by C H Gideon
Podsy floated down an access corridor, using the regularly-spaced handholds to propel himself through the zero-gee environment. In one hand, he gripped the crystalline shaft that housed (or was?) Jem. He had left the translation device attached per Colonel Jenkins’ orders, but Jem was quiet as usual as they moved down the keel of the Metal Legion’s battered flagship.
The ship seemed empty compared to its previous deployments, which he supposed was because it was practically empty. Hundreds of Metalheads and voiders had filled these corridors just a few weeks earlier, to say nothing of the colonists they had carried back to Terran space.
To Podsy, it felt as though the Bonhoeffer was a ghost ship—and that was a feeling he could not shake.
“I am impressed by your species, Lieutenant Podsednik,” Jem said, breaking Podsy from his reverie.
“Oh?” Podsy asked. “Why’s that?”
“Terran humanity suffered greatly during its inceptive period,” Jem replied, “and much of that suffering could have easily been alleviated by a relatively minor intervention by your Solar cousins. But they did not intervene on your behalf, and the Terran Republic nearly failed to draw its first metaphorical breath as a result. Were it not for clandestine Vorr support in the form of technological gifts funneled through certain Terran corporations, it is probable that your Republic would not have survived.”
“What’s your point?” Podsy asked irritably. He still hadn’t wrapped his mind completely around the notion that both Solar and Terran humanity had been pawns in some vast interstellar game between rival alien species. The thought angered him. No, it infuriated him for reasons he could not adequately express with words.
“Solar humans could have helped you, yet they did not,” Jem said simply. “But now Terran humans are in a position to help Solar humans, and not once during the pre-drop briefing did a single Terran ask if this great risk was worthwhile. Successfully accomplishing this mission’s objectives is considerably less than a certainty, and surviving the experience is even less probable. Most warrior castes are reluctant to take such risks if reciprocity is unlikely.”
Podsy smirked. “We don’t have a ‘warrior caste,’ Jem. Terran Armed Forces personnel are volunteers to the last. Self-selection for military service produces a caste-like culture. Many of us were given the choice to clear our records by joining the Armor Corps, so we did. It was self-serving, but once we got here, we found that we were drawn to the life of a warrior. Serving the Terran Federation is what we do. We call it freedom of choice, and it’s the fundamental tenet of Terran society.”
“But you are not serving your fellow Terrans in this mission,” Jem observed. “You are knowingly sacrificing many, if not all, of your lives in service of Solar humans. Solar humans do not respect your freedoms in the same way Terrans do.”
“They’re still human,” Podsy said firmly. “We might disagree on some pretty fundamental things, but disagreement is a feature of freedom, not a glitch to be fixed.”
“Solar humans are brutal collectivists by any standard,” Jem pressed. “Dissent is dealt with via punishment, reprogramming, or exile. Their forebears mercilessly bombarded North America from the very base we will now use to save them from self-destruction. Many of my Jem’un forebears would have argued that Solar humanity does not deserve to be saved.”
Podsy shook his head adamantly. “That’s not our call to make, Jem. There are a hundred billion lives in Sol, and none of them understand the danger hanging over their heads. That’s unacceptable,” he declared, feeling his resolve strengthen with each word that passed his lips. “Besides, in some ways, the Solarians have been victimized by Jemmin even worse than us Terrans. Humanity isn’t a Jemmin plaything. We’re not a Vorr plaything. And we’re going to prove it.”
“And that is why you impress me,” Jem said approvingly as Podsy finally came to the drop-deck where Sergeant Major Trapper and his people had assembled for pre-drop inspection. “As individuals, you arrived at a collective conclusion faster than even my Jem’un forebears could have done. We deeply believed in something similar to what you call freedom of choice that allowed self-sacrifice, but despite the Jem’un’s superior intellect, we lacked the clarity and unity you have repeatedly demonstrated. I hope that I am able to learn more about your species and its cultures.”
