Riding the Red Horse

by Christopher Nuttall

  “And what is that?”

  “Meet the skipper.”

  We passed the journey in silence as the robo-tuk navigated the narrow, insanely busy streets of Penang, Malaysia. It was so crowded here, and life was so varied and free and messy. The closest you could come in the black was along the promenade of a major station, and this level of chaos beat that by several orders of magnitude – especially since the resource war with China had gone from cold to hot and all such places of congregation had cleared out.

  The robo-tuk pulled to a stop in front of a Thai “health club.” Judging by the barely clad, semi-androgynous “personal trainers” out front, they were only interested in working out certain specific parts of one’s anatomy. We clambered out of the small cab, the stocky XO managing it with more grace than I could in the persistent gravity. She brushed past the come-hither beckoning of the ladies and lady-boys arrayed along the sidewalk without a glance. Jones led the way inside and up the stairs to a particular room apparently known to her. I limped along in her wake.

  The XO knocked once and barged into the room without waiting for a reply. Inside stood a girl in a floral silk robe, with her hair pinned up in disarray. She smoked a black cigarette, but ground it out upon seeing us enter. The girl lit into Jones with a loud, rapid stream of what sounded like angry Mandarin.

  The XO waved her diatribe away and held up the shiny, dark rectangle of her phone. “Okay, all right. What does he owe you this time?” The brick translated: Hao ba, hao ba. Shenme shi ta qian ni de zhe yici?

  “Liang bai ouyuan!” the girl answered emphatically, which the phone duly repeated: 200 euros.

  “Less than last week,” Jones muttered. She tapped the amount into her phone and executed a transfer to the young prostitute. The girl’s phone chimed and all her anger and frustration bled away. She smiled, dimpling, and slipped out of the room, perhaps brushing against me in a more lingering fashion than was necessary.

  The XO waved me over and we began to collect an odd assortment of clothes: wrinkled uniform khaki pants, a stained combination cover, rope sandals, and a bright floral batik shirt. Of his uniform shirt, belt, or shoes, there was no sign. The commanding officer himself laid face-up across the width of the narrow bed, drooling, snoring, stinking of old beer and sweat… and without even a sheet for modesty.

  Jones tossed me his underwear. As we wrestled him into his clothes, he roused to consciousness and looked at me in evident confusion. “Damn. You fall into a wood chipper, boy?”

  I ignored him and flipped him onto his stomach to finish pulling his pants up. That’s when I saw a large tattoo on his shoulder blade: the eagle, rocket, and orbits of the USAN. I looked at the XO sharply.

  She wore a wry smile. “Oh yes, Morrow. The Aerospace Navy is already very well represented aboard the USS Forrest Griggs.”

  The second time I met Commander Brett Larkin was many hours later. I had been acclimating myself to the Griggs, meeting my chief and my sailors, enduring their stares and assumptions, learning about my spaces and systems aboard ship, and dealing with the culture shock of the wet Navy versus the Aerospace Navy.

  Free for the moment, I stood alone in the wardroom, slurping a mug of coffee and inexplicably missing the nipple I would have had on a coffee bulb in microgravity. Larkin—my ultimate superior on this dilapidated tub—stumbled in and stopped when he saw me.

  We had both changed, me into coveralls similar enough to a shipsuit while still being inferior in every way, and he into official Navy workout gear. Larkin had showered and appeared more or less lucid now, but he still looked confused as he stared at me until something clicked in his muddled brain. Then he grinned. “Sorry we had to meet that way, kid. You’re our new orbital debris, right?”

  I winced. That was indelicate, if perhaps slightly better than “meteor,” or “crash case”—someone who had made the irreversible transition from naval service among the planets to one stuck on our single livable world. I had heard them all today, though my subordinates had the decency to say them under their breath. “Yes, sir. I just made the shift.”

  He nodded and poured his own mug of coffee. “What were you on?”

  I gestured to my face. “Most recently the USS Jonas Salk and 90 days in a treatment tank as we made the fast burn in from the Belt. Before that I was stationed on Pensacola.”

