Riding the Red Horse (35 page)

I did not reach for the bottle. “Captain, I’m here to bring you back to the ship. Your presence is requested aboard.”

“Calling that tub a ship is an insult to every ship that’s ever plied the spaceways, Josh. I’ve served on real ships before. You have too. Don’t bother telling me what you picture in your head when I say ‘warship,’ cuz I know it ain’t the
Griggs
.” He shrugged and took a slug from the proffered bottle before lowering his arm to his side.

I stepped closer, pleading. “It doesn’t matter what I picture in my head, sir. It matters that this ship is my ship now, and she has a need for all of her officers, including her skipper, whether he respects that post or not. The war has come to us and this is our chance to serve with honor, to do our duty.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “The best thing we could do for duty would be to switch places with the
Edwards
. Don’t kid yourself, Morrow. The Chinese are kicking our asses in space, and now they’re doing it on the water. You go out there, that stupid robot is going to eat you for lunch. It’s probably right outside the harbor, waiting for us to peek out, ready to shoot a whole spread of straight-running super-cavs as soon as it picks up our acoustic signature.”

“We’re working on a number of different options now. We’ll find a way to win.”

He laughed. “Good god, you’re stupid! It doesn’t matter what you plan. It doesn’t even matter if we win this one battle against this one orca. The
Griggs
isn’t anyone’s critical lynch-pin for a defensive strategy. She’s one tiny little rusty destroyer defending a waterway that allows merchants to get to major ports a couple of days faster. She does not matter. We don't matter.”

I looked at him, feeling heat and anger suffuse my face. “You could say the same thing about any single unit in war, in space or the water. The strait is a critical line of communication and defending it is tactically necessary, or else the Chinese wouldn’t be trying to deny it to us. If we make them expend more resources to counter us, we draw resources away from somewhere else. Will we win the war here? No, but that doesn’t mean the fight isn’t necessary.”

“I swear, if you say it’s not the size of the ship in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the ship, I will punch you.”

I stepped directly in front of him, fists balled up at my sides. “The
Edwards
just died here!”

He looked up at me and smiled unhappily. “That’s exactly my point, boy, and I’m saying it’s not worth it.” Larkin took a swig as I stepped back, realizing I was going to fail.

I reached behind me until I found a seat and plopped into it. “What if it was a
Defiance
-class astrocruiser out there instead of the
Griggs
?”

He took another drink. “Have you considered that maybe I’m just a coward, and sea or space, it doesn’t mean a thing? Do you know why I was barred from service in the Aerospace Navy?”

“No, sir.”

“Agoraphobia. I couldn’t stand being in space anymore… but apparently that’s not my only problem. Your whole body got broken in battle and you’re still put together better than me.”

We sat in silence for a long time while I tried to decide what to do. Eventually I stood. He looked up at me. I answered his quizzical look with a question. “What will you do now?”

Brett Larkin considered the bottle in his hand. “I’m going to drink cheap scotch and spend time with beautiful women until the money runs out. And then I’ll finish disappearing.”

I nodded and turned to leave.

“Aerospace Navy! All the way!” he cried out.

I didn’t look back.

Back aboard ship, the XO saw me and paused in her frantic preparations long enough to take me to one side. “Well, is he en route? There’s a lot he needs to be briefed on.”

I had thought about how to couch my failure. This way seemed best. “There’s no need. Our Commanding Officer is already aboard. Captain.”

She stared back at me for a long measure before finally nodding. “Okay then. Gather your gear. You’re leaving the ship too.” She beckoned with her chin and I looked over to a Chinese freighter moored at another pier.

Two missiles boiled out of the vertical launch system cells atop USS Forrest
Griggs
’ outrigger amas and arced overhead. Their primary boosters burned out and vectored thrust took over, driving them down sharply to a splashdown just outside the mouth of Penang’s harbor. One missile detonated upon entry into the water, the other after diving 20 meters. Concussive waves of force expanded out from the detonations, setting the bottom contours of the harbor ringing with vibrations.

Sonar reverberations from small objects and fish were reduced to background by the twin explosive echo-ranging pulses, but large objects gave back a clear signal, no matter how stealthy they thought they were being. The technique was not very benign where fish or coral were concerned, but they were secondary concerns during war.

