1st to Fight (Earth at War)

by Rick Partlow

  Well, that was depressing, if not vaguely insulting. But he sounded like he needed encouragement, and I tried to remember how to do that.

  “Ever hear the term gestalt?” I asked, shrugging. “Maybe when we put our heads together, the whole will add up to more than the sum of the parts.”

  “Jumping now,” Julie said.

  I hadn’t prepared for it, which was fine because it didn’t seem to get any better when I did. Someone made retching noises on the other side of the bridge, but I didn’t look around to see who it was. No use embarrassing them.

  “We are in the Earth-Moon system,” Julie announced, waving at the image in the main display, a very familiar one, but one I hadn’t been sure I’d see again.

  “Where’s the other ship?” Olivera asked her. “Is she out yet?”

  “I hope they don’t name her something stupid,” I murmured, thinking of the conversation I’d had with Jambo.

  “There she is!” Julie fairly whooped. “A thousand kilometers off our port bow.”

  “Port bow?” Olivera repeated, frowning at her. “Have you been picking up bad habits from Clanton?”

  “Just surrender to the inevitable, sir,” I warned him. “You’re gonna be the Space Navy, eventually.”

  “Colonel Brooks and Captain Adams report everything is green on their end,” Collins said. He paused, putting a finger to his ear to shut out the cheering and chatter from the rest of the bridge crew, listening to something over his ear bud. I saw his fingers working the haptic controls and small video screens popped up in the larger display at his station. After a few seconds, he looked up sharply, frowning. “Sir, I’m picking up some transmissions from the news networks on Earth. Things aren’t looking so good.”

  “Put it on the main display, Collins,” Olivera ordered.

  Collins looked doubtful, as if he didn’t think we should see it, but he did it anyway, casting the videos he’d been reviewing over to the central holographic projection.

  He hadn’t been kidding. The video streams were flat screens floating in the midst of the projection, the sound off, but I didn’t need to hear it. Riots were still raging in cities around the world, and the list of cities and casualties scrolled down one side of a screen as images of carnage showed burning shops, cars overturned, Molotov cocktails being thrown at riot police. None were happening in the US, Russia or China, for differing reasons, but Europe was awash in sectarian clashes, and a lot of it was being blamed on infiltration from radical groups based in the Middle East.

  Iran, Iraq and Syria were in the middle of an attempted invasion of the Golan Heights, but Israel had held them off so far, though according to the scrawl, there were fears nuclear weapons would inevitably be used. The main reason the US hadn’t gotten involved was Mexico. The Mexican Revolutionary Government had launched attacks all along the border with Texas and managed to get mixed into the local population before the new defense satellites could be brought to bear. There were reports of Russian involvement and Russian troops had been killed alongside their Mexican allies, but Popov insisted it was mercenaries not under his control.

  Terrorist attacks were happening every day, and the consensus among those polled was that this was the end of the world.

  I tried to add up casualties being reported on the various screens and stopped when I reached half a million. The President’s coalition was hanging on by a thread and there was talk of impeachment in Congress. Again.

  “Holy shit,” Cochrane said, his earlier question answered.

  “The whole world’s gone insane,” Julie hissed, her face screwed up in disbelief. I wondered if she was worried about her daughter. I knew her girl was a young teenager, living with her ex-husband. We’d commiserated about the heartaches of absentee parenthood a few times over lunch in the ship’s mess.

  I thought of Zack living in Austin and felt the same sort of worry. But Paul wasn’t a complete idiot. He wouldn’t leave them in a war zone. Would he?

  “Have you contacted Space Command?” Olivera asked Collins, face grim but no hint of emotion betrayed in his voice.

  “They’ve told me to wait one, sir.” Collins’ hand went to his ear again. “Sir, they just said the President wants to speak to you personally.”

  “Did he request a secure line, Collins?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then put it on the main screen.”

