The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) (36 page)

“You may have just killed us, Barrett,” Ortega muttered,
quiet enough that only Jessica could hear.

Sycamore, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

Of Jessica’s five hundred megawatts, only fifty were not
absorbed by the air and smoke between
Apache
and the Zeixing infantry
fighting vehicle rolling up 19th Street. But that was enough: Everyone heard a
crack, and a thin column of air took on a greenish tint. Then the top of the
IFV flared a brilliant green. Goggles darkened to prevent blindness, but everyone
nearby looked away anyway. The vehicle’s battery exploded, sending fragments
slicing through the nearby Chinese soldiers.

Aguirre and Ruiz, Torren and McKay, Yancey, Pravitz,
Ramirez and the rest,
Rand thought.

Another Zeixing died thirty seconds later.

The advancing troopers realized what happened and scattered,
running into buildings or down alleys, anything to get away from hell being
unleashed on the big, defenseless targets in the street.

USS Apache

“Laser engine temperature is still in the red,” one of
Jessica’s techs transmitted. “Fifteen seconds until I can give you another shot.”

“Not enough,” Ortega said bitterly. “We’re going to catch a
couple of inbounds. Hope those Stoats don’t carry any nukes.”

Your fault,
Jessica thought
. I warned you that you
were holding the lasers way too long on each missile. They weren’t Han antiship
missiles, and we weren’t maneuvering to avoid them. They had lots of excess fuel
for the PD to feast on.

Once cooled, the point-defense lasers destroyed two more
missiles, and a beam touched a third just as it struck the
Apache
’s main
cylinder. A moment later, a second missile struck just three meters away.

Sycamore, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

“Cap’n Castillo, Hans coming up MLK on foot, running!
Lots of ‘em!” Ramos shouted. He blazed away out a window.

Rand ran to an east-facing opening, looked outside, and saw
a wave of Chinese soldiers sprinting toward them. Some were shouting battle
cries; some were firing wildly, and bullets thunked into the restaurant
exterior.

A goddamn infantry charge. They must have decided the
best place to avoid being fried from the sky was right on top of us.

Rand smashed the window with the butt of his carbine, picked
a target, and dropped him. Other members of the squad did the same; Neil
couldn’t actually find space to take a shot, so he went to a south-facing
window, intending to lean out and fire across his body, but he couldn’t see
around the building’s entry vestibule, which extended out onto the sideway.

Rand watched as the leading edge of the charge staggered and
fell to his squad’s fusillade. A few turned and fled, but more kept coming, and
then the enemy was on them.

The first one tried to leap through a window but tripped
over the waist-high sill, crashing into Sergeant Patterson. She threw him off,
put her rifle to his head, and fired. But more followed, and another soldier in
riot gear burst though the restaurant’s front door, spraying shots from a
submachine gun. Three Americans, including Patterson, and the two Chinese
soldiers all went down in a heap. Rand’s armor took a hit, and he stumbled, but
he still brought his M7 up and fired into the man’s chest. His target collapsed,
and Rand fell to one knee.

Behind the fallen riot-gear trooper an officer in battle
armor entered; he wisely took cover in the entry vestibule. He raised his rifle
to fire into the guerrillas still lined up along the east-facing windows.

Neil’s gun bucked in his hands. It was nearly a miss; the officer’s
shoulder armor took some of the blow. The man fell backward for a step, and he
looked in Neil’s direction.

Maybe he’d surrender,
Neil thought.

But Neil’s gun fired again, this time directly into the
officer’s torso. At this range, the carbine’s bullet was too much for the
soldier’s armor, and it cut into his heart. Agency ceased to guide the man’s
motions, leaving gravity to take over and drive him to the ground.

Lieutenant Colonel Shen Liang’s final thought was to remind himself
that his final thought should be of his family.

You’ve killed again
, Neil thought.

USS Apache

Both Stoat warheads struck
Apache
’s ventral heat
sink, igniting a secondary explosion that Jessica felt shake the frigate from
nose to tail.

But most of the explosion’s energy was spent burning through
ship’s food stores and unoccupied crew quarters. Foil packages of burritos and
tins of pasta spun into space; in CIC, the lights blinked once, and a draft of cool
air washed over the crew, stopping when anti-decompression bulkheads slid into
place.

