The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (22 page)

It took ten days for the two new frigates to join the old
one. Commonwealth receded, but the line of three little lights, so obviously
manmade among the chaotic firmament, remained on their tail. The crew grew
restless. They worried
Apache
was only lucky in their first battle
against the
Gan Ying
.

Finally, they had to undergo turnover. They were past the
halfway mark but planned to burn extra remass to decelerate toward the keyhole
to the next system, the red dwarf GJ 1151. Cohen grew particularly frazzled; even
with all the extra remass carried by the
Aquila
, the convoy would have
to dip into emergency reserves before joining the fleet at 11 Leonis Minoris. If
the fleet wasn’t there, they would be adrift.

And still the line of three little lights kept coming, kept
accelerating, all the way to thirty milligees, past the point where they should
have undergone turnover to intercept the convoy at roughly equal velocities.

Soon, they were traveling about ten kilometers per second
faster than
Apache
and her consorts, and that meant they were coming for
a high-speed pass on the convoy. Such combats were quick and violent; most
captains avoided them, as the differences in velocities meant kinetic weapons
were much harder to dodge, and a single hit from a shell was typically fatal.
Tactics and training largely went out the window, and such battles often ended
in mutual destruction.
Did we do this to ourselves?
Neil wondered. The
Koreans were acting like they didn’t have enough remass to decelerate, fight a
maneuvering engagement, and then do another rapid flip to get back to
Commonwealth or the Donatello keyhole. But they did have enough, Neil knew,
although they likely wouldn’t be able to use extra propellant to get back to Commonwealth
quickly.
Do they simply have a suicidal commander? They could close with us
at a normal velocity and probably beat us. Instead they are risking all three
frigates for a couple of troop carriers.

No … assume rationality. They want to avoid a maneuvering
engagement to conserve remass. They need that remass to be somewhere by a
deadline. Or they just want to chase us out of the system, rather than kill us.

With the convoy decelerating, the two sets of ships closed
rapidly.
Apache
increased her thrust even more, allowing the rest of the
convoy to recede behind her. She was now between the three frigates and the
transports, and they would be within weapons range in less than half an hour.

The three little lights kept coming.
One little rock, and
we’re done
, the crew knew.

Ten minutes later, the frigates passed a small sensor drone
left behind by the
Apache
. It read the names of the ships written on the
hull:
Incheon
,
Daejeon,
and
Kaesong
.

When they were eight thousand kilometers away, the Korean
frigates fired their coilguns, a short burst of rounds in a spiraling pattern.
The rounds took nine minutes to arrive, and
Apache
dodged easily.
What
was that? Did they think we were asleep at the wheel? Or maybe they wanted to
gauge our reaction time?

When they were fifteen hundred kilometers away, Neil warned,
“Sir, they should break for their envelopment maneuver soon.”

Howell nodded. “Bring in the cooling fins,” he said.
Apache
’s
tanks of liquid lithium began absorbing the heat the ship would usually radiate
into space. “Fire Control, Guns, weapons free.”

Outside,
Apache
’s new coilgun fired its inaugural
shots in anger, emitting a stream of shells spaced a second apart. Along the
hull, small hatches opened, revealing the nose cones of the missiles within.
The first of the ship’s missiles fell free, and then fired its motor. All forty
missiles launched, ripple-fired to maximize potential damage. They were aimed
at two of the three frigates – Howell and Ortega agreed that spreading the
missiles between all three enemy ships would make it harder to overwhelm any
single ship’s defenses.

During the minutes it took for the missiles to close with
their targets, Howell floated over to Neil’s console.

“You know, Mercer, things really picked up after you came on
board,” he said, his eyes remaining locked on the CIC's main holo.

“Sir?”

