Battlespace (16 page)

“I asked for it, Tom. The Joint Chiefs feel I have the experience with SPACOM. As for why I did it personally, well, that's
personal
.”

“Mm. But you're army. Outside of a
personal
lust for sadism, or possibly masochism, what does a career army type get out of riding herd on twelve hundred leathernecks?”

“As I said, there are political aspects. My Chief of Staff is Colonel Helen Albo, U.S. Aerospace Force.
All
of the services will be represented on this op.”

So that was it. The other services were jockeying for a piece of the operational pie, fearful of being left out, eager to make sure they received the recognition—and the rewards, in terms of military appropriations—that came with participation in a high-profile deployment like this one.

“General, in my opinion, we don't need more chiefs on this op. We need more Indians.”

“Noted. The command structure change will make operations more efficient, which will work out as equivalent to the addition of a company at
least
. So our AIs tell us.”

“And you have the seniority, of course….” Dominick was a one-star general, the same as Ramsey was now, but he'd
been a brigadier for…what? Five years, now.

“Actually, I've been promoted as well. It's
Major
General Dominick now.”

“I see.” And he did. If they'd offered him that second star as an inducement to go to Sirius, well…that was a hell of an inducement. But Ramsey wondered what else was behind this last-second rearrangement.

“That's all I had to tell you, General,” Dominick said abruptly. “Breaking contact.”

And Ramsey was alone in his office once more.

He felt disquieted. He had nothing against the Army, nor against Dominick personally. But Battlespace had been conceived as a joint Navy-Marine operation. Bringing in the other services—even token staff officers—was a mistake. Putting the mission under the command of an officer, however skilled and experienced, who did not have direct experience with Navy-Marine joint ops was a mistake.

In war, victory inevitably went to the force that made the fewest mistakes.

He hoped MIEU-1 could survive
this
round of mistakes, and that the operation had not already been irredeemably compromised.

13
DECEMBER
2159
THROUGH
28
MARCH
2169

Task Force Isis
En route to Sirius

For another three weeks, preparations were made for the MIEU's departure. Now designated Task Force Isis, the eight vessels under the command of Admiral Harris, were readied.

For safety reasons, both the
Chapultepec
and the
Ranger
both had already been loaded with their stores of antimatter from the L-4 Antimatter Production Facility
Vesuvius
, but loading continued with the other vessels once they were positioned a comfortable distance from other ships and inhabited structures at the LaGrange point. With meticulous care, almost one hundred tons of antimatter, sealed in as many magnetic storage and feed canisters, were ferried across to each of the waiting Navy ships and loaded onboard.

It was the Kemper Torch Drive that enabled ships to reach near-
c
velocities. It operated by standard deuterium fusion, which superheated a suitable reaction mass—the city reservoir's worth of water stored in each ship's mushroom cap—into a star-hot plasma, generating the thrust to push the ship. Antimatter could be magnetically injected into the water as it
heated in the thrust chamber, a process called enrichment, and by greatly increasing the operating temperature, it increased the drive's potential thrust by a factor of ten.

As a result, the Kemper Drive could be run at a much more efficient level, husbanding the available reaction mass and enabling the vessel to accelerate for a year, coast for eight at almost the speed of light, then decelerate for another year at the far end of the voyage.

The last of the new Marines, replacements for the losses at Ishtar, arrived just after Christmas. Onboard the
Chapultepec
, the resident Marines celebrated the holidays with parties, noumenal excursions on the Net, and ersatz Yule trees. With space more limited than ever, socializing was about as celebratory as anyone could manage. Cybehibe techs were putting the Marines into hibernation as fast as they could process them. Alpha Company missed the holidays entirely, since all 175 of them were already safely stowed in their CH tubes, their vital signs slowed almost to nothing, the nanogel slowly saturating their bodies to slow their metabolisms, and even the effects of aging.

The final group to board
Chapultepec
, on the day after New Years, was the senior command constellation—Major General Dominick, Colonel Albo, and five other staff officers, who promptly assumed command of the overall expedition. There was little ceremony in the transition—a curt acknowledgment by both Dominick and Ramsey. They were too busy with the final preparations for launch for the niceties of ritual.

Late on January 4, by shipboard time, both command constellations had also entered cybehibe. Admiral Harris and his officers remained conscious, along with all fleet naval personnel. They would not enter cybernetic hibernation until the fleet was outbound and well beyond the boundaries of the Solar System.

