Chapter 7: Losses

I couldn’t feel the inertia as the cruiser maneuvered; the gyroscopic bridge moving seamlessly with the changes in thrust. It was a truly unique experience, as all of my flight training told me I needed to lean against the thrust and prepare for the change in simulated gravity; it was both more confusing to my inner ear and less so to my brain. It was an utterly odd but enjoyable experience.

After about an hour of quiet banter between the Captain and Master Rica, the pilot announced that we were at cruising speed and would reach the first jump buoy in about thirty hours. The Captain ordered the bridge relocked to the ship and the helmsman disengaged the gyroscope, marked with the soft clunk of metal latches clasping between the hulls of the ship.

I followed Master Rica and Tami out as the Captain settled back into his chair at the con with the ship’s master standing near and the rest of bridge crew monitoring their station. My mind wandered a bit as we walked back down the corridors toward mid-ship. I had been trained in the duties of the different stations of a bridge crew, but we never really did simulations on what it would be like to be on shift during an interstellar voyage like this. I imagined that it would get tediously boring with six to ten hour shifts of absolutely nothing going on. Did the crew do anything to help pass the time? I imagined different stations reading books, or talking, or playing cards. Or maybe making extra work for themselves just to keep busy; the communications officer listening to any short or longwave transmissions in the area, maybe listening in to someone’s unencrypted transmission, or listening to old music or television frequencies that were still lingering in the area; maybe even listening in on conversations between the crew by using the internal comm systems. Or maybe tactical was secretly playing some kind of low impact game on one of the tactical screens, listing it as a tactical simulation.

“-you agree, Mary?”

Both Tami and Master Rica were looking at me and I realized I had drifted completely away from the conversation. I racked my brain and cortex trying to see if I could recall anything from the conversation. I couldn’t.

“I’m sorry, sir,” I said bowing deeply and keeping my head down, “I was lost in thought and did not hear what you had asked.” It was unacceptable; I shouldn’t have let myself get distracted like that, least of all in my own petty day dreams.

Master Rica had a half-smile on his face and Tami was grinning broadly with an eyebrow cocked up. “Human, after all,” he said. “We were discussing the wonders of modern space flight, mainly gravity during transit flights.”

“I apologize again for my absentmindedness.” I said, feeling even worse for not giving my full attention to my master, the one I should owe everything to. “And yes, I do agree. Just the energy production of a modern reactor is fascinating, being able to give a constant propulsion through an inertial-based graviton drive. Really, the simulated gravity we feel is more of a byproduct of constant acceleration than an engineered effect.”

“That’s true,” said Tami, “we move at cruising acceleration of one G because it’s what we’re used to.”

“Precisely. I hear there are heavy worlders from some of the outer colonies that do interplanetary travel at as much as one and a half Gs.” Master Rica spoke in a voice that sounded perfectly confident, as if everything he said was fact. Although it was a common myth, it wasn’t exactly true. There was only one colonized heavy world that sat at a little over one and a half G. They did not do a lot of space travel and were not genetically modified for the increased gravity, nor had they evolved any quicker than the rest of humanity to deal with the slightly harsher environment of their world. I found it best to not correct him at the moment.

So instead, I steered the conversation a bit. “Basically the next step in spacefaring technology would be an inertial dampener so that we could accelerate at rates higher than one G for extended periods of time without dealing with the bone-crushing effect of inertia.”

“Our techies talked about that a lot in the Corps, saying it would lead to true artificial gravity; they spazzed out about every new theory that came out about it. But the implications are pretty cool; stations that don’t need to spin, ships and MI that can do pinpoint maneuvering at ten G without killing the pilot, or, better yet, the pilot not even noticing.” Tami paused for a second. “Whoever comes up with the tech first will be able to make a nearly invincible army.”

