Blood-Dimmed Tide, Chapter V
After the gala, the preparations, the long flight through inky space, and the initial terraforming, George was looking forward to a quiet retirement, initially in a prefab hut. When the Bonsai began to be logged, he built his own house in a low, sprawling, Prairie Home style, sent the hut back to central requisitioning, and settled into a retirement of building ships in bottles, historical research, and (during the winter) vicious chess. He was the colony champion and in the quiet years before turnaround had beaten the ship's AI, twice.
It's been about a half an hour, and someone's been doing some math, and I see someone else has been shouting some orders. At last, I see the orders go out. Com lasers twinkle from Luna through the inky blackness, and at the ends of some of them floating question marks appear, with their own columns of figures rapidly approaching zero. I count at least thirteen, and those are only the lasers which have been sufficiently deflected by dust for us to pick up the bounced coherent light. I'm not worried about the original RFD, which even now has only a 23% chance of being in its projected location. I worry about those question marks I can see and the countless ones I can't: the rest of the sharks who know now that there is blood in the water, and are still running dark with their complement of 300 men on five-year tours in space.
Some fraction of them, on every ship, will be ceaselessly and secretly looking for us, watching for the occlusion of stars, our outline against nebulae, making sure we haven't somehow changed course without the glaring use of radar until after it is far too late.
Fuck. At least none of them are between us and Sol.
George faded into the background of colony life, forgotten over the slow course of longer NUyears. This suited him just fine, until the day the FTL mail droid appeared with video in its databanks of the proceedings of the Representatives Republica in which New Utopia had been voted into the Republic. George read it while sipping some of the colony's first batch of Scotch, which had been sent to him by the Governor, his former first mate.
It wasn't Lagavulin, but then few things were.
He stepped out his front door, and looked over the valley below him, around the mountains, focused on his neighbor Roberto Castillo's house. In winter he could ski there, in most of two hours, but it was a five hour walk this time of year. The only reason he could see it at all was the twinkle of a porchlight in the shadow mountains had already drawn over the hollow in which Roberto had built. He looked at the long shadows of local herbivores as they leapt across the hillside, spooked by one of the imported bald eagles George had insisted on bringing. They looked somewhat like an unnatural yet amusing cross between rabbits and frogs, and people had taken to calling them fraggits. He pictured them living like rats, eating from dumpsters in great squealing bundles, hiding from groundcars in the huge cities mankind would build. He drained the last of his scotch, distinctly thought, "No," and went into his house to pack.
He left that night by skimmer and arrived at the Governor's mansion, a six-room house in First Base as dawn was peeping blearily over the horizon.
"Hi, John," he said as the Governor opened the door, "We've gotta have a talk."
Over coffee, and a smidgeon of scotch, George laid out his thoughts. John Koontz looked at him and said, "Are you bent on this, George? I mean, really bent on it?"
"Yeah."
"Good. I think you're right, but it's not gonna be easy."
For the next two weeks George appeared on planetwide broadcast, in speeches and debates with the most respected politicos on the planet. He had given more than his fair share of battlefield speeches, and it showed. He reminded them that the Republic had not footed the bill. He recited chapter and verse on the colony worlds which had been started as adjuncts to the Republic, or which had been annexed by the Republic. He reminded people why they had volunteered for the mission. He rallied them in a way they had not been rallied since the first days of the colony, when every man and woman had endured backbreaking labor in freezing temperatures so that someday this world would be a fit place for their descendants.
The night before a planetwide vote, he reminded them of this time. "And now, someday is today. Today, we live in a place like Eden again. Take a deep breath. Do you smell it? That's freedom! When is the last time you smelled air like that on Earth? Oh, sure, we still toil, we still work hard, but our callouses are honest, our sweat well spent, our land is our own. The Republic didn't bring us here. Hell, the companies didn't even bring us here. We have brought us here, through those callouses, that sweat, and respect for that land.
"Now, the Serpent stands at the gates to Eden, and demands entry as though he were the landlord. I say we tell him where to stuff it."
The inhabitants of New Utopia were mostly not Christian, but the imagery was clear. All but 23 of the 5,328 colonists voted by the cutoff time and the colony's computers tallied the votes. After First Base dinnertime that night, the results were announced. No less than ninety-three percent of the colonists believed they should tell the Republic where to stuff it.
The klaxon sounds again, startling me, and I look wildly around to see that the original Space Police ship has us in its radar sweep again. What the hell are they doing? They're holding it there; if this were a warship everyone on board would know.