On the shared tactical net, the fusion plot combining every source of information available to us lit white with sonar noise, then showed the clear position of a manta-like submersible waiting across from the harbor’s entrance: the first of two orcas Intel indicated were denying US access to the strait. As Larkin and others had guessed, the Chinese long-range underwater drone was fulfilling its directives to destroy us by waiting for our destroyer to emerge from the harbor.

Griggs
drove forward into the trap at full speed, but she was no longer a target surprised and on the run. Torpedo tubes on her central hull opened and spat a pair of our own fish into the water. The explosive pulses had revealed the orca lying in wait, but had also ensonified the water, blinding any sonar system not configured to receive the data. The torpedoes separated from one another, re-oriented on the Chinese unit, and then ignited their own super-cavitating drives, propelling forward at over 200 knots.

The orca never knew what killed it. It erupted in a fountain of white foam, fluids, and debris. A cheer rose over the net, but unfortunately I was not there to hear it in person. As my new Commanding Officer, LCDR Tamicka Jones had warned me, I was off the ship.

But I had not gone alone.

The
Griggs
continued on, leaving the safety of Penang behind and turning to port to enter the traffic separation scheme of the Strait of Malacca. Traffic was notably reduced. Other nations had gotten the word in the last 36 hours: ally with China or be sunk. Any US or US-allied unit that attempted to enter the chokepoint of the Straits of Malacca or Singapore would be destroyed. Enough of our tonnage had been lost to either HGWs or rocket-propelled torpedoes by that time for point to sink in.

Flanked by only a few Chinese-flagged vessels transiting the strait, the
Griggs
proceeded forward, surrounded by drones, using acoustic search, magnetic anomaly detection and blue-green lasers to search through the water. The destroyer had to proceed carefully. The physics of the hunt favored the stealthy, heavily armed orca, which could hide within its element and pick the time and place of the eventual encounter. As Larkin had warned, the odds were almost entirely in the Chinese automation’s favor. We only had one thing going for us: organic brains.

The orcas and HGWs were operating autonomously, relying upon a programmed set of orders about who and what to engage. “Kill US vessels; Preserve Chinese shipping; etc.” While artificially intelligent, they lacked the creativity, boldness, and sneakiness of the devious human mind. That was why we employed local Remote Operators and Autonomous Systems Officers, to help manage our drones and provide adjustment to the rigid and sometimes contradictory orders initially given to AIs.

The second orca rose from the bottom clutter at the center of the traffic separation scheme after the US surface destroyer and its drones had already passed over it, cued by a kilometer-wave radio signal from mainland China, initiated by satellite cueing of transponder-less traffic in the strait. It rose quietly and sinuously, moving like a fish rather than propelling itself with noisy screws or propulsors. Well astern of the sonar blind zone caused by the destroyer’s water jets, and well behind the drones deployed to mitigate that blind zone, the orca set up its shot.

Looking at it in false color through the eyes of a completely separate set of underwater and aerial drones deployed from the Chinese freighter we had commandeered in Penang, I triggered my mike. “Orca 2 is setting up its shot about five kilometers directly astern of you. Do you want to make the kill, or shall I?”

Jones answered from the
Griggs
. “Take your shot. We’ll focus on defense and mop-up.”

I sent a command to my drones and they swept from their positions around the freighter to swarm the orca. Mini super-cavitating projectiles fired out from their sleek bodies and detonated all around the orca, blasting it with shaped-charge jets that pierced the robot’s rubbery skin and destroyed its interior. The Orca imploded less spectacularly than the first, but dead was dead.

Jones keyed her comm again. “Nice work, spaceman. Welcome to the real Navy!”

I smiled for what felt like the first time in a long time. “Thanks, Skipper.”

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

To see oursels as ithers see us!

—Robert Burns,
To a Louse

Who or what, among God’s living creations, is not fascinated by a mirror? In this case, the holder of the mirror is Benjamin Cheah, citizen of the Republic of Singapore. I suppose that’s fitting since Singapore, Chinese, Indian, and Malay jewel of the former British Empire, holds up a mirror to the West, a mirror that shows our weakness, our fundamental unseriousness, our lack of determination to preserve our or any civilization, and our grasping at comforting liberal delusions like a drunken sailor to a tart’s leg after three years at sea.

