Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Ten

26 September 2404

MEF HQ

Marine Sick Bay

Eta Boötis IV

1732 hours, TFT

“Why do you think it wasn’t fair?” Dr. George asked him.

“You’re rigging the program,” he protested. “Making it so I can’t win!”

“Life isn’t fair, Lieutenant.”

“The bastards were waiting for me at my place,” he said. “So I didn’t go there. You had one of them just pop up in a corridor.”

“How would it have been different if you’d gotten away?”

“I’d have gotten across the river to New Jersey. Or I would’ve gotten down to Battery or over to Chintown. I have…I had friends there….”

“But Angela had given them your ID. They’d have caught up with you, sooner or later.”

“Yeah, but why? There must be thousands of squatters in the Ruins! Why bother with me?”

“Because you’d impressed them, of course.”

He snorted. “That stupid test? The three-D navigation thing? That wasn’t until later.”

“You seem to have attracted their attention early on.”

“All we wanted was to be left alone….”

“According to the records, it was you who approached the Authority. When your…when Angela had her stroke.”

“Yeah…”

That, of course, had been where it all had started going wrong.

They were called primitives. And they were, in a way, men and women with almost nothing in the way of a technical infrastructure or implants, picking out a precarious living in the Manhattan Ruins and Norport and Sunken Miami and Old London and a hundred other coastal cities half-swallowed by the encroaching oceans, the polar ice caps having melted away three centuries before.

Gray had been born in the Ruins, a part of the TriBeCa Tower community. His discovery of the gravcycle in an uptown shop had let him “be the man”-Prim slang for proving himself-at his coming-of-age by bringing in a load of food and food-nano from New Rochelle. Life within the ruins was only possible if you belonged to a “family”…meaning one of the hundreds of territorial gangs. Each mound-island had its own family, and while many cooperated with the others, a few lived by preying on weaker families. That gravcycle had seen the TriBeCa Family through a couple of tough wars and innumerable raids.

The Periphery Authority was a department of the Confederal Police charged with maintaining the law in the Ruins-an all but impossible task, when you thought about it. The inhabitants of the Periphery didn’t recognize Confederal control; they didn’t fight the Auths, usually, but they tended to fade back deeper into the warrens and labyrinths of the Ruins, and to have nothing whatsoever to do with the Confeds.

But when Angela had suffered a stroke that paralyzed her right arm and badly weakened her right leg, Gray had gone nearly mad with worry. With very little in the way of modern medical technology within the Periphery-few medicines, no nanomeds at all, no docbots or diagnostic software or, indeed, any Net access at all-Gray had taken his broom and flown north to Morningside Heights, the southernmost tip of the New City. A doctor at the Columbia Arcology had agreed to see her, though with no insurance and no cred-implants, of course, neither he nor his wife could pay for treatment. Gray had agreed to talk with someone with the Confederal Social Authority in order to get treatment for Angela.

He still remembered the snickers, the sidelong looks. A Prim, dressed in rags, pleading for help from the Confeds. And for a wife, of all things. In the Ruins, among the families, people tended to pair off, to form tight pair-bonds rather than the more typical looser social and sexual associations. Monogies, they were called, and if that Peripheral lifestyle wasn’t illegal, on the Mainland it was still widely believed to be possessive, dysfunctional, and just a bit dirty.

The soshies had taken him in and asked a lot of questions. They’d hooked him up to brain scans and thought monitors, and seemed fascinated by the fact that he could fly a broom without a direct neural interface. “That shouldn’t even be possible!” one caseworker had told him. “Have you ever thought of getting an implant?”

“Oh, sure,” he’d told her. “Absolutely! Just as soon as my insurance comes through!”

They claimed later he’d agreed to join the military, but he hadn’t. Well, not really, though he might have tried to give an impression of interest in the idea, just so they’d help Angela. Or maybe they’d taken his sarcasm as agreement. It was always tough to tell with the Authorities. They were a damned humorless bunch.