“I’ll be your tour guide,” Podsy quipped as he put his mag-boots down on the drop-deck and clomped his way over to Trapper’s assemblage. He had been assigned to the sergeant major’s insertion team, which would escort Jem, Podsy, and Styles to one of Luna One’s underground uplink nodes.
“Lieutenant Podsednik.” Trapper smirked. “Good of you to join us. Grab a rifle and field kit.” He gestured to a neatly-arranged row of supplies. “Word is the Zeen have finished coating the hull and that we’ll get shot out of that ‘gravity cannon’ within the hour.”
Podsy felt a thrill of anticipation as he joined the group and went through the final pre-drop preparations.
It was almost time.
5
Prep the Gravity Cannon
Under Colonel Jenkins’ orders (and with Colonel Li’s grudging acceptance) Captain Xi Bao accompanied a trio of Zeen technicians throughout the Bonhoeffer’s interior. Using peculiarly-shaped scanners, they conducted an inspection of the ship with the goal of precisely measuring the assault carrier’s dimensions and mass.
In fact, aside from a security contingent comprised of Sergeant Major Trapper and a dozen of his people, nearly all Terrans aboard the ship were in their grav couches during the measurements. The Zeen, in their difficult-to-understand way, had informed them that the measurements needed to be extremely precise in order for the so-called ‘gravity cannon’ to precisely deliver them to their destination.
The way they talked, it seemed to Xi as though even a few unaccounted kilograms might cause them to miss their destination point by thousands of kilometers.
Obviously, Colonel Li was less than enthusiastic about the prospect of allowing anyone not in the TAF aboard the Bonhoeffer for such a detailed inspection, but he had ultimately agreed to cooperate.
“Scan complete,” declared one of the Zeen. “Ship ready. Transport soon. Terrans ride couches. No movement.”
“Thank you,” Xi said graciously, and the trio of insectaurs turned in unison to make their way to the airlock through which they had arrived. Xi raised Colonel Jenkins on her wrist-link and reported, “Colonel, this is Captain Xi. The Zeen are finished with their scans. They suggest we get in the couches and try not to move.”
“Copy that, Captain,” Jenkins acknowledged. “It’s time for you to get in your couch. As soon as the Zeen are off the ship, the sergeant major’s security detail will follow your lead.”
“Yes, sir,” Xi replied as she made her way, using a combination of mag-boots and zero-gee handrails to propel herself through the Bonhoeffer’s corridors en route to her assigned grav couch.
A few minutes after parting company with the team of Zeen, Xi arrived at the so-called “lounge” where the majority of the Bonhoeffer’s one thousand grav couches were located.
Just a tiny fraction of those couches were occupied, since the various operations decks had their own grav couches to ensure ongoing shipboard operations during high-gee maneuvers. The couches in the lounge were fairly primitive by comparison, affording their occupants only the bare essentials.
“Ah, Captain Xi,” Dr. Fellows greeted her, beckoning her to her couch, to which he was making some final adjustments. “I just need to dial in your current biometric profile, and you’ll be set.”
The doctor produced a medical scanner, which he used to gather precise measurements of her body. Dimensions, total mass, hydration status, hormone levels…everything. As he scanned, she removed the majority of her clothing, leaving her standing in just her underwear—penguin panties and a black sports bra. Fellows didn’t bat an eye.
Some people hated undergoing the scans. They thought it reduced them to a series of numbers.
Xi thought they were fascinating and was always curious to know what her current figures were.
“There, all done,” Dr. Fellows declared, offering her the nondescript form-fitting body-glove that was necessary to maximize the couch’s capabilities. Xi accepted the full-length garment, which she easily slipped into. “You’ll be happy to know,” he added dryly, “that your menstrual cycle won’t come into play during this op, which should be more than enough time for us to either get ourselves killed or find a suitable parade float to ride in victory. Either way, you won’t have to worry about the monthlies depleting your blood volume.”
Xi smirked. “You should know better than anyone that every drop of blood counts in a crisis, Doc.”