  Damn. I was beginning to respect Olivera as well as like him, neither of which I’d expected. He wasn’t afraid to let his staff see the sausage being made.

  The Presidential seal appeared in the projection, occupying more than half the screen, and when Crenshaw’s face replaced it, he was outsized, bigger than life. I could see every crease that tension had added to his face, every line the lack of sleep and stress had given him.

  “I’m glad to see you back, Colonel,” the President said. “I’m afraid things have been a bit rough since you’ve been gone. I might have to keep you in orbit a bit longer than we expected. We’re worried about threats to the landing facilities for the shuttles.” He shook his head. “I’m about to give an address to the networks to try to calm things down, but I don’t know if it’ll do much good.”

  “Whatever you need us to do, sir,” Olivera said, the good soldier—or spaceman, rather—as always.

  But I remembered something Joon-Pah had said and decided to do what I did best: talk out of turn.

  “Mr. President,” I said, stepping up beside Olivera. “Could I make a suggestion?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “I can’t believe I let you talk me into this, Clanton,” Olivera had to shout to be heard over the roar of the engine and the vibration of the hull. “This is a fucking starship! It was not meant to be flown in a fucking atmosphere!”

  “Actually,” Joon-Pah corrected him, “the cruisers are quite capable of atmospheric entry, they are simply not equipped to land. The plasma drives should be quite adequate to keep us aloft. As long as we don’t drop below a thousand meters in altitude, we should be fine.”

  “Roger that,” Julie said, her lips skinned back in a fierce grin, as if the air buffeting the ship and the vibration threatening to rip the hull apart were the ultimate experience of her career. “No nap-of-the-Earth runs in the starship.”

  I couldn’t even concentrate enough to make a smart remark. We’d made atmospheric entry in a starship—no, in two starships. The ship with Brooks and her Rangers aboard was five kilometers behind us, dipping slightly below our altitude of 9000 feet. Below us, the ocean glittered in the late afternoon sun, giving way in seconds to the arid sands of the Arabian Peninsula.

  “All right then,” Olivera said, sighing his resignation to the inevitable. “Colonel Nieves, take us down to 3000 feet. I want them all to get a good look at what they’re going up against.”

  “At that altitude,” she warned, “we’re going to be blowing out windows and setting off car alarms. These ships displace a lot of air and we’re going pretty damned fast.” She laughed sharply. “I can’t believe I get to fly the biggest aircraft ever. I’m going to be in so many record books…”

  “Broken windows are fine,” Olivera assured her. “I could even live with a bit of moderate structural damage. There are some people down there who need to get slapped in the face with a dose of reality.”

  Now, I had to laugh, and I finally found my voice.

  “And nothing screams reality like a pair of starships the size of a city block flying over your city.”

  I couldn’t see a damned thing, of course. I was strapped into one of the spare acceleration couches on the other side of Engineering and it didn’t have a very good view of the one screen showing the view from the ship’s belly cameras, so I was counting on Baldwin to do the play-by-play.

  “We are passing over the Golan Heights now,” she narrated. “Heading inland over the Iranian and Syrian battle lines. Oooh, the people down there are loving this. Lots of lookie-loos. And there goes the first SAM. Should I shoot it
down, sir?”

  “Why bother?” Olivera said with a snort of bemusement. “Unless it’s a nuke, it won’t even scratch the paint.”

  “Yes, sir, ignoring it.” She laughed. “There are actually Iranian troops firing rifles at us.”

  “That would have to be a hell of a golden BB,” Julie said, eyes still locked on her controls.

  “And we got our first fighter jet! A MIG, I think. It’s not even launching air-to-air—” Baldwin looked up from her screen with a broad smile. “I think he’s going to try to kamikaze us! What the hell does he think this is, a movie?” I didn’t hear anything, didn’t feel so much as a speed bump, but the minute flare of an explosion winked on the edge of the camera view. “Ouch. That’s not going to buff out.”

