One Good Soldier

July 1, 2394 AD

Ross 128, Arcadia Orbit

Friday, 3:45 PM, Earth Eastern Standard Time

"We're all stop, CO! Approximately three astronomical units from Arcadia out of the ecliptic," Nav announced.

"Good job, Penny!" the admiral replied. "XO, COB, get my ship back in order."

"Aye, sir."

"Air Boss, how is the QMT of the fighters coming?"

"We'll be at one hundred percent within the minute, sir."

"Good. As soon as that is done, have the wounded QMT protocols sped up. I don't want to lose a good soldier because we couldn't get them to sickbay in time."

"Aye, sir."

Wallace scanned the ship in his DTM, trying to figure out his next move. It wouldn't take long for the Seppy ships to figure out where they were. The interesting thing would be to see if they attacked them there, or if they took the QMT facility back, or if they'd try to protect the QMT control facility on the planet below at Capitol City.

Whatever the Seppy bastards did, he needed a new strategy. Casualty reports from the first wave were huge. The Lincoln was dead in the water, and the Tyler had lost Aux Prop and several DEG batteries. The Roosevelt and the Madira were in the best shape, but they were limping a bit.

"CO! CDC!"

"Go, CDC!"

Shit, what now? he thought.

I'm detecting seven hyperspace jaunts, sir. I'm sure it's that, Uncle Timmy replied.

"Sir! We just detected seven hyperspace jaunts. Five from the previous engagement zone and two from the enemy vessels that were waiting in reserve out by one of the moons," the combat direction center officer explained to him. Wallace didn't like what he was hearing. That was seven ships; they were coming to finish them off.

"Roger that, CDC." Admiral Jefferson turned back to his XO. "Larry! We've got incoming. Let's get ready for it."

"Aye, sir!"

Sound the call, Tim.

Aye, sir.

"General quarters, general quarters, prepare for incoming attack. All hands, all hands, man your battlestations. Prepare for incoming attack. All hands, all hands, man your battlestations," Uncle Timmy announced again over the intercom and to all AICs.

The bosun's pipe sounded throughout the ship, sending a chill over the already overworked crew. Considering that the day started with wargames in the desert of Mars and then wound up across the stars in a real shooting war, the admiral realized that his crew were performing like superhuman heroes. Sometimes, that wasn't enough. But according to his orders from the president, it had to be.

"CO, the ships are coming out of jaunt near us at the following coordinates, sir. Uh, only one of them is coming out close to us. The others are a tenth of an AU off," the STO shouted over klaxons that started up. Wallace had his AIC turn the annoying things off.

"Roger that, STO."

"CO! CDC!"

"We've got the ships coming out of hyperspace, CDC."

"Uh, yes, sir. But, sir, we're picking up EM disturbances near the planet that would suggest QMT jumps."

"Keep me posted, CDC. I hope that's our backup."

"Aye, sir."

"CO! That Seppy hauler is on a collision course for the Lincoln!" the Nav shouted.

"I'm detecting activated gluonium, Admiral!" the STO added. They sure as hell didn't need to be around if the Seppies fired off a gluonium bomb that close.

"Shit! Kamikaze, Admiral!" the COB shouted.

"Helm, emergency jaunt away from here now!" Wallace sounded an alarm across the fleet ships and opened a channel. "Evasive jaunts immediately! Gluonium Kamikaze!"

"Emergency jaunt, sir!" Helmsman Lieutenant Junior Grade Cindy Lewis frantically punched in the commands for an emergency jaunt. It would take the hyperspace projector a few seconds to spin up the quantum vortex required to pass out of normal space. Who knew if they had time?

Wallace sat calm for the few seconds as they passed. The enemy hauler pulled in closer to the Lincoln and opened fire on it. All of its missiles, DEGs, and railguns poured into the wounded supercarrier's sections that housed the jaunt system. The Seppy ship moved closer and closer to the Lincoln, and Wallace could see that there was nothing he could do for them.

"Goddamn those bastards!" He slammed his fist down against his chair arm. Just as the hyperspace vortex whirled around them and they blanked out of normal space, the Seppy kamikaze ship exploded. The Lincoln was vaporized instantly.

