Earth Strike (18 page)

If it was a mouth, it was like no mouth Koenig had ever seen or heard of.

The humans withdrew into the virtual recreation of the outer research lab, not because they were in danger—the NTE robots were pretty much invulnerable—but because conversation had become impossible.

“So that’s the enemy, eh?” Koenig said, shaking his head. “How’d we get them?”

“We recovered one of their Toad fighters,” George explained. “It crashed near the perimeter, and we sent a SAR and a weapons squad out to pick it up.”

“So you don’t think they were trying to surrender deliberately…or infiltrate our lines, or anything like that.”

“No, sir,” George told him. “It certainly didn’t look deliberate, anyway. General Gorman was wondering the same thing. He was wondering if they were berserkers. Suicide troops.”

Until their psychology was better understood, every move the two made, everything they said, was going to be the subject of long and careful analyses.

“My orders,” Koenig told them, “are to get them both to Port Phobos. The xeno department there will want full reports from all of you.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And…I’d appreciate it if you would keep me in the loop, let me know if anything else happens with our…guests, or if you learn anything new.”

“Absolutely, Admiral.”

The Senate Military Directorate, he knew, was extremely anxious to have these two aliens safely secured and under Directorate supervision. They were already assembling a high-powered xeno contact team to keep working on the language, the culture, and the psychology, in hopes of
finally
learning something useful about humankind’s interstellar enemies.

“Admiral?” Nahan Cleary’s familiar voice spoke in his head. “I’m sorry to interrupt, but the Political Liaison wants to talk to you. He says it’s
most
urgent.”

Koenig sighed. Since ordering Quintanilla off the CIC deck, he’d been trying to handle the man more tactfully. Diplomacy and tact, however, did not seem to be helping matters.

“Very well. Have him wait in my office. I’ll be back in a moment.”

“Aye, aye, sir.”

He looked at the icon-images of the three psychs. “We’re twenty hours from Deimos,” he told them. “You have that long to get them ready for transport again.”

He ended the in-head conversation and pulled back out of the virtual research lab, opening his eyes to see Cleary and Quintanilla standing in front of his office desk.

“Excuse the wait, Mr. Quintanilla,” he said. “I was checking on our two special passengers.”

“They are safe?”

“Seem to be. It’s tough to tell when they’re screaming ‘kill’ at you.”

“That’s something, at any rate,” Quintanilla said, frowning. “It at least partly makes up for your mishandling of the battle at Eta Boötis.”

“Mr. Cleary…out,” Koenig said.

“Yes, sir.”

When the aide had left, Koenig stood up behind the desk. “I will thank you
not
to criticize me in front of my subordinates, sir.” His voice was hard, sharp-edged. “My decisions at Eta Boötis will be judged by a court of inquiry once we’re back at Mars,
not
by you.”

“Had you accelerated in toward the target planet sooner,” Quintanilla pointed out, “we could have retrieved Gorman’s Marines more quickly. There’s also the matter of delaying your withdrawal in order to take on board all of those refugees. That, I remind you, was not part of your original—”

“This is not a topic for discussion, Mr. Quintanilla. Now
back off
!”

“Your failure to cooperate with a duly appointed representative of the Senate Military Directorate is noted.”

“Note whatever the hell you want, Quintanilla. Get out of my office.”

Quintanilla scowled, but withdrew.

“God save us from political micromanagement,” Koenig said, staring at the door after it irised shut behind him. Throwing the bastard out made Koenig feel a little better; whatever he thought of political liaisons like Quintanilla, he had to agree that the battle in Haris space had not gone as well as it might have. They’d carried out their orders—gotten in and out, picking up the MEF and their prisoners along the way, but they’d lost too many ships doing it…
especially
the
Spirit of the Confederation
. Battleships were expensive, both in money and in the huge crews they carried, and there would be wolf packs both in the Senate military and budgetary directorates and within the senior military leadership who would be howling for blood. Assigning blame and finding scapegoats both were time-honored traditions for the brass and for politicians alike.

Koenig had made the decisions.

It was his head that would roll.

Flight Officers’ Head
TC/USNA CVS
America
Inbound, Sol System
1027 hours, TFT

Gray stepped naked out of the shower and nearly collided with Jen Collins. “Well, well,” she said, her voice acid. “Look here, boys. Our Prim coward.”

There was no sexual segregation on board Navy ships; men and women both used the same shower heads and shared sleeping quarters, a reflection of rapidly shifting societal mores over the past several centuries within the mainstream culture.

“What’s your problem, Collins?” he said.

