The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (23 page)

That’s an easy one.
He grinned, apologized, and pulled
his hat from his head. Everyone relaxed.

“Sorry, sir, was the music too loud?” asked a trooper, who
looked a year or two older than Rand.

Rand peered at his shoulder. “No, I don’t think it’s quite
loud enough to wake the Hans, Corporal …”

“Cacho!” someone shouted.

The corporal smiled briefly. “Carlos Gonzalez, sir, from
Vieques, Puerto Rico. Marine Corps, sir, I was assigned to the security guard
for the orbitals, but I was groundside when the Hans hit us.”

“Good to meet you, Gonzalez,” Rand said. “Who’s the loud
one?”

“That’s me, sir. PFC Catalina Gutierrez, from Grand Rapids,
Michigan.”

“They call you Cat?” Rand asked.

“No, sir!”

“Goot!” everyone said together.

Others introduced themselves … Maldonado, Turnage, Pasker,
Ramos, Briggs, Johnson, Dellaflora, Jancaterino … Rand met them all, easily finding
things to like about every one. He felt an unofficerlike emotion he did his
best to hide.

And as much as he wanted to stay and talk, relax with the
troops, he knew he was an intruder.

“Carry on,” he said, and left as the music began pounding
again.
These are the kids who go in harm’s way just because goofups like me
tell them to,
he thought.
They’ve already suffered so much since the
Hans came. I won’t lose another, not on my watch.

USS Apache, GJ 1151

“Why weren’t you at the service for Allenby?” Jessica
asked, her voice sharp.

They were in Neil’s stateroom. “I had the deck when it was
scheduled.”

“You could have swapped with anyone, including me. You were
her team leader, Neil.”

“I’ll mourn in my own way.”

She shoved him, an act that pushed them in opposite
directions. She grabbed a handhold to steady herself, and Neil’s back struck
the bulkhead behind him. “How do you think the rest of your people felt,
knowing that you wouldn’t deign to attend their own funeral if they were killed
in the line? What’s wrong with you?”

Neil was shocked. “That’s not why … I mean, I talked it over
with them before the service.”

“You’ve been on this ship for nearly nine months now. Why do
you keep setting yourself apart? Do you think you’re better than us, is that
it?”

“No! I just … “

“Or are you just heartless?”

Neil felt himself sneer, grind his teeth.

“Maybe you should go now,” he said.

The hatch slammed behind her.

Four hours later, Neil’s handheld
buzzed, waking him. A check of the clock told him why he was so groggy: The
sleeping pill had several hours left before it was exhausted. He grabbed the
packet of antidote-stimulant – formulated to nullify the sleeping pill’s
effects in five minutes – but didn’t consume it before answering the call.

“Sir, this is Nuñez at sensor ops. Tango-9
has
flipped again. She’s thrusting back in our direction.”

Tango-9 is
Incheon
,
Neil recalled. That was
the frigate that had been orbiting Commonwealth, and she had started the chase
with nearly full remass tanks, unlike her sisters. She had also suffered the
least damage in the fight.

“How long until intercept?” Neil asked.

“That’s the thing, sir. She’s not pushing it, just slowly
making up some ground.”

Back to shadowing us? It’s like they want to make sure we
leave more than they want to kill us.
Neil double-checked that Nuñez had
let the OOD know and fell back asleep.

The next morning, he took his suspicions to Howell. The
ex-XO was indifferent.

“I’d be happy to oblige them and leave this system sooner,
Mercer,” Howell said. “We just don’t have the remass.”

“But if something is going to happen in Commonwealth the
Hans don’t want us to see, maybe we should linger some, sir.”

Howell chuckled. “Spoken like a true intel officer, putting
information ahead of anything else. Look, Mercer, I’ve got more than a thousand
people in this convoy to deliver safely to Kuan Yin. I know you don’t know what
it’s like to have that many lives in your hands, but try to remember that, all
right? Everything else is secondary.”

I’ve taken more lives than that,
Neil thought.
Not
the issue;
time to try another tack.
”Well, I’d like permission to
expend some collection assets, so we can keep tabs on the system after we’ve
left. We’ve got a few observation drones that survived the fight, but we’ll
need to lay some repeaters so their signal can reach us once we leave the
system.”