“Too true,” Fellows agreed with a grin.
Xi finished slipping into her body-glove and scrunched her brow in consternation.
“I’ve decided I dislike that particular look,” Dr. Fellows said with a smirk of his own.
“It’s just…” Xi’s voice trailed off, uncertain how to put her thoughts into words.
“Let me guess,” Fellows deadpanned. “You think I’m considering you for the next ex-Mrs. Fellows? Not quite.”
She gave him a withering look. “Well, yeah, now that you bring it up.”
“Young women are the worst.” He snorted. “You think everything’s about you.”
“Isn’t it?” Xi challenged half-jokingly.
“In some sense, sure,” he allowed.
“It’s just…” she started again. “Well, you didn’t need to come along for this mission, Doc. There are plenty of people in the Brigade who are trained on setting up the couches, and once we go wheels down—”
“What?” Fellows cocked an eyebrow challengingly. “You think I’ll be dead weight down there?”
“In some sense, sure,” she retorted, turning his words back on him.
He snickered. “Captain, you’re not the only one who’s been up to her eyeballs in the shit and lived to tell about it. Before I went to medical school, I suffered from a particularly virulent strain of patriotism and enlisted in the Terra Americana Colonial Guard. It was only an eighteen-month service term, but I was always good at fixing things, so I became a field mechanic. Worked on old Wolfhound- and Proselytizer-class mechs. You know, swapping the axles in a meter of half-frozen mud while your buddies try to keep you from getting shot before you can tighten all the lug-nuts? That kind of thing.”
“Bullshit.” Xi scoffed. “You’re telling me you were a Wrench before you became a sawbones?”
“I was,” he replied matter of factly, ignoring her incredulity.
“Why the career change?” she asked. “Why didn’t you stay in the service?”
He sighed. “Some of us just aren’t made for hurting people and breaking things, Captain. The thing I learned about myself during those eighteen months was that I’d rather heal people than kill them. It’s not philosophical, mind you,” he amended pointedly. “Some people need to be killed. I’d just prefer that I wasn’t the one pulling the trigger. I value my ability to sleep through the night too much.”
Xi shook her head in muted wonder as she climbed into the grav couch. “It seems like I learn something new about you every time we talk.”
“There’s a lesson there, Captain,” he chided.
“Wisdom begins in wonder,” Xi replied by way of agreement.
“Well, look at that!” Fellows grinned. “You know your Socrates. There might be hope for your generation after all.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” she said, inspecting the couch’s helmet using a long-practiced checklist. “Most people my age couldn’t tell Plato from Pluto, the cartoon dog.”
Fellows chuckled. “That’s probably normal.”
“Probably,” she allowed as she finished her inspection and prepared to slip the tight-fitting helmet over her head. “But that doesn’t make it good.”
“No, it doesn’t,” he agreed before helping her squeeze her head into the helmet.
A few seconds after the helmet was snug on her head, the seals around her jaw clamped down and the helmet went through a series of diagnostics. The helmet’s HUD showed all systems green, so she gave the doctor a thumbs-up and laid down in the molded bed of the grav couch. When she was prone, Dr. Fellows lowered the mostly-transparent lid of the rectangular box.
The lid sealed with an audible hiss, and Dr. Fellows looked in, silently asking if she was good. She replied in the affirmative, and the doctor moved out of view. Alone in the grav couch, Xi had no choice but to wait for the countdown. That was, of course, assuming the Zeen forewarned them in such a fashion.
She felt the grav couch’s molded surfaces slowly squeeze her on all sides. She didn’t mind the closed space, the medical scans, or even the helmet, which restricted airflow to a very specific volume. The one thing Xi had always hated was being held in place and unable to move.
And nowhere was the sensation of being physically restrained more overpowering and nerve-wracking than within the confines of a grav couch.
“Breathe, Bao,” she muttered, closing her eyes and trying to relax as the gel-filled surfaces of the grav-couch continued to press against her body. The pressure was far from crushing, but she still could not ignore the mental image of her body being crushed by the coils of a giant snake.