A few seconds later, as the Madira popped out of hyperspace, the admiral managed to relax long enough to breathe. His DTM dinged in the updated blue-force tracking signals showing that the Tyler and the Roosevelt had managed to jaunt away before the hauler had exploded. The three U.S. supercarriers were battered and badly outnumbered. Or at least they had been. His blue-force system showed four new U.S. supercarriers: the USS Ronald Reagan, the USS Barack Obama, the USS Zachary Taylor, and the USS Andrew Jackson. There were still eight Seppy ships, but only four of them were supercarriers, and one of those supercarriers had taken a good bit of damage. The other four Seppy ships were battle cruiser class—about two-thirds the size of a supercarrier. Seven supercarriers to eight Seppy ships; finally some decent odds.

"CO Madira, CO Obama!"

"Goddamn, I'm glad to hear from you, Johnny!" Wallace answered Captain Johnny Practice's hail. He opened a channel to all the fleet ship captains. "I'm glad to see all four of you. Be advised. We just lost the Lincoln. She was totally destroyed. Her pilots and groundpounders are on the surface of Arcadia near the governor's mansion in the center of Capitol City. Our intel has determined that is where the QMT controls are. So do not destroy that mansion! In the meantime, we're a bit surrounded over here and could use a hand. We also need to put a couple ships on the planet to support the fight there. Carla, you and Johnny take the Obama and the Jackson down. Felix, you and Kiana form up on us here and see if we can't keep the Seppies away from our attack long enough to get that QMT system under our control."

"Aye, Admiral!"

Now things are gonna get a little better, he thought.

Damn right, Admiral, Uncle Timmy agreed.

"Admiral, the Seppy fleet is forming up on us. Looks like they brought their fighters with them, sir," the XO said.

"Well, that will help out downstairs. All right, let's prepare to take incoming!"

"Admiral, with that in mind, do we want to continue our plan to jaunt in two minutes back to the planet?" Commander Penny Swain, the nav officer, asked.

"Good question, Penny." Wallace thought briefly. They were still outnumbered up here and in a ball. He still liked the idea of going to a bowl and being able to support the troops on the ground better. "Yes. Our men and women down there need us."

Timmy, DTM the plan to the rest of the fleet.

Aye, sir.

"Joe! The SIF generators on the aft of the ship are down. There just aren't any other cooling systems to bring them down," Lieutenant Mira Concepcion shouted. The noise in the Engineering Room was a little too loud to talk at normal tones, and the stress from the ship being rocked back and forth didn't help.

"Well, it sure as hell didn't take long for the Seppy mothers to find out where we jaunted to," Petty Officer Andy Sanchez added.

"If y'all wanted peace and quiet you shouldn't have joined the Navy!" Joe scanned the three-dimensional diagram of the ship, looking at all the systems at once in detail all the way down to the nuts and bolts, transistors and integrated circuits, and quantum-fluctuation exciters and spacetime limiters. His problem right now was the universal one, one that caused almost all systems to end up failing: thermal management. Waste heat was the hardest goddamned problem in all of physics and engineering to deal with. And now that one SIF generator was down, he was having to spread the structural integrity fields thin from the others to cover that section of the supercarrier. That meant that other SIF generators were now working even harder. It was an avalanche of disaster that only needed one or two more snowflakes to trigger it.

I should've taken up business or marketing, he thought.

Yeah, but then you'd be rich and would miss out on all this, his AIC, Debbie, replied in his mindvoice.

"Too bad we can't just jaunt over the ice cap of this planet and cool the thing off," Andy said sarcastically.

"I don't think that would work, Andy," the technology officer shouted over his shoulder. He had a flashlight between his teeth, power cabling draped across both shoulders, and a multitool in each hand, working away at an overloaded control circuit for the QMT power supply. The specialist warrant officers were the experts on the quantum-membrane teleportation technology, but those guys still needed good old-fashioned power, and all that came from Engineering. And, from what Joe could tell, the QMT had been working overtime since the battle started. That meant there were heavy casualties and/or a lot of troop movement.

"Why not, Lieutenant?"

"Well, you'd have to get the cold air in contact with the hot coolant somehow. Not sure how you'd do that. Oh shit!" A spark flew across the panel he had pulled out, discharging several thousand volts across his fingers. "That fucking hurt," he said, dropping the multitools and shaking his hands.

"Watch yourself, Lieutenant. Do I need to get Andy over there to show you how to handle high voltage?" Joe laughed. Then, as he panned the three-D image by the flow loops between the aft SIF generator heat exchangers and the main coolant reservoir one deck below Engineering, it hit him. "Son of bitch, Andy! That just might work."

