“You have contacts descending, Angels 100 and dropping-”
“-jesus, I’m lighting up like a Christmas tree-”
“-roll left, roll left-”
“-hypersonic, hostiles going hypersonic-”
“-hell, they’re gonna be on me like white on rice – Fox Two, Fox Two!”
-First confirmed hostile action against House Suubanunaam during the Battle over Hampton Roads
CE2047/NC695
OLYMPIA – LOW EARTH ORBIT [LEO]
Kilauea was in drydock and being subjected to desperately needed refit and crew rebuild, so Katherine reported to Emiliano Salas’ borrowed office over in the naval annex. Her CO stood up, welcoming her with a smile, a returned salute and a firm handshake.
“Kate! I was just pulling up your request. Sit down, sit down. Want any coffee?” An expansive gesture took in a little battered Keurig, precariously perched on a bolted-down filing cabinet.
“No sir, thank you.”
Salas looked comfortable, his uniform jacket off and hung on a collapsible metal hanger by the door. The Naval Annex provided temporary office space; compact but comfortable and in the last month since Kilauea docked Salas had added a little bit of home to it. A framed picture of his wife and kids, a mobile trunk stamped with Kilauea’s service number. They exchanged a few pleasantries, discussed how their leave was going – Salas rode her a little for not taking a shuttle down dirtside, but then, neither had he. She made excuses about wanting to be available for the refits, that she still had paperwork to finish. Salas nodded and commiserated and though it had only been a six-month tour, Kilauea was small and Salas was perceptive. He knew that she knew she was dissembling.
“I’m going to be straight with you, Kate – you’re not on a command track.”
The words weren’t unexpected. It was too much of an ask, too presumptuous-
“You’ve done a bang-up job as Chief Ops,” Salas continued, trying to soften the blow. “Liu’s never had a bad thing to say about you. Command’s a different animal. Besides, I didn’t think you ever wanted a boat of your own.”
She set her teeth.
“It’s the next step.”
Salas nodded slowly, the scroll wheel of his mouse click click clicking in the sudden quiet. Atmosphere scrubbers hummed and popped. Olympia’s half-gee felt strange, neither the comforting pull of standard thrust gravity or the loose uncertainty of the float. The chair under her rear felt only partially real, her stomach stuck halfway between settled and confused. Plan was for Olympia to be dialed up to normal gravity over the next year, year and a half, to let the complex settle. Earth’s most famous orbital had grown quick, as fast and as reckless as everything else after the end of the occupation and now it had to be reined in before it fell apart under its own momentum.
“Academy into five years active, five reserve and then applied for active again. You’ve got kids, Kate – how old is the youngest? Your daughter – I’m sorry, her name-”
“Kyla,” Katherine offered. “Liam is the older, he’s eight. He’ll be nine.”
“It’s not a reflection on you.”
She almost chewed on her lip, caught herself. She reached Lieutenant Commander five years ago at twenty-five. Quick, young. Five years ago. The Navy didn’t skimp on promotions, not if you proved yourself. It was about getting the right asses in the right seats. Calling the growth of both the Army and Navy in the past two decades ‘explosive’ was an understatement and with the way ships rolled off the line both here at Olympia, at the Iyyesian yards and the new ones by Saturn: there were always slots to fill and just not enough people.
Five years without a promotion was, if anything, the baldest reflection on a person. She had been reserve, not active, fine – but that didn’t change things. It meant she’d reached her pinnacle. Chief of Combat Systems Operations wasn’t bad, but it was a plateau. Her peers were all moving on. Kilauea wasn’t just being refit; she was also being rotated with a new crew. Ekon – Chief Engineering – he was reassigned already to a battleship. Rumor had it Salas might not return to captain Kilauea again but might be on the shortlist to captain the latest of the new Roseate Hour-class dreadnoughts when it rolled out of production: The Cloud of Unknowing. Her gigantic hull loomed over Kilauea just a few dozen kilometers from where they sat now.