Join the military? Hell, no! All he knew was scavenging and Ruinrunning. He could barely read and write, and if the Authorities claimed that the squatters out in the Periphery were still Earth Confederation citizens, Gray and a few million other Prim squatters didn’t see it that way at all. They were free. The only law was what they themselves laid down and enforced. They didn’t receive any of the Authority’s protection, medical or financial services, education, clothing, Net access, entertainment, or food. They didn’t have Confed-recognized jobs or welfare status and they didn’t pay taxes. So how could anyone claim that they were citizens?

But then a Navy lieutenant commander had shown up in his black-and-golds and told him he was there to administer the Confederation oath. He’d bolted then, bolted and run. He’d found his broom where he’d parked it, on a landing balcony high above Harlem Bay, and launched himself into the night.

He’d been pursued by a hopper, but he’d eluded them.

They’d been waiting for him in the TriBeCa Tower apartments he’d shared with Angela.

The worst part of it all, the most awful revelation that had transformed his recruit training into a living nightmare, had been the discovery that Angela had…changed. They’d healed her. They’d grown class-three implants within the sulci of her brain, regrown sections of her organic nervous system, given her palm implants and an ID, even given her training as a compositer, whatever the hell that was, and assigned her to a job up in Haworth. The last he’d heard, she was living with some guy named Fred in an extended community.

She no longer loved Gray, and no longer wanted to see him.

The medtechs he’d talked to later had told him that that happened with strokes sometimes. Old neural pathways holding information on relationships, on emotional responses could be burned out by the neuron storm, lost even beyond the ability of neural prostheses to recapture them.

Gray wondered, though, how much was stroke and how much was reprogramming. Reconditioning. When they’d wired her to their machines and downloaded reading and writing, Cloud-Net skills and language training, social norms and Mainland mores, had they also told her what to believe? Who to love? How to love?

The last time he’d been able to talk with Angela, he’d asked if that had been what had happened. The simple question had made her angry, unreasonably so, he thought. “Damn you, Trev! Don’t you think I can think for myself?” she’d demanded.

Maybe she could. But…that hadn’t been Angela he’d been talking to. She was different now, and not just in her attitude or her use of language.

He’d known then that Angela, his Angela, was dead.

“You’re crying,” Dr. George said. She handed him a tissue and he accepted it, dragging it across his wet cheeks until the material evaporated and took the moisture with it as a microparticle aerosol. “We seem to have touched something.”

“Fuck you,” he said, but without much feeling. He felt dead inside, utterly wrung out and empty. “We’re done. I’m done. Get the hell out of my head….”

Hangar Deck

TC/USNA CVS America

Haris Orbit, Eta Boötis System

1740 hours, TFT

Commander Marissa Allyn stood on the walkway overlooking the star carrier’s main hangar deck, a vast and cavernous compartment three stories tall and over 150 meters long, a noisy, banging, bustling nexus of activity as returning fighters trapped on the recovery deck above and were brought down through the mergedeck barriers and into the pressurized interior of the ship.

The last of the Dragonfires had recovered back on board the America hours ago. Allyn had been brought back much later as a tow, rather ignominiously hauled in by the Search and Rescue tug. She’d been unconscious through most of the process, but she’d begun to come out of it as the tug hauled her into the turkey bay…carrier slang for one of the utility bay entrances.

They’d whisked her off to America’s sick bay facilities, where she’d been stripped and deconned, probed by robotic diagnosticians, and shot full of more nanomed healer ’bots. They’d put her on light duty and discharged her just twenty minutes ago; she’d come down here to find out how many of the Dragonfires had actually made it back safely. The numbers hadn’t been posted yet in PriFly, weren’t available on AmericaNet, and the pilots themselves were off the radar-presumably up in God’s country going through the debrief.

Which was where she would be going soon as well, once they called for her. In the meantime, she could talk to some of the crew chiefs or recovery deck personnel to get the “straight eye,” meaning rumors, gossip, or shipboard intelligence that generally was more accurate than the official word of God.

She’d been proceeding along the elevated walkway toward the recovery officer’s suite when a new arrival on the deck below had captured her full attention.

