Battlespace (21 page)

The remaining enemy ships suddenly began concentrating their fire on the fighters.
Talons Seven
,
Thirteen
, and
Sixteen
all were hit by positron beams within the space of eight seconds, and all of the fighters suffered near-misses as their constant, gut-wrenching jinks shifted them narrowly out of the enemy's line of fire. Alexander bumped high and to port just as a particle beam down his starboard side blasted his electronic feeds with static.

Any closer
, he thought,
and I can toast marshmallows
.

And suddenly the enemy craft were no longer firing. Those remaining continued to hurtle toward the MIUE fleet, but they were inert, some tumbling, others fragmenting.
Daring
and
New Chicago
continued to fire, however, for some seconds longer, vaporizing each craft in turn.

Moments later, the sky was clear of targets.

The Redtails, what was left of them, flipped end for end and began to decelerate in preparation for their return to the
Ranger
.

31
MARCH
2170

Combat Command Center
UFR/USS
Chapultepec
1615 hours, Shipboard time

“The fighters are on the way in,” Ricia Anderson said.

“Good.” Ramsey didn't look up from his desk. “I think we lucked out on that one.”

“You don't sound very happy about it, T.J.”

Now he did look up. His exec only called him T.J. when they were alone and
not
on duty…unless she was specifically trying to break through his defenses in order to get his attention. Ricia was more than the best command constellation executive officer he'd ever known. She was friend, confident, and lover.

That last was risky, of course. Fraternization—what a delightfully antique concept that was!—was not encouraged within the Corps, but for men and women serving at isolated duty stations, sometimes for years without seeing Earth, sex between the ranks was expected and quietly accepted. The danger came with the power politics inherent in both sex and in command—the senior officer using his or her authority to encourage or even force sexual favors from a subordinate…or, just as unethically malignant, a subordinate using sex to manipulate a superior officer.

Ramsey and Anderson both were aware of the dangers and had discussed them at length. They'd gone so far as to create a kind of code for the two of them, safe words intended to say, “Hold it! We're over the line. There's something wrong.”

In almost two years of subjective time, neither of them had needed to invoke a safe word.

But using his initials while they were on duty was a different kind of safe word alarm. “Is there a problem, Ricia?”

“A problem? No, not really. You just seem…really stressed. About the Redtails. About the mission. I'm not sure.”

He sighed, leaning back from his desk. “Stress goes with the job,” he told her. “I
am
concerned about the combined arms aspect. And I'm worried about the lack of good intel. We're really fighting in the dark on this one.”

“Okay. What can we do about it?” She walked around his desk and stood close beside him. “Either problem, I mean?”

He wanted to reach up and pull her down on his lap, but there was too great a chance his orderly might come in. Everyone in the MIEU knew he and Ricia slept together, but he would not cross the lines of professional conduct. That was one of the rules.

“With the lack of intel, we do what we always do…try to gather more. We're getting some good stuff back from the probes, now, and Cassius I-3 is on his way. I'd be happier knowing something about the opposition, though.”

She put her hand on his shoulder, gently massaging. “Like the fact that they use crappy tactics?”

“Crappy tactics with no depth to them. No jigging or attempts at maneuver. No combat reserve, no fallback plan. Unless they haven't sprung it on us yet.”

“You think the attack yesterday was a deliberate feint? Something to make us think we'd already won?”

“It's possible. Damn it, we know nothing about their psychology. About how they think. Watching their battle plan unfold yesterday…I kept wondering if we weren't seeing a
purely robotic response, and one with a pretty low-grade AI behind it at that.”

“I was struck by that too. We might be facing nothing but some kind of caretaker computer program. Or maybe the people who built the thing just don't have the same experience with military operations we do.”

“There are so many possibilities,” he told her, “it doesn't really make sense to try to choose among them. We need more intel.”

“Granted. And we're doing what we can to get it. What's your other worry? Something about combined arms?”

“Dominick.”

She nodded. “You noticed?”

“Of course. During the battle, he wasn't really in command. He kept deferring to the rest of us. And he kept
hesitating
.”

Any good commanding officer listened to his subordinates, of course. But Ramsey had been struck by what he thought of as dithering on Dominick's part. He kept turning to Ramsey and to Admiral Harris for advice, almost as though he'd been looking for their approval.

