The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (5 page)

A mortar round landed off to their right, square atop a large
bomber drone, which went up in flames. Other mortars fell randomly around the base.
One landed near a squad of running security troopers; several went down,
screaming.

Ramesh had his hands over his ears. “They’re not supposed to
be able to do that!” he shouted.

Donovan was from the world of political intelligence and no
military analyst, but he had learned fast since the war with China started. Some
of the incoming were missiles that dispersed a plume of laser-scattering
material as soon as a laser hit them. The net effect was a cloud spreading over
the base that prevented lasers from working with any effectiveness. Such
weapons, Donovan knew, were expensive and difficult to manufacture – far out of
reach of the Punjabi guerrillas, or, for that matter, the revanchist Pashtuns
on the other side of the border.

And now, with the defenses suppressed, regular explosive
mortar rounds were falling on the base.

Ramesh waved and pointed toward a bunker fifty meters away. Donovan
nodded, and they ran, as another whistle crescendoed.

USS Apache, Wolf 359

Apache
’s directed energy officer, Lieutenant
(j.g.) Jessica Barrett, was a direct and willful woman, unafraid to make her
desires clear, sometimes in a way that inspired backbiting from other women
within earshot. She didn’t care; she viewed many of the social rules some women
enforced upon one another as silly obstacles to her satisfaction, and she often
preferred the company of men, who of course had their own set of social rules,
but they rarely enforced them on her.

She was broad-shouldered and matched Neil in height. Her
high-cheekboned face was oval and bold, and her hair, somewhere between blond
and brown, was cropped short for freefall but still longer than many women on
Apache
cut theirs. Her blue eyes were bordered by nascent laugh lines.

She had taken to Neil during his first briefing after coming
on board; he had referred obliquely to having had seen action, which was unlike
the crew of the
Apache,
who had spent the war in places that the Hans
had not seen fit to attack. He was unremarkable to look at; she was attracted
to what she saw as a desire in him to understand, to figure things out.
He
has some depth. I wonder what’s in there.

She had approached him the following Friday evening during
the junior officers’ social hour, both surveying and marking him before any of
the other young women aboard could take their shot. She learned he was mooning
over another Space Force officer from his previous assignment, a
difficult-sounding woman who was now light years away, at the GJ 1105 blockade.
An obstacle to overcome.
The following Friday, their weekly alcohol
ration quickly consumed, she made a suggestion in a low, husky voice. He
actually blushed! It hadn’t happened that night – he had hesitated, worried he
had misunderstood or was being pranked by his new shipmates – and she didn’t
press him, wondering if she had misjudged his preferences. But she caught him
stealing glances at her for the remainder of the social hour, and she knew he
would consent. The next week they did the same dance, and he didn’t hesitate.

For Neil, it was a strange time. He hadn’t been looking for
a relationship when he came aboard, and the near-effortless entry into one with
Jessica had left him feeling a little dazed over his good fortune. They made
each other laugh, and he found her easy clarity in her sense of right and wrong
something he wanted to be near.

And the sex: It was frequent and pleasant if usually quick
and purposeful, a half-undressed encounter with one eye on the nearest hatch.
Privacy is in short supply on a warship; it was impossible to predict when
one’s roommate or another officer might stop by, leading to hurried encounters.
But it was fun all the same, and different. Neil’s only prior partner was a college
girlfriend with whom such intimacy had been rare, an event that might take
place after a long evening of decoding her mood and saying the right things at
the right time. And he had never been so close with Erin Quintana, his
not-quite-lover from his previous assignment, the
San Jacinto
, and he had
distanced himself from her after deciding she would have disapproved of his
role in a professionally questionable, if ethically correct, act.

It didn’t occur to him that he hadn’t felt the need to
discuss that act – passing some information to an NSS spy who wasn’t cleared
for it – with Jessica. With her, he felt a kind of relief he had not felt
before. His dreams became markedly less erotic, and he found he could focus on
his work with a new clarity. But he worked less: His job not quite as
important; he still carried out his tasks, but when his shift was over, he
rarely stayed late, to, say, read less-immediate political intelligence or news
reports, opting instead to spend his free time with Jessica.