She tried to focus her thoughts on what little she had learned of the so-called gravity cannon FTL system. From what she could understand, the technology allowed for the temporary folding of space between two points, joining them. The amount of energy required to achieve such a feat was extraordinary, Terran scientists having long postulated that the only power sources sufficiently potent were entire stars.
The only way to harness so much energy was via a Dyson Swarm or a Dyson Sphere, mega-structures consisting of thousands upon thousands of energy-harvesting satellites. It was unclear to Xi just how that energy could be utilized, even if it were merely redirected, but the eggheads seemed confident that if one could erect a stable Dyson Sphere, then focusing the energy would be a surmountable obstacle.
The Terran Republic had never mastered the necessary technology to keep a full Dyson Swarm in a stable orbit of its parent star, and the Terran Republic’s wormhole-linked star systems did not feature a star of optimal size for such a project to be considered economically viable.
Still, there were several vast solar arrays in the Republic that were primarily used to generate antimatter in a process that seemed like magic to Xi. She couldn’t even pretend to understand how it worked, but the eggheads had proven worthy of their pocket protectors and secured sufficient funding to expand that particular project, much to Fleet’s approval.
If the Zeen had been using Dyson Swarms of their own to create antimatter and had undertaken that project uninterrupted for as long as four thousand years, it was entirely possible that there were metric tons of antimatter at the heart of the Zeen worldship. Antimatter was the only source of power Xi was aware of that could fuel something like a space-folding drive without directly harvesting energy from a star.
Then again, it was possible the Zeen were using something else entirely, and Xi wasn’t sure if that should be a comforting or worrying thought.
But despite the enormous power requirements inherent to a space-folding system, Xi had learned it was not power so much as computational capacity that was the most limiting factor of such a system.
The Zeen had boarded the Bonhoeffer to take measurements of the ship and its crew that were precise down to the nanogram. Obviously, the numbers could not be perfect, which Xi had been told increased the computational demands by an order of magnitude compared with a conduction using precise measurements.
That meant the Zeen worldship had a computer that was so powerful it outstripped every virtual system in the Terran Republic combined in terms of raw computational capacity.
Stellar measurements, cosmic radiation, mass and dimensionality of the transited object, mass within a given area near t
he destination point… Hundreds of interconnected variables needed to be calculated in real-time to keep a transited object from missing the mark by light-seconds, or even light-minutes.
“This is Colonel Li,” the Bonhoeffer’s CO declared, his voice piped straight into Xi’s helmet. “The Zeen have disembarked and informed us we have eight minutes before they conduct us to our destination. Everyone sit tight in your couches. The ship is at Condition One. I say again: we are at Condition One.”
Xi forcibly relaxed as the countdown appeared on her HUD. She silently mouthed each second as it slowly wound down to two minutes remaining.
“None of us knows how this is going to work,” Colonel Li intoned at the ninety-second mark, “so all hands need to be ready for emergency couch releases. Engineering will re-fire the reactors as soon as we emerge, while everyone else will await orders. With a little luck, we’ll slip through without a hitch, and the doc can pull us out at his leisure. But as a wise man once said, hope for the best but plan for the worst. One minute to transit.”
Xi continued her silent countdown, feeling her heart beat anxiously in her chest as her limbs tingled from the pressure of the couch squeezing her.
“Ten seconds…” Li informed them.
Xi started to tense despite her best efforts to relax as the clock wound down to six. Knowing these might be the last six seconds of her life quickened her breathing.
“Five…four…” the Bonhoeffer’s CO called, “three…two…one…mark!”
A sudden jolt snapped Xi’s body into the grav-couch, and her stomach began to riot as an intense wave of vertigo washed over her.
She was dimly aware of the blaring of sirens, accompanied by flashing blue emergency lights.
“Emergency couch release,” Colonel Li declared, causing the pressure on Xi’s body to quickly diminish until she was floating free in the tiny, form-fitting compartment.