exactly, he had no idea.

  Suffice it to say, this date was important.

  Oliver entered the tug’s bridge and stared up intently across Biko’s curved horizon line. He flipped three switches and nudged a throttle, dropping his body into a snug, fabric-covered seat that looked like it had been plucked out of a living room, not the deck of a tug.

  Galileo’s Worst Enemy started to gradually turn about, pushing away from the debris field that eerily clouded the northern pole of the planet, like flies around a festering carcass—in this case, a cold, mummified carcass. Biko looked like all planets did once they ran headlong into the Covenant war machine. It was a dead series of grays, blacks, and reds, the charred remains of a way of life that had been swept away far quicker than it had first appeared.

  Slowly filling the front viewscreen was another ship—the CAA Butterworth. Mabel’s residence and his own ownership of Mabel had allowed him, with some clever interpretation of maritime salvage law, to claim the Butterworth as his own. As he approached, the colony ship opened her starboard bay doors and Galileo’s Worst Enemy was smoothly drawn in by an automated electromagnetic tug system.

  When fetching, it was important to have two separate ships for a few reasons, the primary being that fetching often required the operator to enter exceptionally dense fields of debris. This just wasn’t possible from most affordable, slipspace-capable ships. On a normal fetching run, Oliver would typically park the Butterworth four to five thousand klicks from the prospect and then take Galileo’s Worst Enemy as close as possible.

  “So here’s the problem, Mabel, and try to pay attention because I’m not explaining it again.”

  Mabel promptly turned away, but Oliver continued unabated.

  “Biko is located roughly twenty-four light-years from Cygnus and it’s about fifty-eight light-years from Tribute. From point to point the total trip would be well over a month in length.”

  Mabel looked up at him, as if she too were puzzled by the relativistic problem, and sneezed.

  “Yeah, my thoughts exactly,” he said. “That’s where the saddle box comes in.”

  A wreath of energy formed around the bow of the CAA Butterworth and it was drawn into the unknowable texture of slipspace. There, eddies of sheered radiation buoyed the colony vessel, pushing it forward through a tangled web of both space and time. But, on the command deck of the Butterworth, all Oliver and Mabel could see were swirling aureoles of energy and light against the deep black of subspace.

  “Time dilation frequently happens on a small scale whenever you’re dealing with slipspace.” Oliver spoke with Mabel’s head on his lap. “Einstein was pretty much dead on when it came to special and general relativity, but with slipspace, it has always been difficult to accurately measure the time it takes to travel from one location to another. There’s always been an irregular, unpredictable, and inexplicable temporal discrepancy between those who entered slipspace and those who remained outside of it—this is a proven and accepted fact of science. It could be the effects of mass from extra dimensions; it could be magic. We simply don’t know to a certainty.”

  The thought caused him to stand up and exit the command deck through the adjoining corridors, moving toward the ship’s engine room. The Butterworth was perpetually eerie due to its massive size and general emptiness, which was probably the reason Mabel always followed so closely behind. Oliver didn’t really care why she did this, only that she continued to so that he could keep talking without feeling completely ridiculous—which was his own defense against the ship’s spooky mien.

  “The real mystery has always been finding out how exactly slipspace generates time dilation to degrees humans can’t quantify or even understand. For example, why do, on occasion, some ships arrive days and even weeks before they’re scheduled to? How do the Covenant beat us to our own destinations time and time again, even if they’ve left hours or even days later? Or, in those extremely rare and usually classified instances, how have ships been tracked as arriving at one location before they’ve even left another?”

  Mabel had nothing to say to that—Oliver wondered briefly if that meant it was actually sinking in, or if she thought he was a complete idiot. Probably the latter, but he continued nevertheless. They entered the engine room, which was large, cavernous, and dark—at its center was the newly installed saddle box, which he’d hastily mounted in an effort to buy time. It was also the one Oliver used to make their jump away from Biko.

  “Heh,”
he said, reading the sensor relay screen. “Never seen that alignment error before.” Oliver feverishly keyed a response that cleared the error but left a puzzled look on his face. He shrugged it off and continued around the machine.

  “This saddle box is some kind of skunkworks prototype drive that I’m guessing was manufactured by ONI—and I’m guessing again that it was designed to measure dilation by generating several microjumps within a single transition. Not such a big deal for the Covenant, since many physicists believe that’s how the aliens pull off their insane speeds, but it’s a huge deal for humanity. The special thing about this particular drive is that because it can accurately navigate several jumps within slipspace, it can accentuate and coerce to some degree the previously unpredictable dilation.” He paused, casting a glance toward a control panel near the drive’s base. “To what degree though, I don’t know. Not even sure if the people who made it really knew, to be honest.”