Even as I think this, the RFD snaps into sharp focus, mere centimeters from its probable position, as coherent light flashes out of it, pinning the Police cruiser, and then snaps off. Of course, we already knew the area it was in. I wonder if I should run it through decryption, but even as the thought occurs, Thull's ship displays the contents: the single word "DESIST", followed by the spinning seal of the Republic Navy. The cone of yellow flicks off, somewhat desultorily, it seems to me. Or maybe shamefacedly. In a fleet action that idiot would be lucky to be court-martialed. As it is, he's lucky it was a message laser. I watch for a while, but nothing
interesting is happening. Apparently they've decided not to slice his ship in half.
Listening to Thull's description, I wished I had been able to meet George.
He seemed a likeable old bastard. The Governor had of course been a bit more polite in his phraseology, sincerely thanking the Republic for their flattering interest but saying that the colony regretted that they would not be ready for Republic membership for quite a while, emphasizing the long cold winters, the dearth of habitable land, the isolation from the Republic, he said it just wasn't practical. All of this was true. He did not mention that the colonists had voted against it, nor that the mission had been an
independent venture from the first dollar in the coffers, and owed the Republic absolutely nothing. He tactfully did not point out that the Republic was mainly a useless bunch of wage slaves whom the colonists, if they thought about them at all, considered one of the primary reasons they had left Earth behind. His carefully worded and diplomatic missive went into the FTL droid and that, they thought, was that.
George was not so optimistic. When the next mail droid failed to appear, his fears as he saw them were confirmed. He made preparations; these were long and involved, but mainly he looked for the right sort of men and women, in the right positions, and approached them. As the New Utopian Minutemen (as they called themselves) grew, and as the mail droids continued their troubling absence, they became less and less a secret society and more and more a popular movement. Some wailed that surely the Republic was not going to attack a human colony. Others retorted that the Republic did not attack, it merely "settled internal colonial disputes." One young man made the mistake in a public appearance of quoting an ancient flatfilm: "A disruption in communications can mean only one thing: Invasion." He was pelted off the stage by a hail of rotten fruits and vegetables. Eventually things settled down, and by the time they did sixty percent of the population was Minutemen.
When the Republic warships arrived, some instantly capitulated. Some fled into the woods of the equator and the vast blowing snowfields of the icecaps. But the Minutemen had planned and, having planned, did not fail to act.
George waited with a handpicked crew on the bridge of the Covenant, having shuttled up when the warships came out of C-plus ripple. "It's a suicide mission," George had said, "But I'm an old man anyway." They waited, for two weeks, as the fleet approached and entered orbit, They kicked the maneuvering thrusters on and actually managed to turn the main drive on a capital ship in parking orbit, lethally dosing with radiation those who were not killed by heat. "People on the ground later told me it looked like the Apollo came out at midnight," George said later to Thull in an near empty bar. His crew of fifteen were all wearing pressure suits: as the ship was hacked apart with particle beams, they scrambled for the dropship. Three made it out. In the ensuing ground war, George became an ersatz general, and was so successful he eventually fought offensive rather than merely regard actions. In the end, the Republic troops pulled back to their orbiting ships and an FTL droid was seen launching from the flagship. Three hours after it received a response, the fleet issued an ultimatum: cease resistance or face planetary bombardment.
One of the question marks floats past my ear and into my field of view, returning me to the present. If I was in a real military vessel, we'd have three shifts of manpower. As it is, it's just Thull and me. We'll have to sleep in shifts for the next three weeks. The game has gotten more interesting. To paraphrase the underrated and long-dead author of Chess With a Dragon, "Survival is always interesting. If it is your own survival, it is the most interesting thing." As it turned out he was entirely wrong about the nature of the galactic society (there wasn't one) but his title was eerily descriptive of our situation now, perhaps because of my thoughts of George and his liking for chess. Space battle, for it would come, is always like chess. You can see every piece on the board, and the only way to survive was to outthink the opponent. Except the board is three-dimensional, and you can rarely see the piece until after it is moved, and at this distance pieces are destroyed, not captured, Add in that in this particular game, our opponent has a full complement of pawns, knights, bishops, more than a few queens, and not a king on the board. We are stuck with one measly piece.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Fuck.
The colonists on New Utopia probably said the same thing. Eventually they capitulated. The troops landed, and the military governor was installed.
Things didn't return to normal, but they settled, and eventually sources close to the former Governor informed George that the fleet would shortly be leaving. George had already undergone some minor cosmetic surgery, performed by the former medical officer. He dusted off his uniform, made a few tailoring changes to suit the modern Navy, and demoted himself to corporal.
He then walked, bold as brass (which he was, though retired), into a shuttle launching from First Base to join the fleet, then ensconced himself in a disused storage locker roughly the size of a coffin. In this fashion he made the trip back to Earth, generally dining during third shift surrounded by tables of enlisted men.