The final hours before launch dwindled away…and
then the final minutes. The gravity-inducing rotation of the hab modules ceased, and the modules folded back along the ships' spines, safely shielded behind the mushroom R-M caps. Final checks, by humans and by AIs, were carried out.

Precisely on schedule, at 1200 hours GMT, January 5, the main drives on all eight Navy starships lit as one. Thrust was maintained for only five minutes and sustained without adding antimatter to the mix, but the burn was enough to drop the ships into trajectories that carried them one after the other half a million kilometers in toward the Earth, whipping past at a perigee of two hundred kilometers for a gravitational boost.

Traveling now at 12 kilometers per second, just past escape velocity, they flashed outbound once more. Once well clear of cis-Lunar space and the danger of frying other spacecraft or orbital stations with the deadly exhaust of their antimatter drives, they arranged themselves into a rosette formation so that no vessel risked entering the high-radiation wake of another. Only then, some three million kilometers out from Earth, were the Kemper Torch Drives fired in earnest, delivering almost a full gravity of thrust.

They continued firing for the better part of a year.

On the twenty-fourth of October 2160, Task Force Isis was almost half a light-year out from Earth, and traveling within a few percent of the speed of light. By this point, relativistic effects had reduced the passage of time to a crawl, but there was no one on board any of the ships awake to notice.

The drives switched off and the flotilla coasted. Operating under the direction of expert AIs within the ship control systems, each manned vessel deployed its array of habitats, setting them to rotating in order to provide artificial gravity. Even in cybernetic hibernation, humans did better with a half-G or so to keep the muscles from turning to pudding over the long haul.

On Earth, another eight months passed. On June 15, 2161, the Aztlan Question erupted from simmer to outright civil war, as Sonora, Sinaloa, southern California, and Chihuahua declared their secession from the Federal Republic.

The revolution's failure was a foregone conclusion from the start. Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and Baja failed to join the uprising, though there were pitched battles between secessionists and loyalists in both La Paz and Houston. Members of the Mexican Congress, perhaps remembering the outcome of several previous wars with their large northern neighbor, voted at the last moment to stay out of the fight, and with Mexico's neutrality, the
Aztlanista
effort was effectively doomed.

Federal troops, already serving as garrisons in the threatened regions, moved swiftly and ruthlessly to put down the local flare-ups. Portions of Los Angeles were wrecked as General Moore's Third Army fought its way into the city, sending a flood of refugees—both Anglo and Latino—north. The First Marine Division was deployed to San Diego, coming ashore at Oceanside, Del Mar, and La Jolla on June 23, and crushing General Rivera's
Armia Aztlanista Independencia
at the Battle of El Cajon three days later. The 1MarDiv was credited with saving San Diego, its port, and its military environs for the Federal Republic.

After the Battle of Mazatlan on July 12, the Second American Civil War became a protracted guerrilla action.

But by September 2, it had also expanded in scope, becoming international. Late in August, the French cargo submarine
Ré Oléron
was caught at the entrance to the Gulf of California by Federal Navy robotic subhunters and forced to the surface. The European Union denied complicity, but it was clear that the French were engaged in running supplies, weapons, and hunter-killer robots to the
Aztlanistas
, and among the weapons taken from
Ré Oléron
's hold were a dozen K-40 antimatter warheads, each with a yield in excess of 50 kilotons.
Washington declared war on France days later, specifically singling out that state from the rest of the EU.

The European Union began to fragment almost at once, with Italy, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine joining the French, and the other European states remaining carefully neutral. Quebec, perhaps remembering her last military conflict with the United States a century before, also opted for neutrality. The Chinese Hegemony honored her Hainan Declaration, a mutual defense treaty signed with the EU a decade before, but which they now chose to interpret as applying to France alone. Their declaration of war was signaled by the launch of almost two hundred space-based missiles with antimatter warheads. Most were intercepted by Federal Aerospace Force missile defenses, but the destruction of the city centers of Portsmouth, New Orleans, and Atlanta signaled the beginning of a much deadlier and farther-flung conflict.

World War VI had begun in earnest.

Nothing that happened on Earth, however, could affect the life-bearing motes of the Task Force Isis. Had the Sun been visible, it would have been only the brightest of stars in the sky, but the flotilla's velocity had turned that sky strange, crowding all of the stars into a dense band of glowing fog encircling the ships some thirty degrees ahead of abeam.