Howell’s handheld buzzed. He looked at the screen and waved
Neil off. “Sure, sure, it would be good to drop some excess mass anyway. Dump
them out with the garbage, and maybe the Kims will ignore them.”

Over the next several days, Jessica studiously avoided
speaking to Neil.
I guess that’s that,
Neil thought. He tried not to let
it hurt. He failed.

“Captain,
Incheon’s
undergoing turnover! Range
five thousand klicks, relative speed two kips.”

Neil called up the image of the frigate. They had been
looking at
Incheon
’s tail for days; she had flipped to decelerate toward
the keyhole, just like the convoy.

Now, though, the ship was slowly flipping over to point her
nose at the
Apache
and the other ships, now nearly motionless relative
to the nearby wormhole.

I guess seeing us off through the keyhole isn’t enough
,
Neil thought.

“Tell the
Pontchartrain
to move!” Howell commanded.
“Send the
Erie
through as close as is safe.”

Outside, the ponderous troop transports maneuvered and lined
up to transit the keyhole.
Aquila,
which handled just as poorly,
would
follow them, with
Apache
guarding the door.

The transports will never be as vulnerable,
Neil
knew.
They can’t dodge out of the way of kinetics, and their point defenses
are pretty weak.
The opening of this keyhole was still in its original
position, facing inward to the plane of the star system, so
Apache
interposed herself directly between
Incheon
and the fleeing ships. She
pointed her tail toward the
Incheon,
angling slightly upward so her
turrets could fire over the girth of her drive. It would deny her the use of
her main laser cannon, but she could at least make a quick escape.

“Tango-9 at thirty-one hundred klicks. Zombie, zombie!
Tango-9 is firing coilgun shells. Time to impact, six minutes, thirty-nine
seconds.”

“Bring in the radiators,” Howell said. “Antikinetic
defenses, lasers free.”

At this range, Jessica’s defenses could handle the inbound
shells. But each shot made the engines a little hotter and contributed a little
more heat to the heat sinks. The distance at which shells were dying fell from
1,500 kilometers, to 1,400, to 1,200.

“
Pontchartrain
reports transiting the keyhole,” the
CIC officer said. “
Erie
will be through in eight minutes.”

At least the Marines made it, and the Seabees should make
it too,
Neil thought.

Incheon
accelerated, all the way to a quarter-gee.
The gap between ships closed to two thousand kilometers, and the frigate’s gun
shells were succumbing less than four hundred klicks from
Apache.

“Antimissiles free, all but the last ten,” Howell said.
“Engage every other shell to take the heat off the lasers.”

Incheon
’s own defenses were engaging shells from the
Apache
’s
coilgun turret, and so far, they were not forcing
Incheon
to maneuver.
The Korean frigate unshuttered her main laser cannon and fired. The beam cut
Apache
’s
hull for less than a fifth of a second, striking some empty missile cells.
Jessica could only afford to task a single counterbattery laser to destroying
Incheon
’s
cannon, and it could not react quickly enough to the strike, burning uselessly
against the cannon’s armored shutter.

”
Erie
is through!
Aquila
entering guidance
rings.”

Another laser from
Incheon
, this blasting through the
medical compartment. It struck no one, but the flash temporarily blinded the
ship’s senior corpsman.

At nearly the same moment,
Incheon
’s and
Apache
’s
defenses leaked. On
Incheon,
an overtaxed laser shut itself down, and
the ship was forced to perform an emergency pivot and thrust to avoid an
oncoming shell. Meanwhile, a few hundred kilometers from
Apache,
an
antimissile’s vector thruster failed, and it shot straight past the shell it
had targeted. Point defenses exploded the shell about fifteen kilometers from
the frigate, but the master pattern governing the layers of defenses had been
shattered, and more coilgun shells closed.

“Give them the candle,” Howell ordered.
Apache
pivoted slightly and fired her main drive, propelling her toward the guidance
rings. It was too soon –
Aquila
had not yet transited the mouth of the
wormhole
–
and
Apache
was risking a collision, or being damaged
by the white-hot output of
Aquila
’s drive.