“It’s not the end of your career. This isn’t an old world Navy, you know that. You’ve done a great job where you are and with Big K going through a rebuild, it would be good for you to be one of the constants in the command group. And Big K is going to be staying local. I shouldn’t be saying that, but she’s staying attached to Battlegroup Caloris as a training ship. Mercury is a whole lot closer than Eridanus or Herculaneum. You’ll be able to see little Liam and Kyla grow up. Talk to them on a delay of minutes, not days or weeks. Get shore leave to spend time with them.”
It was a strange feeling, getting exactly what she wanted and was terrified to get. Half of her wanted to screw propriety and hug the man, the other half of her wanted to dig in her heels and fight. He kept saying she did a great job as Chief Ops. Great job, no complaints, excellent officer, admirable division chief, respected by those who served under her, blah blah. And then: you’re not good enough for command.
“Isn’t it worth a chance?”
God, she thought, even as she spoke, it was not worth a chance. She couldn’t take the words back, but everyone had to do their part. Was sitting on her ass on a training ship for the next four years, was that doing enough? And Salas was right: Caloris Planitia was just a few days from Earth. Mixed blessings.
Salas hummed under his breath, gaze flicking over his computer screen.
“There might be something. A friend of mine’s boat came in a week ago. Jamie’s lost his XO to lung cancer – not terminal, but she’s going back earthside for treatment. If you’re serious about this – and Kate, listen carefully – I could put in for you to transfer to his command. Semeru is the ship and she’s set to escort the next convoy to MAR Pelileal. Pelileal, Kate.“
The name of the ship – Semeru – didn’t ring a bell nor the name of the captain. Pelileal absolutely did. The latest and possibly last of the Mustering/Armory/Refit bases whose distance made it the darling of the news cycle. Sixteen hundred short light-years away: the farthest the Allies had ever reached. A real marker of the ingenuity, gumption, and bloody-minded determination of the Navy and their doctrine. Sixteen hundred SLY or close to a month’s travel and that was just the diving part.
It couldn’t possibly be farther from Earth.
“I’ll take it,” she said, mouth dry and tongue like wool. It was for the best.
…
CE2048/NC695
MAR PELILEAL – HIGH SOLAR ORBIT
Semeru was of the oldest battlecruiser type: Acotango-class. She was on the smaller side at three hundred and fifty meters, barely longer than the largest wet-navy ships of the old world. A ship without a thought to aesthetics: blocky and angular, ugly to look at but efficient, wrapped up in layers of whipple over composite armor plate. A phased lance ran the length of her and sixteen two hundred millimeter railgun rifles made up her main teeth, supplemented by the usual tube clusters for a variety of missiles: ARMAC-9s, SKIDAR-202s, Tupo-4s and RINGDARTs. Katherine knew the systems inside and out.
The Acotangos were part of the initial fever-pitch design frenzy, one that resulted in the scrappy and famous and now long retired Powell-class destroyers of Intercession fame. Like all of those from that time and still some now, Semeru was tower-type, all her decks aligned with her thrust vector. Newer designs, starting from the largest, were incorporating smaragdine tech from the drawing board, giving them the same inertial sinks as Reach warships and constant artificial gravity as well. Semeru had first sailed before the neutronium looms at Hyades started to get up to speed, when the only smaragdine to be found came from looting killed Reach ships.
The only problem with the delicate, exotic material was that it liked to rapidly decay if you so much as sneezed in its general direction. Surviving the various shocks and violence that putting a warship out of action entailed meant that most of the smaragdine threads of Reach warships had already evaporated by the time marines cut their way in.
