Lines of Departure

^{CHAPTER 23} A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH

“Run that by me again,” Dr. Stewart says. “You want me to do what now?”

“We need you to help us figure out how to blow a Lanky seed ship out of space,” Sergeant Fallon says. “It kind of goes without saying that you have a pretty good motivator to find a solution.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that the kind of thing more in your ballpark? I thought you soldiers were in charge of coming up with new ways to break things.”

“We’ve tried,” I say. “Once they’re on the ground, we can shoot them, but that’s difficult. Or we can nuke them, which is easier, but we don’t have the elbow room to fling around a lot of kiloton warheads on this moon. And nobody has ever cracked a seed ship.”

“Your nukes don’t work on them?”

“Not in space. Nukes aren’t all that effective in a vacuum. And those seed ships have hard shells. I’ve never heard of anyone actually cracking the hull on one, and I’ve been in a battle where a whole task force chucked every nuke in the magazines at it. Dozens of megatons, and not a dent in the trim.”

“I see.” Dr. Stewart leans back in her chair and crosses her arms in front of her chest. I can’t tell whether the expression on her face is amusement or incredulity.

We’re in her office in the science department of the admin center. It’s small and messy, just a desk with data tablets and printouts all over it, and a few office chairs that are weighed down with reference material. If a tidy office is a sign of a cluttered mind, then Dr. Stewart’s mind is as squared away as a boot camp recruit’s locker.

“Let me get this sorted out,” she says. “You people have been trying to figure out this problem for over four years. None of your soldier toys do the job, and all those military scientists haven’t come up with a solution in half a decade. And you’re asking me to solve it for you in seven days?”

“Earlier if possible,” Sergeant Fallon says. “So we can prepare the defense before the bad guys are overhead.”

“Once they are, they’ll start landing scouts, and every human settlement they find is going to get nerve-gassed from orbit. Then they’ll tear down our terraformers and set up their own, and two months later the atmosphere’s mostly carbon dioxide,” I say.

“I’ve read all the intel,” Dr. Stewart says. “At least the stuff they let us civvies read. And I have to admit it doesn’t make me overly optimistic.”

Sergeant Fallon smiles curtly. “That’s the understatement of the month. Personally, I don’t give a bucket of warm piss for this place if we have to go up against those things with what we have. My people are Homeworld Defense grunts. They don’t have the training, don’t have the right guns, don’t have the experience. I have two battalions of glorified riot police with popguns.”

“I have a pocketknife,” Dr. Stewart says. “A few containers of hydrochloric acid down in the lab. Two cargo rail guns that can’t be aimed at anything unless you coax someone into just the right spot in orbit. And our constables carry sidearms and stun sticks. Not exactly a mighty arsenal, I’m afraid.”

“What about those rail guns?”

“Those are for lobbing freight containers into orbit. Ship comes with empty cargo pods, they drop them on the moon for recovery, we fill cargo pods up with water, and up into orbit they go with the rail guns. Saves on fuel for orbital lifts. We have two sites, but they’re fixed. And they just generate enough juice to put things in a low orbit with the minimum amount of energy required.”

“Can we juice them up a bit?” Sergeant Fallon asks.

“Some, but there’s no point. They can’t be aimed. They’re just ramps in the ground. And even at full power, they won’t launch things fast enough to give you more energy than fifty gigatons’ worth of nukes. They were designed for putting payloads into orbit, not for use as planetary defense weapons.”

“So there’s not much we can do, and nothing we can do it with,” Sergeant Fallon says.

“That sounds like an accurate assessment.” Dr. Stewart leans back in her chair again and studies the computer screen that’s shoved into a corner of her crowded desk. “I’m not an expert on weaponry. I’m an astrophysicist. But give me a list of your assets, and I’ll see what we can think up down here in Science Country. I need to know what kind of ships we have, and their list of ordnance loadouts, especially anything with nuclear warheads. I also need to know the maximum power output of their fusion reactors, and their acceleration data.”

“We’ll get that to you,” I say. “It’ll be a short list. Right now we have two ships on our side, and one of them is a ratty old freighter.”

Dr. Stewart lets out a little sigh.

“Not much we can do, and nothing to do it with,” she echoes Sergeant Fallon. “Well, let me see if we can add something of value, Sergeant.”

“Seven days,” Sergeant Fallon muses as we walk back to the ops center. “If we don’t come up with a way to knock your aliens out of space in seven days, we’re fucked.”

“Could be that Russian cruiser isn’t running from a Lanky ship,” I say, even though I can’t even convince myself of the possibility.

