Earth Strike: Star Carrier: Book One

Chapter Fifteen

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.

He realized Fifer was still waiting for a response to his statement about Gray’s feeling marginalized, something the two of them had discussed a number of times during the past three weeks.

“I don’t know if I would call it feeling marginalized, sir,” he said. “It is good when I feel like I’m a part of something bigger, something important. Like being a member of the TriBeCa Family back home.”

“And how often do you feel that way, Lieutenant?”

He thought about this. “Not all that often, I guess. The other people in the squadron tend not to let me forget who I am…where I came from.”

“Understandable,” Fifer said. “Navy pilots tend to form a tight little circle, like a fraternity. Anyone not in the circle is an outsider, an unknown quantity. You get in only when you prove yourself.”

“I’ve been proving myself,” Gray insisted. “For a year now!”

“It can take longer than that, Lieutenant. And sometimes it can take forever.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

Fifer gave a gentle shrug. “You have several paths open to you, as we’ve discussed already. You can resign your commission and become an enlisted man. You can simply turn in your wings, become a non-flight officer. Or you can fold yourself in, hunker down, and ride it out where you are.”

Or I can go back to the Ruins, Gray thought. The hell with the Navy, with the government, with all of it….

“That is certainly one option,” Fifer told him, “but I can’t recommend it. You would be found. You would be brought back. You would face a court martial for desertion, and you would either serve time in a military prison or you would be reconditioned.”

Gray started. He hadn’t spoken out loud about deserting. “You’re reading my thoughts!”

“Your personal daemon is linked in with the AI coordinating this session,” Fifer told him. “It can pick up surface thoughts, at least, yes. How else do you think I monitor your free-form regressions?”

Gray was trembling, though whether from fear, anger, or some other long-repressed emotion, he couldn’t tell. He was beginning to realize that what he resented most about the Navy was the constant high-tech monitoring, the fact that even when he wasn’t linked in, there were machines and AIs in the Net-Cloud that could follow where he was going, watch where he went, listen in on his conversations, even hear what he was thinking.

“I noticed a peculiar, extremely sharp spike in the intensity of your emotions just now,” Fifer told him. “Can you tell me about what you’re feeling?”

“There’s a lot of stuff,” Gray admitted. “I don’t like the constant snooping, the feeling that AIs and Authority monitors are always looking over my shoulder, watching what I do. And…”

“And what?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what? The monitoring?”

“No. I don’t like it, but I’m not afraid of it.”

“What then?”

Gray was trying to put it into words, but found he could not.

“I’m…not sure.”

“That’s okay. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to say some words and phrases, list them. Things I mentioned a moment ago, when you had that emotional spike. Just listen to each phrase, think about it. Tell me what you feel.”

Gray was sweating now. “Okay…”

“‘One option.’”

Gray felt nothing, and shrugged.

“‘You would be found.’”

He felt a quiver of emotional discomfort, but he shook his head.

“‘You would be brought back.’”

“No.”

“‘You would face a court martial.’”

Again, he shook his head, but his heart was pounding now. Damn, he hated this kind of probing.

“‘You would serve time in prison.’”

“No.”

“‘You would be reconditioned.’”

“Damn it, Doctor!” Gray was shouting now. “What does any of this have to do with-”

“It’s okay, Lieutenant. Just relax. Deep breath…”

Gray’s heart was pounding in his chest. He wanted to leave, wanted to run….

“You see, Trevor, as I told you at the beginning of these sessions, we’re recording everything as we proceed with the session. I can call up any part of our conversation, read it on my in-head display. And we can match each phrase with your emotional output. I notice an extremely strong response on your part to the idea of reconditioning. Is that true?”

“You can also tell when I’m lying,” Gray said, the words close to a snarl.

“Yes, but that’s beside the point.”

“I don’t like the idea of…of reconditioning. No.”

“And what is it that bothers you about it?”

“What is it that-” Gray broke off his reply. “Having my brains scrambled, my memories stolen…shouldn’t that bother anybody?”

“There are a lot of public misconceptions about the neural reconfiguration, Lieutenant. It’s not what you think.”

“No? Then explain that to my wife.”

Gray didn’t know that the docbots at the Columbia Arcology had planted new memories in Angela’s brain. The medtechs hadn’t told him much of anything. But he’d known that the Angela he’d spoken to after her stroke treatment had not been the Angela he’d married. Oh, she’d looked the same, had the same body, the same face…but when she’d looked at him she’d been…different. The love he’d always seen in her eyes was gone, and her conversation seemed…distant. As though she were speaking to a stranger.

The Angela he’d married never would have turned him away, never would have told him she never wanted to see him again.

Fifer had a faraway look on his face as he reviewed records he was calling up within his mind. “Angela Gray,” he said. “I see. A serious stroke. Partial paralysis.”

