Virtues of War (20 page)

She pressed her lips tightly, letting the drugs mellow out the old bitterness.

“I am not an opera singer,” she hissed. “I am an officer in the Astral Corps.”

“Then act like it, and pull yourself together.”

This was pointless. She sniffed and brushed away a single irritating tear.

“Good-bye, Father.”

She broke the connection, threw the Baryon down on the coffee table, then sat in silence for a long time, listening idly to the muffled buffeting of the wind against her windows.

No one was going to help her. She’d have to find the solution herself. It was hard to access military memories, now that the drugs were acting in full force, but she strained to recall non-combat events, times in barracks when her peers had talked about their past experiences. How had
they
dealt with it? She recalled a lot of laughter, a lot of off-color jokes.

Katja sagged where she sat. She really didn’t feel like laughing.

There was something else that had seemed to help, though, and she made her way into the kitchen. Sure enough, in the fridge she found the six-pack of beer that she’d bought yesterday, thinking it would be useful to offer guests. She popped open a bottle and took a long swig, savoring the cool, bitter taste. Beers after an exercise had always been the tradition in the Levantine Regiment, and beers after a battle had been the recipe for release during the recent troubles. Why not beers after a war?

It made sense to her.

The first bottle empty, she reached for the second.

“Do you think alcohol would help?”

Jack turned in his seat as Amanda slowly looked up from the blackened pieces of the inter-dimensional probe they’d recovered into the Hawk. In each hand she held a significant chunk of the main data storage unit, with couplings and broken sensor casings scattered on the deck behind her. Other damaged probes lay nearby.

“I think it would put me to sleep,” she said, “but thanks.”

He couldn’t stop a snicker from bursting past his lips, then he turned back to his board and did a quick sweep of the visual, flight controls, and hunt controls. Flight rules demanded that he get eight hours of uninterrupted sleep before any mission. Those rules had been thrown out the airlock in wartime, and apparently they’d never even existed in the Research Squadron.

“I meant cleaning alcohol,” he said. “To get the carbon off. It cleans well, but evaporates before it can drain into any cracks. We’ve got some in the Hawk’s maintenance kit.”

She considered his suggestion. “Oh. Sure, it couldn’t hurt.”

Neil Armstrong
was looming closer on the port bow, and Jack quickly checked the Hawk’s landing systems.

“Okay, just let me get this bird in the nest, and we’ll get into the lab for a good rubdown.”

He established comms with the
Armstrong
bridge and requested automatic recovery. Word came back that it would be at least fifteen minutes before the system was brought on line and proper personnel were in place. Jack frowned. The Hawk certainly had the fuel to loiter, but he didn’t think he had the patience. Why had the bridge not planned ahead, and pre-set the automatic landing system? It’s not like his return to the ship was unexpected.

He glanced back at his passenger. Amanda held one of the broken pieces in her hands, and was staring blankly at it. She didn’t have the endurance for a long wait either. Maybe it was concern for his fellow subbie, or maybe it was just the end of his tolerance for Research incompetence…

He keyed his radio.

“Apollo, this is Eagle-One. I have time-sensitive data on board, and cannot wait for the auto-recovery. I am inbound on final approach and request you open the outer airlock door, over.”

There was a long silence, which Jack firmly ignored as he pressed the Hawk forward to close his mothership. The
Armstrong
’s vast arrowhead shape was illuminated by floodlights, and he easily picked out the quartet of flashing red beacons that indicated the airlock leading to the hangar.

The door, he noted, was still closed.

“Apollo, this is Eagle-One,” he repeated. “I am inbound on final approach and request you open the airlock door immediately. Over.”

The charcoal-colored door finally began to slide open. There was still no helpful information forthcoming on the radio—small stuff like the ship’s course and speed—but Jack had done this sort of thing more than once, and he glided toward the lumbering
Armstrong
with a mixture of flight controls and pilot’s eye to guide him.

Amanda appeared beside him.

“What are you doing?”

“Landing. I suggest you strap in.”

She vanished from his peripheral and he heard the frantic clicking of her restraints.

