"It's been, what, better than a year since yo' saw Marya. She's gotten a little moodier here,'s' much as I've had time to notice. Good to have an outside interest." The Draka linked the fingers of both hands around a knee. "What I was thinkin' of, was those two pretties enjoyin' they weddin' night."
Jolene tossed back hair silvered by the mirrorlight; her brass-colored eyes were startling against the shadowed ebony of her skin. "Well, that we two can do somethin' about, eh, Mistis?"
SPIN HABITAT SEVEN
CENTRAL BELT
BETWEEN THE ORBITS OF MARS AND JUPITER
DECEMBER 28, 1991
"Aw, dad!"
Frederick Lefarge looked over at his wife. She was mixing them martinis, at the cabinet on the other side of the living room. Dinner was a pleasant memory and a lingering smell of guinea-chile and avocado salad—God, what did I do to deserve a good cook, on top of looks and brains?—and he wanted that drink, and his feet up, and more quiet than two teenaged daughters promised. On the other hand…
He glanced sternly at Janet and Iris. "Homework done?" he said. Gods, they're getting to be young women, he thought.
Haltertops, yet. And those fashionable hip-huggers… the damned things looked as if they had been sprayed on.
"Yeah," Janet said. Well, her marks had been excellent, particularly the math. It looked as if there was going to be at least one spacer in the family, if this kept up. Iris nodded. Her current fancy was composing. Well, at least she was still working at that, not like the other fads.
"It's a nice group," Cindy said. She finished shaking the cocktail pitcher, broke it open deftly and filled the chilled martini glasses. "From school, and a bunch over from Habitat Three. You know, the Martins and the Merkowitz kids?"
Lefarge pushed his chair back. "All right," he said, glancing at the viewer; it was set on landscape, with a time-readout down near the lower righthand corner. "But be back by 0100, latest, or I'll shut the airlock on you for a week, understand?"
"Thanks, dad!" Janet gave him a quick hug.
"We'll be back on time, daddy." Iris kissed his cheek. "And they're playing one of my dance tunes." she whispered into his ear, giggling.
He sighed as he watched them fling themselves down the hall with an effortless feet-off-the-ground twist; they adjusted to the varying gravity of the habitat's shell-decks the way he and Marya had to the streets of New York.
"Next thing you know, I'll be beating off boyfriends with a club," he grumbled, accepting the drink. "Ah, nice and dry."
Cindy put hers on the table and went behind the chair. Her fingers probed at his neck. "Rock. Don't worry, they're sensible girls, and we've got a nice family town here." He closed his eyes and rolled his head slightly as she kneaded the taut musics. "At least we don't have to worry about jüviegroups and trashing or having them go into orbit over Ironbelly Bootstomper bands," she continued.
Lefarge shuddered. "No, thank God. Sometimes I think the spirit that made America great hasn't died—just emigrated."
Cindy laughed and leaned over him; he felt a sudden sharp pain at the base of his cropped hair. "Hey, cut that out!"
She held an almost-invisible something close to his eye on the tip of one finger: a gray hair.
"You don't have enough of these to be an old fogey yet, honey," she said, and kissed him upside-down. Her face sobered. "Something's really bothering you, isn't it?"
He reached up to run his hand through her hair, streaked with silver against the mahogany color, shining and resilient. "You're too old to be so indecently beautiful," he murmured. Then: "I have to take a trip back dirtside," he said.
"Oh. That chair big enough for two?"
She picked up her drink and settled in against him, curving into the arm he laid about her shoulders. The silk of her blouse and skirt rustled, and he smelled a pleasant clean odor of shampoo and perfume and Cindy. "Uncle Nate?"
"He's sharp as ever, but not getting any younger," Lefarge said grudgingly. "You know how it is, anyone in his position so long makes enemies." The executive positions two or three steps down from the top in an agency like the OSS were coveted prizes. Not high enough to be political appointments, but they set policy. "Those who want his job, if nothing else; the problem is they're all disasters waiting to happen."
He paused to take another sip of the martini. "I have to blather to a couple of select committees. On top of that, Nate's afraid the new people in charge over in Archona are foxy enough to let up the pressure. That von Shrakenberg's a cunning devil; he knows how quickly some of us will go to sleep if they're not prodded." A frown. "I don't like it, when the Snakes get quiet. They're planning something. Maybe not now, maybe in a decade; something big."