“
You
, Prim. My problem is
you
.”

Gray had managed to avoid the woman since his return to the
America
. He’d been on limited duty and non-flight status throughout most of the long trip back from Eta Boötis, and staying in one of the ship’s officers’ quarters forward; he’d come back to his old quarters in the flight officers’ hab section just this morning, after being placed back on full duty.

He still wasn’t on active flight status, of course, not with Anna George’s diagnosis of PTED in his health record. He was still undecided as to whether he wanted to seek further treatment, or to say the hell with all of it and resign his commission.

Collins had shown up, he thought, right on schedule, with three of her buddies in tow. “Look,” he said, stepping past them and into the drying stall. He raised his voice to be heard above the blasts of hot air cutting in from above and below. “I’m sorry about Spaas. I know you two were close—”

“You don’t know
shit
, Gray! Where the hell did you duck off to during the first battle over Haris, huh?”

“I imagine you’ve seen my report by now,” he replied. “I got separated, went down on the deck. Our orders were to provide support for the jarheads. So I did.”

“Yeah, while the rest of us were getting our asses shot off in hard vacuum! Pretty damned convenient if you ask me!”

“I seem to remember getting my own ass shot off, Collins,” he replied. Dry, he stepped out of the stall and the blast of air cut off. They followed him as he walked to his locker and began getting dressed.

“Well, just so you know, Prim, some of us put together a petition for Allyn and the CAG. You’re going before a BOI and get busted off the flight line, hell, bust you out of the
Navy
if we have our say! You’ll be lucky to find a job as a civilian!”

He glanced at Collins, then at the two men and one woman with her. All three of the others were support personnel with the squadron—Mackey, with Intelligence; Dole, from Personnel; and Carstin, who was with the squadron’s requisitions department. None were flight officers.

“You guys are signing this petition?” he asked. “I didn’t see any of
you
out there.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed, Prim,” Lieutenant Lars Mackey growled, “besides you there’re only three flight officers with the Dragonfires left! And I don’t think you count! Not if you were hiding out down on the planet, like the lieutenant here says.”

“We lost some good friends at Haris,” CWO Tammy Carstin added. “
Sir
.”

Gray stared at her for a moment, until she broke eye contact, looking down. Everybody in the squadron knew she’d had a thing going with Gene Sandoval. Hell, half the female members of the squadron had something going with Gene Sandoval. He started to tell her that Sandoval had been his friend as well…then decided not to bring it up. “We all lost friends,” he told her.

“And that makes it
okay
?” Lieutenant j.g. Kenny Dole demanded. “‘We all lost friends.’ That makes it fucking
okay
?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Gray snapped back, angry now. “But
I
didn’t kill them and
I
didn’t get them killed! For your information Commander Allyn
ordered
me to go down and help the Marines!”

“
After
you’d already ducked down to the deck and left the rest of us, including your wingmate, facing the entire damned Turusch fleet!” Collins was yelling now, her face unpleasantly contorted and red.

“You
do
manage to put the worst possible spin on events,” Gray told her. “Why don’t we just let the Board of Inquiry sort it out?”

Collins stepped closer. She was shorter than he was, and had to look up to look into his face, but her glare carried the mass of someone much bigger. “You’re a coward, Gray. And a fucking technophobic primitive. They should have left you in the Manhattan swamps where they found you, a fucking squattie fighting over scraps with the other maladjies! You don’t belong here. You’re not officer material. You’re not even
Navy
material. Do yourself and the rest of us a big favor and resign your commission now. Because if you don’t, you’re going to go up against that Board of Inquiry and you’re going to be disgraced and broken, and sent back to the Ruins with your tail between your legs!”

She turned and stormed off then, the others following.

Gray shrugged and kept getting dressed.

Why, he wondered,
was
he staying? It wasn’t like he owed the Navy anything, and not a shipboard day went past that he didn’t wish he was still a squattie in the Ruins. Collins was right. He didn’t fit in, and never had. He didn’t
want
to fit in, when it came to that.

For three centuries now, the Navy had tended to recruit its people from the educated and tech-proficient classes, first from the old United States, and later with the larger and farther-flung Earth Confederation.
Tech-proficient
generally meant cerebral neural implants and direct interface capabilities within the general citizenry, since most jobs required direct links with computers and access to the VR facilities of the Net. The Confederation was, arguably, the most technically advanced and capable of Earth’s splintered social groupings, though the Chinese Hegemony ran a very close second. Even the mildly technophobic Islamic Theocracy had its own starships, though they felt that mindlinks were somehow contrary to the will of Allah.

