“Then we’ll keep to our schedule, and see whether you’re right,” Sagale said, already turning away. “Get secured. We burn for Tecoma in eighty minutes.”
Seventy-eight minutes later, Elvi lay in her crash couch, waiting to drown.
The problem with space travel had always—from the very beginning—been the fragility of human bodies. In spite of these limitations, humanity had done itself pretty proud even before Laconia. Now they were improving by leaps and bounds. The Falcon could make the travel time from one system to another almost trivial by comparison to the standard science vessels and freighters of the civilian fleet. A journey of weeks could be accomplished in days. The Falcon would even give most of Duarte’s military ships a run for their money. But the price of all that acceleration was the full-submersion crash couch. A diabolical device that completely surrounded the human body in shock-absorbing gel, and filled the lungs with highly oxygenated fluid to make the chest cavity as incompressible as possible. For days.
“I don’t understand what he wants,” she said.
“He is a complicated man,” Fayez said from the couch next to hers.
“It’s like he doesn’t want us to find anything interesting. Every time we do, he gets grumpy.”
“You took your preflight meds?”
“Yes,” she said, even though she wasn’t sure she’d actually remembered to. They weren’t critical. “I feel like he’s got some other agenda he’s not telling us.”
“Almost certainly because he’s got some other agenda he isn’t telling us,” Fayez said. “That can’t be surprising, Els.”
“It can’t be something more important than this,” she said. “What would be more important than this?”
“To him? I don’t know. Maybe he just hates learning. Traumatized by a science fair when he was young. Ten seconds. I love you, Els.”
“I love you too,” she said. “I remember when juice was something they injected you with, not something you breathed. I remember I didn’t like it at the time.”
“Price of progress.”
She was looking for something clever to say back, but then the fluid poured in the way it always did and silenced her.
Chapter Six: Alex
The Gathering Storm was the absolute state of the art in Laconian naval technology. The first ship of her class to be fielded, she was intended to be the prototype of an entire fleet of fast attack destroyers that could patrol the many systems of the gate network and project Laconian power to every corner of the empire. She had a keel-mounted rail gun capable of firing a three-and-a-half-kilo slug every five seconds at velocities that would punch a hole through smaller moons. She had two separate batteries of torpedo launchers with four rails on each and a fast reload system that could have another eight fish in the tubes and ready to fire less than seventy seconds after the first barrage was let loose. She was defended on all sides by a network of twelve rapid-fire point-defense cannons, and every angle of approach on the ship was covered by at least four of them. She was, as Alex’s copilot Caspar liked to quip, a couple thousand tons of fuck-up-your-day stuffed into a five-kilo sack.
Nestled inside the massive cargo hold of the Pendulum, she was also defenseless.
Sitting in the pilot’s couch, waiting for the go signal, and knowing that if someone realized they were there and started firing he wouldn’t even be able to see it on radar made Alex’s scalp itch. The Pendulum fed them her scopes, so they weren’t completely blind, but she was a lumbering heavy freighter. Her threat detection was mostly so she didn’t run into a stray hunk of rock. The low-res radar and grainy telescope shots he had to look at did little to calm his nerves.
“So you and the boss go way back, right?” Caspar said.
He sat second couch on the Storm, behind and to the right of Alex’s chair. Caspar Asoau was a short, skinny kid with a motion tattoo of a running cheetah on one shoulder and the wispiest hint of a goatee. In spite of looking way too young for the job, he was a hell of a good pilot. Quick to obey an order and perfectly charming company. Alex had rapidly discovered that they had nothing in common outside of a love of flying, so other than a casual greeting, the only time they ever seemed to talk was sitting at the Storm’s controls.
Alex didn’t hold it against the kid. He remembered being a young pilot and trying his hardest to hide his nervousness by chatting up the older officers.
“Yeah. The gunny and I have known each other for a long damn time.”
“See, that’s funny. She’s the captain of this ship, but you guys all call her Gunny. That was a rank or something, right? Back on Mars?”