“We started the war at the WX Ursae Majoris blockade, but we
had something break in the fusion drive and had to return to Kennedy, so we
missed the action when those Han raiders broke through,” he said. “Then we
missed the battle at Kennedy because we were shipping some chickenshit Colonial
Affairs bigwigs to Independence, who insisted on military transport because of
the war. I started to think we wouldn't see any real action at all. I came up
in combat systems, and that possibility killed me, Mercer. You train your whole
career for something, and it happens, but bad luck makes you useless. That
fight with the
Gan Ying
was the most amazing thing I've ever been a part
of. The most amazing thing.”

“Uh, sir, our missiles are in range of their defenses,” Neil
said. If the Koreans had been about to break formation, they cancelled the
maneuver, as all three ships pointed their noses toward the cloud of incoming
and fired their main lasers. Each shot killed a missile.
Apache
’s brood
dropped to thirty-five, then thirty.

But some of the missiles died usefully. They were of a new
generation, equipped with a crude camera in the skin of their nosecones, built
to detect and transmit data about the laser that killed it back to its
mothership. The enhancement had cost the missile some of its warhead mass, but
here, they served their purpose.

“Gotcha,” said Jessica Barrett, as one of her counterlasers,
made smart with data from the missiles, burned out the optics of the
Incheon
’s
forward laser cannon before its armored shutter could close. The laser would
not get fixed until the frigates were well past the convoy, so the ship was
reduced to a gun platform.

“Zombie! Zombie! More coilgun salvoes inbound, from all
three targets!” The CIC officer announced. “Four minutes, nine seconds
closure.”

“Evade,” Howell said.
Apache
turned and thrust at a
full gee, then two gees, and everyone was pressed into their chairs.
This is
the Koreans’ chance to rake us with their big lasers, but if our
counterbatteries can nail their optics, we win the battle.

The Korean commanders knew this, and they didn’t take the
chance … yet. More coilgun rounds, sprayed in a wide area, distracting the
Apache
.

But
Apache
’s dodges cut it a little too close, and
Jessica’s point defenses were forced to engage two shells that threatened to
strike the frigate. The small lasers exploded the first harmlessly, but the
second shattered, sending debris into
Apache
’s hide. While none were
larger than a ball bearing, their residual velocity left a section of the hull
pockmarked and knocked the ship’s primary forward telescope from its mount.

“Damage control, please fix that scope,” the XO transmitted.

“On it, ma’am,” a piccolo voice chirped in the reply.
Despite himself, Neil smiled. Only Astronaut Allenby had a voice that pitched
that high; her battle station was on one of the damage control teams as the
sensor repair tech.

A thousand kilometers away,
Apache
’s surviving
missiles burst into scores of unguided flechettes, and the Korean frigates’
point-defense lasers and autocannons tried to kill them, and the ships turned
to dodge.

One flechette made it through the
Kaesong
’s defenses,
striking a corner of the frigate’s nose and cutting a long furrow along the
side. For a moment, Neil thought the damage was superficial, a cut on the skin,
but small streamers of gas emerged from it, followed by a small explosion,
followed by a large one. The frigate staggered, and its candle went out.

Neil’s forefinger beat against his console, one-two.
One
defanged, one disabled …

Daejeon
‘s captain decided the squadron had suffered
enough; the ship’s forward laser unshuttered and fired, burrowing through the
thin armor on
Apache
’s flank in a quarter of a second. Normally, a ship
would turn off the laser shortly after a burn-through was achieved to prevent a
counterbattery from taking it out. But this was a parting shot, and
Daejeon’
s
weapons’ officer left the laser on until four of
Apache
’s counterbattery
turrets smashed it.
Apache
unshuttered her own primary lasers and
drilled two holes in
Daejeon’s
forward armor, to no appreciable effect.
Daejeon
and
Incheon
turned perpendicular to their original vector, rolling
to present their armored bellies to the
Apache.

They were disengaging.

But
Daejeon’s
damage was done; the Korean frigate’s
beam had struck
Apache
near the point previously damaged by the coilgun
shell debris. A one-meter armored plate broke free, and the Whipple plates
underneath shattered, exposing the compartment they protected. In that spot
were Astronaut Allenby and two other members of her damage control team, who
were working to repair the damaged telescope. While her comrades were tethered
to the back wall of the compartment, Allenby had strapped herself to the inside
of the inner most Whipple plate, so she could quickly tear away some damaged
components.