“Is something wrong?” she asked. “Why aren’t we being auto-recovered?”

He didn’t take his eyes off the gaping hangar door, judging the slight movements of the red beacon lights on all corners to assess his bearing movement.

“System wasn’t ready, but
Armstrong
’s got a pretty big hangar door.”

“Did the captain clear this?”

“I don’t know, but they opened the door.”

She made some sound that seemed less than supportive of his plan, but thankfully stopped distracting him. The airlock opening was looming large, making visual reckoning less reliable. All four beacons were drawing away from him, which was good. He nudged the Hawk down, guessing at the overhead clearance this research bird would need.

The opening grew to encompass his entire view. He tracked one of the blinking red lights for any bearing shift.

Steady… steady…

Artificial gravity caught a hold of the Hawk and gently lowered it to the deck. Jack nudged forward to the standard marker and waited as the outer door began to close astern of him. He released the controls and sat back with a smile of satisfaction.

“Not bad, eh?” He glanced back at Amanda.

She stared blankly at him. “What?”

“The landing!” he said, and he chortled. “Dropped her in light as a feather
and
saved us fifteen minutes of floating out there.”

She shook her head and smiled. “Very heroic, but next time can you just follow the procedures? I’d rather be late than splattered along the side of the ship.”

The inner doors began to open, and Jack monitored the deck clamps as they took hold of his Hawk and drew it into the hangar. Sometimes he really didn’t understand these people.

The probes were easy enough to pile onto a cargo cart, and within minutes Jack was pushing their experimental data load through the corridors of
Armstrong
, the Hawk’s cleaning bottles rattling on the top. Soon they were seated on opposite sides of one of the worktables, a long pile of sensor probes laid out in front of them.

He unsealed the bottle and moistened two cloths. Handing Amanda one of them, he grasped the nearest chunk of the damaged probe’s storage units and started to rub vigorously at the accumulation of black dust.

They’d sown the line of sensors three days ago, launching as soon as
Armstrong
had cleared far enough from Earth’s gravity well to allow Bulk observations to be collected without an excess of gravimetric distortion. It was the first dedicated Dark Bomb data research they’d conducted in weeks, but he’d been barely given an hour to place the sensors before Captain Lincoln himself was on the radio telling him to hurry back. There was a once-a-century near-miss of two asteroids scheduled to occur within hours, and the captain wanted
Armstrong
to be front and center for this highly publicized event.

“At least some of them survived,” he commented, pleased that alcohol was starting to clear off some of the carbon. “I didn’t really care for the other probes, anyway.”

She glanced up slightly. “Not your style?”

“They were weak.” He held up the piece in his hand. “Now this little guy—still ticking even after being cracked in half. That’s dedication. He’s earned my respect.”

Amanda laughed. “I didn’t know it was so personal with you.”

“You wanna play in deep, dark space, you better be tough.”

Her expression twisted between a smile and a scoff. He put the piece down to flex his arms in front of his chest in a classic manly pose.

“You better be mean!” he growled.

She tried to hide her grin. He pulled another pose, growling.

“Just… clean,” she said, and she laughed.

He took up his cloth and broken sensor again, and growled as he hunkered over his work, polishing with new vigor.

“I think that one’s clean enough,” she said, reaching over to still his fingers. Her hands were warm on his, and he felt a rush up his arms. Her round face still sagged with fatigue, but her vivacious eyes made him smile.

He pulled his hands away and placed the newly cleaned probe between them. He didn’t like people staring at him for long, for fear they might notice the artificial nature of his face.

“Okay, this one passes muster,” he allowed. “Let’s see if the recorder can come out.” He fiddled with the minute controls, working the casing open despite the surface imperfections caused by thousands of microscopic impacts.

More than half of the probes he’d sown were contaminated by dust. Some were merely grubby from the exposure while others, like this one, had suffered significant damage. Still more had been completely smashed, their data lost. Already hindered by its proximity to gravity wells, this experiment was suffering from potential contamination by an errant cloud of gas.