And if the average star sailor was pro-tech and linked in, the officers were more so. They had to be, since managing a starship—to say nothing of an entire squadron or fleet—depended on being able to link in with numerous AIs as well as other officers, simply to understand a tactical situation and coordinate all of it according to something like a coherent plan.

And here he was, a squattie from the drowned Manhattan Ruins. Where most kids got their first implants at age three, before starting school, he’d received his first cerebral implant at the age of twenty-five. That had been when he’d completed his initial indoctrination, just before being shipped off to OCS. Officer candidates needed the direct link just to handle the volumes of data they were expected to learn in school. Direct linkages were even more necessary once you hit flight school, and had to learn how to handle a fighter directly, mind-to-AI mind.

Gray still hated the whole idea of having an implant, of having a tiny AI daemon in his skull, watching everything he did, recording, intruding. There were protocols for shutting the thing off when you wanted privacy…but the mere act of shutting down was recorded and could be questioned later.

Besides,
how the hell did you know if the thing really switched off when you told it to go away?

A lifetime of growing up in the Ruins, where the Authority was always hassling, always probing into people’s private affairs, had left him both suspicious and skeptical. How could you trust any claim that
they
made?

He finished dressing—a gray utility jumpsuit. The word was that the squadron would not be on the flight line, not with only four flight officers remaining. With no place that he
had
to be officially, he’d decided to head up to the ship’s observation area to watch the arrival and docking at Mars orbit. That wouldn’t be for hours yet, though, and he wondered what he was going to do in the meantime.

Besides, of course, trying to avoid Collins and her friends.

Yeah, resigning his commission, if they’d let him, might be the best idea after all. He decided to check in with the Personnel Office—
America
’s PO, not with that young idiot Dole—and have an exploratory chat with them.

He’d been strong-armed by the Authority to join the Navy.

Maybe he’d finally proven to himself that his joining the service simply hadn’t been a very bright idea.

16 October 2404

CIC, TC/USNA CVS
America
Approaching Phobos Space Elevator, Sol System
0850 hours, TFT

Koenig watched, expressionless, as
America
maneuvered gently toward Phobos. Mars filled a quarter of the sky, half in light, half in darkness. The dark side showed isolated gleams of city-dome lights; the illuminated half was dazzlingly bright, a hemisphere of broad ocher swaths of desert, the dark brown crinkles of rugged highlands and heavily cratered terrain, and, here and there, the blue gleam of newborn seas, surrounded by strips of burgeoning green.

The premier naval base of the Earth Confederation was constructed in areosynchronous orbit, seventeen thousand kilometers above the Martian surface. At that altitude, it took precisely twenty-four hours, thirty-seven minutes—the duration of one Martian rotation—for a satellite to circle the planet once, so that it appeared to remain in the same spot in the sky. One hundred twenty years earlier, the former inner moon of Mars, Phobos, orbiting at just under ten thousand kilometers from the surface, had been nanotechnically disassembled, its billions of tons of carbon woven into a buckytube-weave tether connecting the summit of Pavonis Mons on the Martian equator with the outer moon, Deimos, which served now as a counterweight to keep the elevator cable pulled taut. There were three Martian space elevators now, spaced at roughly equidistant intervals around the planet’s equator—at Pavonis Mons, at the northwestern rim of Schiaparelli Crater, and in the rugged highlands once known to the earthbound astronomers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Aethiopis.

The three space elevators were now the heart of the ongoing Martian terraforming project, serving as conduits for the millions of tons of nanoformer microbots being shipped down to the surface to break oxygen out of the rusty rocks and nitrogen from regolithic nitrates, and for
trillions
of tons of nitrogen scooped from the murky atmosphere of Titan, or mined on cold and distant Triton, out at the solar system’s rim. As the atmosphere thickened, the temperature slowly rose. One day—in perhaps another century or so—men would walk the surface of Mars beside liquid water seas, without e-suits.

But the original elevator, the one rising above an extinct shield volcano known as Pavonis Mons, was also the location of the extensive orbital facilities known, in honor of the vanished moon, as Phobos Station. The base, most of it, was located at the areosynchronous orbital point. It included the headquarters for the Martian terraforming effort, a large research station with extensive xenobiological facilities, numerous orbital manufactories, and the Earth Confederation military base properly known as Mars Synchorbital…and informally, humorously, and inevitably known as Phobia.

