The Unincorporated Future (5 page)

J.D. had just put her head down on her pillow when her communicator came to life at its softest setting. Instantly, she was awake and would have bolted up but for the six-year-old child who’d snuggled up beside her.

She wasn’t there a moment ago,
thought J.D, who on checking the chronometer saw that she had actually gotten three hours’ worth of sleep
and
that her boots had been removed. Keeping still, she spoke softly, “Black here, report.”

“Your brand-new XO is asking you not to shoot the messenger and get your commanding butt up here,” said Jasper Lee.

J.D. was not totally happy with having to promote Jasper from sensor officer to XO. She was planning to when he’d been seasoned a little longer to actual command duties, but Lopez, her old XO, was now commanding the AWS
Claim Jumper
after that ship’s captain, first, and second officer had been killed by an asteroid impact that took out the corridor those unlucky three were walking down. The
Claim Jumper
was relatively undamaged, but its crew was incredibly demoralized, having served under those three for four years. The last thing J.D. needed was for one of her heavy battle cruisers to be made unreliable just before a battle. Victor Lopez was due for a command of his own, and the
Claim Jumper
getting J. D. Black’s executive officer off the flagship should reassure the crew that they were getting the very best available.

Victor would have explained to her the problem that had been pressing enough to disturb her sleep, as well as have the raw data he’d based his decision on. J.D. patiently explained this to a chastised Jasper Lee. But she was very good at bringing new XOs up to speed, having had so many of them transfer to commands of their own as soon as they were skilled enough. She would have been surprised to know that this XO would be her last one.

But what he told her and showed her was more than enough to get her out of her pallet, although she did move softly enough not to wake Katy and tiptoed out to her desk to put on her boots. Running to the command sphere, she flung herself into her seat while calling up the data. Then she called up the five commodores and her chief engineer for a small holographic conference. While they were all connecting to her communications node, she reviewed the latest fleet assessment. A lot of ships were tingeing into yellow green, and five of them were in the red. Three of those were actually farther ahead of the fleet because they’d taken damage to their propulsion units and could not slow down as quickly as the rest of the fleet. This had put them past the safety of the ice plow, but they’d insisted on keeping formation in hopes of repairing their propulsion systems and rejoining the fleet.

Tawfik and her five commodores were floating images in a circle in front of her.

Commodore Cortez had lost her brother in an earlier battle and seemed to view the entire war as an excuse to seek vengeance. She had not crossed the line to where vengeance was more important than discipline, but she had come close to that line on a few occasions. J.D. was aware that Maria was a hard charger who had the absolute loyalty of her subordinates and would never disobey a direct order.

Francine Waterman was a strict professional, West Point trained and hired right out of the academy by SecureCo., one of the best mercenary companies in the solar system before the war. She wasn’t particularly creative in command, but could be relied upon to do what was ordered when it was ordered, and do it well.

Susan Cho was interesting in that she was a daughter of the extremely powerful Cho clan, which had practically owned Saturn before the war, and was the sister of Saturn’s current governor, Karen Cho, and the Saturnian Congressional Janet Cho. Susan had been the typical family screw-up. The one who would have ended up psyche audited or mining a rock in the middle of nowhere to escape family obligations she neither cared for nor felt bound by. But when the war came, much to everyone’s surprise including her own, Susan had proved to be a superior spacer and then an officer eschewing all the privileges her family had to offer and even pretending to be of no relation for years. Whenever anyone had asked if she was one of “those” Chos, Susan would laugh and say, “If I were, do you think I’d have started out as a spacer third class?” and then buy the person a drink to commiserate her lousy luck to be born to the wrong family. J.D. would not have known except that a then Congressional Karen Cho had come to Susan’s ship when her sister made captain. J.D. was fairly certain that if she had not been accompanying the future governor, Susan would have barred her sister from her new command. But whatever the bad blood was, it seemed to drive Susan to excel at a field none of her family ever bothered with.

Charles Lee Park reminded J.D. too much of her past, and as such she did not much like the man. He’d been an up-and-coming GCI executive who was making a real name for himself in the outer planets. Given his career track, he would’ve been on the board in thirty years or so. But when the war broke out, Charles had stayed in Neptune as the rest of his colleagues took the fastest transports back to the Core. For the longest time, it had been assumed he was a spy for the corporations, but he’d volunteered, like Susan, at the lowest grade of spacer, and the needs of the war and his natural ability had pushed him very high up the chain of command. J.D. still didn’t trust him completely, but the truth was, his background was not that much different from hers. Besides, he was a devious son of a bitch whom J.D. used to test her theories. He’d been very useful in second-guessing J.D.’s battle plan for the latest victory at Jupiter.

David Paladin was one of the few fleet officers who’d started out as an assault miner and made the switch to spacer. It was an open debate whether the assault miners under David’s command were the best, but they certainly thought they were. J.D. knew many a person who would have loved to trip the commodore into a bunk. Deep in her thoughts, it had even occurred to J.D. But Paladin was famously loyal to his two husbands, one an engineer in Ceres and the other an agriculturalist who’d taken over soy production at thirty asteroids orbiting Saturn.

Her thoughts in order, J.D. began. “By now, you know that there is an asteroid swarm directly in our path.” She knew that everyone had seen the sensor reports. The creation of the vias in the outer orbits had created so much disruption in the debris of the solar system that old navigation maps were useless, and new ones had not been made due to the war. Normally this was not a problem, as the vias connecting the outer planets were swept clean and monitored with near religious devotion and no one would be stupid enough travel the outer orbits any other way.

“The odds of a swarm this big in just this place,” Maria said bitterly.

