Battle Station

— 25

Before we headed off into orbit on a shakedown cruise, I responded to an odd buzzing in my helmet. I noticed a set of words displayed in warning yellow, and pulled them up onto the center region of my HUD. On the visor before me, the words displayed read: ‘mailbox full. Message returned.’ I frowned at this for a moment, not recalling having sent any texts lately. I almost activated the warning and opened the report.

Then I realized what it was. The system was warning me that my mailbox was full. It wasn’t just any mailbox, either. It was the one that came from Star Force. Cursing, I decided I had to take a look. Possibly, Crow was crying for help. Who knew, maybe a hundred fresh enemy cruisers had come through the Venus gate and now approached Earth. I didn’t want to open those emails, but it would be criminal not to. Still, I somehow managed to put it off one more time. I justified this by telling myself I was in the middle of a critical combat test operation. Admiral Crow would have to wait a few more minutes.

“Take us up, Commander Welter,” I ordered.

As the ship lifted with an uncertain trembling, I felt for the armrests. Nanite arms snaked out and clamped my limbs into place. We rose out of the domed region very slowly.

Once free-floating in the open air, Welter applied thrust. At first he did so gently, then he gave it a surge of power. I was pressed back into my seat, despite the stabilizers, which were humming dutifully.

“Quite a bit of power in this beast,” Welter said, gripping the control sticks we’d rigged up.

Unlike Nano ships, these vessels had more direct control systems. There were brainboxes to be sure, but they had less knowledge of how to guide the ship than we did. Part of the purpose of this voyage was to demonstrate to the brainboxes how the controls worked and thus how the craft should be flown.

“Let’s take a few strafing runs at that mountain range,” I suggested. “When you are satisfied with the weaponry and atmospheric handling, take it up and we’ll do a few orbits.”

“Won’t that tip our hand to the Macros, sir? They must be watching.”

I shrugged. “Maybe a new kind of ship showing up will give them a reason to wait. We need time, and when faced with the unknown, the Macros tend to hesitate.”

Welter didn’t argue further. He was soon flying the ship in hard twists and turns. I could tell he was having fun despite himself. This ship had power, and power was always fun. Like a muscle car, it didn’t steer smoothly. Turning took a wide arc and lots of sickening Gs. The ship trembled when you pushed it, giving the feeling it might heel over and go into a spin. But it didn’t.

Welter pushed it, but never quite broke it. The first time he fired the gun, however, gave us a surprise. The entire ship bucked up under us. It felt like going over a speed bump in a car with bad shocks. We went over these speed bumps fast, and rhythmically. My teeth clacked each time the cannon fired. But it didn’t flip over, and Welter never lost control.

“We’ll need to teach the brainbox to give us a goose on the stabilizers every time we fire the main cannon,” he said.

“I’ll adjust the gain on the learning rate. Take another strafing run on that lake.”

After Welter tired of bombing the landscape with glowing pellets from the railgun, he took us up into orbit. Things smoothed out above the atmosphere, and I took the respite to finally open my email mailbox.

I opened the oldest email and read it quickly. It was from Crow, as I had expected. It was worded politely, but firmly. I was to report, and return to base ASAP. I grinned. It was weeks old. The second one was almost as cordial, but by the third email things began to get nasty. Crow used unpleasant words, mixed with Aussie slang. As far as I could determine, I was some kind of Wally with a genetic deformity in the region of my hindquarters. I wasn’t sure what a Wally was, but I assumed it was meant in a derogatory fashion.

The last email was a shocker, however. It wasn’t from Crow. It was from Jasmine Sarin.

When I’d left Earth many weeks ago, pursuing the Macro fleet, Jasmine had been a Major and my executive officer. I’d more or less left her in charge of the Star Force Marines in my absence. The first surprise was her new title: she was now calling herself Rear Admiral Sarin.

I stared at that, opening and closing my mouth repeatedly. Like a gaping fish on the deck of a boat, I didn’t quite know what had happened to my world. Jasmine had gone fleet? Crow had promoted her over me, and brought her under his direct command? I couldn’t believe she’d go along with it.

Even as I denied the obvious, it began to sink in. Sarin had been bucking for a promotion for a long time. I’d denied her requests. Then, from her point of view, I’d gone AWOL. Perhaps she’d told herself she was helping the cause of all Star Force by going Fleet. There had always been tension between the Marine and Fleet sides of the house, and having a sympathetic commander on the other side could help ease matters. Still, it felt like a betrayal.

I had to wonder, too, if other forces were at play in her decision. She’d had a personal interest in me, but I’d essentially spurned her after a few flirtations. Perhaps that had caused a rift between us I hadn’t recognized before.

After doing a bit of rapid thinking, I managed to read the rest of the email. There was another shocker at the bottom. She reported she was on her way out here on a Fleet vessel. She wanted to communicate with me directly, and ascertain if I needed rescuing or was having some kind of difficulty with my electronics.

“Hmm,” I said aloud.

“What is it, sir?” Commander Welter asked. He was tooling around in a wide arc, a power-turn that caused every onboard alarm to whoop and flash.

“I think we’re going to have company, soon,” I said.

He shot me a look. “Are we ready for that, sir?”

“Absolutely not.”

Welter chuckled. “Should I fire the big cannon from orbit, sir?”

