by Rick Partlow
“Let’s start with the dinner,” she conceded. “We’ll see about the rest after that.” She leaned back into the house and called out. “Zack! It’s your father.”
He didn’t exactly run to the door, but he was smiling, which was a good sign.
“Sorry I had to leave early before, son,” I told him.
“That’s okay,” he said, waving it off. “I mean, you had to go to another solar system.” He snorted. “Not a lot of guys can say that about their dad, right?”
“You wanna go grab some food?” I asked him. I glanced behind me. It was getting dark and my body was telling me I was hungry, though whether it was for dinner or breakfast I wasn’t sure. “Wherever you want.”
“The Peached Tortilla?” he asked.
“Sure.” I was kind of relieved he hadn’t asked for sushi. I hated sushi.
“Let me go grab my shoes,” he said and jogged back upstairs toward his room.
“You want to come in?” Allie asked, waving a hand invitingly.
“Maybe next time,” I begged off. “He’ll be back in a second.”
She gave me a thin smile.
“Andy, I don’t bite. Much. Anymore.”
“I know,” I admitted. “But like you say, one step at a time, right?”
“Ready!” Zack announced, barreling down the stairs. He’d grabbed a jacket along with his shoes, though it didn’t feel cold enough for one to me. “Seeya, Mom!”
“Love you, honey,” she called as we headed down the front walk, and an old instinct almost had me saying it back to her before I latched my jaws shut and kept walking.
Zack said nothing as we got into the rental SUV, kept silent until I’d taken us down the driveway and out into the street, and I knew that was a bad sign.
“Dad,” he finally spoke up, “you know, you never did finish that story you were telling me about Venezuela.”
My gaze flickered from the Audi approaching the four-way stop to my son beside me.
“I will finish it,” I told him, “I promise. But do you think I could tell you another story first? About a mission a lot farther way than Venezuela? Because this one has a lot happier ending.”
Thank you for reading 1st to Fight, the first book in Rick Partlow’s Earth at War series.
Tap here to get the next book in the series, titled Primary Targets
A sample chapter from Primary Targets (Earth at War Book 2) follows.
If you’d prefer to just get the next book now, tap here.
Chapter One
Reality lurched and twisted and reformed, and the stars reassembled themselves on the main viewscreens of the USS James Bowie.
“Hyperdimensional translation successful,” Colonel Julie Nieves said, her fighter pilot drone making interstellar travel seem as everyday as a flight from McCarren to LAX. “We are a light-minute out from Wellspring.”
We called it a hyperdimensional translation now, for the same reason that the Army calls a jumping jack a “side straddle hop” and Velcro “hook and loop fasteners.” Because “hyperspace jump” sounded too imprecise and, more importantly, too much like a cheesy science fiction movie. The curl at the corner of Julie’s mouth told me she felt the same way about the subject as I did.
“What about the Truthseeker?” General Michael Olivera asked. He was trying to match her relaxed, business as usual attitude, but the fingers of his left hand were tapping on the armrest of the command console. “Has she come out of the translation yet?”
“Nothing yet,” Major Aliyah Baldwin reported, the glow of the display from the tactical station painting her face with red and green highlights as she scanned between sensor readouts.
The viewscreens on the Jambo were a curving holographic projection, 180 degrees around, centered on the command position, which must have made Olivera feel special, but I was far enough behind him, strapped into one of the auxiliary seats near the rear of the bridge, that I could see all the way around the projection. We’d come out with our nose angled toward the system primary. I should have remembered its catalogue name, but hadn’t bothered because the planet itself had a nice, sensible name, or at least an English translation of a nice, sensible name. Wellspring was to the left of the star from our perspective—as meaningless as that is on the cosmic scale—a blue and green jewel of habitability in the cold darkness.
It wasn’t the first habitable extrasolar world I’d seen, but it was the first inhabited one. That should have been some sort of milestone, but all I felt was nervous. Where the hell was Joon-Pah?