Ramsey's deepest worry still focused on the simple fact that Dominick was an Army general in command of a joint Navy–Marine interstellar operation. Neither his training nor his experience had prepared him for this kind of war.

That kind of inexperience could get a lot of people killed.

“So what can we do about the good general?” Ricia asked.

“Not a damned thing…unless he screws up so badly we have to pull a Regs Three-Five on him. And I can't see that happening.” Regs Three-Five was slang for the section of the latest publication of military command regulations spelling out the exact circumstances that not only allowed but
required
subordinate officers to take a senior officer
out of the line of command…and not be charged with mutiny.

Things like treason, incapacitating illness, or insanity.

“So what you're saying, T.J.,” Ricia told him, “is that we're doing everything that can be done, there's nothing else that needs to be done, and we should just keep on doing what we're doing and be done with it.”

He chuckled. “That about covers it, I guess. But we need to stay sharp.”

“Is there any other way for Marines to be?”

“No. But I've been rereading Sun Tzu.”

“Which of Sun Tzu's sayings in particular? He had a lot of them.”

“The one about knowing the enemy…and knowing yourself.”

Sun Tzu's
The Art of War
was still required reading for all military officers, even though it had been written twenty-six hundred years ago. The third chapter of that work ended with a classic aphorism:
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.

She nodded. “And we don't understand the enemy. Odds of fifty-fifty aren't all that hot.”

“Not almost nine light-years from home. But I'm more worried that we don't know ourselves.”

“We need to work on the senior command structure, I agree,” she told him. “It's pretty creaky. But what we
do
know is that we're Marines. We adapt. We improvise. We overcome.
Semper fi
.”

“Ooh-rah.” There was no energy, no enthusiasm in the old Corps battle cry.

“You know,” she went on, “we're really in pretty good
shape right now. Morale is good. Most of our people are happy we beat them so easily.”

“Mm. I'll save my celebration for once we've secured the objective.”

She smiled. “And which definition of
secured
are we using today, General?”

He chuckled. It was a reference to an old Marine joke, one going back at least two hundred years. The four main branches of the military, it seemed, often had trouble talking to one another because their definitions for certain oft-used words were different. The word
secure,
for instance, was a case in point.

Tell the Army to secure a building and they would occupy it. Tell the Navy to secure the building and they'd go in, turn off all the lights, and lock the doors.

Tell the
Marines
to secure a building, however, and they would respond by assaulting the structure using both vertical envelopment and armored amphibious assault vehicles, capture it, clear each floor and room, and set up defenses with interlocking fields of suppressive fire and support weapon strong points, with remote sensors, UAV overwatch, and recon patrols on the outer defensive perimeter, with satcom channels to call in Marine Air close-support, armor, and arty. Finally, they would prepare for CQB—close-quarters battle—as the situation required.

The Aerospace Force would secure the building by taking out a three-year lease with option to buy….

“The
Marine
definition, of course,” he replied. “We don't want to lease the Wheel. We want to take it.”

The Wheel
. It was what the Marines had begun calling that enormous, that awe-inspiring structure hanging in space ahead of the battle group. It was an attempt to reduce the thing to manageable proportions.
Anyone who can build on that grand a scale
, he thought,
ought to be able to swat us down like flies. So where the hell is the flyswatter
?

SF/A-2 Starhawk
Talon Three
On approach to UFR/USS
Ranger
1635 hours, Shipboard time

His Starhawk was down to one, maybe two more squirts of go-juice.

This, Alexander thought to himself, was the
other
worst moment of aerospace carrier ops…the trap. Acceleration at launch was carried out with reaction mass stored in the launch tanks, which were discarded after they were empty. But after decelerating at the far end of a mission run, then accelerating once again to get headed back to the fleet, aerospace fighter pilots usually had precious little reaction mass left for the final slowdown, and often came in with R-M tanks dry. Starhawks, especially, had a rep as “nuclear kites.” Their maneuvering system—and the sweet way they responded to the jacked-in pilot's thoughts—made it way too easy to burn up your R-M and find yourself adrift, waiting for a rescue tug to come out and tow you back in, kitelike, on the end of a long tether.

