The Unincorporated War (20 page)

J.D. left the
Doxy
and headed for the nearest privacy cubicle. It didn’t take long. The port where the ship had moored was usually well trafficked and so had the requisite amount of privacy cubicles for those needing to do business on the fly without prying eyes or ears. Mosh followed the captain into the room ready for a confrontation. Upon entering, he realized he’d be getting far more than he’d bargained for.

“Eleanor,” he said, taking a step back, “what on Earth are you doing here?”

Eleanor smiled alluringly. “The captain asked me to be here. Mosh, I know you kept me out of the Mars rescue, silly old man. I would have been far safer there than here.”

“Don’t remind me,” he growled.

“Oh, but I will, beloved. Fate has a way of paying us back. I’m now a combat medic and I need to be with the units that are in combat. When I heard that this captain was asking for volunteers I was among the first.”

“B-but,” stammered Mosh, “I haven’t heard about a call for volunteers!”

“It’s being kept quiet,” J.D. answered coolly.

“Eleanor,” Mosh said, looking at both his wife and the captain, both of whom he saw were, thankfully, not gloating in his misery, “do you know
who
this woman is? Do you know what this plan is? Do you think we can possibly trust
her
?”

Eleanor went up to her husband and gently put her hand on his cheek. “Dearest Mosh, yes, no, and yes.”

Mosh felt as if he’d been hit in the head with a two-by-four. He’d had the whole scene figured differently. He hadn’t, however, figured on Eleanor.

“Mr. Secretary,” said J.D., then grimaced slightly. “
Mosh,
I know you have little reason to trust me, but please listen. There will be a battle here soon and I
can
win it. Your President Cord
needs
me to win it,
the Alliance
needs me to win it, and
you
need me to win it. So the question is not do you trust me, because we both know the answer to that.”

“Yes, we do,” answered Mosh, glaring at the captain, “so then, what?”

“The question is do you trust your wife?”

Mosh stood for a moment—arms folded, full scowl. He then started shaking his head and then, just as suddenly, guffawed.

“What’s so damned funny?” demanded Eleanor, expecting an entirely different response.

“My dearest Eleanor,” answered Mosh, now touching his wife’s cheek lovingly, “if the woman you hate and the woman you love are both telling you the same thing, it’s probably a good bet that what ever it is they’re up to is the right thing to do.”

Eleanor laughed.

Mosh then thrust his hand out to J.D. “Screw it, where do I sign up?”

Ceres is in chaos. Most of the ships in this once busy port are gone. There are power failures being reported in major habitat zones, and the enemy fleet has not even arrived yet. The government has fled and what ever forces the Alliance had in the capital seem to have fled from the approach of an enemy everyone agrees is too strong to counter.

Well, I call them all cowards. All around me Cerians are arming themselves with what ever they can find. Maybe they can’t win, but some of us are not going to let the corporate bastards win without a fight. I for one have no plans to leave. Reporting will continue until the
power is gone or this reporter is dead, psyche-audited, or both. Stay tuned for all the latest developments.

—From
The Clara Roberts Show
AIR (Asteroid belt Information Radio) Network

Captain Samuel U. Trang finished watching the news feed. It was about what he expected. He turned to a more evenhanded piece by Michael Veritas, who was also reporting from Ceres. When that was done Trang looked back at the tactical display coming in from the fleet. He noticed something was amiss.

“Liddel,” he said, contorting his lower lip slightly, “why has the fleet moved off the projected course?”

His first officer scanned some information coming from the display.

“Sir, intelligence believes the shipping lanes in front of Ceres may have been mined.”

“Based on what?” asked Trang, the incredulity evident in the tone of his voice.

“Far as I can tell, sir, they’re using a code we’ve cracked or it was a wet source.”

Trang thought about it. “I guess that makes a certain amount of sense.” He called up a more detailed view of the altered course. He could see that the fleet was breaking apart and moving to the edges of the shipping lanes on a course that would take them through some of the most valuable real estate in the solar system.

“Not a bad play,” said the captain. “Avoid the minefield and Tully can even pick his vacation home on the way through.”

“Lucky bastard,” said the communication officer with a hint of bitterness. Trang’s first officer was about to say something, but Trang signaled him to let it go. He figured that the man had a right to be annoyed. Trang settled back in his acceleration couch, now in the more functional chair configuration.
Something’s not right here,
he thought.
It’s too easy.
Ceres was the Alliance’s capital. Regardless of what his government thought, these were not the type of people to up and quit. It was true that the first ship they’d encountered had run away, but that was some of the most brilliant running away he’d ever seen. Definitely not in any military tactics books he’d ever read. It ranked, he figured, with the best retreats of Mao or Washington, better even.

“People like that don’t run away just to run away,” he said out loud without realizing it.

“Sir?”

“Liddel, does this seem right?”

“Yes, sir, all actions and reactions are in the expected range.”

That set off alarm bells in Trang’s head. He went back to an old exercise he’d
learned in the academy.
Put yourself in the enemy’s position
, he thought, raking his brain for more information,
take the information you have, and come up with a plan that would match the data you have and be the worst thing that could possibly happen to your—

“Contact the fleet! Priority Red!” he barked. “They must not enter the suburbs! I repeat they must not enter the sub—”

But before Trang could finish or the communication officer could react the feed of the fleet approaching Ceres was cut off and replaced by scorching static.

Too late,
thought Trang.

Justin Cord was on the bridge when the feed from Ceres cut out completely.

“What happened, Admiral?”

Admiral Sinclair narrowed his eyes on the screen and then looked down over the shoulder of his comm officer. “Not many things can blank communication like that.”

“Name the most likely.”