I shivered at that and even Master Rica seemed to sober a bit. “True, but I don’t think we need to worry about that just yet. From what I’ve seen, there is very little actual advancement in that field.” He clapped his hands together and we resumed walking. “Besides, all the research money right now is in genetics and energy manipulation.” I filed the thought away and kept walking.

A couple of minutes later Tami departed and it was just my Master and I.

Once back in his room, we got to work. I made sure his coffee was perpetually full, provided information and documents as he needed them, but I mostly stood back and learned his routines and methodology.

The following week passed surprisingly quickly. I served Master Rica when he was awake, waiting on him hand and foot: bringing properly balanced and enjoyable meals, laying out his wardrobe in the morning, organizing his transmissions, organizing his workload, writing reports, acting as counterpoint to fact-finding research, keeping his calendar and task lists updated, and even suggesting places for advancement in the market. I spent some time almost every evening with Tami in the gym, exercising and sparring. We regularly took meals together in the cafeteria, although between our schedules it was always quick and short, but the conversation was always interesting as we talked about everything that came to mind, especially tactics in micro-gravity.

I only ran into the good Doctor Aretaeus twice. Neither of us had much time to talk, but I tried to feel out his position with Tami, to see what he thought of her and if there was anything there. Not that it really mattered, but it would be good to know; disquiet between two ranking members of the organization could be exploited, so it posed a possible security risk, or it could evolve into a problem and become a drain on resources or efficiency; and problems at the top have a tendency to roll downhill and build up momentum as they do. Unfortunately, I couldn’t glean anything from our short interactions.

But now they were sitting in the same room, all of them, at one table. Master Rica was just greeting everyone in turn: Dr. Aretaeus, Tami Torero, Captain Nesmith, Commander Ferguson who is leading the fighter squadron, and Major Chamberson who is leading the marines. We were just about to go over the plans for the raid on the research asteroid scheduled to take place in three days.

I watched my Master walk around the table as he finished greeting everyone before taking his seat just in front of me. “Gentlemen, in three days, we launch a strike against a Cyrillic Corporation research asteroid. We have a crucial short time to pull this off as the observational blind spot will only last fifty-eight minutes, three minutes down from our last projection and almost twenty from our original estimates.”

He paused and looked around the table. Every single person there looked back with stern, cold eyes. Even Tami had dropped her normal jovial tone and looked serious. “Because of this we’ve had to make a couple of changes, not ones I’m particularly fond of either.” He took another breath, then motioned at Tami. “Please fill them in on the changes, Ms. Torero.”

Tami stood up and gave quick, short bow to the table at large. Her hand slid quickly and gently across the back of her neck, turning autonomy off on her cortex implant and connecting to the equipment in the room. A three dimensional representation of the mining cluster appeared dead center of the table and floating at about chin level for most of the men. “This representation is oriented to the solar plain; please bear that in mind for reference. As you can see, we’ll be entering range of the cluster from here” — a red line slid slowly into the glowing 3D image from the right — “moving in a straight line that will pass within ten kilometers of the first asteroid.” A yellow line with a ‘10km’ over it appeared between the red line and the first asteroid.

“We’ll be counter accelerating till this point, at which point all thrusters will be off and the fighters, gunships, and landing craft will disengage from the support ring and simply carry beside us using our inertia.” A red dot appeared, marked ‘A, ‘ from which green and blue lines emerged. “All of the craft will need to be separated and maneuvered into position for an immediate hard burn by this point.” Another red dot, marked ‘B, ‘ appeared as Tami continued.

“Patricians Star will make a hard braking maneuver at two point three G’s so they don’t fly out of range before we can get back.” She gave a slightly disapproving look at her brother and me, and then continued. “We will make use of that momentum and use an additional hard two minute thrust of three G’s to get us into actionable range.” The green and blue lines came off the red at an angle. “At this point we will likely start taking fire,” it seemed as if everyone in the room was holding their collective breaths; even the vents seamed unusually load.