Cindy shivered against him, and he held her closer. "No more raids, at least," she said. "Oh God, honey, I was so frightened."
And went straight from your office to your emergency station and had the rest of them singsonging and playing bridge, he thought with a rush of warmth. Jesus H. Christ, I'm a lucky man. Grimly: And we took out a major warship, too. They may be pulling back their fingers because we singed them,
"There's something else, isn't there?" she went on.
"Witch." He sighed. "In the latest courier package from Uncle Nate." The Project was on the AI-3 distribution list; this was as secure an OSS station as anywhere in the Alliance, if only because so little went out. "They're in contact with Marya again."
"Bad?" Cindy said softly.
"No worse than before. That Ingolfsson creature's spawn…" He turned his head aside for a moment, then continued. "Anyway, Marya's been taken to their main Martian settlement. Working in household accounts, but even better, she's made some social contacts with the HQ office workers… just rumor, gossip, but priceless stuff. Contact's a priest; Christ, it's dangerous, though!" More softly: "And I miss her, sweet, I really do."
"Mmmmh. So do I. She was always like a big sister to me…"
The diskplayer came on, with a quiet Baroque piece that Cindy must have selected beforehand. The lights dimmed, turning the homey familiarity of the living room into romantic gloom, and a new scene played on the viewer. He recognized that beach, with the full moon over the Pacific and the swaying palms. Surf hissed gently…
"Why, Mrs. Lefarge," he said, looking down at her face. She grinned. "If I didn't know better, I'd say that a respectable matron was trying to seduce her husband again."
She wiggled into his lap. "Why, Mr. Lefarge," she whispered, twining her arms around his neck. "Why do you think I was so eager to get the girls out of the house?" She nibbled at his ear. "And if you are too young to be a fogey, I'm too young to be a matron. So there."
Chapter Seventeen
The Protracted Conflict has a brutal simplicity; the Final War will start the moment either side feels it can attack without risking unacceptable losses. The Draka definition of "acceptable cost" is much higher than the Alliance's. These two facts have driven most human endeavor since 1945, aeronautics included. Average speeds of 200 mph in 1930 increased to about 400 mph by the beginning of the Eurasian War. By 1942 prop-engine fighters had reached their maximum of around 480 mph, but the first swept-wing turbojets were already in service, and by 1946 maximum speeds of 620 mph were common. German rocket-boosted experimental aircraft had reached nearly twice the speed of sound, providing invaluable aerodynamic information to both the Domination and the Alliance. They had also launched research into high-altitude rockets, and rocket-boosted ramjet unmanned vehicles.
After the Eurasian War ended in a blaze of nuclear fire, the contending powers were left with weapons of unprecedented lethality, and inadequate delivery systems. For strategic purposes, what was needed was a means of striking deep into the continental heartlands of the enemy with little or no chance of interception; and the primitive fission and fusion bombs of the 1945-1955 era were massive and clumsy to boot. Jet bombers were useful for tactical purposes, but were too limited in range and easy to intercept to be really satisfactory for deli
vering the new "sunbombs." Rockets had abundant speed, but inadequate payload. The solution both sides developed was the ramjet which was light theoretically simple, and had excellent performance in the Mach 2 to Mach 7 envelopes. Desperate need drove both sides to solve the incredibly complex materials and engineering problems; by the early 1950s, unmanned ramjet missiles following high-suborbital trajectories at speeds of up to 4,000 mph were in production on both sides.