“It doesn’t make sense for the Confederation to use it,” said the admiral, still peering over the control board. “Everything there is too valuable. They’d want to claim it for themselves.” Sinclair then looked up and saw Justin waiting for an answer.

“Atomics, Mr. President.”

“What if the Confederation didn’t?” asked Justin.

“What do you mean, Mr. President?”

“I mean, Admiral,” said Justin, placing both hands on the front end of the control panel, facing the admiral and comm officer, “could it have been us?”

Sinclair’s look of shock was all the answer Justin needed.

Captain J. D. Black was adrift in space. Beside her were close to five thousand volunteers representing all four corners of the Alliance. They were all equipped with vacuum suits, single-use emergency propulsion units, cutters, explosives, and portable rail guns. Their life-support systems were purposely set so low as to be undetectable. Each and every one of them was prepared to die in order to see the mission through. Such was their fervor that they’d told her it would be better to die in space, lifeless needles in a haystack of inestimable size, than risk detection and quite possibly the fate of the Alliance. They’d all been informed of the consequences of breaking radio silence. If the Confederation fleet for a moment suspected their existence they’d be as helpless as lab rats in a cage discovered by a cat with keys. A hastily created debris field consisting of rock, ice, and
metallic junk currently surrounded them. And that debris field, including the five thousand seemingly lifeless soldiers within it, blocked most, if not all, of the Cerian shipping corridor. Above, below, and to both sides of the floating stealth army were the large asteroids containing the wealthiest neighborhoods in the system. The debris field they’d created was meant to plug up the cylindrically shaped corridor leading directly to the ports of Ceres.

For the first time in days J. D. Black had nothing to do but wait. Almost against her will she’d fallen into a torpid sleep. She’d heard Belters talk about the somniferous effects of free floating in space, but it was only until she’d been tugged awake by Marilynn, now tethered to her, that J.D. became a believer. Even though her dreams were filled with many black memories, she was surprised by how refreshed and ready for action she was upon awakening. Marilynn pointed over her own right shoulder, then slowly drifted downward, revealing the reason J.D. had been awoken. Coming straight at them down the corridor, single file, was the Confederation fleet. They were so close J.D. could count them by the naked eye. She saw only nineteen.
Where’s the twentieth?
she thought, heart beginning to palpitate. As it was a problem she could do nothing about, she took a deep breath and promptly filed it away under “later.”

J.D. began quietly talking to herself. Only Marilynn could make out what was being said through the faint vibrations of their shared tether. To Marilynn it sounded like the faint whispers of a liturgical prayer.

“You don’t want to go through this big nasty debris field,” whispered J.D. “What a stupid inconvenience. It might as well have a sign on it that says: ‘Mine-field.’ Stupid Belters. You should show us how stupid we are by going
around
this field. Yes, that’s right, that big shiny fleet of yours should go around the minefield and through the suburbs. The nice
expensive
suburbs. Why don’t you pick out your summer homes on the way?”

J.D. stopped her murmuring when she saw her prayers answered. The tight-knit fleet suddenly broke as one into a vast circular ring and then began to infiltrate the suburbs all around them. It was then and only then that J.D. felt the plan was actually going to work. She and all the miners around her darkened their visors. It wouldn’t be long now.

When the first blast of the atomics hit it was followed by a string of others forming a vast arc all around the field. It looked, she concluded, as if a demented god were setting off a string of firecrackers across the heavens, creating an enormous ring of fire. She toggled her communications switch to the on position and opened up an encrypted channel. No need for radio silence now. It would be a few moments before the next part of the plan could be put into effect, and she would need every one of them.

“Warriors of the Alliance, how do you like the fireworks? Well, you deserve
fireworks, my warriors. You didn’t panic; you didn’t run. You’ve proven yourself the best that humanity has to offer. You’ve placed your bodies between harm and home. There can be no better place to be than here, now at the heart of it all. Many said we should surrender, we should run. Those delegates in Congress kept on saying over and over again, ‘We don’t have a fleet; how can we fight without a fleet?’ Well, I never doubted, because fleets don’t win wars … warriors do.”

J.D. paused, looked up and around, and noticed the chain reaction of atomics she’d seeded in the suburbs was almost complete, just a few more explosions to go.

“Still,” she continued, adding a slight lilt of humor to her voice, “if Congress is so insistent on getting a fleet, I say let’s get ’em one!”

Then the iron returned to her voice. “Prepare boarding parties.”

From each one of the five thousand warriors a beacon went out that determined their proximity to the now-marginalized fleet ships. Then, using a program that Marilynn had devised, the information was collected, orders were given, and task forces directed ensuring that an equivalent number of boarders attacked the lone ships at roughly the same time. When Marilynn signaled that the program was complete, J. D. Black gave the command.

“Commence boarding.”

From the perspective of those watching on Ceres it appeared as if five thousand points of light coalesced and then suddenly exploded outward, disappearing into the fading atomic glow of the suburbs.

Bridge of the TSS Ledger

The operation’s going splendidly
, thought Admiral Tully.
Within the hour the first marine detachments will land on Ceres. We’ll have the place well secured and by the time the Alliance fleet, or what ever they call their sorry excuse for ships, arrives back from Mars we’ll be fighting from a secure location with a superior fleet. This is going to be a short and very profitable war.
His self-satisfied grin was interrupted as the ship was buffeted by a wave of tremendous force. The admiral grabbed the nearest rail and held tight. Just as suddenly all the lights on the bridge went out, accompanied by the sounds of small pieces of debris crashing to the floor.

“What the hell?!” he managed to scream over the din of the ship alarm as the lights flickered back on. The bridge was now awash in the dull red glow of the emergency backup systems. “Report!”