Chapter 10: Cheetah

The weekend might include a day or two of rest to most of the cultures of the Earth, but out in the Diaspora no such luxury existed. This particular Sunday morning was no exception.

The shuttle prototype sat in the hangar bay of the orbital fortress, waiting for the ground crew to finish flight preparations. The Marine crew of one sergeant pilot and one sergeant loadmaster were running through an extensive pre-flight checklist. This checklist was longer than the version used with the production model would be as they were flight testing new avionics and looking at effects of the hypersonic flight on the airframe. The XV-42 Cheetah looked like a demented cross between an American A-5 Vigilante bomber from the 1960's and a German Horton 229 flying wing from the Second World War. It had the Horton's curved fuselage, which merged into the sharply raked wings seamlessly. Like the Vigilante, the two crew sat in a tandem arrangement, the cargo being carried in a round tube that exited directly out the stern, abaft the engine exhaust ports.

Off to the side, mounted vertically in racks, a line of Kitten self-transporting nexuses waited to be loaded into the Cheetah's circular "bomb bay". The Cheetah would not slow down over a landing zone. Instead, it would drop a stacked string of Kittens which would decelerate faster than anything organic could survive and land, ready to instantly disgorge a squad of Marine infantry at a time. According to the designers, the time from when the Kittens dropped to when the first squad of Marines were ready to fire could be less than two seconds.

Looking down into the two-storey hangar bay from a second-level observation gallery stood a pair of high-ranking Marine officers, both dressed in armoured battle suits, their helmets clasped in their left hands. The higher ranking of the two stood glumly, not really taking in the ballet of carefully controlled chaos below.

"Your mind is not on the approaching test," Chaz Desrochers ventured.

"Indeed not," Michael Deschenes admitted. "It's on that conversation yesterday, on board the Clarke."

Chaz didn't reply, but merely waited for his superior and old friend to gather his thoughts.

"Did you ever think, when after that Average Joes show they announced the Swarm was on its way, that it would come to this? That someone, somewhere, would take the skills we're developing here and the knowledge those scientists on the Clarke are gleaning, would make the decision that might just kill the last remaining humans on Earth?"

Chaz was startled. "Surely by the time they launch this Operation Foxhound of theirs, the last humans will be dead?"

"Possibly, but ... I think it's unlikely." Michael stared down at the long, thin shuttle below. "When they do touch off this non-nuclear winter, it will almost have to be before the Swarm find a deposit of uranium. If it happens before they can fuel their reactors, then the only Swarm colonies that will have even a chance of survival will be those in geologically active areas, restricting where you can find them. That means that not long after they land, if Central Command even waits long enough for them to land, we'll be forced to trigger the ice age. It'll take a while, maybe a few years, before the ice sheets cover the whole planet." He turned to Chaz. "That means a lot of people are still going to be there, in small villages scattered around the globe. They'll freeze to death, if they don't starve to death first."

Chaz nodded in comprehension. "And a lot of those left on Earth will be senior citizens, a part of the population less able to handle this worsening weather."

"And in addition to the seniors in the Western countries, and children, you'll have those people used to tropical and sub-tropical weather, without replicators. Many countries in those parts of the globe just don't have the numbers of volunteer-level people to make extractions practical, so the populations there are, if anything, even greater in number than their pre-Swarm levels. And outside of the West, much of the world doesn't use Confederacy fusion reactors – they're still using coal, hydro and natural gas to generate their electricity. When the artificial ice age hits, there go the hydro generators. They don't run well when the water is frozen and doesn't flow through the turbine blades. Getting gas and coal at that time will be very difficult too. A lot of people could end up freezing in the dark."

Chaz easily called up mental images of what life would be like in, for example, tropical Africa: shivering in dark, powerless towns whose poorly-insulated buildings had been designed with little or no call for heat, starving because their crops had succumbed to this new experience of frost, wearing insufficient clothes, and dodging Swarmtroopers day and night. The fortunate wouldn't last long before becoming Dickhead Delights.

"And we all still have relatives living on Earth," Michael continued. "Unextractable relatives. Grandmothers and mothers who are past menopause. Low-CAP-score parents and siblings and cousins and aunts and uncles. Even, for many, technically adult offspring."

"Do you have any relatives on Earth, Sir?"

Michael nodded. "My father's dead, a hunting accident long before Average Joe's. My mother, though, is alive. Too old to extract, unfortunately. She's running the family farm as best she can. I've got a cousin that Confederacy Provost Marshal is keeping an eye on – apparently he's Earth First through and through, thinks I never should have left. Has a couple of teenage boys who are complete gits, scoring something around three some odd like their twit of a father." Michael shifted his stance. "Penny's parents are back there, and a sister who is married with a couple of kids – her mother's like mine, too old. Her father's got the scores and like me and my Dad has the military experience, but he's volunteered for that Home Guard thing they're creating. He doesn't want to leave Penny's mom all alone."

