C.J. Carella's Website

 To be released this Summer, 2016.

(These aren't the final versions and may include different content - and a couple typos - that won't be in the published copy).

@2016 Fey Dreams Productions LLC

“Legionnaires, you became soldiers in order to die, and I’m taking you to a place where you can die!”

- General Francois De Negrier

“The most noble fate a man can endure is to place his own mortal body between his loved home and the war’s desolation.”

- Robert A. Heinlein

Prologue: A Hasty Defense

Star System Melendez, Year 163 AFC

BATTLE STATIONS. THIS IS NOT A DRILL.

Rear Admiral (Upper Half) Horacio Elba was halfway down the corridor leading to the Tactical Flag Command Center before the all-hands alert had fully filtered down to his brain; the keening sound of the General Quarters alarm hammered his eardrums and finished waking him up. He’d been sleeping in his uniform ever since the war began, like every other officer in CRURON 56. They’d been on full alert for two months, and their worst fears were coming true. The aliens were coming.

“Warp emergence, forty light-minutes,” the Space Watch Officer announced as Elba walked into the TFCC.  The specialist hesitated for a second before delivering the rest of the bad news. “Sir, we’ve evaluated the energy signatures of the opforce. Given the number of hulls entering the system, this has to be the full Lhan Arkh Upper Quadrant Fleet.”

Despair is a sin.

The thought did little to comfort Admiral Elba as he glanced at the icons on the holotank display, where the sensor data that had taken the better part of an hour to reach his fleet was being assembled into icons representing the enemy ship classes. Three dreadnoughts. Five battleships. Nine battlecruisers. Twenty destroyers and twenty-five frigates. This was a main thrust into human space, and all he had to oppose it was a pitiful fifteen-ship formation.

His squadron consisted of the City-class battlecruiser USS Charlotte, six antiquated President-class light cruisers, and eight escorts, evenly split between frigates and destroyers. Until a few months ago, this sector, centered around Star System Melendez, had been considered ‘safe;’ his ships were there to prevent piracy and to keep an eye on the Butterflies and Lizards, the two Starfarer nations with warp lines leading into the system. Both polities had been relatively friendly, but good fences – and decent-sized fleets – made for the best neighbors. The Days of Infamy had changed everything. Several human outposts inside Butterfly and Lizard territories had been attacked and destroyed by angry mobs covertly supported by the Lampreys. The fact those massacres had been allowed to happen turned those Starfarer nations into potential hostiles, and CRURON 56 was far too weak to protect the sector in the face of a serious attack from either of them.

The decision had been made to evacuate Melendez System before one of those notional neutrals switched sides or allowed the Lampreys to move through their territories. They’d hoped there would be enough time to save most of the civilians and merge CRURON 56 with other picket squadrons further down the warp-line.

The Lampreys’ arrival meant that they had bribed, bullied or otherwise persuaded one of the two neighboring Startfarers to allow a fleet to enter their territory. Admiral Elba’s guess was it’d been the Lizards, who had skirmished with the US a few decades back and were known to hold a grudge. The Lizards might have even joined the anti-human coalition.

The admiral shook his head. None of that mattered at the moment. He had a system to defend.

There were twelve million people on Melendez-Four, the only inhabitable planet in the system. An additional million spacers who’d lived and worked on the star system’s asteroid belt had been evacuated in the two months since the order was given. Removing the planet’s inhabitants was taking far longer. Spacers knew how to travel light and move fast. Dirtsiders had no clue, most of them, anyway. Elba had spent ninety of his hundred-and-fifteen years inside some artificial vehicle or installation, always knowing that the hard vacuum of space was never further than a few dozen feet from where he slept. He understood how quickly things could go hell far better than those who spent their lives at the bottom of a planet’s gravity well and took basic life support systems for granted.

To make matters worse, twenty percent of Melendez-Four’s inhabitants, a little under half of those who had been born on the planet, could not endure warp space. Leaving them behind was a death sentence, but taking them into warp, even under full hibernation, would result in over seventy percent fatalities, and any survivors would become incurably insane. Abandoning over two million Americans to the tender mercies of the Lampreys would haunt Elba and everyone in CRURON 56 for the rest of their lives.

Removing the nine and a half million who could be saved was proving to be difficult enough. Every freighter, passenger vessel, troop transport and logistical support ship in range had been mobilized and had spent two months ferrying refugees out of Melendez System. Their efforts had saved one million refugees from the planet proper in addition to the spacers. More ships were joining the effort, but it would take three more months to evacuate those that could and would flee.

Time had run out.

“Warp emergence! Ten light minutes from M-4. Same energy signatures.”

That would be the enemy’s next to last jump. The final warp emergence would put the Lamprey Fleet some ten to twenty light seconds away from Melendez-Four, which would give the enemy time to recover from warp transit and maneuver towards the target, three to five hours away at normal cruising speeds.

“All ships. Prepare for warp transit,” Admiral Elba ordered. His cruiser squadron would emerge in geosynchronous orbit around Melendez-Four. Normally he would have tried to engage the enemy fleet as far out as possible to thin out its numbers, but given the disparity in firepower he decided to operate under the umbrella of the planet’s defenses.

Melendez-Four had two orbital fortresses, four Planetary Defense Bases and a local defense fleet of eight monitors, STL ships unable to warp but as heavily armed as a cruiser. Those installations would double CRURON 56’s available firepower. If their combined forces inflicted enough losses on the Lampreys, they might break off the attack and allow the evacuation to continue. The hideous ETs weren’t known for their intestinal fortitude when it came to pitched battles; they preferred to rely on trickery and would attack only when victory was certain. From what he knew about Lamprey capabilities, his chances of achieving a stalemate were maybe one in three. Not exactly gambling odds, but it was the hand he’d been dealt, and he intended to play it as well he could.

He could order the squadron to run, of course. A simple change in warp coordinates, and his ships would be on their way to the Memphis System, nine warp-hours away. All civilian ships capable of warp transit had already fled. The eleven million civilians still on the planet would be at the mercy of the Lampreys. The admiral shook his head minutely and let his orders stand.

Transition.

Elba found himself surrounded by the dead. Hundreds of solemn figures looked at him, and he found it difficult to meet their steady gazes, in no small part because he recognized every face he saw. They were the crew of the Charlotte and the other ships of CRURON 56. All of whom had been alive and well when the squadron had entered warp space. He was overwhelmed with the certainty those ghosts came from the near future. They were all going to die. And they were going to die at his hand.

Emergence.

It took a few seconds to recover. The admiral shook off the disconcerting vision – They’re only hallucinations, he sternly told himself – and oversaw the preparations for the battle to come. The monitor squadron moved closer to support his ships and the combined forces arranged themselves to provide fire lanes for the STL ships and orbital fortresses. When the Lampreys began their slow and ponderous final approach, they would get a warm reception.

“Warp emergence! Half a light second away!”

“What? Are they insane?”

Lampreys – like all other Starfarer species – took far longer to recover from warp transit than humans. The enemy fleet had arrived at ideal combat range, except for the fact that the alien crews would be incapacitated for as long as thirty seconds. Automated systems could only do so much – true artificial intelligence was not only frowned upon, but turned out to be even more vulnerable to warp space than biological sophonts. Usually the best a ship could do upon emergence was to fire a volley of missiles in the general direction of a target. And even capital ships didn’t have enough launch tubes to make such a volley count for much.

These dreadnoughts and battleships were different.

Even as CRURON 56 and the planetary defenders began to fire on the invaders, Admiral Elba peered closely at the alien ships, now that they were close enough for a full sensor scan. Their outlines bulged with box launchers everywhere; they vomited a massive missile volley upon emergence, each ship unleashing as many salvos as a dozen normal ones. Traveling at 0.01 c, that swarm of ship-killers would reach the squadron in less than a minute.

“Divert all fire to point defense!” Elba ordered. Every ship and orbital platform stopped targeting the Viper ships and turned their guns against the unexpected onslaught. CRURON 56 could have handled an ordinary volley from an enemy fleet that size, three to four thousand missiles. Point defense emplacements on the Charlotte alone could destroy twenty missiles per second at the current range. The rest of his ships were somewhat less capable, but their combined fire would reduce four thousand ‘vampires’ to a mere handful that couldn’t hope to inflict much damage.

Fifty thousand missiles were headed towards Melendez-Four.

They did their best. Main and secondary guns shifted their aim and went into rapid-fire mode, risking their tubes and energy modules in a desperate bid for survival. Their laser and graviton charges were grossly overpowered for the job, but their accuracy was just as good as the lighter point-defense weapons. Elba sent out its own missile volley, hastily reprogrammed to go after their counterparts. For fifty seconds, starships, monitors, fortresses and planetary defense bases threw everything they had against the impossibly-massive barrage.

At T-plus-thirty seconds, nineteen thousand missiles were left. At T-plus-ten, as the swarm began to converge, presenting better targets, only two thousand remained.

Post-battle calculations estimated some seven hundred and fifty missiles struck CRURON 56 and the orbital defense units.

Charlotte heaved under multiple impacts. Her warp shields swallowed several missiles, but others – too many others – targeted her unprotected sectors, breaching her ordinary force fields and armored hull. Entire compartments were emptied into space or engulfed in plasma fires and the ship shook like a beast in pain. Elba slammed against the harness securing him to the command chair. Lights flickered for a moment before stabilizing again. His imp dispassionately sent him damage reports as quickly as they were received.

All the fortresses and monitors were gone; unprotected by warp shields, they’d been easy prey despite their heavy conventional defenses. Of the light ships, only one badly-damaged frigate remained. A light cruiser had been destroyed outright. The Charlotte and the rest of the survivors were all damaged but functional, for whatever that was worth. The admiral had some cracked ribs; two of the tactical center’s specialists were down, one of them badly injured, but everyone else was at their post.

The Lampreys had plenty of time to recover from warp transit; they began advancing steadily as their beam weapons engaged the survivors of the massive salvo.