  Oliver did, however, know that the UNSC had been testing such jumps for the purpose of communication probes and drop pod deployment of troops from shielded positions within slipspace. He knew these things because ONI had consulted him more than once already on the matter. But, since he wasn’t involved in the development of those projects, he didn’t know exactly where they stood at this moment in time.

  “So here’s the deal. I’m about 99 percent certain—which is usually certain enough for me—that we can mount the Butterworth’s old slipspace drive to our tug. At a specific point, the Butterworth will release the tug from its cargo hold with us on board.” Mabel responded with a cocked head and a slight drop of her tail. There she goes again, Oliver thought, doubting his plan already. “When we get to the appropriate spot within the slipspace transition, we’ll use the Butterworth’s old drive to slip back into normal space, right smack-dab in Tribute’s front yard.”

  Oliver continued to size up the drive’s well-shielded components, this time punching a series of queries into the control panel. Mabel had already dropped to the ground with her chin resting on her front two paws—two-thirds of all of the paws she had left.

  “While Galileo’s Worst Enemy safely drops back to normal space, within taxiing distance of Tribute and perfectly on time, the Butterworth will continue on course, following a staggered series of automated jumps, all the way through to its designated slipspace exit in Cygnus. We’ll have a playback message and verbal claim of continued ownership running on loop for the dock workers. And, of course, Steve will be there to get the saddle box to the ONI folks on time.”

  Oliver then asked Mabel what she thought of his foolproof plan. He wasn’t entirely sure that he could count it as a positive affirmation, but just then she broke wind and he took that as a sign of relief.

  And for the longest time, his plan was entirely foolproof—well, right up to the point where the radiation klaxons blared on the tug. Now the ship was being hammered from every angle in slipspace.

  Oliver and Mabel had barely made it aboard when the tug was somehow knocked out of the Butterworth’s cargo bay and began literally peeling apart while they tumbled in the colony ship’s radiation wake. Technically speaking, that wasn’t supposed to happen—the Butterworth should have maintained its transition path for at least another day before executing a jump, but for some reason, it hadn’t.

  That was definitely a big problem, but the more immediate issue was trying to get into the cryostorage pod and seal it before Galileo’s Worst Enemy became Galileo’s Spare Parts. Oliver now carried Mabel and bounded as fast as he could through the tug’s narrow corridors as the ship was repeatedly battered. With its shielding failing, the ship was like fresh carrion amid a torrent of vultures; its various pieces would be picked and plucked until all that remained was a skeleton.

  Oliver didn’t want to be picked or plucked.

  Finally, he reached the cryostorage chamber, what essentially amounted to a large closet for a ship of this size. He entered one of two pods, fortunately large enough for both him and Mabel to snugly fit. The pod immediately slammed shut, filling with gas which would coalesce, eventually drowning them both in an artificial surfactant that would put them to sleep while it kept them alive. Through the narrow porthole, Oliver watched as the interior of Galileo’s Worst Enemy heated to a bright red, began melting into shreds, and eventually ripped asunder, all while simultaneously reemerging back into normal space.

  All that was left of the battered tug were thousands of scraps of flotsam and jetsam and a single, radiation-shielded cryostorage pod.

  As he stared into the blackness, barely recognizable star systems drifting and rotating past the pod’s vid-screen, he thought about Gretchen Navarro, beautiful, elegant, impatient, and bad-tempered.

  He patted Mabel on the head, glanced at the pulsing light of the slow-impulse thruster monitor and the reassuring beat of the emergency locator beacon, and muttered, “She’ll have to wait.”

  And sleep took them gently, before the first wisp of cold seeped into their crèche.

  TRANSCRIPT OF THE SECOND PSYCHOLOGICAL DEBRIEFING OF LIEUTENANT FREDERIC, SPARTAN-104, CONDUCTED BY ONI PSYCHIATRIST DR. VERONICA CLAYTON, PH.D.

  DR. VERONICA CLAYTON:

  GOOD AFTERNOON, LIEUTENANT.

  S-104:

  MA’AM.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  IF YOU WOULD, I’D LIKE TO REVISIT THE EVENTS ABOARD THE PILLAR OF AUTUMN, JUST BEFORE YOUR DEPLOYMENT PLANET-SIDE—BEFORE THE ENGAGEMENT, AND TRAGIC EVENTS, ON REACH.

  S-104:

  [SILENCE]

  DR. CLAYTON:

  WHAT WAS THE MORALE AMONG YOUR FELLOW SPARTANS AT THIS POINT?

  S-104:

  EAGER.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  EAGER? HOW SO?