So it took some effort for him to will his thoughts away
from her to the mission at hand: to root around the wreckage of the
Gan Ying
and find secrets worth stealing. This wouldn’t be a deep investigation of the weapons
or construction of the ship; if the admirals at Space Command deemed it
worthwhile, they would send a tug to tow the hulk to a space station for such
work. Instead, Neil and
Apache
’s senior system tech were to raid the
computers for time-sensitive information: fleet and personnel movements, codes,
plans. It was likely they had been wiped, but here and there some fragments of
data might still be intact in the ship’s memory.

Unlike warships, intership jumpers had windows, so Neil
actually saw
Gan Ying
growing larger as he watched from the pilot’s cabin.
He sat behind the pilot and
Apache’
s assistant engineer, who had been
brought along to determine that the jumper’s chosen docking site was safe. Neil
reflected that there was
some
risk in this mission – the
Gan Ying
was
breached in several locations, and an inattentive collision with some wreckage
could cause a ripped skinsuit or bulkhead collapse. It was also possible, if
unlikely, given the extent of the damage, that some armed survivors lingered on
board.
Apache
’s tiny Marine detachment was along for that eventuality.

“Where to, L.T.?” the pilot asked.

The assistant engineer held her handheld up to the window,
comparing the schematics on her screen to the visible portion of
Gan Ying
’s
hull.

“Best place would be here, just below the sphere,” she said.
“Strongest undamaged spot that’s far from the drive.”

As they approached, however, the jumper from the
Kiyokaze
darted in and docked in that exact location.

“No consultation, nothing,” the pilot said. “Fucking Sakis.
You’d think we weren’t on the same team.”

You could have called them
, Neil thought, but said
nothing. It took a half-hour for the engineer to locate another safe location,
further down the hull. Open to vacuum, but structurally secure, and they
wouldn’t catch too many neutrons from the wreckage of the fusion drive, she
claimed. For the moment, it would be only the Apaches and the Japanese
exploitation team on board –
Ajax
’s team was delayed, and
Edmonton
had
taken damage to her small craft bay and would not be able to send a team over
at all.

The jumper maneuvered to a side of the ship partially
shielded from the dusky orange light of Wolf 359. Beams of rent metal twisted
before them. Long spikes of shadow ran along the hull. The size of the ship –
more than 200 meters long, more than 25 meters wide – dwarfed their little
jumper.

The pilot pulled the nose up, showing the hatch on its belly
to the wreckage, and the ship swung out of Neil’s view.

“Prepare for vacuum,” the pilot said.

Near Cottonwood, Sequoia continent, Kuan Yin, 11 Leonis
Minoris A

They crouched in a ditch along the railway, waiting.

Rand reflected that if Sequoia
was any more or less advanced in its technological progress, this would end
badly. A more primitive colony would require crewed trains to shuttle cargo between
its various outposts, and a better developed one would have some security along
its automated rail lines. But on Kuan Yin, they did not have to contend with
either.

They were leaving. They were heading north, to the region
around Sycamore, the occupied capital city of occupied Sequoia. Cottonwood was
overrun and pacified; all the Americans had been shipped off – almost all on
this very railroad – and a few thousand Chinese colonists brought in from Han
territory across the ocean, to solidify China’s claim on this continent.

They had done all they could in this area, Rand kept telling
himself. They had been in hiding for months, unable to move freely, unable to
launch an attack. They were running low on sources of food, water and power –
the abandoned homes they used to raid were either occupied by Chinese colonists
or set with alarms.