Flashing red lights and a hooter had cleared one particular part of the busy hangar deck-surrounding an elevator column extending all the way from deck to overhead, an area marked off by painted stripes, no-go warnings, and holographic barriers. The elevator began to descend, and the black nanoseal of the deck hatch in the overhead began to bulge downward, taking on the curving shape of the lower surfaces of a returning shuttle. The arrival was unusual for two reasons. First off, shuttles, like the SAR tug, normally recovered through a utility docking bay, not the main hangar deck. Troops and other personnel, in particular, generally came aboard in either a troop bay or at the quarterdeck receiving facility forward.

And second, there were a hell of a lot of Marines down there, falling into a broad semicircle facing the shuttle’s starboard side.

Slowly, the shape continued to drop, the shuttle still coated by black nanometal that looked and acted like a viscous liquid, clinging tightly to the shuttle’s surface to keep separate the open-space hard vacuum of the recovery deck above and the Earth-normal atmosphere of the pressurized hangar deck. As the shuttle continued to drop, the nanoseal let go, parting along the ventral surface, oozing up the ship’s sides like tar, merging above the shuttle’s back, then returning to a flat, black rectangle in the overhead. Free now, the shuttle continued to descend until the elevator column had vanished entirely into the deck beneath the splayed landing legs, and the shuttle rested at hangar-deck level. A portion of the starboard fuselage irised open as a ramp extended to the deck beyond the solidifying nanometal pool, and the waiting Marines came sharply alert, weapons at the ready.

This, Allyn thought, must be the shuttle bringing up the Turusch prisoners she’d heard about in the pre-mission briefing. She leaned over against the railing, trying for a better look. There were plenty of rumors about Turusch biology and about their body shape, but nothing that had ever been confirmed.

Aglestch physiognomy was well known, of course. Humans had met them just less than a century before. They were spidery, hairy things that were not spiders at all-the only external skeleton they had on their sausage-shaped bodies sheathed their two-meter legs-and they lived in an oxidizing atmosphere not very different from Earth’s, so humans could meet them face-to…sense-organ cluster. The Turusch, however, were mysteries. There were rumors, conflicting and confusing, of things like dinosaurs, like whales, like sea slugs, but the things had never been visually recorded. Eye-witness reports at Arcturus Station and at Everdawn had mentioned their heavy combat armor, carballoy mecha the size of small trucks.

This just might be the moment when the mystery was finally ended, the reality revealed.

Humans, Marines in combat armor, were coming down the ramp now. One, an officer, conferred for a moment with the officer in charge of the section waiting on the Hangar Deck.

And then the first Turusch drifted into view.

Allyn felt a stab of disappointment. The thing was wearing what presumably was the alien equivalent of an e-suit, a three-meter-long cylinder floating on grav-lifters. The tank was rounded front and back, and there was nothing like windows or a canopy through which she could glimpse the creature inside.

An armored Marine combat walker stalked down the ramp beside it, a protective measure, no doubt. If that floating tube suddenly started smashing into bystanders or equipment, a single megajoule pulse from the walker’s main gun would puncture the Tushie’s protective shell and it would choke on oxygen. That, of course, was why the creature was in the e-suit; she’d heard speculation that the things lived in a reducing atmosphere, though she didn’t know what the gas mix was. Oxygen would be a deadly poison to them.

A second floater tank appeared, emerging onto the ramp, closely escorted by another Marine walker.

So…this seemed to confirm the scuttlebutt that said the Tushies were completely nonhuman, that they couldn’t even breathe a standard gas mix. That meant that humans and Tushies weren’t fighting over the same real estate…unless, of course, they breathed the witch’s brew of sulfur compounds that made up the Harisian atmosphere. According to Naval Intelligence, though, the Tushies were the front-line forces for the mysterious Sh’daar, fighting at their orders. Even less was known about the Sh’daar than was known about the Turusch.

The ring of armored Marines in front of the shuttle parted to let the floater tanks pass through, then fell into columns behind them. The cylinders and their escorts vanished into a side passageway a moment later.