These use-once missies pressed the materials technology of the day to its limits; the Alliance had a lead in precision-formed refractory alloys, and used it to produce the first reusable, manned ramjet craft. The Draka "leapfrogged" with fiber-matrix composites and high-strength ceramics; the Alliance in turn used its superior computers to successfully model supersonic airflows and achieve scramjets (supersonic-combustion ramjets) in the late 1950s. Combined with liquid hydrogen fuel/ coolant and pure-rocket boost this gave the Alliance the ultimate "high ground" of orbital capacity. As might be expected, espionage and frantic catch-up prevented either side from gaining the last crucial edge needed for assured survival. Once out of Earth's gravity well, it was clear that the answer to the high-atmospheric missile was orbital weapons and sensors; these in turn suggested massive counter-measures. Space-based manufacturing and energy were obviously necessary, even after laser-launch and mass drivers became available in the 1960s; this made Luna an indispensable source of raw materials. Once orbital and lunar stations were in place, expeditions to deep space became relatively easy, and neither side could allow the other to monopolize either the material treasures or the knowledge to be found there, nuclear-pulse engines opened translunar space, and beyond the orbit of the moon the Protracted Struggle could and did flicker into active clashes.
Perhaps as revolutionary were the spinoffs of this rivalry…
History in a Technological Age
by Andrew Elliot Armstrang, Ph.D.
Department of History
San Diego University Press, 1991
We're never going to win this race unless we trip the fuckers somehow; all this effort isn't doing anything more than bailing out a sieve. We've got to stop playing to their strengths.
Representative Louise Qayner
Minutes of the
Long-Range Strategic
Planning Board
Senator Eric von Shrakenberg, presiding
Archona, Archona ProvinceApril 16, 1962
DRAKA FORCES BASE ARESOPOLIS
MARE SERENITATIS,LUNA
MARCH 25, 1998
2000HOURS
Yolande turned her head to scan the other side of the Wasp class stingfigher. This is what it's like to be a ghost, she thought. She ran her hand through the solid-seeming bulk of a crashcouch, looked down to see her shins disappear into the deck. A Wasp had room for exactly two crew, clamped into their couches for most of the trip. Or what it's like to be a time traveler. The events she was experiencing were nearly a thousand hours in the past. She watched the movements of the pilot's gloved fingers on the rests.
"Coming up on pod," the pilot said. "Twelve kay clicks and closing. Status." The wall ahead mapped trajectories and ran digital displays.
"Locked," her Weapons Officer said, his voice tight but steady.
So young, Yolande thought. Gwen will be that old in a few years. So young.
"Unauthorized craft, identify yourself." That from a resonator film somewhere in the cabin. Flat, grating Yankee accent with the mechanical overlay of a simple AI-interactive system. "You are on an intercept trajectory to within prohibited distance. Identify yourself or alter course."
"Visual," the pilot said.
"Acquisition," the Weapons Officer replied, and called it up on the screen.
A rough cylinder of slag-surfaced metal, surface pocked with bubbles and lumps from the vacuum-condensation refining process. A pod at one end with sensors and the guidance system, and rings of low-velocity hydrazine steering jets, a minimal course-correction system to send a hundred thousand tonnes of whatever from the asteroid belt to the Alliance smelters and factories, here on the Moon and points inward. These days, a good deal of it might end up on Earth, headed for splashdown sites in the Sea of Cortes or the Cook Strait or the Inland Sea.
"Composition," the pilot was saying.
There was a second's pause and the Wasp's computer replied: "Iron, fifty percent, nickel twenty-one percent, chromium group, sixteen percent, tungsten ten percent, fissionables three percent, volatiles and trace elements."
Valuable, Yolande thought. The Yankees were stronger in the asteroid belt; their initial lead in deepspace pulsedrives had given them an opening they had never relinquished. Much cheaper to drop heavy elements down into the solar gravity well than boost them out of Earth's pull and atmosphere, even now that freight costs were coming down so low. The Alliance would trade metals for the water and chemicals the Draka took from the Jovian and Satunian moons, of course, but it was cheaper to hijack where you could. Better strategy, too, since it hampered their operations and forced them to divert resources to guarding their slingshot modules and scavenging the asteroids for scarce volatiles… She had had a hand in formulating that policy.
At least it's been better strategy until now. A rectangle appeared in the "air" in front of her, an exterior simulation of the two spacecraft. The Wasp drifted, a blunt pyramid tapering from the shockplate at the rear to the crew compartment at the apex. Slim tubes rose from each corner of the plate, linked to the pyramid with a tracing of spars; asymmetric spikes flared out to guide the parasite-bombs riding in station around the gunboat. The simulation limned the outlines, since like any warcraft this was armored in an absorptive synthetic that mimicked the background spectra.