"What will, Joe?"

"Cold air." Joe continued moving the mindview diagrams around rapidly, looking for the one that would work. Then he found it. "There it is! The main coolant lines of damned near everything flow through the exterior bulkheads that aren't pressurized. Any cooling along the flow lines is purely radiative. Hmm . . ."

Debbie, what if we pumped pressurized helium or air or something in there? he thought.

Well, the only thing we could do in a hurry is air, Joe.

Okay, let's do it. What about some water mist?

Yeah, we could do that.

Hell, we are about to jaunt into atmosphere. Let's just open up some panels and let it flow through.

That would work. With the flow speed, it would supercool the air as it was forced down the tube. My calculations show it would increase the cooling efficiency by ten percent.

That might be enough.

"CO! CHENG!"

"Go, CHENG!"

"Sir, we need to get into atmosphere. It might allow us to cool off the SIFs quicker. The sooner, the better."

"We're headed to treetop high in about seventy seconds."

"Great, sir.

"All right, we're hitting the air in about a minute. I want hatches opened to the bulkheads, uh . . ." Joe stepped toward a holoscreen and had his AIC display the image that was in his mind. "Okay, that's it. Here, here, here, and here. We open these hatches and route airflow through the exterior hull walls. We need to figure out how to pull the structural integrity fields in one layer hull or just turn them on and off rapidly enough to get some airflow in there. Any ideas on that?

"Shit, at the rate we're going, the SIFs are gonna shut down anyway," Mira complained.

"Probably, but let's hope not! Shit, there has to be a way to get the air in the exterior dry hull without compromising our security." Joe was perplexed and running out of time. "We'll figure it out. Get those hatches open. Andy, be careful. You'll be outside the SIFs on the hull, and there are fighters and incoming out there. Armor up, but do it quick."

"I'm on it, Joe," Andy replied. He took off running across the room, underneath the hyperspace projector conduit, and into an antechamber where the e-suits were kept. Joe hated sending one of his team into such a dangerous situation. Before he would have done the dangerous bit himself, but now he was CHENG and had too many problems to deal with to do every little dangerous and shitty job. Part of command was sending good people into bad places. Joe would just have to get used to that.

"We need a sheer fence, Joe," the main propulsion assistant, Lieutenant Commander Keri Benjamin, said. "You know, a metal plate full of holes, or a grate."

"Maybe that would work," Joe thought out loud, rubbing at his chin. "Would that stop a QMT? Kurt? You're the tech officer."

"Hell if I know, Joe. That QMT shit is so new I barely even understand why it is possible," Lieutenant Kurt Hyerdahl replied from halfway inside the console that had previously tried to electrocute him.

"Okay, we'll ask." He had to ask his AIC for the names of the warrant officers assigned to the ship as the QMT experts. Then he got one of them on the horn. "CWO4 Ransom, this is the CHENG!"

"What can I do for you, CHENG?"

"Would a metal grate stop a QMT?"

"No, CHENG. You can QMT through walls, you know."

"Duh, right. But what about SIFs? Isn't there some interaction with spacetime or the vacuum fluctuations or something that confuses the QMT connection?" Joe asked.

"Uh, something like that, CHENG. Uh, sir, is this gonna take long, cause, well, we're kinda busy down here." Mr. Ransom seemed a bit uppity to Joe, maybe even constipated.

"Well, we need to flow air in from the outside without allowing enemy QMTs. Could we put small holes in the SIFs and do that?" There was no immediate answer, which meant that Joe had asked a question that the arrogant CWO4 QMT expert hadn't thought of.

"Damn, I never thought of that. Hell, you could just make the SIFs a screen instead of a solid field, and think how much energy you'd save on that," he replied.

Energy saved, hell—think of the heat we wouldn't have to dissipate if the field were half the size due to holes in it, Joe thought. Since it is a surface-area thing, that will be a squared factor! We could increase the SIF lifetime in battle by orders of magnitude.

We need to get on with this, Joe, his AIC warned him. Time was getting short, and the fucking Seppies were still outside, pounding away at them.

"Uh, how small do the holes need to be?"

"My AIC says a tenth of a millimeter in diameter with the same center-to-center spacing. And I bet that is conservative. Damn good idea, CHENG."

"Right, Mr. Ransom. Thanks for your help. CHENG out."

"You're welcome, CHENG."