“Wait…there they are,” Baldwin said, finger stabbing at the rear sensor display. “They came out ten light-seconds behind us. They’re accelerating into formation.”
It had taken me some effort to think in light-seconds, but everyone had decided they were a handier method to measure space than kilometers or, God forbid, miles. It only took me a second to translate it anyway. Everyone knows the speed of light in a vacuum is 186,000 miles per second—every kid brought up on a steady diet of science fiction, anyway—so ten light-seconds was almost two million miles. What that came out to in kilometers, I didn’t give a shit. Fuck the metric system. If the metric system was so great, how come the first human starship was flown by Americans?
Yeah, I know, aliens built the ship, but we were the ones flying around the Moon when the Helta jumped out of hyperspace. Sorry, I should say when the Helta hyperdimensionally translated into the Earth-Moon system. It wasn’t some Chinese dude who built the the first private spaceship to orbit the Moon, it was Daniel Gatlin. And if he’d technically been born in Australia, that was a mistake his parents had corrected early.
“Have the Tevynians seen us yet?” I blurted, wondering why Olivera hadn’t asked the question already.
I still felt like a kid speaking out of turn in class, and if winning the Medal hadn’t changed that, then nothing would. Olivera’s right eyebrow raised just a fraction of an inch, but he didn’t say anything.
“I’m not picking up any activity yet,” Baldwin told me, not even questioning whether I should be asking questions on Olivera’s bridge.
“Getting nervous, Andy?” Julie asked, a teasing note in her voice.
“Damn right I am,” I admitted, feeling no shame in it. “It’s one thing getting shot at when I can shoot back. You guys don’t even let me have a big, red button on my armrest I can push and pretend it’s a laser gun or something.”
“You’ll get your chance, Clanton,” Olivera assured me. “Hell, you’ll probably be taking a bigger risk than we will, if Joon-Pah’s threat briefing was accurate. The Tevynians aren’t supposed to have any space assets more significant than a few in-system patrol boats out here.”
“And here they come,” Baldwin interrupted. “I’m reading twelve…no, fifteen fusion drives coming around the terminator of the planet.”
Red icons sprang to life on the tactical display, breaking orbit from Wellspring on white starbursts of fusing hydrogen.
“What have we got?”
“They’re big, at least three or four hundred meters long, one, one fifty at the beam.” I chuckled at that. Beam. Baldwin was ex-Navy and no amount of being reassigned to the Space Force was going to change that. She pulled up the maximum magnification on the optical cameras and the red icons on the screen turned into bulbous shapes, fuzzy with distance, backlit by the flare of their drives.
“They’re really boosting.” Baldwin whistled softly. Her fingers traced lines in the haptic hologram controls of her station, a conductor leading an orchestra. “Fifteen gravities. Do ships that small have gravity control?”
“Depends,” Olivera replied. “According to the intelligence analysis we got from the Helta, if the ships are pirated Helta tech, they could definitely have gravity field generators. If they’re something the Tevynians slapped together from parts, then no.”
“If they don’t have gravity control, then they’re all unconscious and running on autopilot. Either way, they’re going to be hitting bi
ngo fuel in less than ten minutes if they don’t—yeah, they’re doing a skew flip and decelerating.”
“Time till they’re in range?”
“You want to go to them or let them come to us?”
Olivera considered the question, scraping a thumbnail against the texture of his armrest in absent thought.
“Let them come to us. We want to draw out all their orbital defenses before we send in the shuttles.”
Which was okay with me, since I was going to be on one of those shuttles.
“In that case, if we maintain course and speed and they decelerate to something manageable, we’ll be in particle cannon range in approximately ten minutes. We could hit them with the impulse gun now, but it would be a bit of overkill.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Olivera grinned, a predatory expression. “Start whittling them down, Major.”
“I’ll need helm control.”
“Helm control to tactical,” Julie confirmed.
