So It Begins (27 page)

  “Good. Now, one last thing. The fellows up here from Picatinny are so eager to find out if there were any failures or shortcomings with the Cochrane, that they refused to wait for the debrief. So I promised them I’d ask you: did the Cochrane fall short on any of its design parameters, or did it perform to spec?”

  Grim looked down at the gun. “Yes sir, it performed to spec.” Then—because no one was there to see—he grinned. And he thought:

 
Yeah; definitely to spec.

TO SPEC Acknowledgements: For expert opinion and information on the topic of solar weather in general, and the effects of coronal mass ejections in specific, the author gratefully acknowledges the expert input of: Dr. Gordon Holman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Lt. Col. Peter Garretson, USAF; and Russell Howard, a principle investigator in the USN’s SECCHI (Sun-Earth Connection Coronal Heliospheric Investigation) initiative.

GUNNERY SERGEANT

Jeffrey Lyman

(The events in this story take place directly prior to those in “Compartment Alpha”, Breach the Hull, 2007.)

I dragged my fingertips across rows of sensors mounted just below the gun access-plates. The half-meter hatches at the height of my head had once been yellow, but heat had blistered and chipped the paint. Information flowed from the sensors up through the uplink-pads on my fingers as I walked from one end of the chamber to the other. Everything was in order. Each of my twenty-four guns held a warhead. Twenty-four ordnance conveyers were poised to feed them more. Waiting on my call.

  It was cool in the chamber, but in a day or two, or whenever we ran into the Aylin raiders, it would be a cauldron of ejected gases. I would hang in my gravity harness, shielded from concussion-vibrations, helping Fire Control find weak spots in the Aylin shields.

  I pressed my ear to the hatch at gun seventeen. My primary gun, my baby—Lucinda.

  “Gunner Kirchov,” barked a hard, familiar voice. “Are you making love or taking inventory?”

  “Taking inventory, sir,” I replied to the Lieutenant on the screen above me.

  “Get yourself cleaned up. The captain wants you in his conference room.”

  “Sir?” The captain had never spoken to me before.

  “Admiral Geltier’s ship is docking now, and you’re to meet him in thirty minutes. You’ve been reassigned.”

  “But we’re due at
Zed
Station, sir.” The ship didn’t have enough competent gunners. This reassignment must be important. My heart beat fast.

  “I wasn’t given a choice. Get moving!”

  “Yes, sir. Thirty minutes.” I started a countdown timer behind my right eye and ran for the showers and my dress uniform.

  Twenty-eight minutes later I climbed off of an intership transport near the captain’s quarters. I had never been this far forward. I saw a familiar face as soon as my shoes hit deck.

  “Sergeant Conner,” I said, grinning.

  “Ain’t this the shit, Kirchov? You know what this is about?”

  “No idea.”

  “I hear the admiral needs gunners,” Conner said. “This could be an attack mission.”

  We high-fived. About time. Fleet had been floundering for a year, trying to defend far-flung worlds from the aggressive Aylin raiders, unable to engage the enemy in a meaningful battle while they scourged system after system. Rescue ships couldn’t pick up citizens fast enough. Refugees were piling up.

  My countdown timer reached one minute. “Don’t want to be late,” I said, and held my palm over the scanner at the captain’s conference room door. It slid aside and we stepped through.

  “Private Kirchov. Sergeant Conner. Please sit.” The captain pointed to two empty seats.

  The room was as small as a table with ten chairs would allow, and we had to squeeze our way down to our seats. Gunners Hong and Daljen were already seated, dress caps precisely positioned on the table in front of them. The other three faces I didn’t know.

  The door opened again and the admiral entered with his aide. We stood as one.

  “We don’t have much time so let’s get started,” he said.

  He was probably in his late sixties, and robust. I wondered if he took regeneration shots, or if he was naturally healthy. Decades of sitting behind a desk usually reduced the admirals to potatoes. He dropped into the seat at the head of the table and waved for us to sit. We waited for the captain to sit first.

  “Aylin raiders have taken remote Station BHB-12 in the Mirrim System,” he said.

  I met Hong’s eyes across from me. How could the Aylin field so many ships at once? How could they advance on so many fronts? We
had
to launch an attack—give them a reason to concentrate their forces where we could train our big guns on them. We had to find a system or a planet they cared about.

  “BHB-12 is lost,” the admiral continued. “The next target down the line is the Tarish System. We have a colony in-system called Bountiful, defended only by
Upsilon
Station and a few old carriers.”

  I wondered how he could be so calm, talking about losing ten thousand citizens on BHB-12, but then realized he must be used to discussing the loss of systems and planets by now. Stations were small by comparison.

  “As you may be aware, we can’t stretch our battle groups any thinner to protect the lesser systems. The fleet shipyards are running at one hundred and ten percent, and the mercantile shipyards are nearly all converted to military use, but we won’t see an upswing in new vessels for at least six months. The lesser systems don’t have that kind of time. They’re sitting ducks, and frankly we still can’t find rhyme or reason to the attacks.”

  I stared at him, cold. I had always thought the Aylin were
trying
to stretch us thin, but who was I to have an opinion?