“All sections, damage report,” Howell said.

Reports came in. No casualties. The hull breach was
contained.

We took the punch
, Jessica thought.
I just hope we
did enough for Neil and the others.

Sycamore, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

Seeing the death of their officer, most of the rest of
the Chinese troops abandoned their charge, save two who were fighting
hand-to-hand with Rand’s troops. Three feet away from Rand’s prone form, Marine
Corporal Gonzalez pulled a knife from his boot and stabbed his assailant in the
throat. The man screamed and gurgled blood. Nearby, Ramos tried a wrestling
hold on his own attacker, but the man produced a sidearm and shot him in the
chest at point-blank range, and then leapt out the window and fled.

Neil ran to that window and raised his rifle, lining up on
the soldier who had killed Ramos, but before he could pull the trigger, he
heard more than a dozen shots from outside. He saw little red puffs on the
man’s torso, and the soldier staggered and fell. Other fleeing Chinese soldiers
bolted right or left, save for two, who dropped their rifles and raised their
hands in surrender.

Someone in civilian clothes walked up to them and shot them
both in the head with a pistol. Neil heard more shooting, farther away, and the
streets in view were empty of the enemy.

Neil went to Rand.

“I’m okay, I think,” Rand gasped, rolling over. “Armor
stopped it, barely. Wind knocked out of me. How’s everyone else?”

Neil, his hands shaking, looked around at the carnage and
tried to formulate a reply. At least three of Rand’s troops were dead. Sergeant
Patterson, wounded, had pulled herself upright against a wall, and she was trying
to stop the blood flowing from her thigh. She looked pale but was barking orders
to the PFC trying to help her.

“Friendlies approaching!” Corporal Gonzalez shouted from the
window. “At least, I think they’re friendlies.”

Several people entered the restaurant.

“Where’s your CO?” said a husky female voice.

Rand pulled himself up, coughed, and said, “I’m here.”

Violet Kelley walked up to him. “Glad to see you aren’t
dead, Castillo.”

In her months with the Sycamore underground, Violet
Kelley had not been idle.

She had built a network of more than a thousand volunteers,
some as young as 12. She had directed the construction of hundreds of guns
using a pair of home fab units that the Chinese had failed to confiscate. She
had built a core unit of fighters and used them to train the angriest of the
interred civilians.

But she feared they would not last once they came under
fire, and she didn’t think she could instill proper combat discipline without a
cadre of veteran sergeants. Instead, she doctored a few photographs and engineered
stories of Chinese soldiers kidnapping, raping and torturing American
civilians, nurturing a murderous rage to stand in place of professional
coolness under fire.

She set them loose when Rand’s company had blown a hole in
the internment camp’s outer wall. They ambushed Chinese guards and attacked several
access points from the rest of the city; at the three main western gates, her
irregulars ran headlong into machine gun fire, dying in scores. But two groups
broke through elsewhere, moving into the Chinese civilian residential area,
slaughtering as they went, and a third made it through the same gate Rand and
his platoon had used to reach the VIP prison. Led by Michael Bannerjee, that
group attacked the internment camp for American military personnel, and freed
thousands of POWs, many of whom had been there for two years.

Upon learning of this, the Chinese civilian leadership panicked
and fled for Fengsheng in a suborbital. Rumors spread through the populace
about vehicles able to rescue them, too. Some went to the spaceport, looking
for craft that would not be there, while thousands fled down the winding
cliffside road toward the Port of Sycamore. Hundreds forgot their rebreathers
and perished of carbon dioxide poisoning.

Some with long-range personal cars fled south, running
headlong into the retreat of the PLA brigade that had been defending the
southern approach to Sycamore. A massive traffic jam ensued, and American air
and space power was merciless in its attacks.

General Xie transmitted the surrender of Sycamore a day
later.

Prisoner-of-War Recovery Station, Forward Operating Base
Foster, East of Sycamore

Some of them made it.

Patterson was recovering from her leg wound at a mobile
hospital. And Rand had found Captain Gant, Cruz’s aide from Falcon, on the list
of POWs, along with Major Montaño, his old battalion commander from Cottonwood.
And Sergeant Ruiz had survived! Bannerjee had found him, incapacitated and
dying after the battle at the gate, and he summoned a civilian paramedic who had
stabilized the Green Beret. He would need a new foot grown, but he had messaged
Rand that he would be able to return to combat duty in a few months.