The impulse gun was on a spinal mount, which meant we had to move the whole ship to aim the thing. It was inconvenient and time consuming, but it was a fair trade-off for a weapon that could put a ten-foot tungsten rod through a target at relativistic speeds. And Baldwin was right, it was definitely overkill for ships that small, but Olivera was former Air Force, and there was nothing the zoomies loved better than solving an itty-bitty problem with a really big bomb.
I couldn’t feel the Jambo move, not like in a shuttle where the maneuvering jets would pound against the hull and my stomach would lurch right along with the bird. This was more like an aircraft carrier turning at sea, but the rudder was a gravimetic field and the ocean was the fabric of spacetime. The only indication we were maneuvering was the view on the main screen swinging to our relative left and upward, bringing the curve of the planet closer to the center of the picture. The aiming point of the impulse gun was a green reticle floating across the picture, reminding me of the targeting system in my Svalinn battle armor. The green began to flash red as the reticle drifted into the path of the oncoming enemy ships, then lit up a solid red as the Jambo shoved spacetime to the side and came to a stop.
“Firing,” Baldwin announced.
I’d never been aboard one of the old battleships when they fired the big guns, but my father had been. He’d served in the Navy before he’d gone to the seminary and he told me about standing on the USS Wisconsin during the Gulf War and feeling the whole ship shudder when the sixteen-inch guns fired. It had to have been similar to how it feels when the impulse gun fires. It wasn’t just the pure recoil, because the slug wasn’t propelled by a Newtonian reaction, it was from squeezing the fabric of reality around it and forcing the universe to spit it out. But the feedback across the matrix of spacetime funneled into the hull of the ship and it vibrated down to the quantum level and it’s the goddamned strangest thing I’ve ever felt, stranger than jumping through another reality.
Strange but not entirely unpleasant, sort of like jumping out of an airplane. For the Tevynians in the lead ship, it was more like jumping with no parachute. The slug wasn’t visible in the optical cameras, but the targeting computer tracked it using its known trajectory and painted a red line on the display, crossing the distance as slowly as a the blaster bolt in a science fiction movie, traveling a bit less than half the speed of light. The relative crawl gave the whole thing the feel of watching a car stuck on the tracks with a high-speed train barreling down on it, a fatalistic inevitability.
The fusion drive cut out just a few seconds before the slug hit, like the Tevynian crew had finally noticed the incoming round and were desperately trying to avoid it, but it was way too late. The rod was only ten feet long, but it could have been ten inches and still had the same effect at that velocity. The enemy ship erupted into a small nova. I wasn’t sure if it had been their fusion drive reacting out of control or from the kinetic energy of the round, but I was sure every man and woman on board that ship was dead.
Now the others reacted. Fourteen fusion drives winked out and maneuvering thrusters flared, spinning the ships end for end. Another vanished in a sphere of white destruction and I blinked, not understanding what had happened to it until Lt. Hardy, the Communications officer, spoke.
“The Truthseeker reports they have destroyed one of the ships,” the young woman announced. “They advise they’ll be working from our left to our right and suggest we start at the other side.”
Olivera snorted.
“Old Joon-Pah’s developing a sense of humor. Swing out to the right, Baldwin.”
“Retargeting,” she acknowledged. “They’re trying to scatter,” she added, nodding toward the screen, where a baker’s dozen burning candles careened away from each other in the darkness like the galaxy’s biggest game of pool. “We got the angle on them, though. Even if they turn and run, they’re not going to be able to put Wellspring between us fast enough.”
“They’re not even launching on us?” Olivera seemed surprised and I didn’t blame him. The Tevynians didn’t seem the type to give up without a fight.
“Fire what, sir? They probably have missiles, coil guns, lasers maybe…nothing that can touch us from this range. They’ve never seen the impulse gun before and they don’t have any defense against it yet.”
This was another reason I didn’t like space battles, not just the feeling of helplessness but the whole antiseptic video game nature of the experience. Unless you were fighting someone evenly matched with your ship, it was nothing but a drawn-out slaughter. Of course, if we had been up against a force more evenly matched with us, I would have liked it even less.