At least no one else has died,
Rand thought. Their band
was once larger, but some disastrous encounters with Chinese forces had
winnowed down their numbers. He made sure he thought of his dead daily:
Yancey,
McKay, Pravitz, Ramirez, Torren. I won’t lose another.
His diminished band
consisted of Sergeant Hal Aguirre and Private Rachel Lopez, the last two
survivors from his pre-war artillery platoon, and the NSS operative, Violet
Kelley, who had joined them after they turned guerrilla. Rand and Kelley shared
command, sort of – Aguirre and Lopez wouldn’t follow her without his say-so,
but she was trained for the sort of covert operations, the bombings, ambushes
and so on, that they had carried out.

Still, leaving felt like running from a fight, ceding
Cottonwood to the Hans.
Vincennes,
their angel in the sky
,
had
messaged that the resistance to the occupation was at last getting organized in
the area around Sycamore, under the guidance of some Special Forces who had
survived the initial invasion. Kelley insisted they go at once, and Rand
couldn’t come up with any reasons to argue. They were just scraping by here,
not contributing to the war.

Around them were the highlands northeast of occupied Cottonwood.
Tall, thin trunks of dead trees surrounded them, victims of poor terraforming
preparations and a beetle that unexpectedly thrived in Kuan Yin’s hot
temperatures. At this particular spot the train tracks made multiple
switchbacks as they climbed out of the volcanic bowl that contained the town,
and trains were required to decelerate to a few kph, slow enough where a
running person could jump on.

Aguirre heard it first: the hollow, metallic hum of the
maglev’s approach.

“Get ready,” Rand said, feeling a surge of adrenaline. “No
one gets left behind.” Kelley shot him a dark look for making unnecessary
noise.

The train grew louder. But Rand detected another sound, a
low buzz, barely distinguishable from the maglev noise.

“What’s that?” he said, his voice a harsh whisper. Kelley
shook her head, as did Aguirre.

But Lopez nodded,
hear face suddenly fearful. “I hear it. That’s a …”

“… drone!” Rand finished. “Everyone down!”

They complied. Rand curled himself into a ball and tried to
brush some leaves on himself – anything to make the shape of his heat signature
look less like a human and more like a warm lump in the landscape.

The sound of the drone’s turbofans changed as it emerged
into the open. It cruised slowly above them, a small sensor pod rotating from
side to side underneath its nose. It didn’t see them, or, perhaps it did but
decided they weren’t a threat.

The train glided by, and Rand saw flatcars, their backs
burdened with green Chinese LAVs.
A military train. We’ll have to wait for a
civilian freight carrier.
He let out a long breath.
I guess we’re not
the only ones going north.

Gan Ying, Wolf 359

With only the team’s headlamps to cut through the
darkness, Neil observed that the gunmetal gray corridors of
Gan Ying
somehow
seemed starker than the exterior. But he had to appreciate the absolute
efficiency of the design; creature comforts wasted kilos. Many of the corridors
in this section were damaged, with matching holes on some opposite walls
indicating where a laser had burned through. They saw no bodies.

Their party consisted of Neil, an enlisted systems tech from
Philadelphia named Bradley, and two Marines. It was Neil’s first mission in a
skinsuit, and he was surprised how comfortable he felt in it. The only real
bulk was in the helmet, and he took care when moving his head to look at
something.

They moved from room to room, hunting for intact consoles.
When they found one, Bradley hooked up a portable power supply and tried to
turn it on. None had worked so far.

A voice boomed in Neil’s helmet.

“Lieutenant Mercer, this is Lieutenant Endo,” the voice
said. Something wasn’t interfacing well between the American and Japanese
short-range communicators, and the Japanese exploitation team leader’s voice
came in at a skull-jarring volume. Neil pulled out his handheld and adjusted
it, and Endo’s voice dropped as he continued. “We have a working terminal
attached to their computer core. They scrambled their data, as we expected, but
our technician says they are detecting some patterns. Join us as soon as you
like, and you will be able to download the core’s contents.” He gave directions
and added, “Also, we found something else you might like to see.”

Neil rolled his eyes.
Why can’t people just be direct
over the comms?
Neil had met Endo after the Battle of Kennedy Station
several months prior, but he did not know him well. Rather than argue, he led
the team up to the Japanese officer’s location, seven decks above.