I took a last look around and let combatspace fade around me. I needed a cup of coffee. Thull would be awake in eight hours; I knew I'd have to stay up until then, considering current events.
I sat in the galley and demolished a turkey sandwich. I took a bulb of coffee and thought about Thull's conversation with George.
`"The hardest part was remembering to salute," he told Thull. "Since in my head I was still a lieutenant colonel."
"Alright, it's a good yarn," Thull had said, "But why come to me? What exactly are you looking for?"
"The only reason the colony capitulated was the fleet, and it's gone. The new military governor has the people pacified, but if I could get rid of him, I think the regime would crumble with infighting and jockeying for position.
Not to mention he's hated and the surviving Minutemen would be able to rally the people more easily with a de facto victory."
The old man looked around, lowered his voice slightly. "I need ruthless men. I need assasssins, and none of my people are that. They don't have the makeup. There were two men under my command that might have served, and gladly: but they died on the Covenant when the hydrogen tank was hit. They are how I knew how to contact the Battalion. They were members, though I never got their real names, just the pseudonyms under which they boarded the Covenant."
"It doesn't matter," said Thull, waving it away. "The fact that you found us at all is proof that they were. None of us had names in those days, anyway."
George frowned, sipped his Lagavulin. "I have missed this stuff." He sighed. "But I'll gladly drink the piss we distill on New Utopia, if it's distilled by free men."
"Alright, I know a few people who might serve," said Thull. From my experience with him, he was probably uncomfortable with what he considered "patriotic bullshit." A lot of us are, and with good reason. "What's the payoff?"
George drained his scotch, gave the glass a last lingering stroke on its rim, then tapped it decisively. "How much would you charge for the death of one of the Representatives Republica?"
"Ten billion marks," answered Thull with no hesitation. "At least, that's how much I charged for Falwell."
An eyebrow, hoary under dye just growing out, went up. "So? I thought he died in a skimmer crash."
"He did."
"Double it. Take another man." He looked at Thull's ill-concealed surprise.
"What?"
"This is not how my negotiations usually go."
"I'm a very rich man, Mr. Thull. And I'm very determined."
"I can see that. And it's just Thull. But, having met you, I'm surprised you haven't done it yourself."
"I am also very old, despite this new face, and killing people is a game for the young. I've reached the point in my life," he paused as the bartender walked over, ordered another Lagavulin, watched suspiciously as he walked away. "I've reached a point in my life where I merely decide whom it is necessary to kill. Don't make it look like an accident, either. I want it to be very clear that he has been deliberately and indubitably killed."
"I'll do it for you. I know just the guy to take along," he said, thinking of me.
"Excellent." said George, reaching to shake hands. "I shall provide you with landing coordinates, contacts. Will you require any equipment?"
"Oh, I think the fee will be sufficient, you know, to cover operating costs."
Thull was still a little surprised, but I understood. George was ex-Navy.
The Navy spent money like it was going out of style. Expenses were always secondary to the goal. "One thing, though. What's this military governor's name?"
"Oh, that's the best part," said George, and told him. At that moment, I'm pretty sure Thull's face looked exactly like mine did when he told me.
After a long time, I had said, very carefully, "I thought he was dead."
"So did everyone else. He had a holo. It's him alright."
"It's a good thing you had already taken the money."
"Why?"
"Because if he had approached me, I would have done it for free."
Thull had given a grunt. It might have been an indication that he shared this sentiment, or bitter amusement, or just a grunt.
"Well, okay, just covering expenses, then."
"See?" said Thull, a smile breaking through the clouds upon his visage, gathered there while he told his story. "Ain't nothin' free."
I found a bunch of stuff floating around the interior of my car when I went down to check on it. The change is the worst. I sat up quickly and a heavy three credit coin caught me in the back of the skull. I caught most of it and moved it to a nylon pocket on the door.
I have opened the foldaway roof and am blearily running diagnostics on the car's peripherals when I hear him coming down the ladder headfirst. He kicks his legs away from it and up-ends at the end of a one-hand grip to orient with the car, hooks a knee behind a rung, and squints at the copper coin turning slowly in the light, then at me. "Turn the headlights off, wouldya?" he says, snatching the coin out of the air.
"Sorry. It was too dark to see under the dash."
"We have some decisions to make."
"Ah, you've already seen the tactical summary," I say, and yawn hugely. "Any more transmissions from Luna?"
"No, but some intraship communications have picked out a few more ships. Coded, though. Not a few broadcast radio."
"Of course, those aren't the ones that will hit us."
"Of course not."