Scuttlebutt had it that the Marines on Haris had gone through a lot to capture those two prisoners. Not only that, rumor insisted that the America battlegroup had been deployed to make sure those prisoners were returned to human space; recovering them, apparently, had a far higher priority than rescuing the civilians trapped on Haris. That sucked, but she knew how the military mind worked. You had to know the enemy before you could fight him. Who’d said that…Sun Tse? She thought so.

“Commander Allyn,” a voice said in her head. “We’re ready for your debrief.”

“Very well,” she said. “On my way.”

She would have to see if anyone on the debrief team could tell her more about her squadron…or about America’s new and alien passengers.

MEF HQ

Marine Sick Bay

Eta Boötis IV

1745 hours, TFT

“We’re not done with this, Lieutenant,” Dr. George told him.

Gray scowled. “Yes we are. Sir.”

She shrugged. “You’ll be kept on limited duty until you complete the therapy to my satisfaction, or to the satisfaction of a medical review board. That means you’re off the flight line.”

She’d switched off the electronic feed to his internal circuitry, banishing the vivid lucid dreams of Manhattan. Gray was on a recliner in Anna George’s office, which had the relaxed air of a wood-paneled library. That would not be real wood on the bulkheads, of course. The entire base had been nanogrown from local raw materials five weeks ago.

But there was no practical way to tell the difference.

“There is nothing wrong with me! I…I freaked a bit when those things were crawling on me down there on the planet. But I’m okay now.”

“Lieutenant Gray, I’ve entered a provisional diagnosis in your record of PTED. That’s post-traumatic embitterment disorder, and it is potentially serious. It has little or nothing to do with what happened to you outside the perimeter yesterday, and everything to do with the events that led you to enlist in the Navy.”

“Okay, I’m carrying a grudge, if that’s what you mean, sure. I was tricked into the service, my whole life was taken away from me, I lost my wife, why shouldn’t I be bitter?”

“Good question. My question for you is…who do you blame? The Periphery Authority? The med staff at Columbia Towers? The Navy? Society in general?”

He didn’t answer.

“I suggest that you begin digging inside yourself for some answers. You had a responsibility in what happened as well.”

“I was not responsible for Angela’s stroke!”

“No. Certainly not. But you’d chosen to live on the Periphery, without healthcare, without a socially sanctioned means of support. You then chose to try to bargain with the Authority, to help your wife.”

“What would you have done?” The words, nearly, were a sneer.

“That’s not the question. You and I are completely different people, with different backgrounds, different experiences, different…programming. You made certain decisions. Some were good. Some were not as good. You need to figure out why you did what you did, why you made the choices that you made…and then you need to see where you go from where you are right now.”

“What does any of this have to do with me being on the flight line?” he demanded. “I’ve been doing my job. My duty.”

George leaned back in her seat, and appeared to be thinking about it. “Of course you have. No one is saying otherwise. But…do you understand the sort of responsibility with which you’ve been entrusted? What’s the typical warload on your Starhawk, when you go out on patrol? I think they used to call it a force package?”

He shrugged. “Depends on the mission parameters. Usually it’s anything between twenty-four and thirty-two Krait smart missiles. And we generally carry a PBP and a KK Gatling.”

“How big a punch on a Krait?”

“Again, it depends. We usually carry a mix, five to fifteen kilotons. More or less for special operations, special mission requirements.”

“So what happens if you get mad someday and fire off a fifteen-kiloton nuclear warhead while you’re still inside one of America’s launch tubes, or maybe on the flight deck?”

“That would never happen!” He was angry at the mere supposition.

“Why not?”

“Well, there are interlocks to prevent that from happening, a munitions release inside the ship or an accidental warhead arming, for one thing. For another…well, damn it, if you don’t trust me with those things, why the hell did you turn me into a pilot?”

He’d actually wondered that for a long time. When he’d been taken into custody by the Peripheral Authority, he’d been handed over to the Department of Education for a series of skills downloads and aptitude testing. He’d scored high-“off the scale,” according to one of the soshtechs-in three-dimensional visualization, navigation, and conceptualization, plus lightning-quick reaction times and low fear thresholds. They’d fast-tracked him from an uneducated Periphery vagrant to pre-flight training level with downloads in spaceflight engineering, basic astronautics, and military history in six months of download hell. They’d followed that with a year of basic Navy OCS at the Academy, then flight training in California and on Mars.