  “Bountiful can’t be protected,” the admiral said. “We sent pickup carriers to rescue whoever we can, but there’s not enough time. We’re going to lose a lot of people. That’s where my group comes in.”

  He stood and walked to the vid screen and waved his palm over the ID panel. A still-motion image of a ship filled the screen. It wasn’t a ship I was familiar with.

  “It’s a gun cruiser,” the admiral said, turning to face us. “Light. Fast. Stripped down to guns and thrust.”

  It looked like a twentieth-century rocket, maybe one hundred meters long and fifteen in diameter. It bristled with guns—four double-barrel units crammed in between the attitude thrusters around the bow, four more at midships, and four aft. Communications arrays sprouted along the hull, ending just before standard drive pods at the back. The nose cone was obviously shaped for hyperspace bowshock.

  “We can make these quickly,” the admiral said. “A lot quicker than we can make the big ships. These will be the defenders of the lesser systems. We’ve already sent twenty to Bountiful to defend the pickup carriers. You will be in the second wave of thirty ships.”

  “Sir,” Sergeant Conner said. “A ship that size would be like a gnat against their cruisers.”

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the guns. They were external, like on the carriers I used to gun for. Only bigger. We were
finally
taking the fight to the enemy.

  “Think of it as a super-fighter, Sergeant,” the admiral said. “Fifty of these at Bountiful, six hundred guns, twelve hundred barrels. Enough to handle a raid. But we need gunners and pilots. I’ll take you to the rendezvous point.”

  I looked down at the three faces at the table I didn’t recognize. Pilots.

  “Sir, what’s the complement of those ships,” one of the pilots asked.

  I had been wondering that. With life support and oxygen generators and waste collection and food, there wouldn’t be room for more than fifty people packed shoulder to shoulder. The guns needed thirty-two people, if you just counted sixteen gunners and sixteen gun-techs.

  “Her complement is three hundred.”

  My breath caught. Stunned looks passed around the table. The captain broke the silence. “How could you possibly fit three hundred crew on that ship, Admiral?”

  The image behind the admiral switched to a cutaway of the ship. The space between the inner and outer hulls was mostly hyperspace batteries. Packed around an open inner corridor were lines of stasis chambers. “The crew will be suspended,” he said. “There’s no other way to do it. Pilots and gunners will command your crews through the common neural link.”

  “And if the link fails?”

  He waved his hands. “The link is decentralized. It’s redundantly generated in each of fifteen separate compartments. Each compartment will have a full skeleton complement of crew, and each skeleton complement will be mixed so that, should a compartment fail, we won’t lose an entire gun crew or pilot crew or maintenance crew. You can turn these cruisers into Swiss cheese and still man guns and thrusters. They are perfect for wearing down the Aylin cruisers, or even one of their destroyers, until we achieve killing shots.”

  I felt ill. The ships were too small to generate shields. We would be Swiss cheese after every encounter. I had to get out of here. The room was feeling very small and crowded.

  “Unfortunately,” the admiral continued, “the gun-cruisers don’t have much range in hyperspace. The batteries last about sixty hours, then we have to drop into realspace to recharge. We’re modifying a couple of our big carriers to cradle the gun cruisers, probably thirty at a time, for transport to far destinations. They’re not ready, so we’ll be taking the long way to Bountiful.”

  “When do you leave, sir?” the captain said.

  The admiral stuck his jaw out. “We need to do a few quick body modifications before we leave,” he said. Then he met our eyes. “The original complement of the ships was two hundred and fifty, but there wasn’t enough redundancy. The only way to achieve redundancy was to reduce the size of the stasis chambers.”

  “So what, sir?” Conner said. “We’ll be in the fetal position for the tour of duty?”

  “No, Sergeant, the Fleet has elected to remove your legs. They will, of course, be regrown when you return to Earth Base.”

  One week later, following a brief stop at a second battle group for more recruits, the admiral’s transport dropped out of hyperspace in the scheduled rendezvous system. We sixteen candidates sat, unmoving, in our transport slings. They had, as stated, removed our legs at mid-thigh. My raw stumps had been concealed under titanium cuffs. I scratched at the fusion point where my skin ended and titanium began.

  The flanges at the bottom of the cuffs were crowded with feeder ports. They explained that this would save them the trouble of sticking our arms and legs with I.V.’s and risking infection during the long suspension. Instead the feeders and blood cleaners and waste removers and regulators and injectors would all screw into sterile ports near our femoral arteries.

  I played with my stumps constantly. It reduced my claustrophobia a bit. When we were in realspace I stayed linked to the ship’s external sensors so I could watch the stars go by. The view in hyperspace can be nauseating, so for long stretches I took sedatives and comforted myself that we were the vanguard of the attack. We would be the ones to give the Aylin a bloody nose. They expected lumbering dreadnoughts and destroyers, not fast-attack vessels.

  “Forty-five minutes to docking,” the pilot’s voice drifted through the cabin and we all looked up at the speakers.

  I lifted a cable from my pocket, inserted it into the cybernetic port behind my left ear and jacked in to the ship’s sensors. I linked to the forward visual feeds. We were sailing in toward a very yellow star, coasting on the momentum of our hyperspace exit. I dialed up the resolution on the feeds and caught my first glimpse of our titanium coffins.