"But we can only extrapolate fleet movements from those we know are there. They aren't going to send RFD's after a lifting shuttle. That's like using a machinegun to kill roaches," I say, mostly to myself. Thull stays silent; he has seen me work stuff out like this before. "No, what they're going to do is detail a bunch of small, fast ships from the closest point from which they can match velocity..."
Suddenly, I know it. They ARE going to try for the checkmate. I look up at him. "They're already moving. Look for ships headed toward Sol from entirely different directions than ours, but with velocities which will bring them into sling orbits at around the same time. A standard ship's sensors wouldn't see anything out of the ordinary, but with our hardware we can project far enough ahead. Keep an eye on slower ships moving in long ellipticals, too. Considering the common use of sling orbits to get velocity on the cheap, I'd be surprised if the Republic doesn't keep a few carriers in elliptical orbits for just such an extingency."
"You think they'll try to hit us during the sling?"
"What? No, are you crazy?" His expression suggests he doesn't like this.
"Sorry, I'm tired. What I mean is, nobody's stupid enough to have an
all-out fight in a sling orbit. Fuck up and it's either barbecue time or a permanent vacation in the Oort cloud. Also, if they intend to board, they'll send in a team, and there isn't an exosuit made that can deflect that kind of radiation or compensate for the heat. I think they'll hit their own slings to match velocity and go for extraction on the other side. But they'll hafta do most of the maneuvering before they get into the groove, and that means they'll be close; it's going to be mighty crowded in the final turn. They may try to hit us before we're in, though I wouldn't. It gets tough to dodge debris in that steep a gravity well, not to mention ships like this aren't cheap. If they wanted us breathing vacuum, the RFD's would be firing already. They'll probably issue a warning and try to board us. I am," another yawn, "Exhausted. I have to get to bed."
"Nobody's boarding this ship," Thull says. His tone suggests he would rather see it vaporized.
"Nah, of course not. You know," I say, closing up the car and following him up the ladder, "I've never fought the whole Republic Navy before." I yawn again, push off and glide toward the sleeping cubby. "It's kinda fun."
He says something, but I miss it. I have barely zippered myself into a nest of webbing and straps before I am fast asleep.
I fumble my way back out into the command room clutching a bulb of coffee.
My normal somambulistic coma prevents all thoughts until after the first cup. Sometimes the second. Thull could have had a brass band swinging from chains through his nipples while I was on my way to the galley and I probably would not have noticed.
He doesn't respond. I'm halfway through this second bulb and reasonably certain I can make the glide to the navigator/weapons chair without braining myself on the far bulkhead, so I put it to the test, catching the headrest and allowing inertia to swing me around to a position on one knee on the chair with a foot under each armrest.
He's deep in combat space, dead to the meat. I sigh, empty the bulb and stick it to a magstripe on the console, brush an access point with my forefinger. "What's going on?"
"Get in here."
"Yeah." Figures.
I strap into the chair, find my bulb with one hand, realize it's empty, sigh again. The chair feels me settle into it and there's an icy touch behind my ear.
Space is blue, a blue so dark as to be nearly black. I the only reason I can distinguish it from black is the comet I noticed yesterday, just crossing the halfway point of its journey to the Sun. It is an inky black, and behind it a mane of vapor trails into a lighter darkness indistinguishable from the background. The planets range from Pluto, an incongruously cheery robin's egg blue, to Mercury's dark, sullen orange. "You didn't actually find anthing with this heat emissions horseshit, didja?"
Thull looks over one shoulder and smiles like a wolf, tilts his head: Come and see.
I move closer - you can't really call it walking, not here - and just beyond him is Sol. In this view, the corona is more visible than the photosphere and chromosphere: at one million degrees Kelvin, it is a pulsing, shifting veil of white over the relatively cooler surface layers, which are visibly merely as a blinding yellow-white hazily discernible at best. A vast golden sunspot suddenly revealed by a shift in the corona makes Sol like like some sort of zero-gee omelet and I suddenly realize I'm hungry.
I follow his gaze and there it is, like a flaw in a window or a glitch in a retinal implant; something you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. A seeming whorl in space, only a slight difference in shade from the surrounding color. It's barely a lighter blue, like the comet's tail. I am reminded of the way water curls around an oar, though I can't say why. I look back at Thull, and he's still wearing that predator's grin.
"Computer," I say, as the grin widens, "Follow me."
"Ready," says the computer in its deliberately flat and sexless voice.
I reach out with both hands and form a circle, draw it down and around the flaw. "Increase sensitivity here," I look around, judging values. "Sixty percent."
An irregular cylinder of space around the flaw turns faintly pink; inside it, their noses glowing like cinders, fading ember-red toward their trailing edges, are four Republic interceptors and one assault boat. Curling back from them, away from the Sun, what I now realize is the solar wind (heated by and heating) whirls away into nothing like honey in hot tea leaving the edge of the spoon.