“Could be that I’m not really on some forsaken ball of ice at the ass end of the settled galaxy,” Sergeant Fallon says. “Could be that this is all a bad dream caused by too much shitty soy beer at the NCO club. What do you think?”

“I think if they don’t come up with something really fucking clever in Science Country, we’re fucked,” I concur.

“Never thought I’d kick it out in space. Always figured I’d get my lights turned off in a PRC somewhere. Look around the wrong corner, bam. Not this alien invasion business.”

I have a brief flashback to a hot night five years ago, memories of a rifle in my right hand and an injured Sergeant Fallon hanging off my left side. I still recall the feeling of absolute certainty that we were both just moments away from death as the fléchettes from rioters’ guns whizzed past us with supersonic cracks. I can still feel the blood running down my side, and the way every breath hurt as if someone was driving a knife between my ribs. But the worst of it was the feeling of total abandonment, of being left to die in the middle of a filthy, squalid welfare city, surrounded by people who hated us so much for who we were and what we did that they would have torn us limb from limb with their bare hands.

“If our time is up, at least we’ll be dying in fresh air,” I say. “With rifles in our hands and a hearty ‘fuck you’ on our lips.”

“There are worse ways to go,” Sergeant Fallon agrees. “’Course, I want to explore every other option before we get to the ‘dying in fresh air’ part.”

In the windowless admin building, with the wind blowing the snow around outside in fifty-knot gales, it’s easy for us troopers to fall back into a watch-cycle routine. I spend my watches in the ops center in front of an admin deck, looking at the data from the orbital sensors and the packages the Neural Networks guy on the Indy sends down over encrypted half-millisecond bursts. The Indianapolis has the latest in computers and the very latest in stealth technology, which is the only thing that gives me even a glimmer of hope now. The battered SRA cruiser—if they are indeed damaged and not just pulling a ruse to get into missile range—is creeping closer to New Svalbard with every hour, but even the advanced ELINT gear on the Indy can’t yet see what they’re creeping away from. The fleet units are holding the truce, but their frigate is definitely running an independent search pattern, trying to sniff out the Indy. The Midway and her light cruiser escort are doing slow, predictable laps in orbit, active sensors sweeping the area in equally predictable patterns. In sheer combat power, the light cruiser alone outmatches Indy, but watching those two relics trying to nail down the location of that brand-new stealth ship is almost embarrassing.

At some point, I look up from the screen to see that I’m the only person left in the ops center. I check my computer’s clock and find that it’s 0230 local time, the middle of the night. I lean back and stretch with a yawn.

Behind me, the door to the ops center opens, and Dr. Stewart steps through it. She looks about as fresh as I feel, and there’s a big, old-fashioned porcelain mug in one of her hands. She has a data pad under the other arm.

“Good evening,” she says when she sees me sitting in the corner. “Or good morning, I guess.”

“Everyone’s gone,” I say. “The ops guys turned in a while ago.”

“Actually, I’m here to see you. Where’s the other sergeant?”

“Master Sergeant Fallon? In her quarters, I guess. That mutiny business will wear you out,” I add, and Dr. Stewart smiles wryly.

“For what it’s worth, the civilian crew really appreciates that you decided to stand with us.”

“It wasn’t right for them to try and grab what they did,” I say. “We’re supposed to be a defense force, not an occupying army.”

“I had my prejudices,” she says. “But you’ve managed to put a dent into them. I’m not used to the idea of soldiers being reflective about the ethics of their jobs. I thought you do what they tell you to do.”

“Generally. Not always. They don’t surgically remove your sense of right and wrong when you show up for boot camp, you know.”

“May I sit down?” she asks.

“Sure,” I say. “Your place.”

She pulls up one of the empty chairs from the console bank next to me and rolls it to where I’m sitting. I make her some room and move my rifle, which was leaning against the desk. She sits down with a sigh and puts coffee mug and data pad on the desk next to my loaner admin deck.

“Why aren’t you in your bunk as well? You took part in that mutiny business, too, as far as I recall.”

“I’ll go when Sergeant Fallon is up,” I say. “Somebody’s gotta be down here keeping an eye on things, in case the Indianapolis up in orbit has news to share. They’re sort of our eyes and ears right now.” I point at the admin deck. “That thing is linked with my armor’s computer so I can stay tapped into the telemetry.”

“Is that your job? Communications? I thought you were, you know, a rifleman or something.” She nods at the M-66 carbine leaning against the desk.

