Field of Heroes Page 15
‘The greatest tragedy of the Zoan and Cephal conflict was undoubtedly the loss of Zoa and thus advancements which would have proven such a boon to the field of xenobiology but for the cavalier attitude toward...’
‘[Inaudible].’
‘Science is my focus here, not...’
‘[Inaudible]...be dead?’
‘Of course we’d all be dead, but...’
-
Kim Moon Phd. Dc. Llb. Professor of Xenobiology
Berlin Lectures (Transcript)
30.
A.U. Space Fleet
- Kiyoko Jones
From the journal of Admiral Kiyoko Jones of the Americas Unity Space Fleet, command Flagship Boston:
There are turning points in history. Mostly, humanity is blind to them, because we’re there, inside those decisive moments, and it’s like looking at our own eyes without a mirror. History is the mirror through which we see ourselves for the first time. Fayetteville, where not only did we realise that as a species we were not alone in this galaxy, but that we were far, far away from supreme. It was there that we understood just how hopelessly mismatched we were to fight a race such as the Cephal.
Then, there are turning points like San Diego. Events like lynchpins of such girth that the whole of history swings around them. Moments of magnitude which reverberate for so long that we cannot imagine what they might mean to humankind.
Crowning, magnificent achievements can stem from those pivotal moments, too.
From San Diego came this ship which it is my honour to command; the A.U.F. Boston. Not a single ship, however. The Boston is one of seventeen such ships. I helm the Boston and the first true space fleet. Sadly, it is a fleet in which humanity sails the Black Seas to war. From the Boston to a place we name Zoa.
From Zoa?
How can I know? I am not looking in a mirror. I am within it, one human lost inside this great symbol of humanity’s potential. A ship through which we travel to distant stars.
If the Cephal and their home world are the destination, our fate, then the war on Earth was merely a road along the way. That road was built on the bones of our own dead, but what more fitting path could there be upon which to meet Lord Death?
Sometimes, events turn upon the actions of people, too. Single humans. Sometimes, they are remarkable. Generals, scientists, writers, artists, philosophers, inventors, engineers. The names of those who engineered this, the Boston, are not forgotten, but enshrined in the minds of those who might come after.
I write ‘might’. I do not show doubt before my charges. Of course not. I am the Admiral. I hold myself to higher standards than any. I must. I must show my most confident face in all but my journal. But...
Jones rested her stylus for a moment. A private moment, and the only time she ever allowed weakness to show on her face. The woman who had once sat in a war room and unleashed nuclear thunder on Americas Unity soil. Fayetteville was almost certainly her lowest moment.
Now, I am Admiral of the mightiest vessel ever constructed, leading the first fleet ever to sail toward interstellar – perhaps even intergalactic – space...and I am full of doubt.
But she picked up her stylus once more. Her journal was her outlet, her therapist. Private from those shipboard, of course, because she had no peers here, and certainly no confidents. Not entirely hers, though, because her innermost thoughts would be recorded, and picked over by...well, everyone with a vested interest.
Ultimately, should they survive this trip, the portal, Zoa, the Cephal...even then, they might well never return, and every aspect of the voyage would be dissected and analysed.
Whatever the outcome, everything rested on her shoulders. It was seven years since the start of the war, though. Kiyoko Jones wasn’t a fool. Her shoulders were not as strong as they once seemed.
I do have doubts, she resumed. Crushing, almost.
My shipboard AI advisor, named ‘Halley’, tries to pull one way. It is not AI, but something more, for it has personality, and its own goals and thoughts. Other advisors pull in different directions. Engineers, physicists. Linguists, biologists. Everyone has their own goals, their own opinions. This is why they are aboard. I understand. To advise...but I know this decision is mine alone, and it is my responsibility to ensure our primary objective in this historic endeavour is achieved.
The history of humanity is not only Tesla, Churchill, Dickens, Bosch, King, Alexander, Confucius, Musk, Hawking, Bell, Inip, Makabi, Tzu. It is villains, too; Hitler, Pol Pot, Trump, Oni, Babut. Fools’ tombs and cowards’ epitaphs mar the long scrolls of our achievements also, don’t they? And even the greatest of us were subject to folly. Newton himself, a giant indeed, searched for magic and that fabled philosophers’ stone.
It is yet to be decided which I will prove when I am gone and my shade stands before history’s great mirror – the judgement of Death, the Lord of all.
Kiyoko Jones closed her eyes and let only the gentle vibrations of the ship into her thoughts as she took the last of this moment of rare peace to herself.
She stared at her title, which appeared at the head and foot of every communiqué she left in their wake.
1st Admiral of the A.U.F. Boston
1st Admiral of the A.U.F.
Those words, as always, gave her strength to carry on. She wasn’t only Earth’s emissary. She was Earth’s vengeful avatar, too.