"You sneaky bastard," I whisper admiringly, and the wolf grin opens in a laugh.
It's been about a half an hour, and someone's been doing some math, and I see someone else has been shouting some orders. At last, I see the orders go out. Com lasers twinkle from Luna through the inky blackness, and at the ends of some of them floating question marks appear, with their own columns of figures rapidly approaching zero. I count at least thirteen, and those are only the lasers which have been sufficiently deflected by dust for us to pick up the bounced coherent light. I'm not worried about the original RFD, which even now has only a 23% chance of being in its projected location. I worry about those question marks I can see and the countless ones I can't: the rest of the sharks who know now that there is blood in the water, and are still running dark with their complement of 300 men on five-year tours in space.
Some fraction of them, on every ship, will be ceaselessly and secretly looking for us, watching for the occlusion of stars, our outline against nebulae, making sure we haven't somehow changed course without the glaring use of radar until after it is far too late.
Fuck. At least none of them are between us and Sol.
George faded into the background of colony life, forgotten over the slow course of longer NUyears. This suited him just fine, until the day the FTL mail droid appeared with video in its databanks of the proceedings of the Representatives Republica in which New Utopia had been voted into the Republic. George read it while sipping some of the colony's first batch of Scotch, which had been sent to him by the Governor, his former first mate.
It wasn't Lagavulin, but then few things were.
He stepped out his front door, and looked over the valley below him, around the mountains, focused on his neighbor Roberto Castillo's house. In winter he could ski there, in most of two hours, but it was a five hour walk this time of year. The only reason he could see it at all was the twinkle of a porchlight in the shadow mountains had already drawn over the hollow in which Roberto had built. He looked at the long shadows of local herbivores as they leapt across the hillside, spooked by one of the imported bald eagles George had insisted on bringing. They looked somewhat like an unnatural yet amusing cross between rabbits and frogs, and people had taken to calling them fraggits. He pictured them living like rats, eating from dumpsters in great squealing bundles, hiding from groundcars in the huge cities mankind would build. He drained the last of his scotch, distinctly thought, "No," and went into his house to pack.
He left that night by skimmer and arrived at the Governor's mansion, a six-room house in First Base as dawn was peeping blearily over the horizon.
"Hi, John," he said as the Governor opened the door, "We've gotta have a talk."
Over coffee, and a smidgeon of scotch, George laid out his thoughts. John Koontz looked at him and said, "Are you bent on this, George? I mean, really bent on it?"
"Yeah."
"Good. I think you're right, but it's not gonna be easy."
For the next two weeks George appeared on planetwide broadcast, in speeches and debates with the most respected politicos on the planet. He had given more than his fair share of battlefield speeches, and it showed. He reminded them that the Republic had not footed the bill. He recited chapter and verse on the colony worlds which had been started as adjuncts to the Republic, or which had been annexed by the Republic. He reminded people why they had volunteered for the mission. He rallied them in a way they had not been rallied since the first days of the colony, when every man and woman had endured backbreaking labor in freezing temperatures so that someday this world would be a fit place for their descendants.
The night before a planetwide vote, he reminded them of this time. "And now, someday is today. Today, we live in a place like Eden again. Take a deep breath. Do you smell it? That's freedom! When is the last time you smelled air like that on Earth? Oh, sure, we still toil, we still work hard, but our callouses are honest, our sweat well spent, our land is our own. The Republic didn't bring us here. Hell, the companies didn't even bring us here. We have brought us here, through those callouses, that sweat, and respect for that land.
"Now, the Serpent stands at the gates to Eden, and demands entry as though he were the landlord. I say we tell him where to stuff it."
The inhabitants of New Utopia were mostly not Christian, but the imagery was clear. All but 23 of the 5,328 colonists voted by the cutoff time and the colony's computers tallied the votes. After First Base dinnertime that night, the results were announced. No less than ninety-three percent of the colonists believed they should tell the Republic where to stuff it.
The klaxon sounds again, startling me, and I look wildly around to see that the original Space Police ship has us in its radar sweep again. What the hell are they doing? They're holding it there; if this were a warship everyone on board would know.
Even as I think this, the RFD snaps into sharp focus, mere centimeters from its probable position, as coherent light flashes out of it, pinning the Police cruiser, and then snaps off. Of course, we already knew the area it was in. I wonder if I should run it through decryption, but even as the thought occurs, Thull's ship displays the contents: the single word "DESIST", followed by the spinning seal of the Republic Navy. The cone of yellow flicks off, somewhat desultorily, it seems to me. Or maybe shamefacedly. In a fleet action that idiot would be lucky to be court-martialed. As it is, he's lucky it was a message laser. I watch for a while, but nothing
interesting is happening. Apparently they've decided not to slice his ship in half.
