Chapter 10

Leo Tangent strapped himself into the pilot chair of the Cormorant while, behind and to his left, Midnight held a stylus between her teeth and tapped away at her control panel. Bolide, to his right, had hooked her tail around his ankle and was squeezing him tightly.

“I’m a little teeny tiny bit nervous,” Bolide said.

“Hhnhnnh?” Midnight said around her stylus. She flicked several more switches.

“It’s just ... okay, the last time we used a giant laser to blast ourselves off course, it was because we were all going to die. I had a tiny bit less time to think about it. But now? I’m thinking about it.”

“Mmhppm!”

“Really?” Bolide asked. “You know, that’s a good point.”

“You cannot possibly understand her,” Leo said, his smile widening despite himself.

“Sure I can,” Bolide said. “She said that I was being fucking silly.”

Midnight spat out the stylus into her hand. “The ice plating is in position, we’re good to launch, Commander,” she said. Then, after a beat. “She’s right, though, she is being silly.”

“See?”

Leo sighed. His hand lifted up to touch the overhead coms. “Baikonur, this is Cormorant. We are go. Luna Base, we are go. All systems green. Torch us.”

“Lunar Base here,” the response from the moon came a few seconds later – light lag trailing. “We are going to hit you in ten seconds. And yes, we’re adjusting for light lag.” A beat. “Ten. Nine. Eight.”

Bolide’s tail squeezed tightly around Leo’s ankle. Midnight sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. As the count down continued, she said: “You know, on reflection, strapping fifty city buster nuclear weapons to the ass end of something we’re gonna hit with the solar system’s biggest laser beam is actually kinda fucking-”

“One.”

The Lunar laser array – normally used to decelerate incoming asteroid haulers and accelerate outgoing transports – finally wicked on. Well, it had technically activated about a second before the beam hit – even light took time to travel that far. In a second, the massive amount of reaction mass, stored in the most useful medium of ice, turned into boiling steam and the Comorant sprang away from the Luna/Earth system and away, away, away. By using this as their initial burn, they would be able to vastly increase their starting velocity without bringing a single ounce of extra machinery – no clunky ‘invasion rigs’ that fleets before the Five Minute War had used, no extra reaction mass tanks. Just ice and the energy of a bigass fission power plant buried in Lunar regolith.

The three person crew of the Cormorant spent the time under acceleration, when they had no chance to actually move around the tiny, cramped decks of their war rocket, reading up on the technical specifications and briefings on the capability of their vehicle. The Cormorant was one of the last relics of the Five Minute War that had actually been used in what passed for space combat during that quick, sharp brush with local Terran extinction. One of the reasons why it was one of the survivors was that it hadn’t been part of any of the major orbital battle-fleets, nor had it been one of the outer system fleets that had been left to slowly suffocate and die with the inner planets infrastructure shot to shit. It was what the navies of the day called a ‘fast strike coil/silo frigate’ and what Leo Tangent called a fucking nightmare.

Midnight hadn’t been joking. He thumbed the track ball mounted onto his armrest and scrolled down the armory. A NS-21 FSC/SF Shiva class war rocket was a roughly conical dagger, with four recessed radiators tucked in behind armor plating that was meant to be faced towards the enemy. That cone shape sprouted three equidistant spheres that were the turrets for the four 14mm coilguns, capable of punting downrange a thousand rounds ever minute with a variable accuracy between twenty and a hundred kilometers, depending on the cross section of the target and mutual orbital velocities. Behind them were side mounted launch bays that tucked into the nuclear silos, which were filled with long ranged missiles that were hooked into the computer systems of the ship. They could be launched in direct fire combat, but they were more commonly supposed to be used when the enemy was parked on the far side of a planet and you lobbed them at one another.

Midnight had also called them city busters. It was true in that any nuke was going to bust a city pretty good, but they weren’t fusion boosted: Pure fission warheads, cheap, simple, small. Well. Smallish. That was how a frigate could carry fifty of them.

“How many did a big ship carry?” Leo muttered.

“More,” Midnight said, her voice sharp edged.