Daejeon’s
laser blast was close enough that all three
astronauts suffered burns on their exposed skin. The rapid decompression of the
small compartment blew the shard of the Whipple plate out into space, dragging
Allenby along with it. Her body spun wildly away from the
Apache
on
three axes. Her emergency bubble activated, but it malfunctioned, enclosing the
empty space next to her. Within fifteen seconds, her blood deoxygenated, and
she lost consciousness.

Her fellows, still tethered to the compartment, activated
their emergency bubbles and called the CIC, begging for someone to board the
jumper or send a drone to go get her, but the force of the decompression
imparted too much velocity on her. Her form vanished from view.

In the CIC, their message cut through everyone’s elation
like a cleaver. Neil ground his teeth.
Allenby did her duty. Save your
grief. There will be a time for it, later. One hundred and four of us made it.
The convoy should make it.

Apache
flipped and accelerated to catch up to the
rest of the convoy. Shortly, it would flip again to continue the long
deceleration to the keyhole. No one spoke with Neil, and he sat, dumbly,
watching the wounded
Kaesong
relight its candle and retreat into the
night.

Combat Supply Cache Condor, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

Condor wasn’t a large cache, nor was it based in a
natural terrain feature like Falcon had been. It was just an unassuming hole in
a hill near a small gypsum mine, one of dozens of exploratory cavities dug by
robominers in Sequoia colony’s early days, left unused once the initial burst
of construction was finished. Rand had feared it would be reopened to serve the
Chinese colonists’ needs, but so far, the occupiers hadn’t come near the site.

Inside was similar to Falcon, just smaller: several
hollowed-out chambers, some with rows of bunks, others with stacks of supplies.
Power was limited; what little they used came from a seemingly abandoned solar
array at the cluster of shacks that served as the mine’s management offices.

Rand had the only office and the only desk in the place. It
annoyed him no end to sit there; he joined the Army to spend a life outside of
offices, but he needed to be somewhere where his troops could find him, where
he could keep track of supplies, and where he could meet privately with his
sergeants.

Another hour, and then time to get some rack,
he
thought. He had been trying to finish squad assignments, struggling with
whether to create a squad full of veteran combat specialists for difficult
missions, or spread them out so no unit would have to fight without a trained
infantry trooper or special operator nearby. It was dawn outside, and Kuan
Yin’s sixteen-hour day meant one’s sleep schedule rarely lined up with the
planet’s day-night cycle. He realized he hadn’t spoken to anyone for hours.
I
really need to spend time with the troops, not just the platoon leaders.
He
went to his door with the intent of leaving it open for a while, just in case
anyone who wanted to talk had previously been deterred by it being closed. But
when his hand touched the knob, he felt a low, rhythmic thumping that rattled
the door.

Some paranoid part of his brain worried it was far-off
weapon fire, but the rest quickly recognized it.
It’s a bassline.
He
walked a little farther from his office, and he could pick out the song, that eight-minute
Japanese thunderhowl,
Nenotoki Gaiaku,
which had been credited with
bringing the electric harmonica back in style.

He followed the music to its source, the storeroom farthest
from his office. Inside were about thirty of the troops, nearly everyone who
wasn’t asleep or out on patrol. Rand watched them for a moment – a few were
dancing; others were flirting, telling stories, shooting the breeze, and, now
and forever, heckling one another.

Barracks culture, even in this mess.
The thought
warmed him.

One of the dancers saw him in the doorway, snapped to
attention and saluted. Others saw her motion, looked to the door, and did the
same. Someone stopped the music.

Rand, surprised, returned the salute, his hand touched the
brim of his cap.
Oh, shit. I’m still wearing the damn thing.
He had a
single moment to make a choice.
Do I play the god, or just the guy who has
the captain’s bars?