The images changed back from fuzzy telescope shots to computer icons as they drew away from us, but Baldwin had been right: their drives weren’t powerful enough to outrun the relativistic cannon. If they’d had cruisers here running the same gravimetic warp fields we had on the Jambo and the Truthseeker, we couldn’t sit back and pick them off like this from any appreciable distance. The tungsten penetrators were dumb rounds, bullets fired from the world’s biggest gun and the thirty seconds it took them to reach their targets would have been plenty of time for a ship equipped with a warp field to scoot out of the way or even jump to hyperspace.
Of course, that’s why we’d picked this place for the operation.
“Are we getting any traffic from the surface?” Olivera asked.
“Nothing so far, but they have to have dual-environment fighters, at least.”
“I’m more worried about ground-based defenses.” Olivera leaned forward in his seat, hands clasped, fingertips tapping with impatience. “Comms,” he said to Lt. Hardy, “ask the Truthseeker to clean up the rest of the enemy ships. Tactical, hold fire and return control to helm.” He nodded to Julie. “Take us into orbit.”
I hit the quick release for my seat restraints, knowing what was coming next before Olivera craned his neck around to give me an expectant look.
“You’re up, Andy. Go tell Colonel Brooks to load the shuttles. The party’s about to start.”
***
“Is the Space Force through screwing around up there?” Pops asked me, latching the fasteners on the side of his armor.
Everyone called Chief Warrant Officer Mark Tremonti “Pops” because he’d been the oldest man on the Delta Force team once led by my old friend and the namesake of our ship, James Bowie. And once upon a time, he’d looked it, with deep lines etched into his face and a shock of gray in his hair. That had been before we’d all received the retelomerization treatment from the Helta and in the months since, the gray had darkened back to brown and the lines had softened, but he was still Pops.
The rest of the team was in various stages of readiness across the ship’s armory, stuffing each other into the exoskeletal powered armor suits we called Svalinns.
“Yeah, it’s our turn now,” I told him, finding my own suit and yanking open the panels over the chest and legs and clambering into it.
I’d worn a skintight compression su
it under my fatigues and I didn’t bother to strip the overgarments off before putting on the armor. The skinsuit used mechanical counterpressure to compress my body and provide stable pressure in a vacuum, which was an unfortunate possibility if our shuttle took a hit during the descent. The Svalinn’s helmet would provide an air supply, but making the armor itself airtight would have been more trouble than it was worth. But I felt like an idiot wearing nothing but the silly, unitard-looking thing and I always wore my utility fatigues over it, even in the armor.
“Are the Rangers suited up?” I asked him, latching the armor over my upper arms.
“Oh hell, sir,” Ginger replied, braying a laugh before he stuffed his red hair into his suit’s helmet, “you know how them high-speed, low-drag Space Rangers are. They were suited up an hour ago and they’re already formed up in the hangar bay, probably giving each other classes on waterborne operations out of the Ranger Handbook.”
I concealed my laugh behind my helmet’s visor. Just because it was a stereotype didn’t mean there wasn’t truth to it. No one called them Space Rangers, though, except the Delta boys when they were trying to make fun of them. I sealed the visor and ran an operations test on my air supply before keying the radio.
“Comms check,” I said. “Alpha, bravo, Charlie, delta….”
“Read you five by five, sir,” Pops assured me. It was hard to get used to a radio signal being so damned clear. Well, technically, it wasn’t a radio signal, it was a line-of-sight laser, but that was a mouthful.
I tapped a personal code into the weapons locker security panel and the indicator flashed green. Motors hummed and the gates swung up over a rack of M900 Kinetic Energy rifles. Each was over a yard long and weighed almost fifty pounds with a full drum in place, but with the powered servomotors of the Svalinn supplementing my strength, I was able to yank one out of its rack, one-handed.
“Grab your shit,” I told the others, plugging the physical connection from the weapon’s sight into the jack on my armor and testing the targeting system. “We don’t want to keep the Rangers waiting too long or they’ll blow up the shuttles out of boredom.”