Things changed a few years ago when news started reporting a huge increase in smaragdine production from the neutron stars in Hyades. Popular rumor for the rapidly increasing output was that some Reach research materials had been recovered, but others suspected turncoats or captured specialists that helped the Allies get their own production up off the ground. Whichever it was, or if God himself decided to give His people a hand, Katherine was eternally grateful that the Navy decided it was worth sharing the wealth. Almost all of the stuff stayed earmarked for dreadnoughts like the Antediluvian- and Roseate Hour-classes, for Olympia’s expansion, for the kingships, for dive-stations, but the looms were running 24/7.
Semeru joined the ranks of tower-types that gained a tiny threaded smaragdine sink, allowing the ship to maintain between .7 and .8g constantly in the living spaces. Trying to thread the whole ship would have been a waste of time, effort and the precious material. The big heads in charge thought it was worth at least overhauling the older ships so that the crew could cut back on the necessary supplements and complicated exercise rituals needed to not sort of fall apart in prolonged zero gee. Not to mention it saved lives, shifting medical into the sphere of the inertial sinks. Gee-burns did unsightly things to injuries and microgravity was worse.
Also, it meant that Kate could go for a jog every morning.
The yards opened Semeru up like a fish, cutting out the previous living module and welding in a new one. Bulkheads had to be shifted and rearranged and it left a loop of a corridor between the new living spaces and the rest of the ship, which made for a perfect jogging track. It was probably the intended use, given the sometimes obnoxious thoughtfulness that was being enforced at almost every level of society these days.
Waste not, want not: find ten uses for a single thing.
In compression pants under shorts and a tank with her hair up in a short, tight tail, she pounded feet in circles, making lap after lap after lap, lost in the music thumping through one earbud. Out of uniform, a handful of other sailors entering and exiting the living spaces didn’t recognize her as their new XO, just giving her space and right-of-way as she jogged past. A few others used it the same, passing her in the opposite direction. Underfoot was tight mesh grating, walls covered in anti-spalling cushioning, broken up by maneuver bars for microgravity.
Lost in her thoughts, she slowed down to a rapid walk, taking deep breaths and savoring the burn in her legs and lungs both.
Seegs joined her, poking his head out of one of the hatches leading into the living spaces and smiling, warm and sincere as ever.
“God, Katie, you still run?”
“Don’t even,” she laughed, catching a towel he tossed to her, paired with one already over his shoulders. In his exercise kit like her, Seegs fell in beside her, matching her pace.
“So how the hell have you been? Last I heard, you made a little Hulling.”
“Two now.”
“Damn, congratulations. You look good.” He glanced at her, askance. She hummed acknowledgement.
“How’s Nisha?”
He leapt on the redirect, excited as a little boy.
“Ah, she’s postdoc. She did her practicum in over in the Pact capital on Iyyestil. Things are real dogshit over there, Kate. We thought Earth had it rough, but from what Nisha is telling me, we got lucky—”
“Your family saw the Bihar drop, Seegs. Come on. It’s worse than Archie wiping seventeen cities?”
“Little biddie planet, so things get worse over there quick. Nisha’s telling me that it’s decades before they’re thinking things settle down instead of up. Earth’s already bouncing back. That’s why we invited all the saehara.”
2020 was too early for her to remember anything but scraps of images, here and there. Seegs, like her, was Gen H. Or Gen O. Harrowing or Occupation, depending on who was asking. They didn’t see the drops, but they grew up in the shadow of them. Seventeen holes in the ground where cities used to be, gravesites for a billion souls. Her mother did a lot to explain why God would let something like that happen.
Her generation, they grew up with Archie’s boot on the necks of the species and never knowing anything else. Names everyone knew, names ingrained into every single human being. House Suubanunaam, Governor-General Vhithliss. Secretary General Kinkulith – and that one was a joke. The biggest name: The Reach of the Houses of Sholuto. A big name for killers. She knew darker, colder winters; summers with paler sunlight and frost on the ground.
Seegs’ girl, Nisha, was right about one thing at least. Suub, the idiots that came to Earth, tried to fix things. They wanted to get the world running again after they cut the legs out from under the global community and apparently they had a timetable to do so. While their partner-in-crime, House Kalathivu, was re-enacting World War I a hundred short lightyears away at Iyyestil, the aliens at Earth were scrambling to hook fusion reactors into powergrids and set up local production.