Joe turned and noticed for the first time the bewilderment on the faces of his engineering crew. He wasn't sure if it was because they were confused or couldn't believe the brilliant idea they had just pulled out of their collective asses. He didn't care. Ideas did nobody any good if you didn't follow through with them.

"Okay, Kurt, get that damned panel fixed and get on to the next job. Mira, thanks for the sheer-fence idea. I'm reconfiguring the SIFs on the aft section and in nooks and crannies that are unlikely to be hit by enemy fire to have the screen geometry. I'm also doing that over the openings that Andy is making. We'll see how it works."

"All hands, all hands, prepare for hyperspace jaunt in ten, nine, eight, seven, six . . ."

"Goddamn, that's a sight," Engineer's Mate Petty Officer First Class Andy Sanchez clanked through the outer dry hull of the aft starboard section where the SIF-generator coolant conduits flowed. Even in his tech e-suit he could feel the radiant heat from the pipes. He looked forward and then aft. As far as he could see was the empty corridor between the outer hull and the next layer that the Navy had called the dry hull since the days of submarines. The corridor was poorly lit, and the white light from his helmet cast eerie shadows across the deck plating. The ship jerked downward fast, making him lose his balance briefly. Andy fell back into the coolant conduit and could feel the heat even through his armored glove and seal layer. "Goddamn it all to fuck, I'd better watch what I'm doing or that fucking thing might fry me."

Andy crawled up through the bulkhead to the outer hatch and clanked it a few times with the BFW he had brought with him. The technical term for the tool was a "big fucking wrench." After tapping the bolts on the outer hull hatch with the BFW, he placed it on the nuts, let it self-adjust to them, and then he torqued like hell to break them free. After a few seconds the bolts popped loose. He turned the safety latch and was almost sucked out of the ship. As soon as he had pushed the hatch panel up beyond the SIF, air—very fast-moving air—grabbed it and yanked it away. Twilight from the red dwarf shined through, and Andy could see the planet below.

"That's three. One more to go," he told himself. Then he dropped down to the deck and hurried to the last one of the exterior hatch panels, a good hundred meters away.

The bolts on the last hatch were more stubborn. Andy tapped them harder with the BFW and tried to torque them loose. No luck. He tapped them again, and this time he sprayed some solvent on them. He tapped them again, and then tried turning them again. One of them broke free, and he managed to get the thing off. The second nut was stuck.

"Stubborn bastard!" Andy pulled a laser cutter out of his pocket and started in on the bolt with it. About that time, something slammed into the ship above him with so much force the metal vibrated in his hands and made his suit ring.

"Ahh!" He reflexively grabbed at his ears, which were inside his helmet, of course.

Then another loud hit and the hatch blew free and the SIF directly above him blinked out for the briefest of instants. That was all it took as the atmosphere rushing over the hull at several hundred kilometers per hour sucked him right out of the blown hatch and into the evening sky. Large orange and green AA tracers zipped all around him, slamming into the ship's hull from the ground below. Andy spun with his arms and legs akimbo until he nearly passed out from it. One of the tracer rounds passed right between his legs and nicked his thigh. It burned for a brief second, but the suit sealed it off and killed the pain. Seeing the tracers pass between his legs scared him more than seeing one tear into his leg. His bladder and bowels let loose uncontrollably.

A few seconds passed, and then he realized that the impact of him hitting the air so abruptly had certainly broken several of his bones. A tech e-suit had minimal armor on it and wasn't designed to take that type of punishment. His right leg, not the one hit by the AA round, was definitely broken. His left arm had banged into the hatch as he was sucked out, and he was sure that the arm and the collarbone were snapped completely. The suit had administered meds to him, or he would've been in so much pain that he would have passed out anyway.

Andy spun out away from the ship's gravitational field too quickly to fall back to it. He was falling free. He looked down and could see the ground beneath him at about two kilometers. The Madira had already jaunted in to atmospheric entry height of about twenty kilometers and was decelerating to the treetops. The treetops were still a ways off, and now Andy could see the Madira almost a quarter of a kilometer away from him. At one point several mecha zoomed by, shooting at each other. Andy thought he could have reached out and touched the things, until the air wake hit him and sent him spinning again.

"Oh shit! I don't wanna die like this . . ." Andy closed his eyes as the treetops rushed upward at him. Just as he was bracing himself for death, his heartrate hit nearly two-hundred beats per minute. The next thing he knew, there was a flash of light and the sound of sizzling bacon.