Elba was faced with a simple choice: CRURON 56 could stand and die, inflicting negligible losses, or it could flee.

No.

A third solution suggested itself.

“Attention all hands,” he announced. “Cease fire. Divert all offensive power to the field generators. Prepare for warp transit.” Elba transmitted the coordinates directly to the warp navigators; they would be the only ones who would know with certainty what was about to happen. All of them understood the situation, and all of them acknowledged the orders without protest. He allowed himself a moment of pride in them. Twenty seconds went by as the enemy ships fired on the silent squadron. Most of the hits were absorbed by the ships’ warp shields; the rest didn’t inflict enough damage to stop Elba’s plan.

“It’s been an honor serving with y’all. Engage.”

CRURON 56 performed the first warp ramming maneuver in known galactic history.

Five ships entered warp space. The lone frigate tried to do so and died in the attempt, preceding the rest of the squadron’s demise by a mere second or so.

Each vessel appeared in the path of a Lhan Arkh ship. With closure speeds in excess of three hundred kilometers per second, there was no chance of avoiding a collision. The American cruisers’ warp shields devoured huge chunks of the Lampreys’ ships as they ran into each other. That didn’t save the attackers, however. The catastrophic explosions unleashed as each Lamprey warship was destroyed flowed over their shields and onto the unprotected sections of the American ships, consuming them in turn. The Lamprey dreadnoughts, and one battleship were destroyed outright. Two others were crippled by near misses.

During his final foray into warp-space, Rear Admiral Elba saw the dead nod at him approvingly.

Earth, Sol System, 163 AFC

“The surviving Lhan Arkh’s vessels withdrew without finishing the attack on Melendez-Four, which still retained its planetary defense bases,” Admiral DuPont said as he concluded the report. “There has been no additional enemy activity in the system since then. Given these losses, coupled with the ones sustained at the Battle of Paulus, the Lampreys have been neutralized for at least a year, possibly more. Most of their capital ships are gone. They haven’t been quite reduced to a frigate navy, but it’s close, and it will take them time to rebuild.”

White House Chief of Staff Tyson Keller had always thought kamikaze tactics were for losers, in every sense of the word. CRURON 56 had made their sacrifice count, though. They had saved some ten million people, and given those left behind extra time to hide and hope the Lampreys didn’t find them right away when they finally came back. Long-term, however, exchanging a cruiser squadron for three dreadnoughts and a battleship was not worth it. The ETs could replace those hulls and even their crews faster than the US could.

It also means we may or may not be losers, but we sure as hell are losing.

Even worse, the suicide run was the kind of trick that only worked that well once. The JCs figured that the easiest way to deal with warp-ramming was to keep some thrust power in reserve to perform radical maneuvers the moment a close warp emergence was detected, allowing the target to ‘dodge’ the kamikazes. The end result would be a loss of five to ten percent available power for the enemy, which would lower the chance to ram by over sixty percent, after which the wannabe suicide ship would be a sitting duck with a survival time measured in seconds.

All things considered, however, Tyson couldn’t condemn Admiral Elba’s choice. Elba had sacrificed his command to save millions of civilians. They had lain down their lives between their people and the desolation of war. That’s what it all came down to in the end.

“Thank you, Admiral. Keep us appraised.”

President Albert P. Hewer terminated the conference call, leaving him alone with Keller in the new and improved Oval Office, located in the District of Nebraska, a patch of marginal farmland that had been turned into the new capital of the United Stars of America.

“We can speak freely,” Hewer said to his second-hand man. “Just lowered the Cone of Silence.” Both men were just old enough – they’d both celebrated their two hundredth birthday a good while ago – to chuckle at the joke.

“Yes, sir, Mister Presidente Vitalicio, sir,” Tyson said as he poured himself a drink.

“That gag got stale decades ago, Ty.”

“I’ll keep making it as long as you keep running for reelection.”

“Just to keep me on my toes?”

“Just to remind you this wasn’t supposed to be an Eternal Administration. The Puppies spared the US, not North Korea.”

“You know how it goes. Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in.” Another joke only pre-Contact Ancients would get.

“Heh. You had to quote the worst Godfather movie of the bunch.” Tyson shrugged. “I know all your excuses by heart, Al. ‘Nobody else can do the job.’ ‘Look at the pack of idiots vying for the White House.’ ‘After this crisis is over, I’ll retire – but, wait, here’s another crisis.’”

“I almost quit after we settled the Risshah’s hash. Then the Crabs tried to fill the void they left. And after they’d been taught their lesson, along came the Horde. The Gremlins, may they all burn in Hell. And so on and so forth. And now it’s the Lampreys, Vipers and the Goddamn Galactic Imperium. You really want to switch horses in the middle of this shitstorm? We may have lost the war before the next election anyhow. We don’t do posthumous swearing-in ceremonies.”

“You don’t sound too optimistic,” Tyson said. He heard the same briefings the President did, and he knew the situation wasn’t just terrible, it was close to completely hopeless. But the one good thing about Al was that the man had no quit in him. To hear him spout defeatist crap was worrisome.

“We’re stretched too thin,” Hewer said. “We don’t have the manpower. A little under two billion of us, counting immigrants and probationary citizens and every living being that will salute the flag, plus two billion Pan-Asians and about two billion from all the rest, mostly from Africa. There’re still less humans in the galaxy than before First Contact. Even with the longevity treatments helping things along. It’s depressing.”

“We’re about due for a population explosion,” Tyson pointed out. “People are finally figuring out the kinks of being able to live for centuries. Most people save enough to take twenty years off work, raise a litter of kids, then go back to the grind. We’re going to double in size in about a generation, and double every thirty years of so after that.”

“But we don’t have a generation. The Tripartite Galactic Alliance can outgun and out-produce us. This time, we get to play Imperial Japan during the Second Big Mess; it doesn’t matter how good we are if they can bury us in bodies. Or starships, in this case. Especially if they come up with new tricks for a change. Those missile ships are bad news. They play straight into their strengths. Ton by ton, a missile is more expensive than a starship; that volley they fired at those poor bastards at Melendez cost more than the fleet that shot them. They can afford the expense, though. It’s just the kind of stunt we used to pull back when we were the industrial powerhouse of the world. Spend a million bucks to put a smart bomb through some poor dumb bastard’s window. Except now we’re the poor dumb bastards.”

“So you’re telling me we turned the US into a banana republic for nothing.”

“Not a banana republic, an unofficial parliamentary monarchy. Temporarily. We’ve kept the trappings of a republic and I aim to see the republic restored after we’re secure. Assuming we live that long. And no, I’m not surrendering. I just don’t know if we can win this one.”

“You never know, Al. Vegas odds were the Snakes were going to eat our lunch, and we made them extinct. We’ve always been the underdog and we’ve done pretty well despite that.”

“Not like this. Even with the Wyrms weighing in on our side, the numbers look terrible. And the Wyrms will quit on us as soon as things get tough. They know they can negotiate their way out of this. We can’t. The Days of Infamy made it clear they don’t want a few concessions from us, or even to reduce us to client status. They want us gone from the galaxy, root and branch.”

“Then we need to get the Puppies on board.”

“They have agreed to help out with some supplies and a few extra ships, some of them crewed by volunteers. Figure an extra ten percent in firepower, twenty in logistics. Not enough. The House of Royals at the Doghouse is evenly divided, and the High King has decided to stay official neutral, for now. He’ll slip us as much aid as he can without provoking a declaration of war from the triple asshole alliance, but that’s about it.”

“There is the Lexington Project. That’s just about ready.”

Even as he spoke, Tyson knew he was whistling in the dark. Lexington a ‘super-weapon’ project that looked good enough to fast-track, but that didn’t mean much. Ordinarily, he’d have considered it a waste of time and money: the resources spent in developing and fielding new weapon systems could have produced a lot more ordinary, tried-and-true ships, missiles and the logistics necessary to keep them running. Problem was, they couldn’t match their enemies’ production capabilities no matter what. Their only hope was to try to come up with some innovation that would overcome the ETs’ numerical and industrial superiority.

And who tried to do just that, historically? The Confederacy, with the CSS Virginia and those suicide subs. The Germans in WW2, with all their Wunderwaffe collection. And what did all that inventiveness get them? A steaming pile of nothing.

Of course, he reminded himself, in those same wars the winners had also come with a few new toys of their own. Toys like the USS Monitor, or Fat Man and Little Boy. But the winning side had also fielded the most battalions and ships. If you went by past history, the US was screwed.

Guess we’ll have to make our own history.

“Yep. Lexington is coming on line,” Al said, sounding about as enthusiastic as Tyson felt. “Going to take at least a couple of years to fully implement. A year minimum for any kind of deployment, and those new gizmos will be crewed by be newbies, with zero combat experience. As likely to get slaughtered as to make a difference. Same with all our other tricks. I don’t know if we can produce enough new gadgets, not in time to turn the tide.”

“So we buy some time.”

“We will try. You heard what the JCS had to say. A few good ideas, but most of them are long shots. The biggest thing going for us is that the Tripartite Alliance isn’t coordinating worth a damn. Each bunch is making its own push into our star systems, and the Imperium has been downright halfhearted so far. But the sad thing is, each separate push might be strong enough to steamroll us.”

“We play the hand we were dealt, Al. We put it to the touch.”

“To win or lose it all. Yeah, maybe I should use Montrose’s Toast during the next State of the Union. That’ll cost the Eagle Party a dozen seats in the midterms. People are getting risk averse in their old age. Nobody wants to hear the ‘lose it all’ part. I sure don’t.”

“Buck up, Al.”

The President looked him in the eye. “We’re going down fighting, Ty. But I think we’re going down.” He shuddered, despair clearly written on his homely features. “Not that I’ll let it show when I’m out in public. Never let them see you sweat. And who knows? Maybe the horse will learn how to sing.”