After L-Day, after Endurance – the original Endurance, the captured cruiser, not the kingship – cut the head off the snake at New York City with one hundred and twenty-two millimeter rifles, there’d been a widespread release of documents captured from Suubanunaam and revealed by captured officials. The Harrowing had been a workshopped tactic, calculated for expediency of ‘local political collapse’ and ‘generating viable power-vacuum openings for integration of Suubanunaam ruling apparatus’. The movies always said the aliens came to earth because they hated humans or wanted to eat them or things like that – none of them imagined the aliens that showed up would be middle managers.
Seegs went on and on about Nisha’s work on the other homeworld, talking about fallout management and trying to reverse acidification in the local seas – which was also a test for Earth, because the Harrowing and then collapse of global traffic bought time, not a stay.
She’d only met Nisha once or twice, but the Indian woman was bright, if quiet, and from everything Seegs said about her (and he always said a lot) she had a drive that was frightening. People like her on the problem of Iyyestil’s collapsing biosphere and Earth’s shaky one had to be a good sign for the future.
“Guns,” a sailor greeted, sidling past them, interrupting. “Ma’am.”
“‘Guns’?” She repeated with a snort and ugly laugh, unable to choke it back, train of thought thoroughly derailed.
Seegs flexed, biceps bulging, raising an eyebrow and looking betrayed.
“Chief of Combat Ops. You know. Guns.” Walking backwards, he struck another pose, deliberate. She shoved his chest.
“What? It’s better than Seegs.”
“I still’ve no idea where you even got that.”
Subodh shook his head.
“It’s not even a story. I can’t believe it stuck.”
“It’s how I was introduced to you! Devin’s like: ‘Hey Kate, this is Seegs, he’s trying to be a stupor soldier, gonna strangle Archie and knock his nuts off.’ I didn’t know your name until second year.”
“Academy shit,” Seegs replied sagely, which explained it all. “I’ve made my peace. Listen, Kate, you done pretending to be a trench monkey?” He pointed to a hatch, shut and sealed, coming up. “You should come topside.”
Katherine mopped her face, the back of her neck, draped the towel over her shoulders, rolling her arms. Semeru ran warm, the old boat’s heatsinks only keeping just ahead of demand. At least water reclamation kept the air dry and low humidity – nothing was worse on a ship than when both went down. It got hot, humid and oppressive fast. Stopping at the designated hatch, Seegs racked the lock-wheel for her, pulling it open and gesturing Katherine through first. He was old-school; she remembered back in Academy he always got doors for their female classmates and only sat after they did. He got shit for it. It never stopped him. Good to see Seegs hadn’t changed.
The view beyond stole her breath away.
Every Navy ship was required to incorporate a particular piece of architecture. It was actually outlined in a General Order, veritably written in stone. Along with weapon hardpoints and reaction-control thrusters and sensor arrays, they had to have a topside. Usually, it was tucked away somewhere inconspicuous and on the Acotango-class, it was a little blister dome of coated luminglass panels like a greenhouse. Topside was figured essential to mental well-being; otherwise sailors locked up inside titanium tubes for months on end would go, in a word, crazy. Submariners in the past century could surface and breathe air under the sky. Not an option out in the black.
Topsides were there to open the world up, to look at the stars and the ‘sky’ and pop that blister of claustrophobia that slowly dug into a person during tours.
Seegs, following her topside, murmured something in hindi as starlight fell across his face.
Pelileal’s Veil was an open cluster, young enough that it still had a nebula. She’d read up before Semeru left the solar system, not knowing what an ‘open cluster’ was. In short: a bundle of stars packed together, all being born from the same dense interstellar matter until eventually they blew it all away. Reading about it was one thing – seeing it was something else. She’d been on duty in CIC when they surfaced at Pelileal and seeing the exterior through hull-cameras wasn’t the same as the breathtaking vista now before her.
