The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (15 page)

DECAYING ORBIT

by Robert R. Chase

Humanity is on the brink war with itself. Divided into three factions—the Dominion, the Eternals, and the Trans-Humans—each group vies for supremacy in a crowded galaxy. Dispatched to the Disputed Territories, the crew of a Specter Class IV ship comes across the wreckage of a TransHuman vessel of enormous size—and enormous potential. But unlocking its secrets may prove costlier than imagined.

THE SPECTER CLASS
IV is a long-range reconnaissance vessel with a complement of a junior lieutenant who is also commander and the primary pilot, an ensign who is the alternate pilot, and a warrant officer who is chief technician, in charge of the esoterica related to impellers, quantum drives and environmental controls. You should not be able to see its exterior under most conditions, but if you could, you would see a long, tapering tube, pinched at its nose and bulbous at its base. It has the largest quantum
sur
space engine for its size in the Dominion fleet. Aside from its stealthing, it has little defensive capability and no offensive armament.

It also has the most claustrophobically uncomfortable quarters of any vessel to which I was ever assigned. I was still fuzzy-headed from cold sleep resuscitation when the battle stations alarm sounded. I launched myself down the narrow corridor Lieutenant Jansons had christened the birth canal. It was barely large enough for two crew members in horizontal position to float by each other and I banged my head on the exposed pipes. Those would have been covered over in a commercial vessel but Space Force rules mandate that they be left exposed for quick repairs.

Just ahead of me, Jeanine darted into her station. I reached mine, grabbed both handholds and inserted myself. The couch snugged me down in safety restraints as various screens flicked on. I tried to ignore a growing headache and make sense of the data they were throwing at me. The deck throbbed with barely repressed power; O’Connor, our chief tech, was holding the quantum drive just below critical excitation in case we had to leave quickly.

Interstellar politics were in a state of high confusion. If you asked a man or woman of a previous era “Is the human race at war with itself,” there would have been a confident if regretful answer of “yes.” In my lifetime, the answer had changed to “it depends.” On what? On the definition of human. The TransHuman Confederacy boasted that the term had become obsolete with their embrace of the man-machine union. The Eternals, on the other hand, having granted themselves immortality, proclaimed themselves the endpoint of evolution. Both TransHumans and Eternals looked down on the minimally modified citizens of the Dominion, like me, as at best Neanderthal-like evolutionary dead ends.

Mere disdain would have been no more than an irritation. The problem was that both groups were expansionist. The Eternals recruited from both the Dominion and the far distant Terrestrial CoProsperity Sphere. Since the mortality rate of Eternals was less than one percent, they needed planets for their new members. TransHuman motivations were more opaque. Some said they had a missionary zeal to spread the blessings of the Singularity; to others, it looked like they were determined to eradicate any intelligence unlike their own.

When the Specter had been launched from its base on Victoria, Dominion Intelligence estimated that that there was a seventy percent chance that war between the two would break out in the next three months. As far as we were concerned, the optimal outcome would have been for each to blast the other back to the Stone Age. Since we could not rely on that happening, we had been dispatched to the Disputed Territories between the polities where war was most likely to start.

Jeanine and I each did a quick scan of half the celestial sphere. Emerging from
sur
space sends a pulse of Cerenkov radiation in all directions. Any potential enemies, Eternal, TransHuman or otherwise, could see it and would certainly come to investigate if they were anywhere in the vicinity.

“All clear,” I said after a minute. Jeanine agreed a few seconds later.

“Keep a lookout,” Jansons ordered.

She had put us into orbit around a super Earth, a world with three times Earth’s mass illuminated by a Cepheid variable star. Hurricanes churned through the all-encompassing cloud cover, fueled in part, according to my heat sensors, by volcano chains stretching halfway around the planet. As far as I could tell, its only satellite was ahead of us, rushing into night side’s shadow.

“That’s artificial,” Jeanine said.

“And . . . huge,” I added.

It was larger than the space docks surrounding Gloriana. Large enough to service an armada, if that was its purpose. If it spotted us . . .

“Stand by, Mr. O’Connor.” Jansons was having the same thoughts I was.

I scanned each data stream for any hint that the station was powering up an attack. Nothing. No neutrino flux to indicate a nuclear power source. Skin temperature identical to a black body at this distance from its star. It rotated slowly. A surface irregularity came into view. It became wider and much, much deeper.

The universe is a violent place. It is not that unusual to find a moon or planetoid that has been almost, but not quite, completely shattered by a collision. Something of that magnitude had blown a crater in this station, destroying an estimated twenty percent of its volume. A station that size was frightening enough by itself. Something that could pulverize it like this . . . was something I did not want to think about.

The station was in a lower, faster orbit. Jansons brought the Specter down and slowly closed the gap until we were only a hundred kilometers apart.

“I would like a full, remote inspection of that vessel,” Jansons said. “I want to know if it is really completely dead. Who built it. How it was destroyed. Perhaps most importantly, I want to know if there is anything worth salvaging.”