But too many won’t be,
Rand thought as he walked
through the base.

He found her at a chow station,
hunched over her handheld, trying to answer some of the more arcane questions
on Form 9072-B, POW Repatriation Questionnaire.

“Lopez,” he said.

Private Lopez, the only surviving member of Rand’s artillery
platoon, turned, recognized him, stood and embraced him, something she had
never done before. She stepped back and looked into his eyes, and knew the
answer without asking the question. She turned her head to one side, closed her
eyes, and bit her lip.

“I’m sorry, Rachel,” Rand said. “He saved a bunch of us. He
really did.”

Sycamore Spaceport

Nice landing,
Neil thought as the Marine dropship
touched down on the longest of the spaceport’s runways.

He stood on the tarmac with Violet Kelley, whom he had
recognized from the rescue mission in Cottonwood on his first visit to Kuan
Yin. She hadn’t said much to him.

Neil was there to see Donovan, to have a conversation Neil
much wanted and had looked forward to, a brief spot of leisure before he took
his seat on another dropship heading to orbit a few hours from now. Kelley was
there to meet with both Donovan and Gardiner Fairchild; the trio was to reestablish
the NSS operation on Kuan Yin, which would ultimately target the new Russian
territories on Fengsheng continent.

I guess that will be getting a new name,
Neil
thought. The Chinese had not been fully driven off Sequoia, though; Cypress and
its environs remained in Chinese hands. Facing unceasing bombardment from air
and space, the enemy brigade there had dug in, and the American ground forces
were heading east to root them out.

But the White House was already calling it a great victory,
saying the liberation of Sycamore and most of Sequoia continent meant America
and its allies were driving forward in the war.

But at a cost,
Neil thought.
Seven ships and seven
hundred Space Forcers lost, more than nineteen hundred Marines and soldiers
dead on the ground.
And much of the American capability to move armies
between star systems was tied up here; it would be a long time before the U.S.
could mount another operation like this.
That means no relief mission to New
Albion and the other friendly colonies on Entente, and no offensive against
Guoxing and Xinzhou anytime soon.
Human rights groups were calling for
investigations into the treatment of Chinese civilians by American “irregulars;”
a White House spokeswoman denied any role in any such incidents, which she
could not confirm had occurred. And already thousands of freed American
civilians, led by Moira Tobin, were insisting they be evacuated from Kuan Yin
entirely.

Donovan’s dropship rolled up about one hundred meters away, settling
low on its wheels so its passengers could exit. A refueling truck drove up, and
a bus full of passengers came behind it. Crewmen waved and shouted to hurry
everything along; standing orders were that dropships spend no more than twenty
minutes stopped anywhere. The Chinese had sabotaged the spaceport’s launching
lasers before their surrender, leaving the fleet’s dropships the only way to
get back to orbit until the lasers were fixed. And there were far more people
who wanted to be one place or the other than there were dropships to carry
them.

Gardiner Fairchild hopped down, followed by Donovan. Neil
waved, and Donovan raised a hand in return. Kelley began walking toward the
dropship, leaving Neil behind. Donovan turned back to the door, and a crewman
handed him something, and the fuel truck exploded.

The blast threw everyone from their feet; it shredded the
dropship’s tail and pushed the craft forward several meters. The bus crumpled;
its front end was aflame. Neil, dimly, saw some people running, some limping or
trying to pull others away, and he heard sirens, echoing in every direction,
and screams.

NEW YORK (Op-ed) – We build stories around events to
make them make sense. The American story of this war was initially a thing of
contention; the Chinese attacked the
Sapphire
and the
San Jacinto
, and we had to fight
back. But that story made little sense; why would the Chinese, embroiled in a
difficult war with Japan, attack us? So other stories arose to fill the vacuum:
This is the long-awaited East versus West war, or the authoritarian versus the
democratic, or 20th century powers versus 21st, or some other binary that falls
apart under close scrutiny. Consider that the less educated in Japan and China
say this is the final reckoning of 1,500 years of their conflict, and America’s
participation is just a sideshow. Does it feel that way to you, with the coffins
coming home to Dover?