“And here’s where things get complicated.” A new red dot appeared, labeled ‘C, ‘ and the green and blue lines separated: the green headed in much the same direction, but the blue turned off a bit. “The landing craft and gunships will start a braking maneuver to get in breaching range and speed of the entrance, here.” A star shape appeared on a small speck of gray-green on the surface of the asteroid. A blowout section of map appeared with a line connecting it to the star. The airlock was a personnel airlock, way too small to admit the landing craft or gunships, but two flak cannons stood out on either side of the airlock. “The gunships will put all power to their zero-point field projectors to stop any fire from those cannons during the deceleration process.

The fighters, meanwhile, will be counter-thrusting toward the asteroid’s main guns: three broad-beam lance batteries.” She took a deep breath as blue skull symbols appeared over three spots within a kilometer of each other. The blue line split, passing two batteries, then re-converging on the third. “The fighters are going to be the main stage attraction, but they will also be running a high intensity photon auger sweep and sending it back here. Once we know where every speck of dust is, I will use my MI suit to short jump from the dark side of Patricians Star” —a new grey line appeared next to the original red line — “right on top of their main power plant where I’ll use a disposable single fire tight-beam lance to breach the fission chamber.” The grey line stopped next to a grey skull symbol on top of the asteroid and then continued moving at the same rate for a short distance. “I will be carrying an assortment of arms, but no maneuvering pack, just the jump emitter which takes forty seconds to recharge.”

My heart fluttered at that. It means that, after she exits a Hildestan Gate, she will be moving in only one direction with no chance to maneuver for forty seconds, a ridiculously long time in a fire fight. I used my cortex and messaged Tami, “Where did you find a gate drive small enough for your MI armour?” Then I immediately sent another, “Why do you still have Mobile Infantry armour?”

“I will jump around hitting secondary targets after that, just as the two fighter wings will do.” She didn’t miss a beat as she responded to my messages: “from the yacht; it’s big, three light minutes max range, way bigger than I’m used to. Big Bro got me the suit when he made me the head of his personal security, although he couldn’t get a military jump unit; some things are too well-regulated even for him.” She continued to speak to everyone else at the same time as I read these.

“The gunships will use EMP missiles to disable the defenses around the airlock, at which point Major Chamberson will lead the Marines in an EVA breach.” She motioned to the Major, who stood up as she sat down.

The Major spoke in a deeper voice than I would have expected, drawling out the words at the end of each statement. “We will be moving in a widely dispersed field to avoid any lines of multiple targets and use Crash-Catchers to get us quickly to the area surrounding the ‘lock.”

Personal Impact Dampeners, PID’s, are common pieces of equipment. They deploy an evenly resistive foam over the target area and can stop two G’s of momentum without injury to the user. Means we’re also disembarking the landing craft before it finishes slowing down. Crash-Catchers were a pretty good name for them.

The Major continued, “We have precious little information from inside, other than a map we can only assume is accurate.” He briefly looked up at me accusingly. “We will be escorting two civilians.” The disdain nearly dripped from his words; he clearly thought he would have to babysit me. “One is an information retrieval specialist who will be connecting to the local net to get us better intel as soon as we get through that door.” He focus switched back to me, “The other will be Mary, who will be acting as bodyguard for the specialist and, as I understand it, assisting with the hacking.”

Master Rica spoke up. “She will be in charge of the ground forces, as the asteroid’s exterior shielding will make it difficult to keep in communication with us.” He looked directly into the Major’s eyes. “You are to take your orders directly from her.”

“Yes, Sir,” the Major snapped, then looked at me; his face remained calm but there was anger behind his eyes.

My Master was really trusting me, putting a show of trust in front of his command staff like this. I responded, “Thank you, Sir. I will mostly be deferring to your judgement, as you lead the marines and they follow your orders.”