He eventually worked the data card free and presented it triumphantly to Amanda. She took it with a raised eyebrow and inserted it into the computer.

A few manipulations of the screen and she nodded.

“It looks intact, although I’ll have to analyze the gravimetric effect of the gas cloud.” She frowned, then rubbed her temples and swore quietly. “They don’t make my job easy.”

Jack grabbed the data storage from another damaged probe and started cleaning it with a freshly moistened cloth. While he did so, he rounded the table to watch her work.

“Whatcha doing?”

She indicated the separate windows displayed on her screen. “This on the right is the raw data from the probes, showing the intensity of the graviton waves as they propagate through the Bulk. The red patches here show the reflection back from the weakbrane, but in among them we should, theoretically, see reflections from the Deep.”

Jack nodded. Perched as they were in the three-dimensional brane that comprised the usual human experience, it was only with gravity that they could investigate the fourth spatial dimension, the Bulk. The weakbrane was another brane farther into the Bulk that could distort and even reflect gravitational effects.

Far beyond that, sixteen peets into the Bulk, lay the Chtholian Deep, that mysterious region of unknown extra-dimensional space where dark matter finally surrendered all power to dark energy. Stealth ships operated routinely in the Bulk, and Jack had learned how to hunt them down wherever they might hide, but no stealth ship had ever ventured sixteen peets into the bulk. The only man-made object to ever successfully interact with the Deep was
Rapier
’s specially modified torpedo—the prototype Dark Bomb.

“And this,” Amanda said, pointing at the left-hand screen, “is the Fleet cosmographic survey which shows how strong and how far in we find the weakbrane in this area of space. As we feed in the data from the probes, I’m going to have the computer start correcting for known weakbrane interferences, to give us a clear picture of what really happened to our gravitons. I just hope the gas cloud didn’t dislocate our probes, otherwise there’s no way I can trust the results.”

“Can’t you just estimate?”

“Not if I want to be taken seriously by the scientific community.”

“I don’t mean just random guessing,” he said. “I mean an informed, educated guess. It’s not like we can ever really know exactly where subatomic particles are, anyway.”

She turned in her seat. Her expression was clouded between curiosity and disdain. “I’m too tired to know if you’re joking or not.” He wasn’t sure if that was a statement or a question. She stared dully at him for a moment longer, then clarified. “Are you joking?”

He thought back to the guesswork he’d used to hunt Centauri stealth ships.

“No, not really,” he asserted. “In my experience, you never have all the information, so you go with your best guess based on experience and training.”

“That would explain why you weren’t selected for post-grad work.”

There was no need for cheap shots. “Hey, Doctor-to-Be, I think I did some pretty decent science out there with my little Dark Bomb experiment.”

“Sure, except it wasn’t actually science. It was a half-baked, practical application of a scientific hypothesis. If anything it was engineering, and risky.”

He heard his own voice rising. “Well sometimes we don’t have the luxury of labs and grants and—”

“Jack, please.” She held up a silencing hand, which drooped to rest against his flight suit. “What you did was amazing, yes, as a wartime maneuver, but did it work out like you predicted it would?”

“Yes.” He caught himself and considered. “Well, okay, no. The singularity was a lot stronger than I expected.”

She nodded. “About a thousand times stronger, if I read the reports right. And did you intend to collapse the jump gate?”

“No.”

Her hand fell back to her side. “So you threw together an experiment based on a partial theory and some guesswork. The results were three orders of magnitude away from prediction, and had a catastrophic impact on the surrounding environment. Forgive me if I’d like my predictions to be a little more reliable.”

She turned back to the terminal.

“You’ve been saying since you came on board that real combat isn’t like our carefully controlled lab. Well, what I’m saying is that real science isn’t like your chaotic rodeo, where gravitons are thrown around like confetti. I need to figure out what’s really happening when we manipulate the Bulk, because the consequences of getting it wrong could be a lot more serious next time.”

He nodded, knowing she was right, but too tired to voice his agreement. Instead, he grabbed another probe fragment and started to clean, watching idly as she slowly compared data between her two screens.