“That’s for personal protection. That”—I point at the screen of the admin deck again—“is for calling in the real guns. I’m the guy on the ground who calls in airstrikes, coordinates attack runs, that sort of thing. I can do a lot more damage with the data deck there than with that rifle.”

“I see.” Dr. Stewart takes a sip from her mug and makes a face. “Lukewarm now,” she says. “And too strong. It’s been sitting out too long.”

“So why aren’t you sleeping at this hour?”

She puts down the mug and picks up her data pad.

“Your little science homework,” she says. “I’ve been trying to think up a way to turn this dinky little water stop into a threat to Lanky ships, but so far I’m not coming up with anything. I guess I’m not used to thinking like a soldier.”

“We could fight them on the ground if all those troops dirtside were in bug suits and had bug weapons,” I say. “We have a lot of boots on the moon right now. The trouble is that they all have guns for shooting people, not Lankies.”

“So we can’t really take them on once they land,” Dr. Stewart says. “What about before they get into orbit? I mean, you’ve said that nobody’s ever destroyed one of their seed ships, but have they ever made one turn back, run away?”

I shake my head. “They’re hard to kill on the ground, but impossible to kill in their ships. Those things are immune to anything we can throw at them.”

“They’re using organic weapons, right?”

“Yeah, some sort of penetrator. Get close enough to a Lanky ship, they launch a few thousand of ’em. Goes right through the laminate armor on our ships.”

“Have we tried doing the same?”

“Our main ship-to-ship stuff is missiles. Nuke-tipped for the Lankies. I don’t think they’ve ever made any difference in combat.”

Dr. Stewart taps around on the screen of her data pad and furrows a brow.

“If the fleet would be a little more forthcoming with data on the Lankies instead of treating every little thing as a state secret, maybe we would have found a solution already. But I guess they don’t want to upset the civilians.”

She looks up at me with a frown.

“Anyone ever hit one of their ships with something really big?”

“Some cruiser skipper rammed one with his ship once. Didn’t work. Our biggest ships are a hundred, a hundred and fifty thousand tons. Those seed ships are a few kilometers long. They probably weigh a few million tons. You drive a twenty-K cruiser against a seed ship, it won’t even slow ’em down.”

“That would depend on how fast you drive it,” Dr. Stewart says. “Their hulls may be so tough you can’t crack them with shipboard weapons, but those creatures are living, organic beings. They can’t be immune to physics. I guarantee that if we hit one of those seed ships hard enough, it’ll kill every living thing inside.”

“We haven’t made a dent with a few hundred megatons of nukes. You’d have to go pretty fast to hit them a lot harder than that.”

Dr. Stewart smiles and slurps more of her cold coffee.

“See, I may have a hard time thinking like a soldier, but you think too much like one. Forget gigatons. Start thinking like a scientist. Think exajoules. Petajoules. We don’t want a battle, we want to cause an astronomical event you’ll be able to see on Earth with a telescope in twenty-five years.”

I can’t help but smile at the idea of turning a Lanky seed ship into a new star in the Fomalhaut system.

“I’m all on board with that,” I say. “But how do we get there from here? All we have is that ancient unarmed freighter and a patrol ship. Like I said, not exactly a fearsome task force.”

“Think physics, not guns. A fist-sized rock isn’t so fearsome, right? But throw it at something at one-tenth the speed of light, and the impact energy would be enough to make life really interesting on this moon for a short time.”

She picks up her data pad again and starts scribbling on the screen with her finger.

“Say, how much does that freighter weigh?”

“Five, six thousand tons maybe,” I say. “Fully loaded, three or four times that. But you can’t just ram the thing into a Lanky ship.”

“Why not?”

“Well, you won’t find a crew to man it. Not for a one-way trip.”

Dr. Stewart shrugs. “Who says it needs to be manned? All we have to do is to point it the right way and open the throttle. And if your visitor—our visitor—is coming in on an unchanging trajectory, we won’t even need to nudge the stick after launch. Those Lanky ships are huge, right? It’s not hard to hit a five-hundred-meter bull’s-eye even at high speed. Not for a computer.”

“But someone needs to—”

I look at the admin deck next to me. It’s showing tactical plots right now, but I went to Neural Networks School half a lifetime ago, and I know that only security firewalls keep me from controlling all the essential systems on the Indianapolis remotely. The old freighter with her has far less complicated systems. And it’s a military freighter from the auxiliary fleet, so it has military network hardware, not civilian gear.

“Never mind,” I say. “It’s a super-long shot, but it may actually work.”

“I do science all day,” Dr. Stewart says. “Astrophysics. ‘It’s a super-long shot’ is practically the motto of our profession.”