He saluted, then turned back to everyone else. “Inside, we will make a defensive point here and try to access the network at this intersection, which should be far enough in to not be damaged from the EMP. Once we have confirmed our intel, we will move directly to the data center here.” Another cross section blew-out and showed a green crescent moon in a square room. “From here, the two civilians will attempt to recover the necessary data.” He paused, took a breath, then continued. “Meanwhile, most of the rest of our unit will split up and move to these three points to set sub-nuclear charges, to demolish the station when we leave.”

Everyone nodded as he finished speaking, seeming to understand the plan. The Major looked at my Master, who nodded once, then sat down. Everyone was looking at Master Rica, waiting for him lead them.

Master Rica stood up and spoke to everyone at the same time. I felt like he was speaking to everyone individually, but all at once; it was an impressive skill for an orator. He wasn’t even facing me and I felt like he was speaking directly to me in his private chamber.

“That’s the best plan we can devise, using all of the intel we have, the best astronav data, and some of the best military minds which, I am happy to say, are filling this room.” I saw his ear tug forward and skin across his neck tighten; he was giving them an impressive smile. I could even hear it in his voice.

“This is a complicated task and I know that every one of you is up for completing it with the utmost skill and efficiency.” The smile faded a bit and his voice grew a fraction urgent; the effect pulled us all in deeper.

“We have very little information on how they are defended inside, as the internal reports we obtained have been incongruent.” He paused for a moment to let that sink in and build a sense of caution. “Based on what we have gathered from their purchases and shipping manifests, we can assume between ten and fifty armed guards, likely soldiers, and well-equipped for on-station combat. We know they also have a large capacity matter compiler for food, atmosphere, and equipment manufacturing. Altogether, this means, without better internal reports, we’re down to guessing as that station is self-sufficient for at least one-hundred fifty personnel.”

Getting muscle in to guard the doors is pretty easy; they can come from anywhere and be pretty much anyone. Scientists, especially good ones of the caliber needed for the research they do there, would not be so easy to come by. Master Rica’s information network has gathered sixteen names definitely stationed out there and another eight that are probably there. Given the type of automated equipment, we can assume another thirty-five for maintenance and engineering; maybe five more for management. It’s very unlikely they would be at capacity as that’s pretty dangerous on a deep space station; I think we can safely assume a minimum of twenty-five soldiers but very unlikely to be higher than sixty.

Master Rica continued speaking. “I have a great respect for each of you and I know that you will perform your duties admirably and overcome any misinformation we have received.” He paused for a moment and I messaged my calculations over to Tami and Master Rica through the cortex. Tami acknowledged that she had the same thoughts. Master Rica simply sent back, ‘I am aware of that math; thank you for your diligence.’ Why was he not giving a more accurate count in the briefing? He continued speaking. “Does anyone have any questions or issues they would like to bring up about the plan?”

Was he testing me? Did he want me to bring up this information? Or did he want me to keep quiet about it? He had placed me in charge of the ground forces, for better or worse.

I stepped forward and spoke up. “I think, out of precaution, we should assume a higher number of enemy combatants, closer to the max of fifty enemy soldiers and modify our equipment to include two portable shield generators and an additional twenty plasma caps per man.” Portable shields are very expensive and single use items; we have three on the ship in case of a pirate incursion. Or at least that’s the reason listed on the manifest; pirates are few and far between and much more likely to attack haulers than a private cruiser.

My Master turned to me, nodded once, then looked back at the Major. “What do you think?”

The Major stood up again. “I agree, it’s always a good idea to be prepared. Although, I would recommend we take three magazines of mass rounds and ten plasma caps, which will double our current outfit.”

Master Rica nodded again. “I’ll allow the additional equipment.”

“Thank you, Sir,” the Major said and sat down again.

“You are all dismissed. Please see to your individual preparations.” Everyone stood up at that and saluted, waiting respectfully until the Master had left the room. I followed him out, opening the door for him and closing it gently after we stepped out, making sure to stay just a bit behind him.