Then, last summer, Senator Gregory offered us a story
that made sense: This is a war for territory, for a future in which America
isn’t a hefty chunk of a single continent, but an interstellar ideal that
encompasses whole worlds. We, along with our Japanese and British and
Australian and Canadian and Iranian allies, are victims of misfortune of the
stars, and a China that’s too greedy to share its boon. So we must fight to
preserve our future, to prevent our being overrun by a Chinese Empire spanning
all of our skies.

That’s a fine story. Let me offer another. Start with
the great expansion, the one of John Locke and Isaac Newton, the steam engine
and the printing press. All the billions who were lifted out of stinking
poverty and lived a better life than their parents, first in Europe and North
America and Australia and Japan, later in China and India and South America,
even a few in Africa. The Asiatic boom was the greatest net improvement in the
human condition in history, but it also broke the bank; our ability to innovate
more and more efficient ways to manage energy was exhausted; our resources were
failing, and the seas were rising because of the dirty things we did to sustain
ourselves. The low-hanging fruits of technology had all been picked; we had
solved almost every physical and biological principle that needed solving; the
remaining technologies we could envision simply cost too much to develop and
employ. Many sensed this, and the states, the corporations and individuals who
had amassed great wealth fought harder and harder to maintain their standard of
living.

Then came the blessing of The Rock, the ‘Roide, 1409222
Vonhess, Nubei, Kirainsei – whatever your culture named it. Yes: A blessing,
not for the millions of Africans and thousands of Australians and Indians it
slaughtered, of course, but for the rest of us, who learned we need to ensure
the species by going into space. All the wealthy folk found a useful place for
their investments, and governments did everything they could to assist them. We
got cheap lift, orbital solar power stations, and, lo, new worlds to conquer!
Thus began a century-long boom, the continuation of the wonderful story of
growth via investment, subsidy and profit. Asteroid mines and starships and
colonies, and all boats lifting (except, of course, for a lot of Africans and a
lot of Indians and a lot of Mexicans and so on).

But there was a problem, one nobody likes to talk about:
We never actually made any money beyond the Moon. I mean real money, not
revenue, but true profit, after you count all society’s shared costs in getting
the program going – the tax incentives, government-backed bonds, deferred loan
payments and so on. No, it’s cheaper to send nanorefiners into the old
landfills than it is to mine most of the asteroids for terrestrial projects,
and it’s cheaper still to use tried-and-true methods of strip mining and
polluting. And there are very few things that are made on our colonies that
can’t be made here; interstellar transport of mass-produced goods is in almost
all cases economically unfeasible.

It has taken a while for that to shake out, but many of
the big space investors started to cash in their chips about a decade ago.
Solar power and orbital access were in the realm of the controlled profits
provided to utilities; for work beyond Earth space, subsidies and tax breaks
were dropping, and the capitalists did what they always do when they run out of
ideas: They try to turn themselves into aristocrats, walling themselves off
legally, financially and physically from the rest of us.

Don’t hate them. You would probably do the same if you
were in their position. And they did help extend the economic boom the Enlightenment
brought us for another century. Now the bubble is bursting; the desert of stars
Senator Gregory told us about has only hurried the process along. But he was
wrong: We’re fighting this war not for planets, but for dominance on Earth. The
winner controls the direction Earth’s economy will go and who gets to maintain
their standard of living as the rest of the world begins a bitter decline.

As I said, I’m just offering one more story of the war.
It’s a series of factual assertions I strung together with a common thread.
Perhaps you prefer the clash of cultures or the lebensraum stories that are
already well-known to humanity. Perhaps you’ll take this narrative and
incorporate it into your own, most likely in opposition to it, casting me as
some opponent to progress or the military or America.

Perhaps the story you believe says more about your
politics than the reality of things. But none of that means our stories are
arbitrary; quite the opposite is true, as they guide our decisions whether to negotiate
with a rival, or send thousands of good boys and girls to their deaths.

South of Sycamore, Sequoia Continent, Kuan Yin

Neil and Rand helped bury James Donovan and Hal Aguirre alongside
hundreds of other American dead in a new cemetery in a meadow beside Highway
Two. The weary chaplain had to speak loudly over the buzz of the nearby fab
unit trailer, which was producing a steady supply of American flags, coffins
and decomposition-assisting chemicals.