Tyson shrugged. That would have to do; Al was getting punch-drunk with the steady stream of bad news coming from every direction, but he would fake it till he made it, and that should be enough for now. Tyson would keep doing his job, of course. There were a few surrender-monkeys in Congress that needed to go, for one. Luckily one of them was into child porn and most of the others had been feathering their nests for a good while. He’d had files on them for a little while and been waiting for the need to use them. Removing those assholes wouldn’t even require any wet work. His people in the press would take them down in quick succession, and that would encourage the others not to obstruct the new war plans.

 It was going to get ugly, both internally and externally. Wars to the knife were like that.

One

New Parris, Star System Musik, 164 AFC

Charlie “Cossack” Company, Battalion Landing Team, 101^st Marine Expeditionary Unit, led the way towards the cauldron of battle.

“Dammit, where’s Cossack-3?” USWMC Captain Peter Fromm said, resisting the impulse to slam a gauntleted fist against the command and control console in the command vehicle. The rest of the company was due to start moving forward in about thirty seconds, a bounding overwatch maneuver that required his weapons platoon (Third Platoon, a.k.a. Cossack-3) to set up and provide cover for the advance.

Enemy artillery was already in action; the dull roar of distant explosions was getting closer as the defending Vipers struck out at the three battalions trying to destroy their ground base. Speed was vital when going on the offensive: staying still only made you a better target. And the overwatch platoon was behind schedule, holding up everyone else.

“Lieutenant O’Malley sent two squads forward to check for possible snipers,” said First Lieutenant Hansen, Fromm’s executive officer. “He’s confirmed the position is clear and the platoon is deploying. Five more minutes, he says”

To wait would mean delaying the entire battalion’s advance. O’Malley’s timidity had already cost them ten minutes while he hunted for imaginary snipers. He’d probably caught some ghost sensor reflection and reacted with his typical over-cautiousness. Third Platoon’s sergeant would make sure the weapons sections took their positions on top of a mesa overlooking the company’s advance as quickly as possible, but they were running out of time.

The modified Land Assault Vehicle that served as the company’s mobile command post enhanced Fromm’s computer implants, enabling him to watch what was happening from multiple angles, from the godlike view afforded by recon drones to the personal helmet sensors of every soldier in his unit. A quick look showed him that the weapons platoon was just beginning to dismount from their vehicles and set up their heavy weapons. Five minutes was an optimistic estimate.

Fromm made a decision. “Send out the Hellcats and Cossack-1,” he ordered, placing icons on the tactical map. “Move Cossack-2 over that ridge to the east, have their LAVs set hull-down to provide cover fire while Third gets its head out of its collective ass.”

“Roger that.” Hansen began to relay the orders while Fromm watched the unfolding situation and prepared for his next move.

The first enemy shells were beginning to burst over the narrow mountain pass separating the 101^st from its primary objective, a Viper Planetary Defense Base. The terrain being traversed by the battalion was a rocky desert plain broken by scattered mesas that rose up to two hundred feet in places. Sections of it were still smoking, indicating spots where enemy units had been caught and destroyed by the artillery preparation that had preceded the attack. They were going to have to rush forward and hope the dug-in enemy troops had been neutralized by the rain of high explosive and plasma that had descended upon them. Intelligence estimated the pass was defended by a company of Viper Crèche Defense fighters (an alternative translation for the alien designation was ‘Child Protective Services’). There would be some survivors even after the massive barrage and the longer they left them be, the more likely it was they would try to do something about the invading force.

Movement to contact against unknown and likely strongly-held enemy positions wasn’t the kind of thing any commander wanted to do, because the butcher’s bill was guaranteed to be high. But the remfies in charge had decided it needed to be done that way, and now it was time to do or die, with any questions to be saved for the after action report.

If things had gone according to their OPORD, Cossack-3 should have been providing cover for the rest of the company, hitting possible enemy positions with mortars while their missile and heavy gun sections stood ready to take out any return fire. Their slow deployment meant Second Platoon would take their place instead of joining in the advance.

The sixteen Hellcats that comprised Cossack-4 rushed forward. The Mobile Infantry suits looked like mechanical headless felines: four-legged, nine feet long and no more than three feet high at the shoulder, or a foot lower when lying fully prone. Suit and wearer together weighted about two thousand pounds, but they exerted only slightly more pressure per square inch than a standing trooper in normal combat armor, and their frontal profile was smaller. Shields and armor nearly equal to a Land Assault Vehicles, and enough weapon pods to rival a heavy weapon section completed the ensemble. The Hellcats could run at up to a hundred miles an hour, and their power packs allowed for thirty-six hours of sustained operations.

To his surprise, the mechanical kitties were performing as advertised. He’d spent the last eight months integrating Cossack-4 into his company, and he still didn’t have a good feel for the powered armor systems – or a good feeling about them.

Heavily armed and armored battlesuits had entranced visionaries since long before First Contact. Reality kept disrupting those dreams, however. Once you added enough armor and weapons to justify their use, the artificial musculature necessary to move them at more than a walking speed, and the energy supply required to empower both, what you got was something too tall and bulky to be anything more than a better target. The more armor and shields you added, the better a target it became, until you ended up with a tank rather than anything even vaguely humanoid. After many failed prototypes, a team of designers had realized that, if a bipedal suit of armor wouldn’t work in open field combat, maybe a different body plan would. Something like, say, a dog or a cat. The end result now led the way.

First Platoon followed the Hellcats, five LAVs carrying its three rifle squads, command element and an area field generator that created an invisible umbrella with a three-hundred-yard radius.  The troop carriers were long, angular vehicles with a topside bubble turret holding an assortment of support weapons and a four-shot missile launcher on each side. They floated a foot or so off the ground as they darted forward at 150 k.p.h. Despite the protection afforded by their heavy force fields and sixty millimeters of carbyne-steel composite armor, any vehicle that stayed in the open for too long risked immediate destruction.

Enemy rockets and shells began to fall upon the two advancing platoons. Gatling air-defense lasers mounted on the vehicles’ turrets went into action, exploding about half of the barrage mid-flight. The surviving munitions detonated against the area force field and went off harmlessly over the advancing vehicles as they pressed forward towards their objective, a clump of massive boulders a quarter of a klick away.

Two hundred and fifty meters – less than three football fields long – isn’t a long way when you’re dashing forward at over ninety miles an hour. It took Cossack-1’s vehicles and their picket line of Hellcats a little over six seconds to reach their rally point.

It took a lot less for two camouflaged Viper anti-tank teams to emerge from hiding and engage the Marines.

Camo blankets were thrown aside; their spoofing systems made the Viper’s dug-in positions look like a harmless pile of rocks, and they had survived the artillery barrage and evaded detection by the drones orbiting overhead. The closest unmasked position was a grav-gun emplacement; it swung towards one of the Hellcats, but its target caught the sudden movement and managed to shoot first. The MI trooper walked a long burst of 15mm AP rounds into the Viper position before it could line its shot, the plasma penetrators tearing gun and gunners to undistinguishable bits of plastic, metal and charred flesh.

The second team sprang into action a couple of seconds later, and whoever was watching that sector didn’t react in time.

A cage launcher holding a quartet of hypervelocity missiles popped out from its concealed position like a jack-in-the-box and fired at First Platoon’s lead LAV. Four depleted uranium darts, propelled with enough acceleration to reach escape velocity in under two seconds, hit their target. The short range meant their speed at the point of impact was a mere five thousand meters per second, but that was enough. The attack had come from inside the area force field’s perimeter, so only the vehicle’s own shields protected it. They shed one of the missile hits and were overloaded in the process; its tough hull armor sent a second dart flying into the air, leaving a blazing contrail in its wake. The other two penetrated. The LAV spun in place before dropping inertly to the ground. Fromm’s tactical display showed the troop carrier’s status carat change color from green to red, switching a second later to black. The view from the drones showed the vehicle disappearing in a blossoming fireball. Sixteen men had been inside; their personnel carats all turned black at the same time.

The Vipers didn’t live long enough to enjoy the success of their ambush. Less than a second after they fired, they were obliterated by a barrage of plasma and graviton blasts from Cossack-2’s LAVs. None of that mattered to the dead Marines, of course.

They pressed on. Once Cossack-1 and -4 were deployed defensively, the rest of the company moved forward, except for Cossack-3, which was finally ready for action and had the range and visibility to provide overwatch while the rest of the company moved to its next position. Assuming they were ready to do their damn jobs, Fromm amended bitterly.

The Vipers’ artillery barrage was intensifying, and they were using coordinated time-on-target shield busters, multi-stage munitions that unleashed half-a-mile long plasma jets after an initial explosion meant to weaken or breach the area force fields protecting each platoon.  Once they reached one of the taller mesas ahead, their bulk would obstruct most of the incoming. Only a few more seconds and they would be…

A trio of missiles went off overhead, their baleful discharges spearing through the shield and down on the target - the company command vehicle. Fromm’s universe flashed bright white before fading into darkness.

* * *

“Goddammit,” Fromm said, leaning back on his chair when his imp stopped overloading his vision.

Field training exercises combined the realities of moving over real terrain with extremely vivid sensory input piped directly into everyone’s brains via their cybernetic implants. The grueling advance under fire that had ended with his notional demise had felt so close to the real thing that his system was still pumping adrenaline into his bloodstream. The sensory overload that simulated ‘death’ wasn’t as painful as being on the receiving end of actual high-energy ordnance, as Fromm could attest from all-too-personal experience, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.

“Not fun at all,” Lieutenant Hansen agreed, recovering from his own administrative murder.

Now that they were done for the rest of the exercise, their training vehicle grounded and showing up on any active unit’s sensors as scattered flaming debris, they could watch the rest of the action while they waited for the FTX to be over. Or they could just slack off if they were so inclined; the driver, gunner and comm specialists in the command vehicle did just that, leaning back on their seats and playing video games or catching up on their emails or Facetergram feeds. Fromm didn’t have that luxury; he kept watching the action. The diagrams and visual feeds cleared up as the computers cleaned up the jamming and interference that had been part of the simulation. He now could see everything that was going on, unimpeded by the normal fog of war.

