The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (2 page)

PARIS – Bidding for colonization rights for a suspected
terran world orbiting 10 Tauri has reached an unprecedented E200 billion, a
record that even exceeds bids on planets that have previously been confirmed to
be habitable by humans. The planet, in European space, will not be subject to a
close survey until 2147 at the earliest, when a wormhole is expected to open
there. European officials have not indicated whether they will accept any bid
and have hinted they may opt to colonize the planet themselves, or perhaps
allow multiple nations to colonize different regions of the world. Colonization
Minister Claude Delvaux has ruled out accepting bids from any belligerents in
the war, a move that some experts suggested may prompt Iran to withdraw from
the conflict to pursue the planet instead.

USS Apache, Wolf 359

“Contact!” The astronaut’s voice was shrill with
excitement. “Two candles lit at Thales keyhole. Drive signatures indicate they
are Whiskey-12 and Whiskey-15.”

“No, no, no!”
Apache’s
executive officer grew louder
with each exclamation. “They can’t be back in action yet. Intel, didn’t you
tell us that those Hans would be out another three weeks?”

“Aye, sir,” said the intelligence officer, desperately searching
for a way to mollify his superior. “Analysis had indicated the
Gan Ying
needed
additional repairs.”

“The analysis was fucking wrong, Lieutenant,” said the XO, a
lieutenant commander named Nathan Howell. He seemed to believe swearing made
him sound serious, but most of the Combat Information Center crew simply
regarded him as coarse. “Can’t you people get anything right?”

The target of his outburst, a recent addition to the
Apache
’s
staff, remained mute. He hadn’t performed the analysis, just relayed it from
the technical experts in the fleet who had studied the damage suffered by the
Chinese ship in a skirmish several weeks ago.

“Someone needs to go wake up the captain and brief him,” the
XO went on. He looked at the intelligence officer. “Since you aren’t doing us
much good here, how about you?”

“Aye, sir.”

The officer pushed off from the console, with a little more
force than normal, in hopes of getting out of the CIC before the XO could
reload and fire again.

But as he departed, the astronaut at the sensor station tapped
his elbow. The officer halted his motion on a handhold.

“Sir, am I pronouncing Thales right?” said the astronaut, her
voice hushed. She was a nervous 19-year-old first-cruiser named Dacey Allenby. She
pronounced the planet’s name as a single syllable.

The officer smiled gently. “No. It’s pronounced
‘Thay-leez,’” he said. “The planet is named after a dead Greek philosopher. But
don’t worry about it. Everyone knew what you were talking about.”

“‘Thay-leez.’ I’ll get it right next time, sir,” the
astronaut said.

The officer nodded and pushed off again, reaching the
vessel’s axial tube without the XO launching another barrage. Captain
Hernandez’s quarters were three decks below.

The captain didn’t always respond to his handheld when he
was asleep, so the officer knocked on the hatch and waited. He heard coughing
within, and the hatch opened.

“I trust you have a good reason for waking me, Mister
Mercer?” he said hoarsely.

During his brief, Lieutenant (junior grade) Neil Mercer
did his best to ignore his captain’s frail condition. Commander Roman Hernandez
was only in his late fifties, but a life in space had taken an extreme toll. He
had made too many transitions from gravity to weightlessness, and he had taken
too many stray neutrons from the fusion candle and protons from solar flares. Despite
all the modern shielding, exercise regimens and drugs, his body was failing.

Neil politely paused the brief each time the captain lapsed
into a bout of coughing. Hernandez had good and bad days, and scuttlebutt was
the ship’s doctor was, out of loyalty to a friend, not reporting the severity
of the captain’s condition to higher command, as that would see Hernandez
replaced. A darker rumor held that Hernandez was from a family that refused
genetic improvements, and the Space Force had declined to have him removed to
avoid appearing it was discriminating against him.

The captain had a stubbled, rotund face topped by short gray-and-white
hair. He completed a twenty-second fit of coughs, the last of which launched a
small comet of phlegm that darkened a spot on the left sleeve of Neil’s khaki
uniform.

It was too much. “Sir? We can do this later, if you prefer,”
Neil said.

“No, I’m fine, Mister Mercer. Go ahead.”