  Realization dawned on his face. “Damn. I’m sorry about that. As San Diego-class astro frigates go, Pensacola was one of the best. I knew your CO, Jim Goldsmith. He was a year behind me at Annapolis; it was a bad day when we heard how things went out there.” He took a sip of his coffee, black, and searched my face. “Backscatter or explosive decompression?”

  My heartbeat stuttered a bit and panic bloomed, but I fought the emotions down. “A bit of both, Captain. I was one compartment over from where the first laser-head missile holed us. I don’t remember much, but I was lucky. It was early in the battle with Zhengzhou, so there was still time for others to button me up and get me to a med cell. The Chinese found my beacon and ten others after the reactor went. They forwarded us to Jonas Salk as part of a humanitarian exchange.” Forty-five others had been lost outright.

  Larkin grinned. “Ya gotta love civilized warfare, as if you can just compartmentalize atrocity. They blow the ship out from under you, and then pick you up from among the dead. They blast you with impunity off-planet, then declare the Earth off-limits to hostility.” He took another sip of coffee. “Why are you here, Lieutenant? Surely they gave you the option to exit.”

  I ignored sudden flashes of memory, of my parents urging me to do just that. “I still had time remaining on my initial commission.”

  “Don’t bullshit me, Morrow. You could med-board your way out of any contract! You’ve got a better case than most with just the injuries I can see.”

  I stared into the brown dregs of my cup. My stomach churned bitterly. “They wouldn’t let me stay in space. I can’t take the level of rads I might encounter, and my pressure resiliency is shot to hell.” I looked up at my CO. “But there’s still a war on. There’s still payback to be made and honor to be satisfied.”

  Larkin chuffed a single, humorless laugh. “God damn, you’re a dumb son of a bitch! Almost as dumb as me when I screwed up and asked for the good ol’ real Navy too. I wasn’t turned to hamburger like you, but I was riding that same line between ‘they can’t get rid of me’ and ‘they won’t let me stay.’ What I didn't know, however, and what you're about to find out, is this: there is no more real Navy. Resource extraction and transport has moved on to space. The petroleum economy is over. Most goods are made on site with 3D printing and materials recycled locally. The ocean traffic and waterways don't need defending with just a fraction of their former activity. Even power projection has moved into orbit. You’ve chosen to continue the good fight against an enemy you can’t touch in the equivalent of a global coast guard.”

  He slammed down his mug and gave me a bleak look as he continued. “My ships used to have a range of influence as close to infinity as one could get, in every possible direction. My weapons unleashed the power of stars. There was no horizon. Everything was within my sight and within my grasp.

  “Now? Now we are pond scum, stuck at the interface of sea and sky, bound by a horizon barely a stone’s throw away. Our sight above is clouded and our sight below is almost totally obscured. Right or left, forward or backward, it doesn’t matter where we go, because we’re never going anywhere. You think you got lucky, that the Chinese spared you? Son, they gave you the cruelest death of all. They doomed you to mediocrity after you’d already touched eternity.”

  The captain shook his head bitterly and left the wardroom, abandoning me to my thoughts and the consideration of the possibility that perhaps I might have made a huge mistake.

  USS Forrest Griggs got underway the next day, along with our sister ship, USS Jefferson Edwards. It had been our intention to pull the two trimaran hybrid destroyers away from the pier together at first light. E
dwards succeeded. However, we did not, as we were plagued by a cascading series of system casualties and engineering errors. I spent the morning on the bridge uselessly, watching the clean, rust-free lines of the other ship get underway smartly. I had the conn, a learn-to-drive-the-ship position usually reserved for Ensigns, but since most Ensigns had more experience on the water than I did, it fit. As the Conning Officer, it was my job to parrot the Navigator and the Officer of the Deck’s orders to the helmsman who actually steered the ship, under the theory that at some point I would learn enough to do it myself and qualify to become the OOD.