The loss of Cossack Actual had slowed the advance but not stopped it. One more LAV and three Hellcats had also been reduced to – virtual – burning wreckage by the brutal artillery barrage. The battalion commander had ordered Charlie Company’s survivors to hold their positions and provide cover while Bravo – call sign Bison – leapfrogged it and pressed forward.

The end result, three hours later, wasn’t pretty: over thirty percent casualties, and no joy in taking the objective. The operation had ended in a disaster of historical proportions; Warp Marine units had only taken those casualty levels in a handful of military operations during their century and a half of existence.

Fromm tried not to take it personally, and failed. His company had been the tip of the spear, and it had taken unacceptable losses without achieving anything. There had been no opportunities where a dash of brilliance might have saved the day, the way they so often did in fiction. In reality you did your job and often failed because someone else fucked up, or due to simple bad luck.

He wanted to blame Lieutenant O’Malley but he couldn’t. The delay in setting up and providing mortar fire had directly led to the surviving Viper anti-tank team’s destruction of a squad, but the artillery barrage that had decimated the rest of the company had been beyond anybody’s power to affect. When you maneuvered you were exposed to enemy fire. The MEU’s artillery battery hadn’t been able to suppress the enemy’s. There would be plenty of blame to go around during the post-game analysis.

A big part of him was sick and tired of the training rotation he’d been stuck in for the better part of a year while the war went on. He’d lived through the start of the conflict and two ‘minor actions’ before that; some would think he’d shed enough blood for God and Country and it was time to let others do their share. When he thought about it rationally, he shared the sentiment. He knew only too well how random chance could take you down no matter how well-trained, tough and motivated you were; this FTX was a case in point. But he still kept poring over briefings about the war, trying to guess where the 101^st would be sent next. The choice of enemies in the field exercise was probably not an accident. Fromm wanted to get a piece of the Lampreys, but the Vipers would do.

Fighting was the only way he knew how to begin to pay his obligation to the Marines he’d led to their deaths, in Jasper-Five and Astarte-Three. Nothing would ever make up for those losses, but doing his part to make sure their sacrifices wouldn’t be in vain was all he had left.

That, and laying down his own life.

* * *

A passing freighter dropped a load of emails from Earth later that evening. Fromm got two, one from Heather McClintock and one from his sister. He read Heather’s first.

Fromm hadn’t seen her since his last leave, over six months ago. He’d hopped a ride on a troop transport headed for Sol System and met her in New Washington, where she’d been stuck on a desk job. The three days they’d spent together had been worth the combined eighteen hours of warp transit. Since then, they’d kept in touch with weekly or monthly emails, depending on how busy they were. Neither of them had a lot of spare time; their energy was focused on their respective careers.

Most people their age had to do that if they wanted to get ahead. In a world where your competition could have decades of experience over you, the only way to rise in the ranks was to work harder than the old farts were willing to. You wanted to make your mark before you were fifty, take twenty years off to raise a family, and then jump back into the grind for another three or four decades. The seventy- to ninety-year olds were the toughest competition. In the Corps, they tended to dominate the Major and Colonel ranks, and filled the talent pool from which general officers were selected. Or, at the enlisted level, they ruled the E-8 and E-9 roost. Fromm didn’t follow the Navy’s inner workings, but he figured that their command ranks were filled by the same age bracket, except for the occasional maverick like Lisbeth Zhang, who’d gotten her first ship at the tender age of thirty-two – only lose it at Jasper-Five. Of course, the old bastards would blame Zhang’s problems on her age and lack of experience, even though most anybody would have lost their ship under those circumstances.

Fromm wondered what’d happened to the ballsy bubblehead officer as he opened Heather’s message. He hadn’t really followed up on her, but Heather had, and apparently Zhang had left the Navy and dropped off the face of the Earth. She deserved better than that, but a lot of people did. He set that aside and read the message. You could put anything from a full sensory display to mere video or sound clips in an email, but most people still preferred to use the written word to communicate.

 All’s well, Heather wrote. Still behind a desk on Old Mother Earth, but that may change in the near future. Which meant she’d be going out into the field again, probably as an ‘illegal’ intelligence officer. That usually wasn’t as dangerous as being a ground-pounder, but it could have its moments, and if the shit hit the fan the spooks would have little or no support while in far-foreign space.

He could sympathize with the thought of being on one’s own, surrounded by enemies.

Walking in the middle of the broad street, bullets flattening against his force field, the combined pressure of a multitude of hits making him stagger slightly as he moved on, the heavy grav-cannon vibrating against his body armor as he unleashed hell on the hundreds, on the thousands of screaming red-skinned aliens in the fancy uniforms of the Kirosha Royal Guard, their bodies torn apart by the relentless energy barrage. He guided the beam pulses towards the main target, the shield generator that must be destroyed before the enemy overwhelmed the Starfarer embassies and murdered everyone inside. A brief flash of light was his only warning before a massive wave of force washed over him…

Fromm blinked. The memories of those frenzied minutes still came back once in a while, uninvited guests he hadn’t quite learned how to get rid of. The dreams were bad; the urge to cringe or throw himself to the ground at any unexpected loud noise was worse. The explosion had ripped off three of his limbs and very nearly killed him. There were wounds that even the best Starfarer tech couldn’t repair, and the besieged compound had been running out of critical medical supplies when he’d become a casualty, so the best tech hadn’t been available. He had lines of scar tissue at the points where his vat-grown limbs had been attached, courtesy of the emergency patchwork which was the best Navy corpsmen working with substandard methods and materials had managed. The Frankenstein's Monster-like marks did not affect his range of motion, and removing them would take time he couldn’t afford to waste at the moment, so the scars remained, a constant reminder of how close he’d come to the end of the line.

He shook his head and read the rest of the email; whatever joy he’d been feeling at hearing from Heather was gone, replaced with a dull, bleak numbness. The flashbacks had a way of ruining his mood.

The rest of the email became just words in his field of vision, the warmth they usually stirred in him gone. Even the news that former Ambassador Llewellyn was getting his just desserts failed to cheer him up. Llewellyn, whose incompetence had helped precipitate the crisis that killed dozens of Americans, was currently serving a four-year sentence in Venus, assigned to the terraforming project there. Working on the second planet from the sun was nobody’s idea of fun; the convicts would be trapped in small subterranean habitats, doing hard labor while surrounded by a lethal atmosphere with an average temperature in the hundreds of degrees even after fifty years of artificial cooling. With a war on, on the other hand, doing hard time in Venus might be considered a lucky break; convicts could be inducted into penal battalions and used as cannon fodder, but that was rarely done. Fromm doubted Llewellyn would count himself lucky; the fact that his family connections hadn’t saved him from his fate also meant he’d been finally cut off from their support. The ‘rat might even have to figure out how to work for a living after his sentence was over, assuming he didn’t piss someone off and end up the victim of an ‘unfortunate accident.’ Those were easy to come by in Venus.

Other people’s suffering, even when well-deserved, had never pleased him very much, and in his current mood the news mostly irritated him. He skimmed over Heather’s parting words – she wasn’t one for effusive endearments anyway – and went over the dutiful message from her sister. Lucinda Fromm-Bertucci and her husband ran a catering service for the rich and famous in Windsor. She hadn’t had any contact with the military after doing her four years’ Obligatory Service, spent largely in Logistics, and she acted as if her very survival had nothing to do with the efforts of men and women in uniform fighting and dying light years away from home. Her email didn’t mention the war at all, except to note that business was down because there were ‘hardly any receptions or parties being thrown in the city.’ She concluded her email with a terse ‘Take care.’ That only deepened his dark mood.

Sometimes he wondered why he did any of this. Whether anything mattered at all.

Windsor, New Michigan, 153 AFC

“You can’t be serious.”

Fromm shrugged and looked away from his friends, savoring the view from the high-rise where they were throwing the End of Ob-Serv party. The open balcony looked upon the lake where the city of Detroit and much of the original site of Windsor, Canada had once stood. His imp provided a pre-Contact image of the cityscape that the Snakes had burned into slag, creating a miles-wide crater that Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River had been happy to fill. He didn’t need video replays to remind him of the screaming and dying of its inhabitants. The restless ghosts of the dead still called to him, a hundred and fifty years after the fact. The doomed people of Detroit-Windsor had left hundreds of hours of audiovisual records of their demise, and Fromm had watched most of them, obsessively going over the worst ones.

“Pete? Hello? Anybody home?”

He turned his gaze back to the inside of the luxury apartment where a bunch of other twenty-something Freebirds were cavorting; he’d missed something June or Brad had said. It’d be easy enough to have his imp play back the tape and find out what they’d told him, but he didn’t bother. They’d be happy to repeat themselves.

“Sorry,” he said.

“You’re not even drunk or stoned,” June Gillespie said accusingly. “And you don’t get to drop that bombshell on and then ignore us. What’s your excuse? We just got out and you’re ready to go back in? After you almost got killed?”

A brief image flashed through his mind – the hulking shapes of Horde pirates, plasma rounds detonating uselessly on their heavy force fields as they advanced towards him and the rest of his squad. He repressed a shudder and turned it into a shrug.

“I’m staying in, that’s all. It’s a good deal, and I’ll be going to college, same as you.”

 “New Annapolis,” Brad said in the same tones he would have used for ‘the Seventh Circle of Hell.’ “How about NIT? What happened to the plan?”

“Now you sound like my father.” Fromm’s parents had been elated when the acceptance e-package from the Nebraska Institute of Technology had arrived. Getting a degree from the premiere school in the nation was a golden ticket, a stepping stone to wealth and glory. Brad and June had also been accepted; their plan had been to go together once they were free and clear.

Had. Plans changed.

He’d thought about showing up in his dress uniform, but that wouldn’t have gone over well. Telling his best friends that he had just signed for a full ten years in the Corps was turning out badly enough. Almost as badly as telling his family.