The government had spent something like two thirds of a million creds to raise him from squatter to fighter pilot. And they didn’t trust him?

“It’s not about trust, Lieutenant. It’s about your emotional stability, about whether or not you’re going to have a bad day someday, maybe get pissed off at someone else in the squadron, and in an emotional moment you make a bad decision.” He started to protest, and she gave him a hard look. “It has happened before, hasn’t it?”

“You mean when I decked Howiedoin’ at SupraQuito? That was handled NJP.”

“‘Non-judicial punishment.’ I know. It’s in your record.”

“So I did my time. Got scolded by the Old Woman, restricted to quarters, and lost a month’s pay.”

“But it was a bad decision on your part, wasn’t it?”

“The bastard had it coming.”

“And you’re getting angry and defensive right now, just talking about it. Am I right?”

He was about to tell George to shut up and get out of his face, then realized she was trying to provoke him, trying to prod an emotional reaction out of him. “Don’t tell me what I’m supposed to feel,” he said quietly. “My mind is still my own. So are my feelings.”

“Up to a point, Lieutenant. Up to a certain, and limited, point. What I’m trying to establish is that you boost down those launch tubes almost every day with more firepower at your fingertips than has been expended in all of the wars fought by Humankind since World War I. The jihadist nukes that took out the city centers of Paris, Chicago, and Washington were in the ten-to twelve-kiloton range. The one that got Tel Aviv was a little more, twenty kilotons or so. Your commanding officers-and the Confederation government-need to know that you are stable, competent, and reliable. Naval space aviation requires cool reasoning, a clean organic-cyber network connection, and emotions that are under control. No hotshots. No show-offs. And no one who’s going to go off half-cocked when someone calls him a name, like Prim or monogie.”

Fresh anger flared for an instant. His fists clenched. “Okay!” He forced his fists to relax, then said, more quietly, “Okay. Look, if I’m a risk, a threat to the Navy, kick me out! Send me back to the Periphery!”

“Is that what you really want?”

The reply stopped him cold.

The Authority might have been swinging its mass around when it brought him in, but the truth was that Trevor Gray had really started growing when he joined the Navy. Hell, you could romanticize the free life of the Periphery…but what “free life” really meant was constant raids by other clans and families, near-starvation in the winter if you didn’t have a big enough stock of nano for food, clothing, and clean water, and a short, brutish life span that generally ended with a gang fight, with an accident, or with disease and exposure, all without the healthcare to see you through.

He missed his friends, the others in his TriBeCa Tower family. But in exchange, he’d received an education, social standing, implants, and a purpose…not bad for a filthy gutter kid from the Manhattan Ruins.

“It’s not about what I want,” he insisted, though the words sounded uncertain even to him. “Why even bring me in in the first place? I wasn’t bothering anyone out in the Ruins.”

“The Confederation is dedicated to bringing the benefits of technic civilization to all of its citizens,” she told him.

“Bull. They wanted someone who could fly Starhawks. If they don’t want me to fly, they can send me back to where they found me.”

“It’s not that easy, Lieutenant, and you know it. You-” She broke off in mid-sentence, listening.

“What is it?” Gray asked. She appeared to be receiving a base announcement of some sort. Gray’s in-head circuitry was attuned to the naval Net on board the America, not the Marine version in use here.

“It’s time for us to evacuate, Lieutenant,” she told him. “They’re ordering us topside, right now, to the transports.”

“So where does that leave me?”

“I’m recommending continued therapy, Lieutenant. With me, or with therapy teams on the America, or back at Mars, it doesn’t matter. But you’re going to need to break that PTED cycle before you launch in a Starhawk again.”

And he was dismissed. A Marine escort led him to the shuttle, and he never saw Anna George again.

He did know, however, that he was going to spend a lot of time thinking about just what it was he wanted out of the Navy, and about what the Navy wanted back from him.