The next three days passed rather quickly; the tension on the ship was at an all-time high as calculations were done over and over again to confirm their validity. This entire operation was being finely tuned to make sure it would be successful in a fairly tight time frame. Everyone checked his gear over and over, again and again; weapons were cleaned repeatedly and run through diagnostics. The Marines spent most of their time running boarding and breach drills and practicing in the virtual firing range. The pilots likewise were running repeated simulations of the encounter: they needed to know the area like the backs of their hands. The couple times I saw Tami were short and she was distracted, running maintenance and diagnostics on her Mobile Infantry Armour to make sure it was working and that the commercial jump drive was communicating properly with the military software that would now be controlling it.

I watched as she put it online for the first time, the actual core being removed to avoid any horrible disasters, with a dummy put in that would trick the sensors. Dummy cores were used a lot in testing any ship that would be using a Hildestan Gate. The alternative is to risk an atomic reaction every time you ran a calibration test. When she turned it on for the first calibration every panel in the open cockpit lit up red and terrible beeping sounded. Tami stood there cursing for several minutes as she fiddled with settings. She explained to me that she ended up having to turn off all of the tolerance limits in the suit; the drive was simply too big for her little suit. With some clever editing, she was able to set new tolerance limits and get the thing to function in the green, well within the safe zones listed for that core size and type. It, unfortunately, reset the recharge time to forty-eight seconds; an incredibly long and dangerous time to be, technically, not moving when people would likely be shooting at her. She told me not to worry, that she had a plan, but I would have to trust her. I had a feeling this plan is something that neither I nor Master Rica would like. But I gave her the benefit of the doubt and didn’t ask her about it again.

When the day to launch finally arrived, I felt all of the tension melt away. Everybody was now moving with a purpose toward a very near goal. Time to launch was three hours and I was suiting up in the locker room on the Landing Craft. Surrounded by men and women with the best military augmentations and training available, I undressed and started to slip on my combat gear. I was so much smaller than all of the muscle bound soldiers. Every one of them was quiet and direct in his actions, very professional, no gossiping like the pilots tend to do. My second skin, my synth-muscle pressure suit, was the first layer on top of my underwear, followed by a special military vacuum suit made of a flexible, high resistance armour specially designed for the hardened armour web to fit around it. Finally I started strapping the armour web on over the suit, giving me ninety-eight percent ballistic coverage once my helmet was on. We all strapped our helmets on and my team marched behind me in a column to the breach compartment where we locked our boots into mounts and grabbed hand bars above our heads.

I scanned the line back and forth, my helmet not actually moving but for a small set of sensors and cameras moving back and forth across the hardened metal surface of the face plate. We looked like a row of robots standing on a public bus.

My vision went a bit fuzzy for a moment and my breath caught in my throat. My knees felt weak as I had an atypically vivid hallucination of a row of men and women standing on a public bus with a strong midday sun shining forcefully through the windows and man in a suit constantly mopping the sweat off his face instead of just taking off his heavy suit jacket.

Then I was back to looking at the soldiers around me.

I shook my head and pushed any thoughts of the vision from my mind. I have never been on a public bus. I could not spend any mental power on that hallucination right now — there was too much about to happen and I needed my entire focus for the coming engagement. The hallucination had to simply be stress-induced.

I felt a small shudder as the docking clamps released. We were in free-fall, gliding beside Patricians Star, no longer attached. Atmosphere was being sucked out of the space around me and compressed into storage tanks. We were starting.

Like anything important, there was a lot of anxious waiting. The marines around me breathed slow and steady as I felt my own heart rate start to rise a bit. A quick check of my cortex showed all of the marines were barely above baseline sleep: a mix of drugs and augmentation was keeping them calm and centered during this anxiety-inducing ride.

I switched my cortex to show me the forward cameras and saw just blackness. We were in a radio shadow, which also meant a normal shadow blocking out all sight of Ran and any inhabitable planet, station or even simple satellite. The chance of this occurring is so small it’s no wonder that Master Rica jumped on the opportunity. We probably won’t see another opportunity like this arise in our lifetime. Even with augs and cyberization it will be several hundred years before things line up like this. With astronomical object tracking and the ever-increasing number of satellites, ships, and stations, there is a good chance that this won’t ever happen again.