 “Well, your old man is right, Pete. It’s a waste, man. A total waste. We already did our time in uniform. Time to get on with real life. To have a life without being told when to sleep, wake up, eat, take a dump. Seriously. Did you enjoy that shit so much you’re going back for a big heap of seconds? You did your duty. You even got to fight. That thing at Galileo-Nine should have gotten all that hero crap out of your system.”

The pirate was eight feet tall and almost as wide. He swung the heavy particle-beam projector and played the energy stream like a hose. Two of Fromm’s squaddies - he never found out who - screamed briefly when their shields failed and they were torn apart. Fromm closed his eyes, unaware he’d been screaming as well until First Sergeant Bolton shook him and slammed him into a bulkhead. When he dared to look, he saw the massive alien’s body sprawled three feet in front of him, smoke pouring from the exit wounds on his back.

Everyone in the squad but him was dead.

“You got ‘im, Fromm,” the NCO said. “Not bad for a Foxtrot-November, even if you punked out at the end. Now quit yer crying and get on your feet, Marine! We ain’t done clearing the station.”

He blinked rapidly for a few seconds, slowly realizing he’d almost punched Brad.

“Take it easy, Brad,” June broke in. The look in her face made it clear she knew Brad’s badgering wasn’t going to help matters. Her boyfriend ignored her, too angry to stop his tirade. Brad and Peter had grown up together, had been as close as brothers. Fromm could see the anger was mostly out of concern. But there was also an element of pique involved: Brad didn’t like surprises, or changes of plans, and he took them personally.

“And on top of that, what’s with your obsession with the Marines, for Christ’s sake? At least in the Navy you can actually get a useful career out of it.”

“Brad!”

“All right, Junes. Sorry, Pete, but I just can’t believe you’re doing this. We’re having a party to celebrate being done with the whole yes-sir, no-sir, three-bags-full-sir crap. Why are you doing this?”

 Fromm looked back out and gestured towards the flat expanse that used to be Detroit. It took them a second to get it.

“Jesus. First Contact? Ancient history, Pete. You aren’t a Golden Oldie that lived through it. Might as well get upset about the Japanese killing General Custer.”

“The ETs are still out there,” Fromm said. “There’s fighting going on right now, over at Xon System.”

Brad sighed. “That’s just a police action. A skirmish here or there, or a little war whenever someone’s worked up the nerve to ask President Hewer if he’s ever going to retire and he starts something to distract everyone. We killed off the Snakes over a century ago, man. It’s over. The other Starfarers may push us around the edges, but they aren’t going to risk an existential conflict with us.”

“That’s not what I hear.”

“You’re taking that Galactic Studies crap too seriously. It’s scaremongering, plain and simple, to keep us on an eternal war footing.”

“Not really, but never mind that,” June said, always the voice of reason. “Okay, forget about Brad and his lack of knowledge about anything that doesn’t involve nanotech…”

“Hey!”

“And I quote: ‘the Japanese killing General Custer.’ Give me a break.”

“Didn’t they? Or was it the Soviets? Something like that. Who cares?”

“Woogle it.” June turned back to Fromm. “Yes, the other Starfarers pose a potential threat. But the fact is, we’ve got enough soldiers and spacers already. You could be an engineer, a designer, and do a lot more good using that brain of yours for something constructive. Why waste all that talent?”

“I…” Fromm struggled for words. He didn’t know how to explain the incident at Galileo-Nine, the terror he’d felt, and the way he’d set that terror aside and done what he’d had to. He couldn’t just say that he’d never felt so alive as during those insane moments in the pirated mining complex. The memories haunted him, but the thought of never going back bothered him more.

And then there were the Detroit Archives. Ancient history, perhaps, but unlike Brad, Fromm felt certain history could easily repeat itself. Starfarer species weren’t exterminated routinely, but it happened: three times in the last century and a half, as a matter of fact. Humans had been responsible for one of those extinctions and played a role in the second. To think it couldn’t happen to the US, to Earth, was idiotic. Only an over-privileged kid could indulge in that sort of illusion, and not for long.

“Well?” June asked.

“It’s what I want to do now,” Fromm finally said. “Maybe in twenty years I’ll change my mind and do something else, but this is what I’m doing now.”

Brad started to say something else again, but June shushed him.

“I hope you don’t regret this,” she told him. “But I fear you will.”

New Parris, Star System Musik, 164 AFC

“As you may have guessed, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve got our new marching orders,” Fromm told the assembled company officers, platoon commanders and senior NCOs. The latter group were the oldest people present, all veterans with no less than twenty years in the service, people who  had been involved in at least one of the many wars, police actions or skirmishes the USA could not seem to escape as it carved its own place in the galaxy. Cossack’s officers ranged in age from their late twenties to their mid-sixties; the older officers had found their niche and were unlikely to rise in rank but were damn good at their job. The dynamics of the Corps often led to senior officers commanding people old enough to be their fathers or grandfathers, resulting in numerous leadership challenges. Second Lieutenants were expected to lean heavily on their NCOs, but by the time they got their second bar, they'd better had learned to do their own thinking, doubly so for those who made it to Captain. Fromm’s service record was decent enough that people respected him despite being on the young side for his rank.

“We will be deploying in twenty-one days,” he continued. It’d been a month since the FTX, and while he wasn’t a hundred percent satisfied with the company’s progress, the higher-ups had decided they were ready to dance and he was willing to lead them.

“’bout fucken time,” First Lieutenant Ivan Guerrero of Second Platoon muttered under his breath. One of the older breed, Cossack-2 Actual had been driving his people hard ever since the FTX; that platoon was the fittest unit under Fromm’s command. Which meant it was going to get the toughest assignments. Guerrero knew that, and he was willing and able, full of gung-ho oorah attitude. Maybe to a fault.

“It is what it is. There hasn’t been much need for ground-pounders since the war started,” Fromm said, and everyone had no choice but to nod in agreement. After the Days of Infamy kicked off the conflict, the ensuing fighting had consisted of space actions, and most of those hadn’t involved any Marine boarding parties. Warp insertions had been a most unwelcome surprise to other Starfarers in the early days of America’s entry into the galactic community, but now just about every alien warship carried a large contingent of troops aboard. That in turn meant their ships had less space for weapons, shields and other important systems, so in a sense the presence of assault ships served an important purpose even when they weren’t used. In any case, sending Marines on one-way teleportation trips had become as rare as massive paratroop deployments back in pre-Contact days. Word was that a lot of Marine Assault Ships were being pulled off the line to be reconfigured, although nobody was sure into what.

Fromm agreed with Guerrero’s sentiment, but he hadn’t minded the quiet time, either. He’d spent the best part of a year making sure his company was as ready as it could be for the hard days ahead. And he knew only too well that there were going to be plenty of those. He’d been on the front lines during the Days of Infamy and come back from that deployment with three replacement limbs and a large selection of bad memories.

And a handful of good ones, mostly involving a certain female spook he hadn’t seen in half a year, but that wasn’t important now.

“So here’s the deal,” he continued. “The 101^st Marine Expeditionary Unit and the USS Mattis are now part of Landing Squadron Three.” A Landing Squadron consisted of three Marine assault ships like the Mattis, a four-frigate escort, and three logistics vessels. “All part of Expeditionary Strike Group Fourteen. We’ll be sent to reinforce Sixth Fleet at New Jakarta.”

More nods, and several somber expressions. New Jakarta was a Pan-Asian colony and warp junction; its location made it a possible target for the Vipers. In theory, the system was shielded from direct invasion by the fact that all its warp lines led to neutral or friendly star systems, but Melendez System had been in a similar position, and the enemy had simply pushed through neutral space, daring the local Starfarers to make an issue out of it. So far, nobody had objected, or in the case of the Lizards, had abandoned any pretense of neutrality. Sixth Fleet, plus whatever forces the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere could put together would make sure any attacks there were met with plenty of force.

“We have a week to implement any changes and fix anything that needs fixing,” Fromm said. He glanced at the company’s senior NCO.

“We’ll be ready, sir,” First Sergeant Markus Goldberg said confidently. Privately, the company’s senior NCO still harbored doubts about Cossack-3’s Lieutenant O’Malley. The Weapons Platoon CO slow reaction time and tendency to rely too much on his sergeant had become apparent during the FTX. A counseling session had ended with multiple assurances things would change. Fromm had commanded Third Platoon during several desperate weeks at Jasper-Five, and still had an instinctive proprietary feeling towards it. He’d fought off the urge to meddle, and now he was worried he might have overcompensated and left the unit in the hands of a subpar commander.

“I know everyone will be ready,” he said in a confident tone.

* * *

“Why don’t we all take a breath?” Lance Corporal Russell ‘Russet’ Edwin said in what he thought was a reasonable tone. He was the only asshole without a drawn weapon and when you’re outgunned, your best option is to be reasonable.

The hooker’s crib was much too small to fit four people. A bed and a small dresser filled most of the space; a nightstand was currently being wielded by the hooker in question, a plump and pretty girl by the name of Francesca, formerly from the People’s Republic of Sicily, here on a guest worker’s visa and earning a living the old fashioned way. She was crouched on the bed, naked as the day she’d been born, ready to start swinging with her improvised club. Blood was dribbling from a cut on her lip, and the left side of her face was already beginning to bruise. He eyes were bright with murderous rage.

Standing next to the bed was Russell’s fellow Marine, PFC Hiram ‘Nacle’ Hamlin, a lanky kid straight from New Deseret, currently holding a set of brass knuckles that Russell had given him for Christmas. There was blood on the business end of the weapon, but Russell was certain none of it belonged to Francesca but rather to the other bleeder in the room, a fat Navy asshole who was half-propped against the opposite corner, his nose spurting red and glaring out of the one eye that hadn’t been punched shut. His injuries wouldn’t stop him from using the holdout beamer he was clutching in a trembling hand, though. The little pistol’s power pack only had enough power for six shots, but each of them would cook twenty or thirty pounds of flesh and organs with a direct hit, or burn right through an arm or a leg. The bubblehead had been nerving himself to shoot Nacle, Francesca or likely both of them when Russell walked into the room and interrupted the ongoing drama.