Time passed…weeks aboard the speeding starships, and nine full years for those people left behind. During those nine years, World War VI was fought and won by the Federal Union. The Madrid Peace Accord was signed on April 12,2165. Both the European Union and the Chinese Hegemony were shattered, those monolithic states replaced by patchworks of tiny, economically ruined but independent nations. The Madrid Peace Accord allowed for the rebuilding of a single European government, but it would be years before that dream would be realized. China, meanwhile, had come apart
in a civil war of its own; after the destruction of Beijing in 2164, both South China and Tibet had declared independence. Canton sided with the Americans, while Lhasa remained neutral. Across the planet, however, more and more nations were drawn into the fray, a global spasm of destruction, as nations tried to settle old scores, as refugees drifted across borders, as disease and starvation wiped out whole populations. The destruction of an already fragile and badly damaged ecosystem accelerated. Later estimates pegged the number of war casualties at five hundred million; the death toll from the famine and plague that followed might have been six times higher, though anything like an accurate assessment was impossible.

North America had suffered badly, for a number of the AM warheads, biobombs, and nanoweapons had made it through the aerospace force defenses. The nation's infrastructure had remained more or less intact, however, and her technological base had kept damage and casualties mercifully low…or, at least, not as high as they might have been. Still, a certain social cost was paid. As the engineers began rebuilding Washington, D.C., from the antimatter-blasted rubble, the Federal Republic—which, of necessity, had frankly and openly become a military dictatorship for the duration of hostilities—was voted out of existence.

In its place arose, once again, and phoenixlike, the United States of America. Its capital—at least for the time being—was situated in Columbus, District of Columbia.

None of this was known, or of consequence, to Task Force Isis. On September 12, 2169, the AIs controlling the fleet began deceleration. The habitat arms were pivoted aft, until they were once more flush against each vessel's spine in the drive configuration.

This was the tricky part of ship mechanics in the flight profile. At near-light speed, it was imperative that passengers and crew be kept safely within the shadow of the broad
mushroom cap of each starship's R-M tank. About a quarter of the total water had been expended in the acceleration phase, but there was water enough still to absorb and scatter incoming high-energy particulate radiation—specifically the stray hydrogen and helium atoms and nuclei that, with a relative difference in velocity of almost
c
, became deadly.

Previous star flights had seen the ships spun end-for-end at the beginning of the deceleration phase of the flight. With the crew and passengers now exposed to the deadly flux of radiation coming in from astern, a complex system of water-filled balyuts had been employed in order to screen them. The system, though, made engineers nervous. An impact with a grain of dust missed by the drive flare itself packed the destructive potential of a fistful of high explosives. If the balyut ruptured, the humans in its shadow would fry. In fact, there was a fair chance that the percent or two of casualties each flight suffered en route was due to stray particles missed by the water balloons aft.

With this in mind, and beginning with the explorer ship
Isis
, a new system had been brought on line. The plasma drive conduit now extended along the entire length of each ship's spine, passing all of the way through the R-M tank and emerging at the bow. Reconfigured, the drive was now reversed, the star-hot plasma accelerated magnetically forward, up the spine, toward the bow. This meant, of course, new headaches in shielding the hab modules from the avalanche of highly radioactive plasma through the ship's central column, scant meters away, but this had been accomplished by using a fraction of that energy to generate powerful magnetic shields about the ship's spine near the hab modules. Now, the ship didn't need to flip end-for-end, and the R-M tank continued to shield the sleepers.

At least, that was how it would work in theory….

In practice there was a lot more in the way of complex systems in both the ship's engineering and electronics that could
go terribly wrong. The ships' designers hoped, however, that the change would improve the odds for the survival for
all
of the sleeping Marines.

During the first two weeks of March 2170, the flotilla entered the environs of Sirius space. Slowed now to a handful of kilometers per second, the vessels—their R-M shielding tanks now worn and deeply pitted by the wear and tear of their ten-year voyage—moved into increasingly dusty space, with the dazzling, pinpoint beacon of Sirius A casting a brilliant glare, white with a faint tinge of blue, just ahead.

The Navy crews had been revived by the ship AIs on February 23. General Dominick and his command constellation, along with the CAG staff on board the carrier, were revived on March 12.

Both
Chapultepec
and the carrier
Ranger
released a small cloud of drones—AR-7 Argus reconnaissance probes and UV-20K robot drones—while the fleet was still almost eighty a.u.s out. Traveling much more quickly than the starships, these probes swarmed into the inner system, measuring, listening, looking, recording…seeking any information at all of possible interest to Dominick, Harris, and their staffs. The stargate was located, and the task force shaped an inbound vector for its vicinity.