“Something like that,” Alex replied. “She’ll always be Gunny to me.”
Caspar was running the preflight as he talked, fingers tapping softly on the screens. On Alex’s monitor the checklist rolled past, each system verified and reporting green before Caspar moved on to the next, with Alex giving the final okay to his work. His copilot was thorough and efficient. He took his job seriously. It kind of made Alex wish the kid were thirty years older so they could be friends.
“She give you any hint on what this op is about?” Caspar asked, then threw the weapon stores inventory to Alex’s screen for his double check.
“I show two hundred slugs in the rail-gun mag, eighty fish in the pipes, all PDCs show green and full,” Alex said, sliding his finger down the inventory list as he went. “And no, she’s an old operator. Keepin’ your mouth shut gets drilled into those guys pretty hard.”
“Copy, two hundred in the rail gun, eighty torpedoes, PDCs full and greens across the board, verified,” Caspar said. “Yeah, but I figured since you guys were friends, maybe she gave you some kinda heads-up.”
“She did not. And I wouldn’t ask. We’ll know when we need to know, and that’s good enough for me,” Alex said, then, with the preflight complete, spun his couch around to face Caspar. “It’s okay to be nervous.”
Caspar nodded. He didn’t look embarrassed at all to be discussing his fear. Alex felt another little rush of affection for him. He was a good kid. Alex hoped he’d make it through to the other side of the Laconia business, but the odds on that were pretty short for all of them.
“I knew a guy on Pallas,” Caspar said. “It wasn’t like we were tight. We never seriously dated or anything. But when I’d go through the station on cargo runs, we’d hook up. Ben Yi. I liked him.” A tear formed at the corner of his eye and then failed to be pulled down his cheek in the gentle quarter-g burn of the Pendulum’s drive.
“He didn’t make the evacuation?”
“Nope,” Caspar said, then wiped his eyes. “They say that the Tempest turned the station into rubble so fast no one would even have seen the actual attack coming. I guess, if you have to go, that’s not the worst.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex said. Everyone on the Storm had their reason to hate the Laconians. Everyone had a story. The only answer for most of them was I’m sorry. It felt pretty limp.
“If this op gets blown up,” Caspar said, turning his attention back to his screens and going through his checklists one more time, “I want you to know. You don’t have to worry about me. If that big bastard Tempest comes after us, the only thing I’ll be thinking is how can I make a hole in it.”
“I know, man,” Alex said, then patted the kid’s knee before turning around. “No doubts.”
“Kamal?” said Bobbie’s voice in his ear, where the comm bud was inserted. Bobbie only called him Kamal when they were on an op and other ears were listening. It meant go time.
“Kamal copies from the flight deck, Cap,” he replied, sitting up straight in his couch. From the hiss of the gimbals behind him, he knew Caspar was doing the same. Even the crash couches on the Storm sounded slick.
“I need a go, no-go for deployment,” Bobbie said. “Pendulum cuts us loose on your word.”
“We are all greens up here on the flight deck, go on your command.”
“Outstanding,” Bobbie said. “Okay, kids, word came down, and here’s the op. Listen close, because I don’t have time to repeat myself.”
Alex hated flying ballistic. No drive meant he had maneuvering thrusters at most. No active sensors was like piloting with his eyes half-closed.
The Storm had a tiny radar profile for such a large ship. Something about the hull materials just absorbed or bounced off at an angle almost any radar that hit it. She could also dump all her waste heat into internal heat sinks for several hours and run liquid hydrogen through capillaries in her skin, keeping the hull temperature pretty close to zero. Unless someone was really looking for her, she’d just show up as a slightly warmer spot in space with a radar profile not much bigger than a bunk bed. Alex could remember when a destroyer with similar technology had killed his old ship the Canterbury. How terrifying it had been when a gunship seemed to materialize out of the dark of space and started firing torpedoes. Apparently that came standard now. Still, he could relate to what their intended targets were about to experience.