Just seconds ago, he’d been enjoying the amorous attentions of another lady of the night, a sweet little thing from the Canary Islands whose name he couldn’t recall at the moment. Shouted curses and the sounds of a scuffle new door wouldn’t have drawn him away from what’s-her-name, not usually, but he’d recognized Nacle’s voice, and the cursing had gotten his attention. Nacle only cursed when the shit had well and truly hit the fan. So he’d rushed towards the noise and walked into this Charlie-Foxtrot.

The bubblehead turned his beamer on him. Three pounds of trigger pressure and Russell would be seeing Jesus or the guy downstairs, more likely the latter, or even more likely he’d be seeing nothing at all. It was times like these when Russell wished he could believe in something.

“Easy there,” he told the Navy guy. “Chief Petty Officer Murphy, right?” He’d seen the bubblehead around, mostly in low-rent whorehouses like this one. Murphy had a bad rep; he was an asshole, the kind who liked to get rough with the girls, ignoring safe-words and house rules; he’d been banned from a lot of establishments in and around Pendleton as a result.

“Edison,” Murphy said, or rather lisped; a thin spray of blood and spittle accompanied the name, and Russell caught a glimpse of jagged broken teeth. Nacle had been going to town on the fucker before the beamer came into play.

“That’s me, Lance Corporal Edison,” Russell said cheerfully, as if he’d run into the guy at a party.

“Your cock-sucker buddy just tried to kill me.”

“She told you never to lay a hand on her,” Nacle said through clenched teeth. “She told you.”

Shit. The kid was sweet on Francesca. He didn’t play with whores all that much, and when he did he got all romantic on them. Stupid.

“Stow it, Nacle,” Russell hissed at him before turning back to Murphy. “Hey, Murph. Let’s be reasonable. There’s been no real harm done…”

“No harm?”

The beamer wavered between Russell and Nacle.

“The med techs will fix your mouth easily enough, Murph. You just tripped and fell, that’s all. That shit happens all the time. But you pull that trigger and it’s all over, brah. For whoever you shoot, and for you.”

“Fuck you!”

“Fuck me? Murph, you pull that trigger, you’ll be fucking yourself.”

The asshole was drunk, in pain and pissed off, so there was no telling what he was going to do. Russell waited, wondering if this was the way he’d step out. The sad thing about all this wasn’t that he’d been this close to death a bunch of times before, but that he’d been this close to death in a whorehouse a bunch of times before. This was supposed to be the kind of place you went to forget about all the close calls that happened when you were on duty. But Russell had always been a frugal shopper, and bad things often happened at discount brothels.

Nacle tensed up, about to do something stupid.

Stop! Russell texted him via his imp’s tactical channel. The kid froze.

Out loud: “Whaddayasay, Murph? Can we work things out?”

Murphy looked like he was trying to think about it but finding it a bit of a chore. Concussion, maybe.

“Va fanculo!” Francesca screamed and threw the nightstand at the bubblehead.

If she’d tried that boneheaded move on a Marine, she would have gotten blasted. Murphy didn’t have those killer instincts, though. He flinched and threw up his arms to protect his already battered face, and Nacle and Russell lunged at him before he could bring the weapon back into line.

The beamer went off, but Russell had already grabbed Murphy’s hand at the wrist, and the charged-particle bolt made a hole in the ceiling. Nacle had the asshole pressed against the wall and was delivering a series of brutal underhand jabs, the brass knuckles making a wet smacking sound every time they hit flesh. Murphy whimpered, then screamed when Russell got enough leverage to break the man’s wrist. The beamer dropped to the floor. Francesca started to make a grab for it, but Russell kicked it under the bed before things went from bad to unsalvageable.

The Navy puke sagged down, barely conscious. “You fucking asshole,” Russell said in a mild voice. “You pull a gun on me, you better have a plot saved up.”

“He was hitting her,” Nacle said, punching him one more time. Murphy went limp and they let him flop to the floor like a bag of meat. “She called me on my imp. I was kind of okay if all they did was have sex, you know? It’s her job. But he didn’t have to hit her.”

“I know.” Russell turned to Francesca, who was beginning to get the shakes. “Where’s Ronnie?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Ronnie was the whorehouse’s bouncer, a massive guy with heavy-worlder muscle enhancements. He must be drunk or stoned, or Murphy had paid him off to look the other way while he had his fun. Either way, he wasn’t going to be much help.

“Grab his shit. All of it,” Russell ordered Nacle while he knelt down and groped under the bed until he found the beamer.

“He pay you?” he asked Francesca while his buddy gathered the bubblehead’s clothes and personal items.

“No.”

“Okay. Put the stuff on the bed, Nacle.” He rummaged around until he found a couple of credit sticks in Murphy’s stuff, the kind of thing you used to pay for stuff you didn’t want showing up in your financial statements. Prostitution was technically illegal in New Parris, although nobody had ever been arrested for it unless there’d been another crime involved. Francesca’s work card listed her as an ‘entertainer.’ Russell checked the balances and handed her one of them, about three hundred bucks’ worth, three times the going rate. “That should cover your time. This never happened, got it?”

She nodded. Russell wouldn’t expect her to hold out if the cops leaned on her, but hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.

“Give us the room. We need to take care of this.”

“Molto bene.” She hugged Nacle and whispered something in his ear before she threw a bathrobe on and left. Hopefully the guy would get a discount for his next date. Least he should get for almost getting their asses killed.

Russell considered his options. He could call Gonzo and a couple of other close friends, the ones who’d help you move a body, and make Chief Petty Officer Murphy disappear. He’d done it before, but never on New Parris. There was shit you could pull off on deployment in far foreign that just wouldn’t fly at home, and the Marine Corps’ main base was as close to home as it got. Too many cameras, too many people with their imps recording everything they saw. If the asshole went missing, there would be an investigation, and even though Murphy clearly didn’t have many friends, the chances of their getting away with it weren’t great.

If it came down to it, he’d do what he had to, but there were alternatives.

* * *

“You shoulda killed the fucker,” Gonzo commented when Russell told the story over a card game a couple weeks later, on their last liberty before they sailed off on the Mattis.

“More trouble than it was worth. I took care of it.”

“How?”

“Well, turns out Murph had a whole system going. He liked to beat on women; guess that was the only way he could get it up. He bribed the bouncer to look the other way and brought a couple doses of memory-wipe drugs and a full set of nano-meds to his dates. He’d have his fun, then heal up the girl and make sure she didn’t remember anything. He’d been doing it for a while. So we used his own drugs on him, made sure his imp wasn’t recording, which it wasn’t, and when he woke up the next day he had no idea what’d happened to him, other than he was missing a bunch of teeth; the nano-meds he’d brought fixed his insides and the broken wrist, but not his mouth.”

“That it? All he got was a beatdown he doesn’t remember?” Gonzo said. “He pulled a gun on you and Nacle. That don’t seem fair.”

“No, that wasn’t it. I figured that kind of hobby costs a lot more money than a Chief Petty Officer makes. I did a little digging that night and found out he’d been skimming supplies off his ship and selling them on the side to pay for his fun. He was at the Med Center trying to get new teeth fabbed when the MPs picked him up. He’ll get a good fifty years’ hard labor; some of those supplies were pretty important, the kind of stuff that gets people killed if they run out at the wrong time.”

“What an asshole.”

“Chances are he won’t live through those fifty years. Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

“How about the bouncer?”

“He’s MIA. A lot of people weren’t happy with him after it all came out, and nobody’s going to miss him.”

Everybody at the table nodded. The local cathouses enforced their own brand of justice. In fact, Russell wouldn’t be surprised if someone invested some money into making sure former CPO Murphy didn’t make it out of prison in one piece. He wouldn’t be surprised at all.

“Well, that’s that,” Gonzo said.

“Yeah. Nacle should be all right now.”

“Not really. I think he’s sweet on that girl.” Gonzo grinned; he was clearly planning to give the Mormon kid a hard time about it. Russell reminded himself to make sure things didn’t get too far; he’d seen how Nacle reacted when he got his dander up.

“He’s a romantic. He’ll get over it. It’s not like he was going to marry her and bring her to Mama and Papa over at New Deseret. It don’t matter none anyways. We’re off to kill us some ETs. That will cheer him up.”

“True that.”





Two

Earth, Sol System, 164 AFC

“Let’s be blunt, Commander,” the Marine Major said. “Your career in the Navy is ruined. You know that.”

“Yes, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Lisbeth Zhang agreed, trying not to squirm in her seat. The jarhead was simply stating the facts, but she didn’t enjoy being reminded of them.

Even in wartime, you didn’t go very far after losing a ship, let alone both vessels in the task unit you were commanding. If you did, you'd better go down with said ship. You most certainly weren’t supposed to be the sole survivor of such a disaster. Whatever the circumstances, at first glance it looked as if she’d abandoned her command and left everyone to die, and all too often a first glance was all you got. Her subsequent actions on Jasper-Five hadn't been enough to redeem herself in the merciless eyes of the Bureau of Navy Personnel. As far as BUPERS was concerned, she had been tried and found wanting. She’d been cleared of any actual wrongdoing, but that didn’t mean she was going to be in a starship bridge any time soon.

Lisbeth had spent the last few months on the beach, stranded on Earth while waiting for new orders. Nobody seemed to know what to do with her, or want to spend much thought on the matter. Even with the massive mobilization going on, there were more available officers that hulls, so she’d probably be stuck on some non-combat assignment when they finally decided to make her earn her munificent pay. It would be decades, if ever, before she went into the dark, and then it’d be somewhere in Logistics, probably as the XO of a supply scow, not anywhere near a combat vessel. If she spent a century doing her best, maybe that would change, or maybe not. A service ruled by near-immortals had a long memory, both institutional and personal.