  “Give the Iranians a nice, good look at both ships,” Olivera said. “Collins, pass it on to Captain Adams. As soon as we’re past the main body of their force, give it some gas and take us over Tehran.”

  “Reports are they have nuclear-tipped SRBMs, sir,” Baldwin warned him, sounding concerned for the first time.

  “Then don’t let them shoot at us. There’s nothing they have that can touch this ship if we don’t want it to.”

  “I feel I should apologize,” Joon-Pah cut in. “I sought your help out of desperation, but it seems our very presence has caused great violence on your world.”

  I barked a laugh at that, louder than I should have.

  “The violence has always been there,” I assured him. “All you did was give the usual suspects an excuse to kill each other.”

  “The President is giving his speech,” Collins said. “It’s going out on every network, every service, even in Russia and China.”

  “Put it on,” Olivera told him. “Audio, too.”

  I twisted around in my seat, which was more difficult now than usual. Olivera had instructed everyone to strap in tight during our foray into the atmosphere since the ship’s artificial gravity wouldn’t be working under the influence of the Earth’s all-natural, organic, gluten-free gravity, and he didn’t want anyone getting tossed around like an old episode of Star Trek.

  “Why the hell didn’t they have seat belts?” had been his comment on the matter, and I couldn’t disagree.

  I was just able to turn enough against my seat restraints to see Crenshaw’s face appear next to the video feed from our external cameras, his comments seeming to run in counterpoint to the missiles flying at us from below. Baldwin had decided not to take any chances, I suppose, and had switched on the ship’s ECM dampening field, because whenever one of the SAMs got within a few hundred yards of the hull, it swerved away and self-destructed in mid-air.

  “My fellow Americans, my fellow humans,” he began, laying the earnest statesman act on thick, “today we are faced with an opportunity unlike any given to us in all of this world’s history. When the Helta visited us and offered us a chance to enter not just a larger world but a larger galaxy, when they gave us the chance to reach the stars and join them in fighting against an aggressive enemy that threatens all peace-loving people, it frightened many of you. And I don’t blame you for being frightened. These are frightening times. Great opportunity always comes with great risk.”

  I’d never been to Tehran, although I’d fantasized about it when I’d been a young Marine infantry platoon leader, eager for battle and not knowing any better. The Alborz mountains outside the city seemed terrifyingly close, and I worried more about running into them than I did the surface-to-air missiles streaking upward at us from all around the downtown area. I had my first sight of the other Helta cruiser since we’d arrived in-system and my breath caught just a bit in awe of the image of the massive starship floating as if by magic only a thousand yards above the downtown buildings of the city. None of the weapons came within two hundred yards of the Truthseeker or her sister ship, though a few tumbled back into the city and exploded in sheets of flame from the rocket propellant tanks.

  “And as always, in times of fear, the frightened have struck out at their neighbors, blaming them for problems far beyond their control. To these people, to the rioters, to the terrorists, to the rogue governments trying to seize control of contested lands or get revenge for old wrongs, I would ask them simply to do this. Go out in the street and look up. What you see is not a threat from the United States and her allies, it’s a promise of a better world. Look up and see the evidence of the size of our universe, the scale of the threats we face and the steps we are ready to take.”

  “Get us some altitude,” Olivera directed. “Get us over those mountains and into Russian airspace.”

  Julie snorted a brief, harsh laugh as she complied, probably at the idea of flying the ships over Moscow, letting them see firsthand just what they were up against.

  “The promise of the marvels you will see in the air above you this day, from the Middle East to Europe and across the rest of the world is quite literally a brand-new day for our species. Even now, new medical wonders are being shared with governments around the world, the means of curing cancers, repairing spinal cord injuries, of lengthening the human lifespan and ameliorating the ravages of old age. If your government tries to withhold these medical miracles from you, find a way to contact the nearest American embassy and we will make sure you are treated. This is a gift given to the whole human race and it’s one we intend to share with anyone who wants it.”