  Instead, I was stuck, listening as the captain yelled at engineers and technicians over both the phone and the ship’s general announcing circuit. LCDR Jones ran from one brushfire to the next, until finally we could take in all lines and start making way under our own power. The skipper sat in his bridge-wing chair, glowering as we pulled away from Penang Island harbor and entered the mouth of the Strait of Malacca. He left the bridge as soon as Malaysia was just a line upon the horizon astern of us, and I focused on my watch duties until I could be relieved. My fellow watchstanders only spoke to me when it was necessary, and they all gave me significant looks whenever the subject of the captain was mentioned.

  After watch, I toured the weatherdecks, watching as sailors went about their duties, chipping rust until the orange was gone and slathering on paint until the damage was smooth again, or greasing up anything that moved until the grease sprayed out the other side of the fitting. It was disgusting, wasteful, imprecise and—had we been in space—deadly. Or perhaps that was just my prejudice showing, buyer’s remorse and the skipper’s dim views settling in and making my eye overly critical. Was I seeing normal as abnormal and untidy as careless just because it wasn’t the neat order of USAN maintenance?

  Around us, heavy shipping traffic with unknown cargos flowed up and down the Strait of Malacca, forced by economics and geography down this particular strategic waterway. It might well be a tithe of what flowed through here a century before, but the funnel of Indonesia, Thailand, and Malaysia still forced hundreds of vessels of a dozen different nations’ flags through this lane every day. It looked vital enough to my untrained eye.

  Later, near sunset, I watched as my petty officers and those from their partner divisions prepared the Griggs’ AI drones for coordinated operations. I watched closely, to see how managing drones as an Autonomous Systems Officer in a wet Navy differed from being a Remote Operator in the Aerospace Navy. I had always loved the god-like sensation of seeing through the multiple viewpoints of widely separated AI drones, wired directly into my brain. How strange would it be to experience the air and the sea through them instead of the vacuum of space?

  The sailors deftly managed the launch, releasing undersea, surface, and aerial drones until we led a small phalanx of artificially intelligent servitors through the water and sky. As my chief and petty officers finished up, they caught me watching them. They all smiled nervously, then scattered back to the interior of the ship. I shook my head at my continuing failure to connect to anyone and turned to follow them – whereupon I saw the XO watching me intently.

  “Ma’am,” I said.

  “What’s up, Morrow? Everything to your satisfaction? All in line with the premium standards of the Aerospace Navy?” Her question had a hard edge to it, and I remembered some of the blistering rebukes the skipper had laid upon her as we struggled to get underway.

  “I’m not in the Aerospace Navy anymore, XO. I think I should probably judge things according to wet Navy standards instead, don’t you think?”

  Jones nodded. “Probably, but transition is hard, and we tend to fall back on what we already know, rather than what we should know. Speak up, ASO. What do you think?”

  I paused and slumped. Turning, I looked over at the Edwards, lit in red and shadow by the setting sun behind us. “I think there’s something wrong. I think there’s a big difference between that ship and this one, and everyone knows it, but no one will address it.”

  She smiled. “Oh, goodie. Let’s hear your sage outsider wisdom on where we poor wet Navy types get it all wrong.”

  I shook my head. “Listen, ma’am, I can guess why everyone is being stand-off-ish with me, why they look at me and make assumptions, but you have got to give me a chance. Do I look at everything through a prism of where I’ve come from? Of course, everyone does that at first…but it would be a mistake to think I’m not actively trying to reshape that prism. I’m not…I’m not what others are. Okay? So, can I ask for a fair hearing before you hang me?”

  She stared at Edwards for a while herself before responding. Eventually, she answered. “I don’t mean to have a chip on my shoulder, Josh, but it’s there after years of being looked down on for being a proud member of a service whose glory days are behind it. All my career, the service has been regarded as a haven for the rejects and the also-rans. So maybe I’ve grown to expect some unfortunate things. It's like a cancer. It starts out as something small, a tiny thing you either don’t notice or disregard, like a switch thrown into the wrong position. Or it’s something as simple as dashed expectations. Despite your best intentions, the cancer grows. It grows and metastasizes until it infects and poisons everything. There was once a fine, hopeful officer in command of this ship, a slightly older Josh-Morrow-type of officer. Now…”

  Jones stepped away from the lifelines. “You’re going to have to make a choice about what kind of officer you’re going to be, but you’re a fool if you think you’re totally in charge of that decision-making process.”