Listening to Thull's description, I wished I had been able to meet George.
He seemed a likeable old bastard. The Governor had of course been a bit more polite in his phraseology, sincerely thanking the Republic for their flattering interest but saying that the colony regretted that they would not be ready for Republic membership for quite a while, emphasizing the long cold winters, the dearth of habitable land, the isolation from the Republic, he said it just wasn't practical. All of this was true. He did not mention that the colonists had voted against it, nor that the mission had been an
independent venture from the first dollar in the coffers, and owed the Republic absolutely nothing. He tactfully did not point out that the Republic was mainly a useless bunch of wage slaves whom the colonists, if they thought about them at all, considered one of the primary reasons they had left Earth behind. His carefully worded and diplomatic missive went into the FTL droid and that, they thought, was that.
George was not so optimistic. When the next mail droid failed to appear, his fears as he saw them were confirmed. He made preparations; these were long and involved, but mainly he looked for the right sort of men and women, in the right positions, and approached them. As the New Utopian Minutemen (as they called themselves) grew, and as the mail droids continued their troubling absence, they became less and less a secret society and more and more a popular movement. Some wailed that surely the Republic was not going to attack a human colony. Others retorted that the Republic did not attack, it merely "settled internal colonial disputes." One young man made the mistake in a public appearance of quoting an ancient flatfilm: "A disruption in communications can mean only one thing: Invasion." He was pelted off the stage by a hail of rotten fruits and vegetables. Eventually things settled down, and by the time they did sixty percent of the population was Minutemen.
When the Republic warships arrived, some instantly capitulated. Some fled into the woods of the equator and the vast blowing snowfields of the icecaps. But the Minutemen had planned and, having planned, did not fail to act.
George waited with a handpicked crew on the bridge of the Covenant, having shuttled up when the warships came out of C-plus ripple. "It's a suicide mission," George had said, "But I'm an old man anyway." They waited, for two weeks, as the fleet approached and entered orbit, They kicked the maneuvering thrusters on and actually managed to turn the main drive on a capital ship in parking orbit, lethally dosing with radiation those who were not killed by heat. "People on the ground later told me it looked like the Apollo came out at midnight," George said later to Thull in an near empty bar. His crew of fifteen were all wearing pressure suits: as the ship was hacked apart with particle beams, they scrambled for the dropship. Three made it out. In the ensuing ground war, George became an ersatz general, and was so successful he eventually fought offensive rather than merely regard actions. In the end, the Republic troops pulled back to their orbiting ships and an FTL droid was seen launching from the flagship. Three hours after it received a response, the fleet issued an ultimatum: cease resistance or face planetary bombardment.
One of the question marks floats past my ear and into my field of view, returning me to the present. If I was in a real military vessel, we'd have three shifts of manpower. As it is, it's just Thull and me. We'll have to sleep in shifts for the next three weeks. The game has gotten more interesting. To paraphrase the underrated and long-dead author of Chess With a Dragon, "Survival is always interesting. If it is your own survival, it is the most interesting thing." As it turned out he was entirely wrong about the nature of the galactic society (there wasn't one) but his title was eerily descriptive of our situation now, perhaps because of my thoughts of George and his liking for chess. Space battle, for it would come, is always like chess. You can see every piece on the board, and the only way to survive was to outthink the opponent. Except the board is three-dimensional, and you can rarely see the piece until after it is moved, and at this distance pieces are destroyed, not captured, Add in that in this particular game, our opponent has a full complement of pawns, knights, bishops, more than a few queens, and not a king on the board. We are stuck with one measly piece.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Fuck.
The colonists on New Utopia probably said the same thing. Eventually they capitulated. The troops landed, and the military governor was installed.
Things didn't return to normal, but they settled, and eventually sources close to the former Governor informed George that the fleet would shortly be leaving. George had already undergone some minor cosmetic surgery, performed by the former medical officer. He dusted off his uniform, made a few tailoring changes to suit the modern Navy, and demoted himself to corporal.
He then walked, bold as brass (which he was, though retired), into a shuttle launching from First Base to join the fleet, then ensconced himself in a disused storage locker roughly the size of a coffin. In this fashion he made the trip back to Earth, generally dining during third shift surrounded by tables of enlisted men.
I took a last look around and let combatspace fade around me. I needed a cup of coffee. Thull would be awake in eight hours; I knew I'd have to stay up until then, considering current events.
I sat in the galley and demolished a turkey sandwich. I took a bulb of coffee and thought about Thull's conversation with George.