“Your record shows a great deal of potential, however,” the jarhead officer went on. “Among other things, you are a superb small-craft pilot. Aced all your shuttle qualifiers as a cadet, and your handling of that escape pod when it came apart over Jasper-Five was impressive.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, suppressing a snort. Yeah, she could handle a shuttle. Which had as much to do with commanding a warship as her skills in hand to hand combat, or in basket weaving for that matter. She already regretted agreeing to this interview, but she’d been advised not to miss it by her few remaining friends in the service. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.

“And you have a Warp Rating of 3,” the major added. “The Corps is prepared to offer you a position in a new program. A black program, which limits what I can tell you about it, among other things because I don't need to know very much about it. You won’t be briefed any further until after you accept the offer. Until you are at your new post, to be exact. You would transfer to the Corps, and the move would entail a loss in grade, but I’m told that you should pick up rank rather rapidly. The assignment will involve a remote deployment, mostly out of contact, for an undetermined length of time.”

Lisbeth's eyes widened as the Marine officer spoke. The questions and the statement about her warp rating pointed towards something that had long been rejected as impossible. Could it be...? It was the only thing that fit. She fought to keep her face impassive as the leatherneck finished his spiel.

“Where do I sign up?” she said as soon as he was done.

Groom Base, Star System 3490, 164 AFC

USWMC Captain Lisbeth Zhang watched the screens as the transport ship made its final approach and waited to see if her guess was more than just a wild-eyed fantasy.

Fantasy or not, there she was, at the ass end of the galaxy, some gigabytes’ worth of paperwork later, wearing her brand-new Marine uniform. She’d made Captain at last, although a Marine Captain was a mere O-3, three ranks below a Navy Captain and one rank below her previous pay grade. It sucked, but at least she had a career path of sorts ahead of her. The jarheads would value her ground combat experience a lot more than the Navy, that was for sure. And if she was right about this black project, she might end up going into battle again, and a lot sooner than she’d ever hoped to.

The transport ship’s viewing room was crowded; most of the passengers were like her, volunteers who knew very little about their mission and who’d rushed to take a gander at their destination as soon as the ship emerged from warp. Lisbeth traded glances with her fellow recruits; her imp revealed the public details of their records, popping up in her field of vision when she focused on any of them. They were all officers. The Marines were mostly 75s – their Military Occupation Specialties were in shuttle piloting. A smattering of former Navy personnel were like her, all having transferred to the Corps, all with high scores in small craft handling. Lisbeth was the only one who had commanded a warship, which made her feel all kinds of special. Not.   

Everyone, Navy or gyrene, had a high warp rating. You needed a WR-2 to pilot a starship or be launched from a warp catapult with a reasonable expectation you’d come out the other side. A large percentage of WR-2s ended up in the Corps just so the jarheads could send them to their near-certain death, something she found incredibly wasteful. Okay, maybe it wasn’t a near-certain death, but it wasn’t exactly safe. All the volunteers in the transport ship had the silver or gold spiral symbol on their profiles that denoted a WR-3 or -4. Even considering that over fifty percent of humanity was warp rated, about five times the ratio of the next most warp-adept species in the known galaxy, this group was pretty unusual.

Everyone in the transport had pointedly kept their thoughts about the project to themselves, but most of them must suspect the exact same thing she did. Just cross-checking the records was enough. All her life, she’d grown up reading, watching movies and playing games involving a fighting platform that Starfarers didn’t use, which everyone said just couldn’t be effectively deployed in combat. But humans had been breaking rules since First Contact.

Star System 3490 didn’t even rate a name and didn’t look all that impressive on the data and viewing screens. It was a red dwarf, and a warp dead end, connected to a minor colony by its single warp valley. The closest thing to an inhabitable world in the system was a Mars-like planet with an unbreathable, thin atmosphere and average temperatures in the twenty-degree Fahrenheit range; its only saving grace was its near-Earth gravity. Someone had been busy on its surface, though: there was a ground installation large enough to fit in a good ten, twenty-thousand people, and an orbital starship yard busily at work on a number of vessels Lisbeth quickly identified as assault ships, the troop carriers that could conduct shuttle and warp-catapult deployments and which, while officially Navy property, were largely manned by the Corps. Just the sort of ships the senior service might consider expendable enough to lend to this black project.

“Holy shit,” one of her fellow Marines said, glancing at another part of the viewing screen.

Lisbeth had seen plenty of warp emergences before, even at this close range, mere kilometers away. The sight was no longer awe-inspiring, although it was never something you ever got fully used to. People described it as a shimmering followed by a display of colors not unlike the aurora borealis on Earth. The shimmering had a depth to it, though; it inspired the feeling of staring into a vast chasm with no bottom in sight. Everyone felt a brief thrill of vertigo when looking into a warp hole; a few of the spectators in the viewing room wobbled on their feet.

Twelve tears in the fabric of space-time appeared at the same time, clustered closely together, far more so than even a corvette squadron would. Twelve tiny ships emerged from them. Her imp provided her with a size estimate: about the same length of a standard combat shuttle, but with a narrower profile. They weren’t pretty. Lisbeth magnified the image, focusing on one of the vessels, and saw a tiny cockpit on top of what looked like a capital ship’s energy cannon, with graviton thrusters and warp generators welded around it. Shimmering warp shields in the front and rear made it hard to pick up details. But the fact that the tiny craft had warp shields was impressive enough. Ships of that size just shouldn’t be able to mount warp generators. And yet these did.

The squadron kept station with the transport ship for several seconds. Nobody spoke until they dropped back into warp and disappeared from sight.

“Warp fighters,” another Marine officer said, wonder in her voice. “They fucking did it. Warp fighters!”

The common room erupted in cheers.

Lisbeth nodded. She’d guessed right, and her life was never going to be the same.

* * *

The first briefing was thrilling and sobering at the same time.

“You’re probably wondering why I’ve gathered you here,” the brigadier general giving the toy-and-pony show said, drawing a few chuckles from the crowd. There were about two hundred of them in the auditorium, about one-third of them female, which made sense, since shuttlecraft pilot was one of the few combat career paths more or less open to women. The physical requirements weren’t quite as harsh, and most women didn’t want to undergo the costly and painful muscle-and-bone treatments needed to be able to lug a hundred pounds on your back for extended periods of time. “My name is Dennis Singh, and I’m in charge of the Lexington Project. A long time ago, I used to be in the Air Force. Made it to bird colonel a few weeks before First Contact. After a century and a half, it turns out my old skill set has become useful again.

“You’ve seen them. Yes, they are warp-capable attack ships. And yes, we want you to fly them.”

There was the beginning of a cheerful roar, but the general quickly put a stop to it.

“This is going to be no picnic, ladies and gentlemen. We are fielding a genuinely new weapons platform, the first since we developed warp shields and catapults, before most of you were born. As all of you know, Starfarer technology has been stable for thousands of years: ship designs that came out when we hairless monkeys were hunting mammoth with spears are still in service, with only a few tweaks here or there. Through Providence or random chance or what have you, humans have certain unique capabilities that have allowed us to develop new technological applications that no one else even considered, simply because no other known species can make use of them. Count your blessings: it is the only reason we’re still here.”

The enthusiasm of the crowd dimmed somewhat. Everyone knew that humanity’s continued survival was as close to a miracle as you could get: without their species’ tolerance to warp space, Earth would have been depopulated by the Lampreys when they came back to finish the job they’d started during First Contact. And that blessing wasn’t exactly all that cost-free, either.  No matter what one’s warp rating was, nobody enjoyed the experience of leaving standard four-dimensional reality and plunging into a place that nobody really knew much about, other than that it provided the only way to break the laws of relativity and move from one point to another faster than the speed of light. There were a myriad side effects: time distortion, hallucinations, and extreme psychological stress were just the most common. And they got worse the more frequently you jumped, especially without adequate time to recover in between.

A civilian starship’s crew could expect to perform two or three warp jumps a month during routine operations. Combat maneuvers, in which ships had to enter the edge of a system’s gravity well and then close in through multiple warp transits, would require as many as five jumps in the same day, often separated by a minutes instead of hours, which imposed a great deal of stress on the crews involved. Even human crews took casualties after more than three or four jumps in a day.

They’d seen the warp fighter demonstration outside. The tiny ships had done two warp jumps in a matter of seconds. The implications of that began to sink in.

“Why are humans different from the rest of the inhabitants of the galaxy?” General Singh said. “To begin to address that question, I must go on a brief foray into Galactic history. We are not the first to have this special quality, just the only ones in recent history. As Fermi’s Paradox suggests, many thousands of technologically-advanced species have risen in the billions of years since the formation of the Milky Way Galaxy. As anyone who took Gal-Hist 101 knows, Starfaring species generally spend one to ten thousand years playing with starships and colonizing planets, after which they either Transcend or die out. What happens when you Transcend is unknown; the species or civilization in question simply goes somewhere else, leaving only well-policed ruins behind. Over millions of years, most of their records have been lost as well.

“From the fragments that remain, however, there are stories about ‘Warp-demons,’ species that could use warp-space in ways most cannot. They tend to spread rapidly and dominate much of the galaxy before moving on or being destroyed. Which helps explain why so many Starfarers have a hair up their butts when it comes to us.” Muted laughter from the crowd. “Okay, history lesson is over. Biology lesson coming up.”

There were a few groans at that, but Lisbeth and most others leaned forward intently.

“The ability to resist warp transit appears to be both biological and cultural. At some point in our evolution, humanity developed a mutation that enables our minds to cope with warp space. Our studies show that this mutation is directly related to the human brain’s ability to enter a trance state. As it turns out, most sophonts are not capable of entering into trances or similar altered states of consciousness, unless they are well and truly insane, as in nonfunctional, chewing on the walls insane. Which I suppose means you don’t have to be crazy to travel into warp space, but it surely helps.”

More chuckles followed the comment, but they had a nervous edge.