Neil projected a map of the Wolf 359 system from his
handheld. The star, one of the closest to Earth, served as a strategic junction
between wormhole arms controlled by several powers. Fleets guarded five of the
six exits from the system, but neither side had the strength for a decisive
attack upon the other, for fear of abandoning their own wormholes and leaving
vital systems beyond at risk. So for months, Wolf 359 had resembled a middle
school dance, with everyone sticking close to the walls and exits, avoiding
coming into contact on the dance floor.
Gan Ying’s
recent clash with a
hydrogen tanker convoy and her escorts had been an exception.

The system had seven planets of any size, all worlds of rock
and ice, their collective composition closer to that of the moon system of
Jupiter or Saturn than that of the Solar System as a whole. The wormholes
orbited within the fourth and fifth tracks, far enough apart that they didn’t
interfere with one another.

USS Apache
was part of a three-frigate escort to a
convoy of fourteen space trains and five transports, carrying between them a
brigade of troops, including the British Army’s Black Watch and the Royal
Marines’ Four Five Commando. They were bound for the New Albion, United
Kingdom’s enclave on the multinational world of Entente, where nine thousand British
soldiers, backed up by a few thousand Australian and Canadian troops from
neighboring territories, had mounted a heroic defense against an entire Chinese
corps for the last five months. The son of the Duke of York was among the
defenders, and the Western press was calling the resistance the “Long Night.”
But Neil knew the defenders were running out of food and ammunition. The new
troops were not expected to turn the tide – that force would not be ready for
several months – but they would provide some relief to the beleaguered defenses.
Substantial portions of the British, Canadian and Australian fleets were waiting
several stars downstream to help the reinforcements fight their way to the
surface of Entente.

To his captain, Neil said, “Sir, the Hans apparently
completed repairs to
Gan Ying
much earlier than we expected. It looks
like our information fell short there. We detected her and a supply tender
thrusting to intercept us a little past the halfway mark to the FL Virginis
wormhole.”

“So they can reach us?”

“I’m afraid so, sir. She is carrying drop tanks, so she will
have enough remass left to fight,” Neil said.

“Three frigates against a cruiser? It would be close,”
Hernandez said, shaking his head.

“Too close. And the Hans launched at the worst possible
time. The convoy has built up enough velocity that there’s no point to turning
around now. I have prepared simulation data for your review.”

“That won’t be necessary, Mister Mercer, but thank you.”

One question answered,
Neil thought. As intel officer
– the designated bearer of bad news – he shared responsibility with the ops
officer to run various simulations of any prospective battles. But they were
required to keep the outcomes secret, lest bad results destroy crew confidence
and serve as a self-fulfilling prophecy, or good ones lead to hubris and
mistakes. Indeed, one input variable in the simulations was whether the crew
would
be aware
of the output; Neil had, in this case, left it undetermined. Either
way, it was up to the captain to order Neil to release the data to the crew,
and Hernandez was apparently one of the old-school captains who saw no value in
doing so.

Perhaps it was for the best. The probability of defeating
Gan
Ying
with no losses to the troop transports was in the mid-thirties.
Victory with all three frigates surviving without major damage was only nine percent.

Hernandez absentmindedly tugged at an earlobe. “Any chance
we could be reinforced?”

Neil tried to punch up some calculations, but he was too
impatient to find the precise data, so he released his handheld computer to
float in front of him and ballparked an estimate.

“Sir, the fleet at the Lalande keyhole is too far away. From
the Sol keyhole, I think they would need to run at about eighteen milligees to
make the intercept, but …”

“… but would Admiral Sakuri risk weakening his defense any
more than he already has to aid a lesser ally? He didn’t want to give up a fourth
frigate to escort this convoy. Japan doesn’t have any immediate stake in the
outcome on Entente.”

“Yes, sir. My thinking as well,” Neil said. “The only ship
that could conceivably reach us is the frigate
Kiyokaze,
but she’s
heading back to Earth for a candle overhaul. The Brits might be able to release
some reinforcements from the other side of the FL Virginis keyhole, but
Gan
Ying
can catch us first. And that’s not a big force the Brits have there,
and the Chinese know it.”