The docking facilities were independent of the elevator-tethered portion of the base, trailing along in synchronous orbit a few kilometers behind. The
Kinkaid
, the
Symmons
, the
Puller
, and a half dozen other ships of the carrier battle group were already snugged into the docks.
America
was so large that she had an orbital dock facility all to herself, a mass of girders, struts, and braces extending out from two counter-rotating hab modules as bulky as small O’Neil cylinders.

A second dock facility, just as large and as massive, just as complex, waited empty a kilometer off. The
Spirit of the Confederation
would not be returning to her home port.

Koenig glanced at the
Spirit
’s berth, then looked away. If the politicians had their way, this would be his last time in command of anything larger than an orbital shuttle, but he was past caring at this point. Well…
almost
past.

In point of fact, he was certain that he’d made all the right calls, given all the right orders, made all of the best decisions in the scrap at Eta Boötis, and he was as certain as he could be that the other officers in the Board of Inquiry would agree with him. The problems started when you brought civilian politicians into the mix…men and women with their own agendas, their own prejudices, and more interest in how they appeared to their voters than in the realities of military command.

God alone knew what the politicians would do.

America
was closer now to the docking facility, which was slowly growing larger alongside, backlit by the brilliance of the sunlight gleaming off of the ocher Martian deserts. This close to the orbiting structures, ships could not use their grav drives without the danger of warping support struts or damaging delicate structures designed for microgravity environments. The ship had to rely on water thrusters to adjust attitude and gently nudge the behemoth into the dock’s gantry, assisted by a flotilla of dockyard tugs.

He could hear the ship’s captain giving orders over the com net. Just a bit too much velocity now would ruin Buchanan’s whole day.

ECN, the Confederation news service, was showing a live report on the battlegroup’s arrival. One display in CIC had been tuned to the broadcast, which now showed
America
herself broadside and slowly approaching the camera’s position—presumably somewhere on board the docking facility ahead.

A banner across the bottom proclaimed “Disaster at Eta Boötis: the battlegroup returns.”

So they were calling the battle a disaster, were they?

Koenig was a student of military history; in his job, you
had
to be. What, he wondered, would the media’s response have been to the evacuation of Dunkirk on the French coast of the English Channel, a little over four and a half centuries ago? A fleet of 900 British naval vessels, transports, fishing boats, freighters, and anything else that would float, practically, had managed to pull almost 340,000 British and French troops off the beach and carry them to safety after they’d been cut off and pinned against the sea by the advancing German
Blitzkrieg
. Those troops had lost most of their weapons and heavy equipment, but they’d lived, to form the nucleus of an army that would return one day to liberate a conquered Europe.

Had Dunkirk been a defeat or an incredible victory?

It depended on your point of view, of course. History was rarely as clean, neat, and orderly as the historical downloads suggested, especially in light of the ancient dictum that the victors wrote the histories. Politicians rarely could afford to take the long view. What they and their constituents were interested in was now…especially when blame needed to be assigned, and scapegoats found.

Koenig had already reviewed the events at Eta Boötis and his orders with the AI that would be representing him at the Inquiry. The likeliest outcome, he’d been told, was public censure and a private promotion sideways within the Navy—assignment to a desk job, possibly here at Phobia, possibly with the Joint Chiefs or the Military Directorate…unless, of course, he opted to retire.

Sacrificing his career had much the same flavor, for Koenig, as it might for a disgraced Roman general throwing himself on his own sword. He wasn’t going to go quietly and conveniently; he wasn’t about to “fade away,” as an American general named MacArthur, broken in a political battle of wills with his commander-in-chief, had once so eloquently phrased it.

One step at a time. First he would face the Board of Inquiry. Then it would be time to face the political fallout of his decisions.

The problem, which he was trying hard not to look at just now, was that he would be running afoul of political considerations at the Board as well. In the Navy, every promotion above the rank of commander required patronage, well-placed friends, and politics, and the politics became thicker the higher up the totem pole you went. Admirals owed favors, had favorites lower in the chain of command they wished to help, or had their eyes on political positions or a seat on a corporate board once they retired from the military. That was how the game was played, how it had
been
played for centuries.

Koenig would rather have played with a Turusch battle-fleet any day.

Sick Bay Psych Department
TC/USNA CVS
America
Mars Synchorbit, Sol System
0910 hours, TFT

The carrier’s passageways were crowded with refugees…even more so now than during the past three weeks of the journey in from Eta Boötis. Mufrids who’d been camping in rec areas, mess halls, cargo bays, and storage compartments were emerging now to strand in narrow passageways, their meager belongings in small suitcases, bags, and parcels, waiting for the order to debark. Gray wondered if the refugees were as eager to get off the carrier as
America
’s crew was to be rid of them.