Susan Cho rolled her eyes. “Please, Maria.
We’re
the anomaly out here, not the random asteroid streams. We’ve got enough on our plates as it is to start second-guessing God.”

“Poor God,” Charles broke in, “getting blamed for this.”

“This has nothing to do with God,” protested Maria. “I’m merely pointing out the coincidence.”

“The question is,” asked David, “what are we going to do about it?”

“We have to change our course or our rate of deceleration,” said Francine with her characteristic practicality.

“We can’t.” It was Tawfik. There were bags under his eyes, and his shoulders were hunched. On all the displays in the six command spheres an image of the fleet with a line leading straight toward Saturn appeared in red and a smaller line in gold showed it leaving Saturn and intercepting Ceres. “Our course and deceleration were precisely planned to not only rendezvous with Saturn but do so in such a way as to make it possible for us to reach Ceres at a specified time. But our gas tanks are going to be empty when we leave Saturn. The Saturnians have already positioned all the hydrogen they had in orbit at just the right location and velocity for us to be able to fuel up and continue to Ceres without pausing. And we must get that hydrogen because we will have to burn our thrusters at full to slow down enough to intercept Ceres at less than hello/good-bye speeds.”

“Can’t they simply move the hydrogen blocks to match our new course?” asked Charles.

“They damaged most of the block thrusters moving that much hydrogen to where we needed it with such short notice. I doubt they have enough to move twenty percent of what we need in the time we could give them. We will be at Saturn in twenty hours. It’s just not enough time.”

“Then we go through,” J.D. said.

“Admiral,” implored Francine, “that’s suicide, and you know it.”

J.D. nodded. “Yes,” she answered, looking every bit as haggard as Tawfik, “I do. But I also know that if we deviate from this course and arrive too late, Ceres
will
be destroyed—and if it’s destroyed, we lose the war. End of story.”

“You have debris the size of softballs, Admiral,” said Francine. “It was a few of those traveling in a clump that destroyed the
Pickax.
That swarm has hundreds that size and thousands the size of baseballs and tens of thousands the size of golf balls. At our calculated speed, the swarm’ll destroy us. What good will it do the Alliance if it loses the fleet and Ceres at the same time?”

And that was the question to which J.D. did not have a good answer. Without a good answer, J.D. knew she was going to have to order a minor course correction that would lose them the war. But she could not see what to do. Suddenly she felt tired to her soul and her mind refused to work. All the sleep she’d put off since she awoke in the hollow moon with her three hundred hidden ships was now extracting its price, and the three hours she’d gotten with Katy just before were not nearly enough to make up for the endless days of constant demanding decision.

Allah, I beg of you,
she thought,
don’t let me fail your children. They need me to lead and I have nothing. Surely it is not your will that we enter the swarm and die? Help us for their sake if not for mine!

“Admiral,” Tawfik said softly and seemingly from far away. “Blessed One, are you with us?”

J.D. brought herself to and realized that she must have dozed. For her head and shoulders tilted at a considerable angle in her chair. She froze, almost falling out of the seat, and saw the asteroid swarm from a slightly different angle than she had sitting upright in her command chair.

“Praise be Allah,” she said softly.

“To Allah, all praise,” responded Tawfik automatically, recognizing the change in J.D. at once. To the depths of his soul, he knew when the Merciful One breathed genius into his Blessed One, but he had never seen it so clearly before.

J.D. stood, now fully awake, and rerouted the fleet in the holo-tank. “The asteroid swarm is shearing across our path almost ninety degrees from our course. That means that the debris we have been running into is also being blasted out of our way. So we need to move the fleet ninety degrees behind the plow. We must maintain course and speed, just change our position.”

“The farther down the line a ship is, the more likely it will get hit by cross debris,” cautioned Maria. All heads nodded in agreement. “My flotilla will take the end position.”

“No. The
Warprize
will take the end position,” said J.D. firmly. She was met by a wall of silence. However, J.D. knew it was of the dangerous sort—that of firm rejection. “My orders
will
be obeyed,” she said with a throaty growl.

“Admiral, if Ceres is lost, we lose the war,” said Charles.

“I know, Charles.”

“And if you are lost, we lose the war.”

“No one person—,” she began

“Bullshit, Admiral,” interrupted Maria, “anyone else, maybe, but not you.”

J.D. looked at the convocation before her. “I cannot fight this war from safety. If I’m indispensable, we have already lost.”

“Blessed One,” Tawfik said, “if you must die for the Alliance, then you must. But if you die leading us to victory against Admiral Trang and all he fights for, your death will free us. If on the other hand, you die in the trackless wastes of the solar system, pounded by asteroids far from any battle, your death will doom us. Tell me I’m wrong,” challenged Tawfik, smiling with the knowledge that he was not.

J.D. pushed her lips up against her teeth and tried to come up with a better argument against the young engineer’s reasoning but could find none. “You know, Tawfik, your mother had that same annoying habit.” Tawfik, J.D. could see, was deeply touched by the public praise he’d just received. “Very well,” she said, “the
Warprize
will take up a position in the upper third—”

“Ahem,” was the sound of all six people clearing their throats loudly and simultaneously.

“Very well, the upper fifth to the plow.” And then she proceeded to give quick and concise orders that were followed as always with dedication and speed.

*   *   *

The image of the ships forming three to a rank going back ninety-six ranks was done with a precision and skill that seemed effortless, however it was anything but. Twelve ships did not take part in the maneuver, being too badly damaged or, sadly, already destroyed. The surviving ships promptly altered course to avoid the asteroid swarm and would regroup at Saturn to repair and await further orders.