  S-104:

  REACH—ASIDE FROM BEING AN INVALUABLE MILITARY RESOURCE, REACH WAS OUR HOME—OR…IT WAS THE CLOSEST THING TO HOME ANY OF US HAD EVER KNOWN.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  SO, YOU’D SAY THERE WAS AN ATTACHMENT—A CONNECTION—BETWEEN THE SPARTANS TRAINED ON REACH AND THE PLANET ITSELF. AS YOU SAID, THIS WAS YOUR HOME.

  S-104:

  WE TAKE EACH ENCOUNTER SERIOUSLY, MA’AM, AND WE VIEW EVERY COVENANT ENGAGEMENT AS CRITICAL, BUT WE WEREN’T ABOUT TO LET THE ENEMY GO UNCHECKED IN OUR OWN BACKYARD.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  YOU ARE REFERRING—WHEN YOU SAY “US,” “WE”—YOU ARE REFERRING TO YOUR FELLOW SPARTANS?

  S-104:

  YES, MA’AM.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  AND “EAGER”—YOU SPEAK FOR YOUR UNIT AS WELL? YOU SPEAK FOR THE OTHER SPARTANS WHEN YOU SAY THIS?

  S-104:

  WE WERE—WE ALWAYS ARE—ALL OF US—EAGER TO ACCOMPLISH THE GOALS SET FORTH BEFORE US AND ACHIEVE VICTORY WITHIN A GIVEN TACTICAL SITUATION…

  DR. CLAYTON:

  YOU’RE NOT…

  S-104:

  I’M NOT FINISHED…AND, AS THIS SESSION IS ONE IN WHICH I AM ENCOURAGED TO SPEAK FREELY, I WOULD APPRECIATE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO SO.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  CONTINUE.

  S-104:

  THANK YOU. YES, AS SPARTANS WE ANTICIPATE OUR INVOLVEMENT IN ANY MILITARY CAMPAIGN. IT’S WHO WE ARE. IT’S WHAT WE WERE BORN TO DO. WE’RE HERE TO WIN THIS WAR AND WE’RE EAGER TO DO JUST THAT. TO BE FRANK, MA’AM, IS THIS ANOTHER INQUIRY ON MILITARY ETHICS BASED ON CIVILIAN ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE SPARTAN-II PROJECT? IFITIS, I’D LIKE TO SPEAK WITH LORD HOOD BEFORE—

  DR. CLAYTON:

  ANY “ASSUMPTIONS,” AS YOU CALL THEM, ARE BASED UPON YEARS OF OBSERVATION AND RESEARCH. YOU CANNOT CHANGE WHO—WHAT—YOU ARE.

  S-104:

  I WOULD NEVER ASK TO CHANGE WHO I AM, DOCTOR. I AM PROUD TO BE WHO I AM, AND ANY OTHER SPARTAN WOULD SAY THE SAME. ESPECIALLY CONSIDERING THE NATURE OF OUR PRESENT ENEMY AND THE CURRENT DIRECTION OF THIS CONFLICT—

  DR. CLAYTON:

  WE ARE WELL AWARE OF THE CURRENT DIRECTION OF THIS CONFLICT, LIEUTENANT, BUT THAT IS NOT THE TOPIC OF THIS DISCUSSION—

  S-104:

  I WOULD MOST
CERTAINLY ARGUE THAT YOU ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH ANYTHING OF THE SORT. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A PLANET GLASSED?

  DR. CLAYTON:

  I—

  S-104:

  NOT IN A VID. NOT IN A FEED. WITH YOUR OWN TWO EYES…. WE WEREN’T GOING TO LET THAT HAPPEN TO REACH. SO, YES, WE WERE EAGER, AND WE WERE READY—FOR ALL THE GOOD IT DID.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  WERE YOU THIS FRUSTRATED BEFORE THE DEPLOYMENT?

  S-104:

  EXCUSE ME?

  DR. CLAYTON:

  IF REACH WAS SO IMPORTANT TO YOU AND YOUR UNIT—

  S-104:

  EVERY WORLD IS IMPORTANT.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  NO DOUBT. BUT, REACH—REACH MOST ASSUREDLY HAD A DEEPER EMOTIONAL RESONANCE FOR YOU—FOR ALL OF YOU. I MEAN; NO ONE—NONE OF US—BELIEVED REACH WOULD EVER BE IN DANGER. IT WAS ALWAYS SAFE. IT WAS ALWAYS OUR ROCK. AND NOW…IT’S GONE. JUDGING FROM YOUR PREVIOUS STATEMENTS, THIS HAD TO HAVE HAD SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL EFFECT ON YOUR TEAM.

  S-104:

  IT ABSOLUTELY DID NOT.

  DR. CLAYTON:

  FOR ALL OF YOUR TRAINING AND SKILLS, YOU ARE STILL HUMAN. HOW COULD IT NOT?