“And she changed,” Gray said. The words were hard. Bitter. “She changed toward me.”

“That can happen. A stroke can destroy established neural pathways. Those that control movement in muscles. And also those that govern memory, recognition, even attitude and belief.”

“They told me they had to adjust her,” Gray said.

“Adjustment isn’t the same as neural reconfiguration,” Fifer told him. “It’s not reconditioning.”

“No? It made Angela different. It changed her.”

Fifer sighed. “Without direct access to Columbia Arcology’s medcenter, I can’t really say this for sure, but I suspect that what changed her was the delay in getting her to competent treatment. It says here it was almost twenty-four hours before you got her to a medcenter.”

“It took that long to get them to look at her.”

“Yes, well…there were social considerations.”

“Yeah. To them I was a damned filthy primitive, a squattie, with a wife, of all obscene things.”

“That might have been part of it. So was the lack of med insurance, though. That’s how you came to join the Navy, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Fifer nodded. “Lieutenant…I think we may have identified a key focus of your embitterment disorder.”

“Oh, really?” Gray’s tone was biting and sarcastic. “Do you think. Maybe? Damn it, of course I’m bitter about what happened!”

“And I don’t blame you. What happened had a serious, a terrible impact on your life. But you don’t have to let what happened at the Columbia Arcology control you, control your thoughts and actions, for the rest of your life.

“As with everything else in life, Lieutenant Gray, you have a choice-to be done to, or to do. And we’re here to determine which it’s going to be.”

CIC, TC/USNA CVS America

Mars Synchorbit, Sol System

0916 hours, TFT

Koenig felt the faint shudder as America finally nestled into the docking facility gantry, the boarding tubes nestling against the access hatchways in the zero-G sections of her spine. Magnetic clamps locked and nanoseals formed impenetrable, airtight connections. Buchanan had already passed orders that the first off the ship would be the Mufrid passengers. The transports that would take them to Earth were already moving toward America’s berth.

They were home.

He could hear the steady stream of orders from the bridge as some of the ship’s systems were shut down. The hab modules would continue their rotation for a time, providing artificial gravity, at least until the Mufrids were off. And wasn’t that going to be fun…herding more than a thousand people down to the zero-G regions of the ship and floating them out through the boarding tubes? America’s Marine contingent and the Master-at-Arms Division were going to be busy for the next several hours, keeping the civilians moving, keeping them from panicking and thrashing about and possibly hurting themselves. Ship’s crew would be responsible for cleaning up after those who got sick in the passageways, though at least they would have robotic help in that unpleasant task. The ship’s quartermaster’s department was already deploying cleanerbots to the ship’s zero-gravity hab areas.

With America back in spacedock, Admiral Koenig now was technically off duty. Other ships in the carrier battlegroup were still arriving-though a few had been redirected to Earth Synchorbital-but they were now under the individual commands of their respective commanding officers, no longer maneuvering or fighting as a fleet. Now, he thought, might be a good time to go back to his quarters and try to catch some sleep. He’d been awake through much of the inbound passage from Sol’s Kuiper Belt, and dead tired. He already knew he would have to appear in person before a review board of the Senate Military Directorate early tomorrow, ship’s time…and likely face a Board of Inquiry shortly after that.

It might be his last appearance before his peers as a flag-rank officer, and he wanted to be sharp for that meeting.

“I have an incoming communication from Dr. Brandt,” his personal AI informed him. “It is flagged ‘urgent.’”

“Put it through.”

“Admiral Koenig? Brandt, down in med-research!”

“Yes, Doctor. What can I-”

“We’ve got a problem here! The Turusch are killing each other!”

“Damn it! Separate them!”

“It’s…too late for that. You might want to link down here and see for yourself.”

“Stand by. I’m coming down.”

He connected directly with the NTE robots hanging from the ship’s overhead in the compartment holding the two Turusch. The two aliens appeared locked in a deadly embrace, heads split wide open, the harpoons and feeding tubes within imbedded in each other’s bodies. Several medtecs in red e-suits were there, trying to separate the two, but the aliens continued to thrash about weakly, pushing the humans away with flailing black tentacles. A pair of white Noters suspended from the overhead were trying to help, but were knocked away with ease.

Shit! “Get them apart!” he barked.

“We’re trying, Admiral!” Brandt said. “Those rigid spears are like injection needles. They squirt digestive juice-sulfuric acid-into whatever they’re eating. Then they suck up the soup through those soft tubes.”

“They’re eating each other?”

“That’s about the size of it, Admiral.”

Moments later, the humans and robots together managed to get a firm grip on both of the alien combatants and drag them apart. Acid dripped from the harpoons as they slipped free, steaming on the deck.

But by then both of the aliens were dead.