"Closing," the pilot said. The outside view showed a needle-bright flicker behind the gunboat, deuterium-tritium pellets squeezed into explosion by the lasers. Yolande started, almost surprised not to feel the acceleration that pushed the crew back into their cradles. "One-ninah kay clicks, matchin'."
"Unidentified craft, this is your last warning," the robot voice droned.
"Eddie, shut that fuckah up, will yo'?" the pilot said, exasperated. The man grunted, touched a control surface.
The control chamber vanished, leaving a blackness lit only by the face of the investigating officer in the central portion. "That's it, Strategos," he said, shrugging. "End datalink. The fighter went pure-ballistic from then until we grappled what was left." Yolande gestured, and the black turned gray, then faded into her office. She motioned again.
"All right," she said, as the rectangle expanded to occupy a square meter above the surface of her desk. "Give me the record of the recov'ry action."
"Well, the Yanks scrambled once they'uns realized what was happenin'," the Intelligence Section merarch said. The three-dimensional image lifted a cigarette to its lips. "Two Jefferson-class patrollers, with six and four gunboats respectively, in position to do somethin'. Thirty personnel, all told."
Yolande nodded: Yankee gunboats were single-crew, and the Jeffersons had ten apiece. The Alliance military relied more on cybernetics than the Draka did. "That was all they had within range."
Space was large, and even with constant-boost pulsedrive units it took a long time to get from anywhere to anywhere, compared with on-planet applications. There were times when she thought it was more like the situation back in her greatgrandfather's time, when it could still take weeks to cross an ocean, months to traverse a continent. Then trouble blew up, and the soldier on the spot was left with their ass hanging in the breeze and no way to call for mama.
"Luckily, we'n's had three Iron Limper corvettes on, ah, patrol." Corsair duty, her mind added sardonically, using the crew slang. "This's what happened."
The view shifted to points and data-columns, a schematic of the corvettes and their twelve—no, eleven—gunboat outriders, and the machinery's best guess on the Yankees. The usual thing for space combat, a long gingerly waiting before a brief flurry of action. A pulsedrive was sor
t of hard to hide anywhere in the solar system unless you had something the size of a planet to shelter it, but that told you very little except the past position and a fan of possible vectors. Space-ships were another matter; between stealthing and datamimic decoys, long-range detection had always run a little behind the counter-measures.
"Well, both parties knew they'd have to intersect somewhere along the trajectory of the cargo pod and the stingray." A section of the curve that looped in from beyond the orbit of Mars turned red, the area where either set of warships could match velocities. "The Yankees went into constant-boost, figurin' to overrun us on the pass, then go back fo' it. We went silent, coastin'; had the advantage, comin' out-system from sunward."
"Ah." She could guess what came next. You could think of a pulsedrive as a series of micro-fusion bombs and field-shielding and reaction mass heated to plasma—or as a sword of radiation and high-energy particles tens of kilometers long.
That was the Staff way of seeing it. Her imagination flashed other images on the inner screen of her consciousness. The matte-black shapes of the Limpers falling outward. A shallow disk perched on a witch's maze of tubing like some mad oil refinery, all atop the great convex soup-plate of the pusher. The dozen crewfolk locked into their cocoons of armor and sensors, decision-making units in a dance of photonics. Units that sweated with fears driven down below consciousness; the ripping impact of crystal tesseract-mines scattering their high-vee shrapnel through hulls and bodies, blood boiling into vacuum. The pulse of a near-miss and secondary gamma sleeting invisibly through the body, wrecking the infinitely complex balances of the cells. Tumbling in a wrecked ship, puking and delirious and dying slowly of thirst…
Fears carried down from the ground-ape; hindbrain reflexes that twitched muscles in desperate need to flee or fight, pumped juices into the blood, roiling minds that must stay as calm as the machines that were master and slave both. Yolande swallowed past dryness, and used the inward disciplines taught by those who had trained her for war. The slamming impact of deceleration; railguns, lightguns, mine-showers, missile and counter-missile, the parasite-bombs driving their one-megaton X-ray beams like the icepicks of gods. The drives punching irresistibly through fields and shieldings; perhaps a single second for the stricken to know their fate as plasma boiled through the corridors.