Hernandez sucked in a long, labored breath. His eyes
brightened at the prospect of action, and some of the fatigue seemed to melt
away from his frame.

“Mister Mercer, this convoy is going through,” the captain
said, his voice drying into a warm tenor. “In the meantime, get to know a
Chinese captain for me, if you please.”

They had eight days to prepare. Admiral Sakuri declined
to release any relief from the Sol wormhole, and the convoy dispersed in an
effort to limit the number of ships the raider could take. The escorts would
stay with the troop transports, while the space trains would scatter. Neil
wondered how the space train captains took being told to break off from their
defenders.
Not well,
he imagined. But Neil could see the logic in the
move – it would limit the damage the
Gan Ying
could do in a single
strike. A more daring alternative would have been to keep them together, and he
wondered if he should feel slighted the commodore on the
Ajax
didn’t
have more faith in the escort’s ability to defend their charges.

He studied. The enemy ship was a
Ban Chao
-class
cruiser and one of China’s newest warships. She massed nearly fifteen thousand
tons, nearly three times that of the
Apache.
She was armed for all
occasions: missiles, three turreted coilguns, and a laser cannon that, when
tuned to ultraviolet frequencies, outranged anything the escorts carried. The
intel file on her captain, Lu Jiaheng, described him as a solid but
unimaginative officer, chosen for his political reliability over any special
talent for command.
That means he will follow the PLA’s playbook to the
letter. He’ll be predictable. We might have a shot at this customer after all.

A few days later, a message arrived from the allied intel
cell in the fleet at the Sol wormhole:

PRIORITY MESSAGE

TOP SECRET

1004Z07JAN2141

FR: CPT VILLANUEVA, S-2, CJTF17

TO: LT KERR, HMS AJAX; LTJG MERCER, USS APACHE; LTJG LAVOIE, CFSS
EDMONTON

CC: LT ENDO, JDF KIYOKAZE;
CPT HASHIMOTO, JDF SHOKAKU

1. SOURCES INDICATE WHISKEY-12 (CSS GAN YING) RECEIVED NEW
COMMANDING OFFICER DURING RENDEZVOUZ WITH CHINESE TASK FORCE AT WOLF
359-PROCYON KH EVENT.

2. NEW CO IS IDENTIFIED AS CPT QIN BAO. BIOGRAPHICAL
INFORMATION ATTACHED.

3. CONFIDENCE IN THIS
INFORMATION IS HIGH.

Neil sighed. Four days of work wasted.
I wonder what the
sources were.
He had no need-to-know, but that didn’t stop his brain from
attacking the question anyway. “Sources” suggested they had heard it from two
places, and “High” confidence was one step below the top, “Very High,”
confidence rating, which analysts employed when they wanted to say, “We really
mean it.” The one-off grade made it likely that at least one of the sources
belonged to Japanese intelligence, and Captain Villanueva’s analysts on
Kitty
Hawk
didn’t know who or what it was.

Hmm. Probably one or both sources are SIGINT, some tap on
Chinese fleet message traffic. And of course, if the Sakis aren’t telling us
who their sources are, it’s possible that the “sources” are the same message,
intercepted at different points by American and Japanese taps. Does it matter?
This would be pretty silly disinformation. Or extremely nuanced … ah,
discipline your thoughts, Mercer, and quit wasting time on questions you can’t
answer. The mission is to figure this Captain Qin out.

Qin Bao was born January 14, 2100, on Hainan Island, he
learned. Her father was a Han Chinese bureaucrat assigned to the island; her
mother was a member of the Li minority there. Qin attended Shanghai Jiao Tong
University for one year before being selected for the experimental “Achieve
Celestial Primacy” officer training program, which emphasized independent
decision-making, adaptability and crew morale. A reformist general’s
brainchild, the curriculum was couched as a modernization of the teachings of
Sun Tzu and other strategists, and it was intended to create innovative
officers who could break away from the PLA’s rigid doctrine.

Only one class – Qin’s – completed the curriculum before the
general’s adversaries shut it down. But the damage to Qin’s prospects was
minimal: She was regarded as an effective administrator and even better
captain. Neil learned that it was she who had left the battlecruiser
Truman
a worthless hulk at the Battle of Kennedy Station six months prior.