Aguirre’s service was first; a score of Rand’s guerrillas
were in attendance. He received a Methodist burial, and Rand told stories of watching
the skies with him, night after night. He was performing, Neil saw, putting
aside his own grief to make his troops feel a little better.

After that, all the ex-guerrillas left, save Rand and Lopez.

“What kind of service for Mister Donovan?” the chaplain asked.

“I’m not sure,” Neil said.

“I’ve got one for that.”

She read the generalist, sort-of-spiritual, sort-of-secular
service over him; it focused on citizenship rather than matters metaphysical – the
same service a soldier would get if he indicated “unaffiliated” on his
documentation.

It was brief; there wasn’t much to say, anyway, about a man
who had lived his life swimming in secrets. Neil held his handheld so the video
camera could transmit the service to Gardiner Fairchild, who still had one eye
he could watch it with from his hospital bed. He would have done the same for
Kelley, but she remained in an induced coma; the doctors had said she would
need both legs regrown at facilities back in the Solar System.

I don’t even know if Donovan was his real name,
Neil
thought. Probably not. He knew Donovan was divorced and had a teenaged son on
Earth, but Fairchild had politely been no help in providing any information
that would allow Neil to contact his family, saying the service handled such
matters on its own.

Donovan is gone,
Neil thought over and over. He felt
numb, defeated. The old spy had seemed larger-than-life. Immortal.
We’ve won
the day, freed thousands and thousands of Americans, yet all I can think about
is the lives lost, the lives taken.
The chaplain spoke of the eternal
dignity of those died in the line of duty.
Shouldn’t that be enough? But what
if nobility is just a story we invent to make ourselves feel better, a way to
impose a bit of meaning on what’s really just meaningless violence?
Donovan
was the one person who could have provided an answer that made sense.
And
Donovan is gone. This war's gotta end.

Rand’s face remained a mask.
He’s lost a mentor, too,
Neil
thought. As Donovan’s coffin descended, Neil leaned over and dropped his
handheld into the ground beside it.

Something for you to read, Jim.

Investigators believed someone had attached a bomb to the
refueling truck, although the captive Chinese military commander had denied
ordering such a thing. Neil was inclined to believe him; other than obvious
strategic moves like disabling the spaceport’s launching laser and blowing up
the sub pens at the port, the surrendering Chinese forces had not left behind
any traps or partaken in any kind of scorched earth campaign in the city.
But
who, then? Why blow up a random dropship from orbit? Was it random, or revenge,
or a targeted operation?

Could it have been Li Xiao?

He remembered the final words from Donovan’s last
communication to him, about having to live with uncertainty.

Neil and Rand and Lopez rode back to the city together, in a
civilian car the Chinese colonists had confiscated from the Americans, and the
Americans had confiscated back.

“Do you know where you are headed next?” Neil asked.

“Earth,” Rand and Lopez said at the same time. Rand added,
“They’re pulling one of the Marine brigades out, and we’re riding back with
them. Lopez, here, she’s been offered a job with the recruitment command.”

“Not sure I’ll take it,” she said.

“Really?” Rand asked.

“Hard to kill Hans giving speeches at high schools.”

They were silent for a moment. Rand said, “I’m not sure what
they’ll do with me. Probably not the recruitment circuit; I think I burned some
bridges with General Grogan. Maybe back to an artillery hole. What about you,
Neil?”

“
Apache
.”
And Jessica.
“She still needs a few
days of repairs, but I’m not sure if we’re staying here, joining the Alley
blockade, or heading somewhere else.”

They dropped Neil off at a quartermaster’s post; at last he
was able to get a handheld that allowed him to access his Space Force
Intelligence accounts. His queue was overflowing.

He found a message from Fort Belvoir regarding the serial
number Donovan had asked about.
Why was Donovan interested in some Chinese rocket
the Japanese captured in Korea?
He forwarded the message to Gardiner Fairchild,
and asked if he knew what this was about.

No idea
, Fairchild replied.

As Neil wondered if he should press Fairchild further, three
more messages appeared in his queue. The first was a recall to
Apache
giving
him priority on the next available launch to orbit. The second was orders for
Apache,
Valley Forge,
and several other warships to return to Earth immediately.

The third was an intelligence report that explained why: A
great Chinese and Korean fleet had crossed over from Sirius and launched from
Venus’ Trailing Trojan, headed for Earth.