“The cultural aspect is related to that biological trait. Humans have an over-developed ability to believe in things that cannot be proven to exist. Most of our cultures are more religious than just about any Starfarer civilization, for example. Call it faith or delusions; we’ve got more of it than the rest. And it seems to help us endure exposure to warp space.

“The Lexington Project – named after the first US aircraft carrier, by the way – got started at the same time as the initiatives that gave us our spiffy shields and Marine assault catapults. Unlike the other developments, it took us a long time to get any traction. The Navy gave up on it, and the Corps picked up the ball, although with a tithe of the original budget. The initial hurdles were in engineering: miniaturizing warp generators so they would fit inside a small fighting platform took a long while. The same with graviton thrusters powerful enough to let fighters keep up with capital ships. But most of those problems were solved a good fifty years ago. The hardware wasn’t the main problem; the software, the human element, was. To be effective, a warp fighter pilot must be able to endure multiple jumps over a short period of time. Dozens of jumps an hour, to be exact.”

Here we go, Lisbeth thought. She liked to listen to Warmetal music, especially the original German stuff, as her way to cope when she warp-jumped, but there weren’t enough metal tunes in the world for the kind of stuff the jarhead general was talking about.

Once you were inside warp space and the initial shock didn’t cripple you mentally or physically, you could endure as long as thirty hours of exposure with only a slightly-increased chances of suffering adverse side effects. But each transition performed without at least a few hours to recover added cumulative strains on the crew and passengers. More than two of them within an hour was highly unadvisable.

Everyone knew what happened if you jumped too many times in too short a time. The story of the frigate Merrimack was the most-quoted case. A series of unfortunate incidents, involving pirates, a multi-system chase, and an ambush, forced the ship to conduct six warp jumps spread over a mere seventy minutes. On the seventh jump, only about thirty percent of the ship emerged on the other side. Thirty percent of the ship, and none of the crew. They were all listed as missing, presumed dead.

Death was the most you could hope for those missing crewmembers. For all anyone knew, the Merrimacks were still trapped somewhere in warp space. And that’s what you’ve signed up for.

“We’ve learned a lot,” General Singh went on. “It wasn’t easy, or cheap. But we have reached several breakthroughs along the way, and are ready to move from R&D to full implementation. We are putting the finishing touches on what will become the first space-capable Carrier Strike Group. You will be the last candidate class before we go on our first cruise. The project is being fast-tracked; I think you all can figure out why.”

They all did. Anybody who could do math knew just how bad the odds against the USA were. The question was whether fast-tracking the Lexington Project would produce anything of use in time to change the outcome of the war.

Problem was, she was unlikely to find out the answer until it was too late to change her mind. Not that it mattered. As far as she was concerned, she’d been living on borrowed time ever since her XO sacrificed himself to save her life aboard the USS Wildcat. Death didn’t scare her all that much.

Failure did.

* * *

Lisbeth had to use every ounce of willpower left in her to make sure her legs didn’t wobble on her way out of the flight simulator room.

Warp fighter combat was unlike anything pilots from pre-Contact day would recognize, except for the constant risk of death. The non-warp portion of combat was relatively simple: the ship emerged from warp space at a pre-determined speed and heading, usually matching or slightly exceeding the target’s, fired a spread of weapons over five to ten seconds, and warped out of existence.

One big reason regular fighters had no place in space combat was simple: graviton engines had a relatively fixed performance, and they didn’t scale down very well. A small ship couldn’t go much faster than a big one, and shuttle-sized craft were actually much slower than a full-sized starship. The reactionless grav thrusters that propelled virtually all manned spacecraft had an effective speed of one thousandth the speed of light. You could move that maximum up by a few tenths of a percent, but that was it. Alternative methods using reaction mass were just impractical for manned vessels. Missiles moved at up to ten times that speed through the use of magnetic or gravitonic catapults that flung them at tremendous speeds, followed by standard reaction rockets that accelerated them further, using gravity or impeller thrusters for steering. Try that with a fighter and you’d be scraping its pilot out of the cockpit, not to mention that a return trip would be somewhat difficult, given that its reaction mass would be exhausted covering any normal engagement distance. Even if those hurdles were overcome, missiles typically had attrition rates in the seventy to eighty percent range, since they would be engaged by point-defense beam weapons every second of their thirty to ninety-second trip. A fighter force would be similarly savaged before it could do much good.

With a warp drive, the equation changed radically, of course. And even then it’d taken some amazing engineering to provide the fighters with enough thrust to keep up with regular ships.

And the warp drive was the reason she was having trouble walking in a straight line.

The simulator couldn’t quite replicate what you felt when you performed a warp jump. Instead, if messed with your sense of balance to produce a similar sense of disorientation. It was plenty to make even the simplest things difficult, and when you got that jolt every five seconds while trying to manage targeting your weapons, things got funky.

She was getting used to it, which left her feeling proud and somewhat dismayed at the same time. After the first round of simulated combat, she’d puked her guts out, along with just about everyone else. They’d had their second flurry of washouts after that. The first one had happened when about half a dozen pilot candidates had been deemed physically or psychologically unfit. Unfortunately, the fitness tests were classified, so those poor bastards had traveled all the way here to end up doing other work for the duration of the project. It wasn’t scut work; the washouts were finding assignments in other occupational specialties related to supporting and maintaining both the new fighters and the carrier vessels that would take them into battle. But they weren’t going to be flying missions, and Lisbeth knew most of them would feel like losers; she certainly would have if she’d been in their shoes. All in all, they were down seventeen pilots out of a class of two hundred, and the real warp endurance training hadn’t even started yet.

“Best rollercoaster ever, isn’t it?”

Lisbeth turned toward the speaker, who had just walked – well, staggered – out of another simulator.

“I’m getting used to it,” she said. “This time I managed to keep breakfast down.”

The fact that she’d skipped breakfast that morning had helped a lot, of course.

“Yeah, I guess I’m getting jaded, too,” Lieutenant Fernando Verdi agreed. The Marine pilot was even more than a newbie than she was; he’d gotten roped into the project from the infantry, and any flying he’d ever done before now had been while playing Halo of Duty’s aerial missions. He grinned at her. “Feel up for a second breakfast? I kinda went light on the first one.”

“Yeah, me too.” Come to think of it, now that it was over she actually felt a little hungry, and her schedule was free until mid-morning.

A few minutes later, they were scarfing down some ersatz eggs and bacon while enjoying the view from the cafeteria. The clear sapphire-alloy windows looked down on the barren planet where Groom Base – informally known as ‘Area 52 2.0’ – was located. The system’s only redeeming features were planet they were on, which had water and enough oxygen to help supply the base, although not to allow people to take a stroll outside without an EVA suit, and a nearby gas giant with a helium-rich atmosphere, a critical fuel component for most power systems. The star system’s location at the end of a single warp line deep inside American space had cinched the deal; the place was ideal to build an anonymous, self-sustaining base. With very few exceptions, everyone who arrived to Star System 3490 was there for the duration.  That was one way to ensure word never got out until Project Lexington, a.k.a. the Flying Circus, was ready to show the ETs a thing or two.

You could send emails or vids out, but only after a team of censors and decryption specialists went over every scrap of data to ensure nothing indicating the nature of the posting made it through. And you got the usual infodump of news, mail and gossip from the rest of the country whenever an American ship made a supply stop. Other than that, they were completely cut off. It would be a boring life without the training and tests.

“I looked at your service jacket,” Fernando said after a few minutes of eating in companionable silence.

Lisbeth nodded. She’d have been surprised if he hadn’t. Everyone checked everyone’s public records and Facettergram profiles the second they lay eyes on each other. She knew, for example, that Fernando Verdi had been born in Memphis-Seven, was forty-three years old, had served in the Corps since his third year of Obligatory Service and had seen action in five occasions, earning a number of medals and commendations. He also liked to post cute kitty videos and play full-sensory MMOs in his spare time. With a little effort, she could find out what kind of porn he liked, but generally prying to that level was considered impolite.

“I mean, I did a little digging,” he went on.

Her grin turned into a frown. That meant requesting access to her full personnel records, which should have resulted in her being notified someone was snooping around. Living in the Second Information Age meant anybody could take a close look at you, but not anonymously. If you peeped, your identity was revealed to the one you were peeping on. Turnabout was fair play when it came to personal information. At least, that was the theory. There were ways around it.

“I was just curious, okay? Not too many Naval officers transfer to the Corps. So I asked around, called in a few favors, unofficial-like.”

“So you know the sordid truth. That I had my first command blown up right from under me,” she said, not fighting to keep the anger and bitterness out of her voice. If he wanted to pick a fight, he’d get one.

Fernando’s expression didn’t show any contempt or hostility, though. “It would have happened to anyone, Zhang. The threat board was clear when you made your approach to Jasper-Five. Nobody could have seen that coming. And the stuff you pulled after surviving those mines, well, I think you’ll fit in just fine in the Corps. And you have starship command experience. Guess where that’ll take you.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re refitting a whole bunch of assault ships for the Carrier Strike Group, plus a larger vessel, I think a cruiser although that’s still classified, to serve as the flagship. If this takes off, they’ll be building a lot more. And they’ll need people to captain them. You being a former bubblehead and now a fighter pilot, that puts you on the fast track to command rank.”

She had thought about it during her precious spare time, but had dismissed the idea as highly unlikely.

“The Navy will take over as soon as the program is successful,” she said.

“Maybe. I think the Corps may get to keep the fighters for a good while. For one, they’re not just good for blowing starships to smithereens. With their warp shields, they’re going to be very useful for ground-attack missions.”

“We’ll see.”

The Navy clearly hadn’t wanted anything to do with this program. She could guess the admirals were all asking for more battleships and dreadnoughts, and probably were bitching about every penny spent on this ‘boondoggle.’ But if it proved its worth, they’d be falling over themselves to take over.

None of that mattered though. She’d get to fly, one way or another.

Assuming she learned how to survive multiple warp exposures.  

Sometimes her job sucked.

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