Stars filled the sky. Bright, brighter than any to be seen on earth and close enough that their color shone through. Ghostly tendrils and threads of shimmering blue and green made a heavenly web across the entire sky, mixed in with a gauzy, pale haze just visible enough so that no part of the sky was truly black. ‘The Lady’s Veil’, they called it, and Katherine couldn’t see it as anything else.
“You’ve never been out of the solar system, hm?” Seegs whispered. It didn’t feel right to speak any louder when topside, like it would disturb the peace of the place. Acotango-class had a decent square-footage to their topside: about thirty feet in diameter and perfectly circular and it was empty but for them. No lights – letting the stars and the sky throw cross-hatch shadows from the luminglass dome.
“I was stationed at Caloris for my whole first tour.”
Before seeing the Veil, that had been the most humbling moment of her life. It was something of a rite of passage for new arrivals at the Caloris crater to have to go out and see the Sun from the scorched surface of Mercury. Three times bigger than at Earth doesn’t seem like it would be that different, but she couldn’t put into words the feeling when she looked up and the Sun, that one constant, the thing that every human ever saw the exact same way, was different. Bigger and brighter and somehow more furious. More powerful. Mighty.
The nondenominational chapel at Caloris had a luminglass window that faced the slow, endless sunrise for a reason.
The Sun from Caloris Planitia meant more than the Sun up close at the dive array. At the array, she’d gone topside to look and it looked…unreal. Too big, too clear, too detailed. The Sun wasn’t a ball or a real, physical body with spots and glows and huge streamers of starstuff. That view, that was for stars, not the sun. The sun was white disc; a concept more than anything.
Of course, at the tight orbit the dive stations claimed Semeru had to have her fields up at full tune and the filter coating on the luminglass was tinted to maximum, which washed out color and made everything unreal.
“I was at Perseus for a few years. That was my first time out of the solar system.”
“Uh-huh,” Kate managed, still open-mouthed. She had to get a picture of this. Send it back home. Liam would flip.
“Got in a fight out there, when the line was pushing.”
That got her attention.
“No shit?”
“None at all. Didn’t make the news, just a handful of goblins popped in to see what was going on. They tried to take a dive station and we were all gunning for promotions so our squadron ran them down.”
Katherine whistled, tuneless.
“Did you get to strangle Archie and punch his balls off?”
“Almost.” Seegs wandered over to the edge of the dome. Semeru, along with the rest of the squadron, sat at high anchor over the local star, just in sight of topside, churning and warm and orange, as big around as her fist. The dive stations skimmed lower, in the denser stellar matrix where their fields always glowed a little from the superheated flux. She followed her friend, reaching out to touch the chilly luminglass. It felt good, compared to the warm air. Far distant, a flicker of Saint Elmo’s fire marked a new surfacing, too far to make out any details. It could be a courier from MAR Tysuv, it could be another chunk of the convoy; it could be a ship returning from local recon. Diving was always an imprecise ‘science’, driven by vagaries of weather and friction and streams, leaving estimated arrival times as a guesstimate, not a rule.
“Think we’ll see anything out here?” She wondered aloud.
Seegs wrapped fists about either end of his towel, resting his arms against his chest and looking thoughtful.
“We’re too far out. When the push goes at Leonis; that’s where all the Houses are going to look.”
The idea of passing through her service without ever once seeing combat sat strange with Katherine. To grow up under occupation, to be too young to take part in the global liberation, to be just the right age to take part in the birth of mankind and saeherid’s true interstellar navy, but to never get a chance to see guns fired in anger? Count her blessings. Seegs’ luck at MAR Perseus aside, the casualty tolls from near-parity clashes against the Reach could be horrifying.
She’d keep her faith in God. He led her out here for a reason, Katherine just had to trust that it was one that would mean something.