"What about Penny's sister?"

"She'd make a good concubine for someone, and her two daughters are dependant aged, like Diana. But you need to be lucky to get off Earth. Your chances are fewer in rural areas, and since her divorce from Liver Lips, they've been living with Penny's parents in Sainte-Agathe-des-Monts, which is a fairly rural part of Quebec. It's not big, maybe ten thousand total population, so there aren't a lot of sponsors – and so there aren't a lot of pickups."

"I see," Chaz said. Then, "Sir, who is 'Liver Lips'?"

"Her ex-husband. Loser like you've never seen. Never met a job he really liked. Amazing his girls are as nice as they are – at least, the two I know about. He's suspected of having fathered other kids."

"And if you had to, could you give the order to launch Operation Foxhound, Sir? Knowing you would kill civilians by doing so? Including your own kin?"

"I'd like to think I could, Chaz. After all, we've got to stop the Swarm, and if we don't, then even the evacuated humans of the Diaspora are dead. As are the rest of the Confederacy races and the AI. I wouldn't like giving the order, much as I doubt 'Bomber' Harris liked sending his crews against civilians, but you do what you can with the technology you're given." He shrugged sourly. "Life sucks, sometimes."

Before Michael could quiz Chaz on what family he had left behind, a voice came over their implants. "Sir, the XV-42 is ready for its test run. I recommend you relocate to Martello One One Nine."

Michael and Chaz looked down at the Cheetah. Its engines were "spooled up" to full power, purring excitedly. Only restraining force fields were keeping the eager feline on the deck. "Very well, as soon as it launches, we're away."

With the aid of a force-field catapult, the thin shuttle bolted out of the hangar bay as if ambushing a gazelle, clawing for space. The two officers turned from the now-empty view provided by the observation gallery window and strode purposefully for the nearest transporter nexus.

The scene that greeted the General and his second-in-command at Martello One One Nine was far less confusing than the one in the hangar bay in orbit. A squad of Marines calmly stood in sealed matte-white battle armour in a sub-surface bunker. The battle armour was just in case anything went wrong with the Kitten drop test, so that the squad would not be exposed to the inhospitable atmosphere of Thule for even a second.

The objective of the test was to see if the Kittens would land properly and still be fully functional after such a bumpy ejection and rapid deceleration. Rather than testing anything organic, the plan was to use something they could afford to lose: 40-centimetre-tall test dummies. Each Marine in the test squad stood in front of a nexus with three of the dummies on a table in front of him. When the nexus glowed green, he would pitch all three test dummies through as fast as he could.

The General hefted up one of the test dummies. For its diminutive size, it was quite heavy. He cocked an eye at Lieutenant Carruthers. "This must weigh at least twenty kilos."

"Just under that, Sir," confirmed Carruthers. "We didn't want them to blow away in a wind storm. The on board sensors actually only weigh a few milligrams."

Michael nodded at Carruthers and replaced the test dummy on the table. He decided to avoid commenting on the exterior design of the thing until after the test was concluded – Carruthers obviously had given the construction careful thought. The duty controller from Martello One One Nine's Combat Information Centre chose that moment to announce, "General, Sir, One One Nine CIC. Test pass is on schedule for twenty minutes from ... mark. Per standard protocol, all humans in this martello are to don battle suits."

As Carruthers ordered the squad to lower their visors and go on internal atmosphere and power, the General placed his helmet over his head, secured the collar ring and lowered his visor. Beside him, Desrochers did the same. On the wall beside the two senior officers, a display appeared, showing the black dot that was the approaching Cheetah, with the range in the foreground.

The Cheetah raced for the landing range, her engines howling. Behind her, fur flew in the form of snow, scattering every which way as the vortexes curled off the wing tips. The sergeant pilot was pushing the craft to battle speed.

As the craft crossed the range outer boundary, the cone covering the cargo exit popped off. Instantly, the stack of ten Kittens was ejected and almost as instantly slowed down to a more sane subsonic speed. They landed gracefully on their feet, in two lines of five. The time had been less than a fraction of a single second.

In the bunker within Martello One One Nine, ten nexuses suddenly glowed green. Instantly ten armoured pitchers tossed thirty identical, 18-kilogram, 40-centimetre-long teddy bears into their nexuses. Each plush bear was dressed in a teddy-bear-sized sealed battle suit, coloured day-glo orange to make finding the little beast after the test possible in the event the tracking device malfunctioned.

A display on a wall glowed with thirty green indicator lights, showing the teddy bears had all survived their valorous encounter with research glory. Carruthers pumped his fist triumphantly. He took a second to compose himself, and turned to Michael.