What that meant now, at the end of the mission, was coming in dead-stick, as they'd said in the bad old days of manual-controlled aircraft, needing to put all of your trust in the men and the AIs controlling the carrier's magfield.

The same powerful magnetic field that had launched him, directed along the
Ranger
's spine and through superconducting field projector drones astern, would now be used to slow him down enough that he could drift gently into the trap bay.

The hard part was trusting the guy at the other end to get it right. They were
Navy
, after all, not Marines….

“
Talon Three
, we read you eighty-three kilometers out, inbound at one-point-one kps. You are three-five mps high, seven mps to port. Please correct your drift and reduce forward speed to point seven five kps.”

He checked his own readouts and agreed.
Ranger
was still no more than a bright star forward. “Copy, PriFly. Correcting.” He thought-clicked the control and fired a burst first from a port maneuvering thruster, eliminating his slight left drift. He then fired his dorsal thruster once…twice. His upward drift—“upward” as described by the artificial horizon declared by
Ranger
's PriFly—ceased…almost. But then warnings flashed in his noumenal vision. That final maneuvering burst emptied his R-M tank.

“
Talon Three
, we read you still with one zero mps high and your inbound at point four kps high. Please correct.”

“PriFly, check your instruments. My tanks are bone dry. What you see is what you get.”

“Ah, copy that,
Three
.”

“You'd better, Navy. Get ready to catch me.”

“Sit back and relax, Marine. We've gotcha.”

He hoped so. He'd elected to correct his drift first, since that made it harder for
Ranger
's trap crew to grab him, but he was still coming in too hot. It was going to be rough….

The Starhawk drifted past the outermost FPDs, and felt a sudden sharp tug toward the front of his craft as deceleration hit him. He watched his velocity readout in his noumenal display, the numbers flickering down in meters per second, felt the pressure of deceleration increase until his harness dug painfully at his shoulders, chest, and belly. Damn it, he should have reoriented the fighter to come in tail-first, but he'd not wanted to waste even a drop of go-juice.

Then the
Ranger
's stern loomed dead ahead, swelling from a star point to the massive banks of drive venturis sweeping past just below his Starhawk's keel. The trap bay embraced him….

…and he was hurtling down the length of the bay, still slowing as the carrier's drive fields bled his fighter of kinetic energy.

It took Alexander a long moment to realize he was again
enjoying zero-G. He thought-clicked to disconnect from the Starhawk's computer, then opened his eyes and saw only the blackness of the interior of his cockpit. All he could hear was the ringing in his ears, the pounding of his heart.

The moment when he was no longer linked to his fighter…that was always a wrenchingly lonely few seconds. It was like realizing he was…merely human, no longer able to soar free among the stars.

He felt the vibration through the fuselage as the exit lock clamped down over the escape hatch above his head. A moment later, there was a sharp hiss and a blast of light as the hatch cycled open. Hands reached down to unjack him from his fighter. He hit the seat harness release, then tried to move about to give those helping hands access to the small forest of cables sprouting from him.

“Welcome home, Pooner. Let's get you out of there.” Master Sergeant Nancy Rierson was his crew chief, responsible for the Starhawk's maintenance. Her first responsibility, though, was to get him fully disconnected from the spacecraft.

“Took a near-miss down the starboard side, Nan,” he told her. “Was getting some red flags on the starboard-side electronic net after that. Intermittent stuff. Might be some EMP fry along that side….”

“Don't worry about it, sir. We'll have it squared away ASAP. Can you stand up?”

He managed to drag himself up to a standing position in the hatch, then allowed the others to maneuver him the rest of the way, floating him up and clear of the cockpit. He always tended to forget—while he was star-soaring—that he had a physical body, one made of flesh and blood, not wound carbon fiber and plastic-titanium laminates. Suddenly he felt weak and the muscles in his legs and back and shoulders shrieked their protest. He'd been strapped into that cockpit for almost ten hours, with his only food and water coming
through a pair of tubes inside his helmet. As someone lifted the helmet off his head and unsealed his suit, he caught the ripe stink of his own body. The suit had a limited ability to absorb wastes and included a kind of plastic diaper layered with nanotechnic cleaning agents, but twelve hours was a
long
time. He stank.