“No,” I said. I noticed an immediate look of disappointment on his face. “I don’t want to show the Macros everything. We’ll save that for later.”

“Okay, Colonel.”

I contacted Miklos next, as the cruise continued. I checked the time. Another hour had passed. The second gunship would be finished soon. I was impressed at this rate of production, now that I was experiencing it in real time. If they gave us another week, the Macros would find themselves facing a fleet of tough little midget ships.

Miklos answered on the first hail. “Hello Colonel. I see your ship does fly.”

“Even pigs can, I hear, when in possession of very large wings.”

“What can I do for you, sir?”

“Do you have any new contacts? I mean, around the ring?”

“Yes sir, as a matter of fact, I wanted to talk to you about that.”

I heaved a sigh. Jasmine was already here. I didn’t know what I was going to say to her when we met.

“The Nano ship we had posted as a scout at the ring didn’t return to report this last hour.”

I frowned and blinked. “What?” I asked. “I’ve got plenty of relayed emails over our little pony-express system. Are you telling me we’ve been disconnected from Earth?”

“What? No, sir. I’m talking about the other ring. The one that leads to the lobster worlds.”

“Ah,” I said, catching on. “Do we have another ship out there to go look for the scout?”

“No sir, every ship we have is orbiting the Centaur homeworld except for a few miners and the scouts at the two rings.”

I looked at Commander Welter. He looked back at me.

“You’re going to ask me to fly out there, aren’t you, sir?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “This ship is too critical. We have too much firepower to remove it from the main front now. The Macros might take the opportunity to attack while we appear out of position. We are going to stay in orbit, and send Socorro. She’s our smallest, fastest, most lightly-armed ship.”

I’d specially designed Socorro for scouting trips. It bothered me to send her out on a dangerous mission without being at the helm myself, but I wasn’t about to leave my post. There were too many unknowns in the Eden system for my liking today.

“Colonel?” the command channel asked. Miklos’ East European accent was unmistakable. “This might be premature. The ship is less than an hour overdue.”

“No,” I said. “Something went wrong. I know that pilot. Jameson is always timely. He’s not going to sit on the far side without a good reason, especially with no orders to do so. The Crustaceans have been gathering on the far side for days, and they haven’t been responding to the queries I’ve relayed to them.”

“Very good, sir. I will dispatch another scout.”

“Just one man aboard Socorro. We can’t afford anything more.”

I rode out the next half-hour of tests without enjoyment. I was tense, and finally ordered the shakedown cruise cut short. “Take me down, Commander. I’ve had enough.”

He looked at me and misinterpreted my expression. He grinned and lowered us into the clouds again. The ship shivered and heated up forty degrees. I closed my helmet and let the air conditioners dry the sweat from my face.

I wasn’t sick from his twists and turns, but I didn’t tell Welter that. I was worried. There was new activity from two new directions. I’d been expecting the Macros to make a move, but now it seemed that Star Force and the Crustaceans were in motion instead.

We went straight down to the dome. Together, Welter and I had come up with a score of improvements to the design. They were all minor, however. The craft functioned as is. Even the prototype was viable.

“Marvin?” I demanded over the general channel once inside the dome. I walked around on the crunching moonscape that was the region under the dome. It was all chunks of ground-down rock, dust and bits of shiny metal.

“I’m engaged at the moment, Colonel.”

“Well, unengage yourself,” I said. “I need translations done. I’m reprogramming this facility.”

“Just speak to it directly.”

“I don’t speak binary.”

“There is no need. I’ve affixed a brainbox and taught it appropriate translation engrams. It should do the job as well as I could.”

“Right,” I said. “Well, that’s excellent.”

I ordered the changes through the new brainbox, which I found near the output tray. While I did so, I scanned the bleak landscape for the robot. I knew he had to be under the dome with me somewhere.

The first thing I saw was the wrecked bunker of steel planks. Many of the planks were missing. Smiling, I then knew where he had to be. I circled to the far side of the production unit and squinted toward the wall of the dome. A structure of scarred metal had appeared there. Marvin had been very busy. He’d built an encircling pen around his pets, and now enclosed them completely. I didn’t even see a door, but I suspected he was inside his little fort, tending to the Microbes.

I frowned with a new thought. Could he be shocking them in there? Out of sight? Or maybe applying some other form of discipline? I didn’t like the idea, but I didn’t have time to walk out there and check up on him. Right now, he was busy and out of trouble. I wanted him to stay that way.

I finished my programming edits and witnessed the birth of a new gunship. The fresh hull rolled out into the output tray with a tremendous clang. My construction-duty marines set to work on it immediately, pouring in nanites, adding major systems and cementing fittings into place with caulk-guns full of nanites.

As it took shape, the second vessel looked about the same as the first, but there had been many adjustments. The central turret and the generator unit had been edged a few feet forward. This squeezed the bridge crew, but provided a more balanced arrangement of mass. The stabilizers wouldn’t have to work so hard when the ship was firing or accelerating to provide a stable platform.

The big machine began working on the next ship, filling the dome with odd hot smells and a deep, thrumming sound that made my feet tingle in my boots. I wondered how these little ships would hold up in battle. As I exited the dome, I calculated I would learn the truth soon enough.