She loaded her journal into the last buoy to leave in orbit around Saturn before the Boston and her sister-ships reached the giant vortex, or portal, through which the Cephal had come to Earth on their mission. They had left it behind.
The aliens’ blimp-ships were never capable of escape velocity...their trip was one way.
More would come. Why else would they leave the portal behind?
A doorway into the unknown darkness, yes, but one which led both ways, as all do.
An open door, or a trapdoor?
They were about to find out.
31.
Flagship Boston
Kiyoko Jones
-
Jones left her quarters and took a walk through the Boston’s long halls, portside where her small, private cabin was, past equipment and combat suits for the fall to Zoa. She was relatively short, so she was one of the few aboard who neither had to duck beneath low bulkheads or twist into an uncomfortable sideways gait to make her way along the corridors.
The spin on the huge ships gave them gravity, but only .5G, so she constantly felt light headed a little like she was thinking about being sick but not quite there...all the time.
That .5G was a miracle of a kind, on top of many others.
The ship was the first of its class ever built. Each component part had been constructed on the moon, then assembled on orbital platforms far above Earth build for that one very specific purpose.
Should the Boston and the A.U. fleet return, it would be to those orbital platforms. The Boston and the other sixteen ships in the fleet were not so different to the ships of the Cephal. They were never intended to breach a planet’s atmosphere, nor escape a planet’s gravity well.
For that, they had the fall ships.
If we make it to Zoa. If they make it to the surface. If they make it back us. If we make it back home...
Admiral Jones shook away thoughts of failure with increasing effort, and tried to concentrate on her vessel, not doubt.
The Boston was created to follow the invaders through the portal the Cephal had hidden within the swirling rings of Saturn, deep inside the Keeler Gap.
Such a feat, she thought as she ran her hand over one of the many struts which made the barren, functional interior walls of her Flagship. Inside and out, the ship was ugly, like a bare factory building with girders on show. No weight, no feature, no space was without use or need. Anything not designed to transport destruction or keep those forces alive for the duration of their journey was given over to structural integrity and drives.
Force equals mass times acceleration.
A
huge ship needed huge drives to move it, even in space. Once it was moving? With nothing to stop it, it wouldn’t stop...but they knew they’d been fighting Saturn’s gravity with certainty, and going inside the Keeler Gap. They couldn’t just float. Jones was navy, but the Boston wasn’t a boat adrift, and space wasn’t a sea.
But it has currents and we do drift, after a fashion, don’t we?
That would be a fine thing, wouldn’t it? Adrift, to discover new lands and planets.
She wasn’t an astronaut, either, though. Her job now wasn’t space exploration, or to run the ship, but the people. And if ships were complicated, the Boston was an order of magnitude beyond that.
‘Drifting’, ‘currents’...these analogies were not quite so simple as she wished. But for the minutiae, she had advisors and staff and for everything else, she had Halley.
An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force.
Space was not a vacuum, though, was it?
She couldn’t see space from within the long passageways of the Boston, but she’d stared out from the view port on the bridge for long periods, marvelling at the beauty of it. How could anyone have ever thought space a true void? No. It was more like a sheet with marbles rolling around on it, like when she’d been a child. She’d sat on the bed, blanket over her head, and the marbles rolled toward her weight.
The droning of the massive drives was constant, always there to remind her that nothing came free, nothing was easy. Whatever the obstacle...you had to push against it.
For every action, she thought, there is an equal and opposite reaction...
Like when you attack Earth.
It was a kind of miracle that these ships were built, let alone working, but there was more to do yet. Harder obstacles to hurdle – like trying to move a fleet of giant spaceships into the Keeler Gap while fighting gravitational pull and then shooting those huge vessels through a portal only a three kilometres wide. Not sideways, because they would never fit, but perfectly, bow first. As though the ships were a high diver somersaulting through the air to land in a cup of water.
Near seventy percent of the ship’s total weight was drives, shields, and cooling, and just under 50% of her size, too, from mid-ship to stern. No nacelles, but a simple, almost dull oblong like a high rise tower on the side. Everything was inside. Even the vast aft, port, and starboard thrusters which would resist Jupiter’s grasping arms did not stand proud of the hull.
Jones’ Boston boasted no external weapons or gun placements either. As the Cephal ships were troop carriers, so too were these new ships of the Fleet. The interior was more akin to the inside of a submarine than a destroyer or aircraft carrier.
It was five weeks to Saturn, not including whatever might wait beyond the portal. The people aboard would struggle with the experience. There were sickness pills, of course, but also heavy sedatives and cocaine-based stimulants which would wake up even the coldest of marines with a scream or a roar. Humanity understood planetary travel well enough in 2297 A.D., but knew little about warps, or dimensions, or even interstellar space. They had covered everything they could, and with redundancy, too. But they sailed through a mystery now. Everything was new, everything was experimental.
The heliopause had been breached many times since Viking first slid away to the ineffable beyond, but the effects of such journeys on a human body? What stresses might a human body undergo inside the portal, or on the other side?