Ben is a journalist as well as a veteran of Singapore’s armed forces, a well-regarded citizen-soldier militia, and one with a great deal of Havah Nagilah in its ancestry. Between regulars, reservists, and conscripts, Singapore is capable of mobilizing a million and a half (mostly, though not entirely) men, out of a population of five and a half million. Even the Swiss and Israelis have never approached that kind of commitment to self-defense. If they'd been able to do that in 1942, Yamashita's army would have died in the Straights of Johor. On my short list of places likely to survive and ride out the collapse that I sense coming, Singapore ranks high.

Ben’s motivation for writing his story, “War Crimes”, was the highly-edited fraud perpetrated upon the stupid and gullible by Wikileaks, “Collateral Murder”. Rather than ruin it for you, I’ll content myself with suggesting that you look deep into the mirror Ben holds up for us, and see what he, an objective witness and reporter, sees.

“Look at the Vashies. They’re fish in a barrel.”

“Go get ‘em, tiger.”

A living tsunami of aliens surged through the street, closing in on an apartment building. Four tiny figures scrambled about on the roof, highlighted with green carets. The camera swiveled, the central crosshair focusing on a cluster of Vash jumping out of a truck. All were armed.

“You see those lizzies jumping out the truck?”

“Yep. Engaging.”

Red carets blinked into existence, framing the truck and the aliens around them.

“Fletchers out!”

Streams of white smoke obscured the camera, terminating in small bursts. Storms of flechettes tore the Vash apart.

“Good shoot!”

“Roge-o. Use smart shells on the rest of the bastards. Try not to hit our guys.”

“When have I ever?”

The camera abruptly jinked right and aligned itself with the road. The alien mob was pounding on the doors of the building, a roaring wave of inhuman fury. Then the camera panned up to show four men leaning over the side of the roof, dropping small objects into the mob, and ducking quickly back.

The street vanished in smoke and fire.

“Holy shit! What the hell…”

The soldiers repeated their action. Again, multiple explosions tore through the mob.

The dirty smoke cleared. Broken, bleeding bodies filled the street. The Vash still standing froze or fled. The soldiers reappeared on the roof edge and opened fire, inspiring those that still could to run away.

“Holy shit!”

The airscreen winked out. Josephine Anders set her holobracer aside. Seated across the table, Lieutenant Desh Horvan clenched his fists. His cheeks were flushed with anger.

“That’s it? That’s the ‘proof’ Andrew Nash has?”

“That’s the meat of the vid.”

“How the hell did he get guncam footage?”

“An anonymous whistleblower passed it to Nash and Transparency Interstellar.”

The lieutenant's eyebrows furrowed. A scowl spread across his face. Standing, he slammed his palms on the table. “That’s fucking treason!”

Anders winced. “TransInt is calling the whistleblower a hero for exposing war crimes.”

He sighed. Sat back down. “Hero my ass. They weren’t there.”

“Yes, but he’s using the video as proof that you killed hundreds of innocents.”

“That's bullshit! I was cleared by the court-martial.”

She steepled her fingers. “Nash is calling for a re-trial.”

“Won't happen. Double-jeopardy. Nash knows that, he's just chasing publicity.” He sighed. “So why are you here? You believe him?”

“I’m a reporter. I’m just here to find out what happened.”

He snorted. “Really. Just one question, reporter: I saw one of your pieces. Why did you call it 'The Confluence Massacre'?”

She shifted awkwardly on the hard wooden bench. “Well, that’s what people back home are calling it.”

Horvan snorted, so loudly a passing soldier stopped and looked at them. The lieutenant laughed and waved him on.

“Did I say something funny?”

He grinned humorlessly. His eyes were dark with cynicism. “Everybody’s calling it a ‘massacre’ because TransInt branded it that way. I was there. And that vid Nash leaked? If that’s all he’s showing, it makes any fuck—anybody look bad.”