“The Republican class run by the NEB was capable of carrying five hundred fusion boosted weapons,” Bolide said. She started that sentence with the chipper attitude she had for ‘sharing fun facts’ but then with every word she said, it got more and more depressed. She wound down with: “W-well, um, f-fortunately, most of those never went off.”

“I’ve got a good handle on the missile maneuvering capacities,” Midnight said. Her lips pursed. “The thing I’m trying to figure the fuck out is ... is ... this really it?”

“Hmm?” Leo glanced at her – not risking to tilt his head against the continuing acceleration.

“The Five Minute War, like, six engagements beforehand, three skirmishes against pirates that had actual guns on their ships over the past two centuries, is that really all the space war this fucking species has managed?” Midnight asked. “You Terrans were in space right after you killed that Hitler asshole, and you never managed to get into more than one space war?”

“Devonians aren’t much better at it,” Leo said, his grin playful.

“Yeah, cause before we met Terrans, if you tried to kill a Devonian, they’d mostly just lay there and look at you sadly,” Midnight said, her voice edged. She paused, looking to the side with her eyes. Her golden freckles glittered in the harsh light of the cockpit.

“I wouldn’t have!” Bolide said.

“So, basically, we’re either going to smash them like an ant being hit by a laser cannon,” Midnight said, her tail flicking weakly against the floor. “Or we’re going to get vaporized by some kind of inversion beam or graviton gun or some bullshit. That’s our options?”

“It might be a fair fight,” Bolide said.

“What’s a fair fight in a nuke duel?” Midnight asked, scowling. “This is bullshit. We’re being sent out here as a sacrificial goat so they know how to build actual war ships before the bad guys get home.”

“Yeah,” Leo said.

“Yup!” Bolide said. “I thought that was obvious.”

“I know it’s obvious! I’m just bitching!” Midnight paused. “I don’t want to die.”

“At least you’re dying in good company,” Bolide said.

Midnight was smiling, despite her best efforts. “You are fucking silly, Bolide.”

“When I was a kid, I dedicated myself to being cute as a button and it has worked,” Bolide said. “Besides. We have the gods and anime on our side. We’re gonna win through the power of unity, friendship, and the ethos of the Human Union.”

“Yeah, ethics stop gamma rays even better than lead,” Midnight said.

“ ... actually, she’s right,” Leo said, his voice soft. “Do you think those assholes expected the evacuation of Mars to go so well? Do you think they planned on their subversion being fucked over because even a bigoted, idiot racist like Sponson can realize that he has a heart? I bet they expected us to be carrying on like ... like...” He trailed off. “Shit there’s too many different times in Terran history where we split ourselves into groups and started stabbing eachother because of skin color or religion or gender bullshit. But just this once, we’re all in this together and I bet it’s scaring them shitless.”

“They might be robots,” Midnight said. “Or made of dark matter.”

“Weak, Midnight, weak,” Bolide said, shaking her head – the acceleration was beginning to taper off, and the pressure on their bodies was weakening. It was still a cakewalk compared to the harsh burn from Mars to Earth. Bolide clicked her tongue. “Your resistance to the boundless optimism from me and Leo used to be so much sharper before ... the Incident.”

Midnight snorted, then lifted her hand up and flipped Bolide off.

Midnight, Leo and Bolide were all not following regulations when it happened. The regs said you always had someone in the cockpit – but they were still several days from the engagement zone and still cruising along using the secondary xenon-ion engines. They had hit the point where the Cormorant was facing towards their destination and was beginning to slow down rather than speed up. They were in the bridge because none of them wanted to be reminded of death and violence. Not now.

“What we’re hearing,” the hushed voice of the reporter was pitched over the overlapping sounds of radio communication, piped through the speakers of the small vid-unit built into the wall. “Is the conversation between Phobos and New Shanghai Shuttleport...”

“ ... waive off! Waive off! You need to get out of there, Tetrahedron!”

“Uh, that’s a negative, Phobos.” The voice from the shuttle was shockingly calm. “We can get one more load of refugees aboard. We’re not leaving.”