`"The hardest part was remembering to salute," he told Thull. "Since in my head I was still a lieutenant colonel."
"Alright, it's a good yarn," Thull had said, "But why come to me? What exactly are you looking for?"
"The only reason the colony capitulated was the fleet, and it's gone. The new military governor has the people pacified, but if I could get rid of him, I think the regime would crumble with infighting and jockeying for position.
Not to mention he's hated and the surviving Minutemen would be able to rally the people more easily with a de facto victory."
The old man looked around, lowered his voice slightly. "I need ruthless men. I need assasssins, and none of my people are that. They don't have the makeup. There were two men under my command that might have served, and gladly: but they died on the Covenant when the hydrogen tank was hit. They are how I knew how to contact the Battalion. They were members, though I never got their real names, just the pseudonyms under which they boarded the Covenant."
"It doesn't matter," said Thull, waving it away. "The fact that you found us at all is proof that they were. None of us had names in those days, anyway."
George frowned, sipped his Lagavulin. "I have missed this stuff." He sighed. "But I'll gladly drink the piss we distill on New Utopia, if it's distilled by free men."
"Alright, I know a few people who might serve," said Thull. From my experience with him, he was probably uncomfortable with what he considered "patriotic bullshit." A lot of us are, and with good reason. "What's the payoff?"
George drained his scotch, gave the glass a last lingering stroke on its rim, then tapped it decisively. "How much would you charge for the death of one of the Representatives Republica?"
"Ten billion marks," answered Thull with no hesitation. "At least, that's how much I charged for Falwell."
An eyebrow, hoary under dye just growing out, went up. "So? I thought he died in a skimmer crash."
"He did."
"Double it. Take another man." He looked at Thull's ill-concealed surprise.
"What?"
"This is not how my negotiations usually go."
"I'm a very rich man, Mr. Thull. And I'm very determined."
"I can see that. And it's just Thull. But, having met you, I'm surprised you haven't done it yourself."
"I am also very old, despite this new face, and killing people is a game for the young. I've reached the point in my life," he paused as the bartender walked over, ordered another Lagavulin, watched suspiciously as he walked away. "I've reached a point in my life where I merely decide whom it is necessary to kill. Don't make it look like an accident, either. I want it to be very clear that he has been deliberately and indubitably killed."
"I'll do it for you. I know just the guy to take along," he said, thinking of me.
"Excellent." said George, reaching to shake hands. "I shall provide you with landing coordinates, contacts. Will you require any equipment?"
"Oh, I think the fee will be sufficient, you know, to cover operating costs."
Thull was still a little surprised, but I understood. George was ex-Navy.
The Navy spent money like it was going out of style. Expenses were always secondary to the goal. "One thing, though. What's this military governor's name?"
"Oh, that's the best part," said George, and told him. At that moment, I'm pretty sure Thull's face looked exactly like mine did when he told me.
After a long time, I had said, very carefully, "I thought he was dead."
"So did everyone else. He had a holo. It's him alright."
"It's a good thing you had already taken the money."
"Why?"
"Because if he had approached me, I would have done it for free."
Thull had given a grunt. It might have been an indication that he shared this sentiment, or bitter amusement, or just a grunt.
"Well, okay, just covering expenses, then."
"See?" said Thull, a smile breaking through the clouds upon his visage, gathered there while he told his story. "Ain't nothin' free."
I found a bunch of stuff floating around the interior of my car when I went down to check on it. The change is the worst. I sat up quickly and a heavy three credit coin caught me in the back of the skull. I caught most of it and moved it to a nylon pocket on the door.
I have opened the foldaway roof and am blearily running diagnostics on the car's peripherals when I hear him coming down the ladder headfirst. He kicks his legs away from it and up-ends at the end of a one-hand grip to orient with the car, hooks a knee behind a rung, and squints at the copper coin turning slowly in the light, then at me. "Turn the headlights off, wouldya?" he says, snatching the coin out of the air.
"Sorry. It was too dark to see under the dash."
"We have some decisions to make."
"Ah, you've already seen the tactical summary," I say, and yawn hugely. "Any more transmissions from Luna?"
"No, but some intraship communications have picked out a few more ships. Coded, though. Not a few broadcast radio."
"Of course, those aren't the ones that will hit us."
"Of course not."
"But we can only extrapolate fleet movements from those we know are there. They aren't going to send RFD's after a lifting shuttle. That's like using a machinegun to kill roaches," I say, mostly to myself. Thull stays silent; he has seen me work stuff out like this before. "No, what they're going to do is detail a bunch of small, fast ships from the closest point from which they can match velocity..."