Putting the bogey scan on automatic, I called up one hundred twenty mini-rovers and, with three muttered commands, had them packed into two firing canisters and loaded them into the rail gun tubes while Jeanine took care of their last-minute programming.

“Ready, ma’am.”

“Fire, Mr. Wu,” Jansons commanded.

I pressed the appropriate button, which kicked them silently out the tubes. It would take them ten minutes to cross the gap. The next phase of this operation was likely to be intense and prolonged. Time to grab snacks and take a restroom break.

I was born in an arcology that was not a slum because slums were illegal on the planet Spencer. I had access to basic nourishment at the communal kitchens, basic education through the city’s library net, and basic entertainment through joining or running from any of the dozens of youth gangs.

Near the top of the pyramid, while trying to hide from one of those gangs, I discovered an abandoned maintenance section. One of the rooms opened onto an exterior platform and it was there that I took myself, whether to watch one of the innumerable
Casablanca
remakes or read something as old and obscure as “The Ballad of Reading Gaol.” Old entertainments, useless education. I knew I lacked the self-discipline to learn the skills that would free me from the arcology.

From that platform, when the air was exceptionally clear and the setting sun was behind me, I could see a silver ribbon stretching from the ground beyond the horizon to the sky. As dusk spread across the desert, the ribbon would dance and shimmer high above the ground. Sometimes I even glimpsed some of the Dominion’s military spacecraft which, disdaining the use of the beanstalk, hurled themselves into space on their dark-energy impellers.

One day I realized I could watch them no more. I took a jump tube down to the base of the arcology, stepped out to the desert, and began walking to the spaceport. It took all day. As if guided by fate, the first thing I found that I could recognize was a Space Force recruiting station. I signed up after the most rudimentary physical and mental tests. To my surprise, they indicated that I had “intellectual promise.” I was put into a cram course for combat engineers. I learned a lot, sometimes painfully.

Now that I was near the end of my second hitch, I had decided not to re-up. The Dominion economy has good jobs for people with combat engineer training. I wanted to make something of my life. And I wanted someone to share it with.

Jeanine was cradling a coffee bulb by the time I made it to our galley.

“At least your final mission is proving interesting,” she said. “In enemy territory, examining a mysterious derelict . . .”

I turned away from her to heat my own coffee. I was not trying to feign indifference. The truth was, I didn’t dare look at her.

“What interests me right now is what I will be doing after this mission,” I said. “And with whom.”

“You are referring to that, ah, proposition you made to me back on Victoria?”

I wanted to make the sort of fervent declaration protagonists in ancient literature are always making. Instead, I cleared my throat and said, “Yes.”

She seemed to be mulling it over. I stole a glance. Only then did I see the huge grin on her face.

“Yes!”

Micro-gravity has a way of making all the old clichés come true. Jeanine launched herself at me and I was knocked off my feet and, even within the confined quarters of the galley, found myself dancing on air. We spent the next few minutes cementing the agreement.

“Kipnis! Wu!” The voice of alternate pilot Shakeel rang in my earphone. “To your stations. The situation is becoming complicated.”

“The problem is with the star,” Shakeel said. I was snugged back into my station, viewing the graphics which accompanied Shakeel’s explanation.

“We recognized it immediately as a Cepheid variable,” he continued. “What I did not immediately realize was the effect that has on the planet below. The extra energy pumped into its atmosphere at the height of the star’s pulsation makes it puff out. That in turn is causing the derelict’s orbit to decay.

“According to my calculations, it should begin its terminal descent sometime in the next twelve hours.”

“Stupid placement by whomever constructed it,” Jeanine said.

“Probably not their fault,” Jansons said. “I have been running attack scenarios, trying to account for the situation we see. Here is the best fit so far.” A new set of graphics spread out before me. “I am assuming the derelict was part of a TransHuman power projection strategy. A base that large could be used to maintain and provision as many as a hundred X-5 fighter equivalents.

“The original orbit must have been much higher. For this scenario, I made it geosynchronous with the planet below. Pretty certainly, it was not finished when the Eternal strike force appeared. The battle seems to have climaxed with a small nuclear device burying itself thirty meters below the sphere’s surface before detonation.”

The battle station on my screen obediently exploded.

“Supposing that that hemisphere of the station was facing away from the planet at the time, the recoil from the explosion would have kicked the station toward the planet, lowering the perigee enough that it would brush the upper reaches of the atmosphere. With each succeeding orbit it would drop lower and lower. Which brings us to the current situation.”

“If the Eternals won the battle, where are they?” I asked.

There was just the slightest hesitation before she answered. “This star system is as far from Eternal support as it is from TransHuman lines. A battle group could just manage to come this far and fight an action. There is no way it could maintain itself so far from home. I just hope they had to leave before they were able to loot everything of interest from the station.

“On the other hand, we are extraordinarily lucky to have arrived when we have. Another day, and everything would be lost.”

Something about that statement bothered me, but I had no time to figure out why. The canisters, having reached their destination, disgorged the rovers. Half a dozen began circling the exterior of the derelict, sending detailed images of every hatch, gun port, and exterior sensor. The rest plunged into the crater and started mapping the interior of the structure.