But the maneuver worked:
Incheon’s
latest salvo of
shells burned up in
Apache’
s fusion flame.
Apache
lurched
forward.

Incheon
pivoted again, turning its nose back toward
the fleeing American ships. It was close enough, and had created enough of an
angle, that the keyhole mouth was no longer obscured by
Apache
. Her main
laser targeted
Aquila
, and fired.

The beam struck the tanker’s candle, overheating one of the
superconductors that kept the magnetic bottle intact. An angry jet of hydrogen
burst from the hole in the bottle, which, not unlike a vector thruster,
imparted a change in pitch and yaw along the ship’s primary axis. Neil watched
in horror as the ship began a graceful, slow-motion backspin
within the
mouth of the wormhole.

The nose of the tanker struck the inner edge of the mouth,
where the universe had been folded in on itself to create the passage between
Beta Canum Venaticorum and distant GJ 1151. It seemed to Neil that a wave of
distortion passed through the
Aquila
’s hull, and then the ship came
apart.

Pieces of
Aquila
spun into space; pieces crashed into
the guidance rings; pieces struck the mouth and shattered. The slush hydrogen
stored in the ship’s bulbous tanks expanded in a cloud and rapidly dissipated.
Neil saw a thousand bright flashes; the ship’s antimatter dying, atom by atom,
in collisions with regular matter. The antimatter failsafes at least did their
job and prevented a catastrophic detonation – no one was really sure what a
twenty-kiloton explosion would do to a wormhole, and Neil didn’t want to find
out from only a few kilometers away.

“Sir, if we’re going to avoid the keyhole, we’ll have to
start a pivot now,” the XO warned.

“No, we’re going through!” Howell shouted.

Incheon
managed one more laser strike, but
Apache’s
hide absorbed it, and then they passed through the keyhole.
Pontchartrain
and
Erie
were already thrusting away, on different vectors.

After exiting the guidance rings,
Apache
performed a
quick pivot to face the wormhole, on the chance that
Incheon
dared to
follow them through. But the sensor drones they left behind told them that
Incheon
slowed to a stop and did not appear to be attempting a transit.

“Extend cooling fins,” Howell said.

Shuttles from the three ships picked up four emergency
bubbles from the
Aquila
– two with survivors, one with a body, and one
entirely empty. Of the other thirteen members of the crew, they found no sign.

The little convoy formed up again, less one tanker, and
thrust toward the next keyhole.

The following Friday night, Jessica came to his cabin.

“Missed you at the social hour,” she said.

“Didn’t seem like a good idea.”
Are you just heartless?
Her
insult still rung in his brain.

“Look, I’m sorry about what I said. It’s not my place to
expect you to deal with things the way I do.”

A number of responses occurred to Neil, some angry and
defensive, others noncommittal.
No, patch things up. She’s here, trying.
She’s worth it.

“No, I … should have gone to Allenby’s service. I’m going to
regret not going for a long time. What you said … it wasn’t far off from what
that Brit commodore accused me of, back in Wolf 359.”

He described his offhand suggestion of sacrificing a single,
half-filled troop transport to ensure the survival of the convoy.

Jessica looked dubious. “That’s an entirely rational
suggestion, given the circumstances. But it utterly dehumanizes the people we were
supposed to be protecting. Warfare is more than a cost-benefit analysis, Neil.”

Something inside Neil sank to his gut.
I know that. Why
don’t I act that way, think that way?

Jessica tilted her head slightly. “While we were part of the
blockade over Entente, I traded messages with some of your old comrades from
San
Jacinto.
They said you could be pretty introverted, but you really thought
hard about doing the right thing.”

“And you’re saying I don’t anymore?”

“I’m saying it sounds like something changed you, Neil. What
happened to you?”

A small flash of clarity.
One thousand, seven hundred and
twenty-six.

“I killed some people, Jessica.”

Her brow furrowed. “It’s part of our job. I probably killed
someone on the
Gan Ying
or in our fights with the Koreans.”