Gray squeezed past a seemingly endless line of bearded men in turbans and
kufiyyat
, past women veiled in
khimar
or
jilbab
. It was slow going, and his passage provoked angry mutters and dark glances from the men.

God, the ship
stank
…three claustrophobic weeks of the accumulating smells of cooking, vomit, urine, feces, and unwashed bodies, the stench of too many people in too small a space, with limited toilet facilities and showerheads.

Gray finally reached sick bay, ducking past the line of civilians waiting to get in and provoking more angry looks. The psych department was just down another passageway to the left.

A reception bot accepted his ID off his palm implant and sent him straight through to Dr. Fifer.

“Well, good morning, Lieutenant,” Fifer said, looking up from his workstation. “Not out watching the docking? I think everyone else on the ship is.”

“No room, sir,” Gray replied, seating himself in the link-equipped recliner opposite the desk. “The ship’s lounges and rec areas are all still off-limits.” That had been necessary to provide the large number of Mufrid women on board with an acceptable degree of privacy. He shook his head. “Damn, I thought the Mufrids would be happy to be here. If they’d stayed on Eta Boötis, they’d all be dead now.”

“Oh, I imagine they’ll be grateful enough once they get out of these confining circumstances. Right now they feel trapped, stifled. And they resent us and what they perceive as our ungodly attitudes. I understand a couple of large transports are here to take them the rest of the way to Earth.”

“And good riddance to them.”

“You don’t like them?”

Gray frowned. Commander Leonard Fifer had a way of turning everything into a discussion of what you felt, what you liked or disliked, what you thought. “I don’t mind
them
. I’m glad we were able to help them. But I’ll be glad to have our ship back when they’re gone.”

“As will we all, Lieutenant.” He chuckled. “I was wondering, though, if you didn’t sympathize with our Mufrid guests on some level?”

“Why? I’m not Muslim.”

“Religion has nothing to do with the question. But it occurs to me that they feel like outsiders on the
America
. Marginalized. Out of place. Like you.”

Gray had been coming here for sessions with Dr. Fifer every few shipboard days since he’d returned to the
America
at Eta Boötis. He would have preferred to keep working with Dr. George, but she was assigned to the Marines, not the carrier. He’d heard she was working over in the research labs now, in any case, trying to make sense of the two aliens captured on Eta Boötis IV.

Fifer tended to make him uncomfortable. Of course, he knew that these sessions were
supposed
to make him uncomfortable. They
had
to be so, if they were going to help him dig down through the crap and find the roots of what George had called PTED—post-traumatic embitterment disorder.

And fixing that was a prerequisite to his going back on flight status.

Since yesterday, though, he’d been toying with the idea of never going back to flying, of resigning his commission. He’d swung by the Personnel Office yesterday afternoon to see what his options might be.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t just turn in his uniform and walk away. Part of the agreement he’d signed obligated him to ten years of active Confederation military service, if only to pay the government back for the creds they’d invested in his training and his implants. He’d joined the Navy in 2401, but two years had been spent in recruit training, OCS, and flight school. Back in the old days, all of his schooling download time and training would have counted as active duty, but according to the Personnel Office he’d only entered active duty early last year—just in time for Arcturus Station and Everdawn—and he still had more than eight years to serve.

Whether that was as an officer or an enlisted man was up to him. He
could
resign his commission and become a fleet sailor…though he might have to sign on for more active duty time. Sailors weren’t as valuable in terms of creds and training as were pilots.

The news had put a definite bump in Gray’s career path. Flight officers had status, and a certain amount of privilege. They even had
respect
, assuming they weren’t a poor squattie kid from the Manhattan Ruins.

He hadn’t made up his mind yet. That was part of what he wanted to talk to the therapist about today. But if he
had
to stay in the Navy, being a pilot was definitely the way to go. At least when he strapped on a Starhawk, he could boost for cold, hard vacuum and be
free
, at least for a few hours, free from the constraints of shipboard life, the prejudice of his squadron mates, the rigidity of the rules and regs. Oh, he still faced prejudice and regulations when he was on a mission, sure, but it was different “Outside,” surrounded by stars and a beckoning cosmos. You had your orders, your mission to complete…but you also got to make decisions, even at times to interpret how best to carry out the mission, a singular freedom and feeling of power that he missed as a relatively junior officer on board a large warship with five thousand other officers and men crowded into its habs.