No one knew, and Jones understood that she, if not the scientists who had dreamed this mission up, had to remain realistic.
We’re probably all going to die.
She didn’t enjoy that thought but the Cephal and their war machines made the journey, didn’t they? They did not die. Perhaps the aliens had made preparations of some unknown sort. While mankind’s understanding of the ship from San Diego indicated that the organic troops of the enemy survived this journey in simple quarters, it did not, necessarily, help Earth’s cause; human and alien biology were not the same.
How many billions died for us to build these ships?
Seventeen ships, each holding over three thousand troops, engineers, mechanics, Fleet staff and officers. Aside from personnel, each of those carriers held falls hips, autonoguns, exosuits, D-Guards, DTC marine armour, weapons, ammunition. A force of nearly 60,000 and all the equipment, too.
Had any human endeavour ever been so magnificent? Or possibly pointless?
They faced an army which invaded Earth with millions...and killed billions in less than a year.
They didn’t have one thing, though, did they?
This was a vast, astounding undertaking. An expedition, yes, in ships not intended to fight battles in space.
These ships were intended to end planets.
Aside from the soldiers and their equipment, the Boston and her sister-ships only carried weapons with power measured in Kilotons.
*
The soldiers were smart, tough, and brave, but Jones saw the results of warriors cooped up in tight quarters. One soldier, a tall, broad young man with a twinkling eye bled through a smashed nose as she went by. He didn’t complain, but shrugged.
‘Walking into something didn’t want to be walked in, Ma’am,’ said the soldier. Patriot, she figured. Patriot Company were insane.
Saturn still over a week away.
It was possible that despite the best guesses, despite the efforts over the two years between this military expedition and the victory at San Diego, the Boston and sister-ships might reach the Cephal portal and simply cease to be. That must weigh on the soldiers aboard just as it did her.
The portal appeared to be some kind of field generator made of interlocked devices which held the field open. It was technological, and therefore the prevailing assumption was that it could be recreated. Overlapping units, seven of them, were woven and joined by energy manipulation. It was built of materials none dare examine more closely at this stage.
For now, close-work satellites and tiny skiffs out of the deep-space station Nash only had guesses to offer humanity. Understanding, if it ever came, would take decades, at least.
Surely, she wasn’t the only one who felt crushed by pressure and doubt. Almost everyone involved understood very well that this might be a one way trip.
Then, a remote drone came back through that portal unscathed.
In two days, a scout ship nearly fifty times smaller than the Boston would breach the portal while the Fleet were on approach. In two days they would discover if humans could survive the journey.
And then? The Boston didn’t seek a treaty or understanding. She carried retribution.
32.
Before the Fall
Vidar Dawes
I didn’t remember a time when there might have been a crowd cheering at a swim meet, or high school, or getting a job, or even the faint shape of a woman I might have once known. Memory’s as much my enemy as the Zoan. I had the build of a swimmer. Aside from that? A ring on a chain and a memory of a truck I’d loved and a drifting thought that there was a woman on the hood of that truck that I should’ve known. I’d had a sliver of metal in my head and maybe that had sliced out those earlier memories. Maybe it was just how a mind protects itself. Those memories could still be inside, somewhere.
I wasn’t brave. I was terrified those memories might one day return and that they might cripple me.
I remembered when they put Sergeant Pain in our heads. I remembered people dying, if not most of their names. The things I didn’t need from before? It was like I’d slid them aside to make room for the skills I did need.
And now? I was in space. Turned out fear was a skill I still needed, but wonder was rising, too.
It wasn’t as I’d imagined. I’d seen newscasts, might have even seen some kind of net-documentary about Mars or the Moon. It wasn’t like this. Perhaps those things were skewed, like all advertisements were, making colonisation look like you might be taking a luxury cruise. This wasn’t that.
We were grumpy, too, with that kind of itching irritation only true boredom and hot winds can replicate. We were cramped and constantly woozy despite the meds they gave us. After a week I felt less like puking constantly, but more like punching someone by the day. By the fifth week, waiting on a go/no go that so much was riding on, most of us were ready to skin even our best buddies.
Patriot were disposable, but we were good. We knew that. That’s why we were going through the portal. Was it a vote of confidence, sending us, or were they throwing us away for StratInt? That nagging doubt didn’t help moral.
Other companies might have thought we were crazy. Maybe we were. We were the unit a soldier came to when everyone in their old unit was dead. We were either bad luck, or the shit bucket where broken soldiers got dumped from the Army’s ass.
Insane?
Sure we were.
The shunt in our heads probably didn’t help on that count. We looked like cybernetic humans who might not be so far removed from the biomechanical monsters we fought. I didn’t think we were cybernetic but we did have an AI grafted with dry-implants directly in our heads.
I guess there was a fair helping of truth in the rumours about Patriot, and I couldn’t deny I got a kick from being the crazy one.