  The image of the President was replaced by a drone shot of a fusion plant, the one I’d heard about the government building with Helta help out in the Nevada desert.

  “And the medical miracles are only a part of the gifts we’ve been given. This is the first commercial fusion energy plant in history and it will be online in less than three months. The United States will offer its expertise and the aid of our Helta allies to any nation who wishes to build their own fusion reactor. You provide the raw materials, we build it for you and after that, it’s yours, no strings attached. Safe, cheap energy to power your homes, your cars, desalinization plants to provide fresh water, to make sure no one has to do without electricity. Again, if your government won’t agree to this out of fear or jealousy or an attempt to control its people through artificial scarcity, ask us for help. We have the ability and the luxury of being able to aid everyone who needs it, who wants it. Don’t let tired old men living in the past keep you from having enough to eat and proper medical care. In addition, we are developing cheap and easy to maintain fabrication plants that take 3D printing to new levels and can build basically anything, given the right raw materials and patterns.”

  Crenshaw smiled, and I saw just a hint of the cynical combat operator in that smile.

  “And now you’re all asking, what’s the catch? And there is one. These aren’t Christmas presents from Santa, after all. There’s a war going on out there. The Helta and their allies are peaceful people who have helped their neighbors and asked for nothing in return, but there are always those who take what you give them and begin coming up with ways to take everything you have. The Tevynians are such a people. They took the technological gifts the Helta offered and used them to build a military and try to seize control of every star system they could reach. They’ve overrun their neighbors and unless they’re stopped, they’ll get around to us. We have to provide aid, provide soldiers for this war. The United States and her allies have volunteered to do this. We do not wish to force anyone else to make this decision, but if any of you wish to help, wish, as individuals, to enlist and be trained, we will make the opportunity available to you, and you’ll be among the first to take advantage of the new technologies we’re developing.”

  The smile thinned out, became something less pleasant. Below us, the mountains and the Caspian Sea had been left behind for the western steppes of Russia.

  “And for those who still believe they can wrest control of the power the Helta offer and use it to oppress their own citizens and threaten our own, then yes, the promise of those ships you’re going to see passing over you today is a threa
t. If you don’t wish to participate in the defense of this world, no one will force you to do it. You’ll still receive the medical advances, still be given the chance to build fusion reactors and fabricators. We won’t ask for troops or support in return. But if you try to attack us, try to sabotage our effort to keep this world safe, then we can and most certainly will put you down. If you had a military, you won’t have one anymore. If you had a government, you’ll have a different one. Because this isn’t an American war, and it’s not a European war, it’s not even just a human war. This is a war between those who believe in peace and autonomy and those who think the universe belongs to them.

  “And we’re not going to lose without one hell of a fight.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The medal around my neck dragged at my shoulders, but the one in my hands seemed to weigh more than worlds. I stared at the case, at the words inscribed on the brass plaque. “Command Master Sergeant James Edward Bowie Jr.”

  “Why the fuck did they give it to me?” I said under my breath. But not softly enough.

  “Because he didn’t have anyone else,” Pops told me.

  Pops, whose real name turned out to be Chief Warrant Officer Mark Tremonti, looked like a different man in his dress blues, but then so did we all. The awards ceremony had ended only minutes ago and the crew of what was officially referred to as Operation Bridgehead was milling about the East Room of the White House while carefully-chosen reporters interviewed President Crenshaw and Colonels Olivera and Brooks.

  “I know he was married once,” I said, not quite an argument but more of a question.

  “He was.” Pops’ eyes flickered downward. “She died. Cancer. Fifteen years ago. His mother and father both passed away when he was a teenager. No siblings. Us, you….” He waved a hand around at the rest of the Delta team. “We’re the closest thing he had to family.”

  “Then you should have it,” I said, trying to hand the case off to him. “You guys worked together.”