  The XO walked down the weatherdecks, away from me, and I went into the ship, both to get back to my drones and to stop looking at the other, better-run, happier ship.

  The war in space came to Earth while no one was looking.

  The Griggs and the Edwards had spent a week and a half underway, exercising in the Indian Ocean and making a round-trip transit through the Straits of Malacca and Singapore, establishing our presence and showing off the US flag to all the nations and ships using the waterway. During that time, I had seen a number of things, some which improved my outlook, and some which lent credence to the skipper’s dismal view of reality.

  In the plus column, my people had begun speaking to me. They still did not fully trust me, harboring a deep resentment similar to that carried by the XO, but I made a concerted effort to look at everything they did with a fresh set of eyes, to not judge them too harshly if it seemed like the Aerospace Navy could have done the same thing better or more efficiently (even if in many cases, that was exactly what I had been thinking). As they opened up, so did a few of the other officers and crew. It began to seem as if I could make a valued life here.

  Then you had the minus column. I looked up what CDR Larkin had told me, and ocean-going traffic was way, way down. The US maintained the heaviest forces in the area with ships in both Singapore and Penang, but if one looked at the loadouts and capabilities, you could tell they were not designed for heavy or sustained combat. China was only a few days’ transit away, but we were not built up to any sort of posture to face them should that become necessary. And it would likely never become necessary. China did not put so much as a patrol boat in the straits, and judging from internet traffic about our presence, we were largely regarded as a joke, the last desperate spasms of nationalism and empire. I would not be satisfying honor and continuing the fight for my lost brethren on this front.

  I could see why the captain drank.

  Thus, as the Griggs and the Edwards pulled out of the Malaccan Strait and bore right to return to Penang, I considered whether I should spend my remaining time in the wet Navy embracing it or deriding it. Thinking deeply, I stood upon the starboard weatherdecks and watched as the green, lush strip of land upon the horizon grew larger, heedless of any danger. And that’s when danger struck.

  Without any warning, both Griggs’ Close-In Weapons Systems lasers aimed upwards and began snapping off dozens of shots per second from their b
ottomless magazines. Invisible high-UV radiance speared upward along a multitude of vectors from our two emplacements, made evident by a sound like a buzzsaw and the minute flashes of air heated to incandescence. I looked astern and saw similar flashes of light from the forward and aft superstructures on the Edwards.

  I searched the sky, mind boggling, with no idea what we were shooting at. Globes of light and streams of smoke blossomed in the skies overhead, with the streams transitioning from fast, straight lines to slow, chaotic curls as whatever they had been broke up under the assault of our lasers. All the streams originated from the northeast.

  I hobbled aft as fast as I could to the closest watertight door. Around us, ships outside the cone of our influence erupted in gouts of flame and debris as hypersonic glide warheads found their targets. I scanned the skies for any attacking aircraft, but there was nothing but the HGWs themselves. That was telling. The Chinese used suppressed-ballistics missiles, capable of hurling an HGW half-way around the world from the mainland.

  I noticed something else, too. Some ships seemed to remain untouched as other ships took multiple hits. Were these ships just lucky so far, or were they specifically not targeted? A theory began to form in my head.

  Reaching the door, I felt the vibration of the deck increase and we heeled hard to port, as the ship turned to starboard and accelerated to flank speed through the water. I fled inside and sealed the door behind me. Men and women rushed to their battlestations to the accompaniment of the General Quarters alarm. I hobbled toward the bridge, both to stand watch as Conning Officer again, and to share my observations with the command.

  As soon as I stepped on station, I saw the XO was there in battle dress, looking at a conferencing screen. The screen showed the faces of the CO, the Tactical Action Officer, and representatives from Engineering, Damage Control, and Intelligence. They were all talking, but I ran up and interrupted even as I struggled into battle dress myself. “XO! Sorry, ma’am, but it looks like all the Chinese-flagged vessels are escaping attack.”