So, we don’t get a redo if something goes wrong. We can’t mess up and let the Master down.

My heart rate bumped up again and I immediately tried to focus myself and calm down. Still, the darkness I was looking at, the thought of failure, and the lack of proper intel were very close to too much. I could feel myself starting to sweat inside my suit; my palms were going oddly dry as the circulation drained from my extremities and my fingers started to feel cold, even through the insulation of the suit.

“Okay,” Master Iounn’s voice was high and smooth in my ear, reassuring and solid. “Your objective is to infiltrate the compound, hack the datacenter using the information provided by the briefing, and extricate yourself by any means necessary.”

I nodded to myself, my breathing fast and loud as it echoed in my helmet. I brought up the map in my cortex and took another look. I was standing behind a wall on the east side. East is only east because you need orientation and I had decided a specific side was north, so, therefor, this was east. I followed the line in my mind for where the guards were supposed to be moving and looked for the path I had decided on beforehand that I would be taking to avoid detection. At least until I made it to the data center. The datacenter was closer to the south side of the compound, but the defenses made it so this was the best place to enter: a mechanical loading dock, always open, and guarded mostly by people. People are fallible and can be controlled.

I stuck a mechadendrite around the corner of the perimeter wall and watched through it, getting a bead on the location and speed of the guards. There were two, walking casually by, the cameras on their suits moving back and forth, scanning for any changes, any radiation, anything that shouldn’t be there.

I was moving too slowly; I could feel the heat building up in my stealth suit. I’d have to vent soon and that would give me away if I didn’t time it right. But not yet. I needed more information. I could see that the intel had been partially inaccurate: there were cameras and sensors in more places than there should have been.

Retracting the snakelike arm of the mechadendrite, I very carefully and slowly placed a limpet on the wall and pointed its series of emitters toward the cameras and sensors, using my cortex to gently move them to point in the exact right position to target the sensors and cameras. A series of different tight beam radiations would effectively disable the sensors until I made it into their shadow. The emitters basically changed the background information the sensors received so that my signature could hide in it.

Smart sensors were great, as they reduce the chance of a false positive by algorithmically adjusting their baseline monitoring to account for things like nearby vehicles, radio and microwave transmission, light, and heat fluctuations. The downside, security-wise, is that they could be beaten if you knew their algorithm. Knowing that, you can configure an emitter to increase radiation levels inside the sensor’s tolerance range until you could pass inside the camera’s or sensor’s scope of surveillance. Normally, increasing the radiation enough to allow a human or most drones in would still trigger the failsafe, but, thanks to the stealth suit I was wearing, I was putting out a lot less radiation than a normal person.

With the limpets positioned and slowly raising the background range of the sensors, I moved back away from the corner to a safe distance and vented my heat sink. On my scanners, a plume of heat showed up beside me and dissipated quickly.

I watched my map until the guards I had tracked were past the corner. Turning the stealth suit back on, I dashed around the corner and into the loading area. I had no way to know if the limpets were working correctly, but if they weren’t, I would notice pretty quickly when the guards came running and the loading bay doors slammed closed on me. The cameras were a little trickier. The laser pointing at them caused them to basically go fuzzy, distorting their view and making object recognition very difficult. If someone was actively watching the feeds, then they might see what was happening and sound the alarm. It was a risk I had to take. And once I was under the awning and inside the cameras’ shadow, I remotely turned off the limpets. I had made it in.

Peering around the inside of the dock, I saw another couple cameras, cheaper low grade cameras meant to keep an eye on work instead of external security. Using another limpet, I knocked them out and rushed the dock masters office. I kicked the door in and quickly fired a silenced burst from my SMG; the holographic figure of the dock master flickered and collapsed on the floor.