Suddenly, I know it. They ARE going to try for the checkmate. I look up at him. "They're already moving. Look for ships headed toward Sol from entirely different directions than ours, but with velocities which will bring them into sling orbits at around the same time. A standard ship's sensors wouldn't see anything out of the ordinary, but with our hardware we can project far enough ahead. Keep an eye on slower ships moving in long ellipticals, too. Considering the common use of sling orbits to get velocity on the cheap, I'd be surprised if the Republic doesn't keep a few carriers in elliptical orbits for just such an extingency."
"You think they'll try to hit us during the sling?"
"What? No, are you crazy?" His expression suggests he doesn't like this.
"Sorry, I'm tired. What I mean is, nobody's stupid enough to have an
all-out fight in a sling orbit. Fuck up and it's either barbecue time or a permanent vacation in the Oort cloud. Also, if they intend to board, they'll send in a team, and there isn't an exosuit made that can deflect that kind of radiation or compensate for the heat. I think they'll hit their own slings to match velocity and go for extraction on the other side. But they'll hafta do most of the maneuvering before they get into the groove, and that means they'll be close; it's going to be mighty crowded in the final turn. They may try to hit us before we're in, though I wouldn't. It gets tough to dodge debris in that steep a gravity well, not to mention ships like this aren't cheap. If they wanted us breathing vacuum, the RFD's would be firing already. They'll probably issue a warning and try to board us. I am," another yawn, "Exhausted. I have to get to bed."
"Nobody's boarding this ship," Thull says. His tone suggests he would rather see it vaporized.
"Nah, of course not. You know," I say, closing up the car and following him up the ladder, "I've never fought the whole Republic Navy before." I yawn again, push off and glide toward the sleeping cubby. "It's kinda fun."
He says something, but I miss it. I have barely zippered myself into a nest of webbing and straps before I am fast asleep.
I fumble my way back out into the command room clutching a bulb of coffee.
My normal somambulistic coma prevents all thoughts until after the first cup. Sometimes the second. Thull could have had a brass band swinging from chains through his nipples while I was on my way to the galley and I probably would not have noticed.
He doesn't respond. I'm halfway through this second bulb and reasonably certain I can make the glide to the navigator/weapons chair without braining myself on the far bulkhead, so I put it to the test, catching the headrest and allowing inertia to swing me around to a position on one knee on the chair with a foot under each armrest.
He's deep in combat space, dead to the meat. I sigh, empty the bulb and stick it to a magstripe on the console, brush an access point with my forefinger. "What's going on?"
"Get in here."
"Yeah." Figures.
I strap into the chair, find my bulb with one hand, realize it's empty, sigh again. The chair feels me settle into it and there's an icy touch behind my ear.
Space is blue, a blue so dark as to be nearly black. I the only reason I can distinguish it from black is the comet I noticed yesterday, just crossing the halfway point of its journey to the Sun. It is an inky black, and behind it a mane of vapor trails into a lighter darkness indistinguishable from the background. The planets range from Pluto, an incongruously cheery robin's egg blue, to Mercury's dark, sullen orange. "You didn't actually find anthing with this heat emissions horseshit, didja?"
Thull looks over one shoulder and smiles like a wolf, tilts his head: Come and see.
I move closer - you can't really call it walking, not here - and just beyond him is Sol. In this view, the corona is more visible than the photosphere and chromosphere: at one million degrees Kelvin, it is a pulsing, shifting veil of white over the relatively cooler surface layers, which are visibly merely as a blinding yellow-white hazily discernible at best. A vast golden sunspot suddenly revealed by a shift in the corona makes Sol like like some sort of zero-gee omelet and I suddenly realize I'm hungry.
I follow his gaze and there it is, like a flaw in a window or a glitch in a retinal implant; something you'd miss if you weren't looking for it. A seeming whorl in space, only a slight difference in shade from the surrounding color. It's barely a lighter blue, like the comet's tail. I am reminded of the way water curls around an oar, though I can't say why. I look back at Thull, and he's still wearing that predator's grin.
"Computer," I say, as the grin widens, "Follow me."
"Ready," says the computer in its deliberately flat and sexless voice.
I reach out with both hands and form a circle, draw it down and around the flaw. "Increase sensitivity here," I look around, judging values. "Sixty percent."
An irregular cylinder of space around the flaw turns faintly pink; inside it, their noses glowing like cinders, fading ember-red toward their trailing edges, are four Republic interceptors and one assault boat. Curling back from them, away from the Sun, what I now realize is the solar wind (heated by and heating) whirls away into nothing like honey in hot tea leaving the edge of the spoon.
"You sneaky bastard," I whisper admiringly, and the wolf grin opens in a laugh.