Analog Science Fiction and Fact - November 2016

189 Pages·2016·1.41 MB·English

by  Penny Publications

Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Kindle Edition, 2016 © Penny Publications
We Side with the Free
Gray Rinehart | 18137 words

I. NEW ORDERS

By long habit, Mark Elliott floated into the bridge thirty minutes before his shift
began. Exactly eight minutes later, they received the message the crew would
come to call “the Signal” that changed every life aboard the ship— because it
threatened everything they held dear.
Elliott nodded to the skipper, wedged himself up into the space between a
stanchion and an overhead light, opened a viewroll, and prepared for his
rotation. The duty logs were unremarkable at this stage in the cruise, and he was
reviewing the ship’s status—puzzling over some temperature fluctuations in one
propellant tank; probably just a sensor issue, already flagged for the engineers’
attention—when Spacer Second Class Reynolds spoke up from the nav/comm
station.
“Circitor, we have an intercept.”
Vindex Elliott, second in command of the Solar Guard Cutter Belmont,
looked down in time to catch the briefest hint of a smile on Circitor Hellmer’s
face. The skipper too had noticed the excitement in Reynolds’ voice.
The expression was gone by the time the circitor spoke. “Do we, now?” His
words were measured and precise, and matched exactly the virtues he valued in
his ship and on his crew.
“Yes, sir,” Reynolds said, and now Elliott allowed himself a grin at how the
circitor’s tone had not dampened the spacer’s. “Ephemeris is loading, decrypting
the message now.”
“What will it be, what will it be?” the circitor mused. “Rescue? Safety
inspection? Smuggling inspection?”
Elliott’s smile thinned. As if we’d find a smuggler out here.
“Unknown, sir,” Spacer Reynolds said, feverishly manipulating icons on his
screen.
The circitor’s voice took on the dangerous edge that Elliott recognized.
“Unknown? Have you forgotten your decoding?”
“No, sir! Standard intercept header, priority one, but this message is
jittery....” Reynolds swept his fingers across the screen, tapped it twice, and then
half-turned toward the circitor. His voice took on a tone almost of awe. “Sir, the
bulk of this is command encrypted.”
Elliott raised his eyebrows, surprised to see Circitor Hellmer raise his as
well. “Very interesting,” the circitor said. “Transfer it to my vault drive, and I’ll
address it.” He looked up. “Vindex Elliott, I mark it as eleven minutes before the
hour. Are you up to date and ready to relieve me?”
Elliott pushed away from the ceiling, caught a floor strap with his right foot,
steadied himself, and came to the best approximation of attention that zero-gee
allowed. “Aye, Circitor. I’ve read the logs and reports, unless you have
something to add.”
“Only that we appear to have an intercept. Priority one. See to it that the
orbit is properly entered and begin evaluating the match possibilities.”
“Aye, sir. If that is all, then I relieve you.”
“I stand relieved of the watch,” the circitor said with an actual smile. “Now
to see what’s interesting about this intercept.” He unstrapped from the command
station and exited the Belmont’s tiny bridge.
With a feather touch, Elliott pushed off toward the command station. The
roughly hemispherical bridge was only three meters edge-to-edge, and conduits,
ducts, and equipment lockers intruded on the space, but he was well used to
maneuvering in it. Its light grey nonspecular bulkheads diffused the harsh glare
of the LED lights, so the bridge felt a bit like he imagined it would inside an
igloo.
He caught the back of the command station seat, now his for the rotation, and
said, “Reynolds, prep for changeover. I expect Servus McAden to arrive in just a
few minutes.”
“Aye, sir,” the spacer said, his voice strained as if he yearned to say more.
Elliott pushed off again and caught himself adjacent to Reynolds’ post. The
young spacer stiffened at the XO’s approach.
“Something on your mind?”
Reynolds typed a bit on his screen, probably closing out his log, before he
turned to the XO. “First intercept this cruise, sir!”
“Aye,” Elliott said, “which means it’s your first intercept at all, right?”
Reynolds glanced down, and his ears darkened though Elliott could see his
smiling reflection in the nav/comm screen. “Aye, sir.”
“Mine, too, on this ship, but we’ll be sure to make it a good one. Have you
started the orbit match yet?”
“Sir?”
Elliott dropped his smile. “Spacer, did my message need decoding?”
“Sir, I—no, sir. And no, sir, I have not started the orbit match.”
Elliott looked up as Spacer First Class Aloysius McAden floated into the
command center, pushing a caddy with two bulbs of hot coffee in it. McAden
cocked his head but remained silent at the scene that confronted him. Elliott
turned back to Reynolds. “By the time you take over your next shift I expect you
to have run orbit matches based on fuel efficiency, time, and safety limits for
ship and crew, and have a recommendation prepared based on your assessment
of the target’s orbital characteristics. Any questions?”
To his credit, Reynolds did not hesitate. “No, sir!”
“Complete your changeover, then.”
Elliott returned to the command console. He logged Reynolds’ homework
assignment and then began verifying the target’s orbital elements himself. It was
between Earth’s and Mars’ orbits, which in itself was not too unusual—the
Belmont herself was a bit outside Earth’s orbit—but the planets’ positions were
not optimum for a vessel to be in that region of space, and the target did not
match any known traffic. Its path was almost comet-like...
McAden cleared his throat. “Sir?”
“Yes, Al?” Elliott allowed himself a bit of familiarity during his own shift,
when the circitor was not within earshot. He took the insulated drinking bulb
McAden offered; the coffee was hot, but a bit weak.
“I think you shook up Buster pretty bad.”
“Reynolds? He’s a good troop, he’ll get over it.”
“Aye, he will. I see you’re working on the same problem.”
Elliott smiled, but the comm chimed before he could respond. “Bridge, this
is the circitor. Vindex Elliott, report to my office at your earliest convenience.”
Elliott racked the drinking bulb and keyed the console mic. “Aye, Circitor.
Bridge out.” He knew well what “earliest convenience” really meant. He keyed
in the wardroom. “Attention, all personnel. Senior available officer report to the
bridge immediately.” He did not wait for an acknowledgement, but turned to
McAden. “I anticipate Burgaw will bounce in here in five minutes or less, and
I’ll go see the circitor. While I’m gone, set up the ephemeris problem yourself
and see what you can get out of the computer. I’ll take it up again when I get
back, and we’ll compare our solutions against each other. I want to have a solid
answer for Buster’s to orbit around.”
McAden waved a lazy salute. “Aye, boss.”
Efficiency trumped everything in the realm of space vessel architecture, and
the Belmont exemplified that principle. The circitor’s cabin and “office”
occupied a position near enough to the bridge that Elliott could almost have
conversed with him without the benefit of the intercom, but all walls have ears,
and some topics required at least the illusion of privacy. Usually those topics
involved personnel matters, but Elliott knew as he squeezed himself into the
remaining spare volume in the circitor’s office that this matter was far more
serious than any brawl, failed evaluation, or poor inspection. Circitor Hellmer’s
demeanor was different from any he had presented during their past year
together, or any time they had met during their time as auxiliaries before
Belmont was christened; Elliott’s first impression was that the circitor looked
wistful, and the thought made his guts cinch as if someone had pulled a cable tie
around them.
“Did you ever consider joining the navy, Mark?”
The circitor’s question only added to Elliott’s discomfort. Not the
familiarity: here in the skipper’s office, Vindex Elliott was always “Mark”
unless he himself was under scrutiny, and the circitor even used the other
officers’ first names in the wardroom at times. But the question itself, apropos of
nothing...
“Thought about it for a few microseconds, I’m sure, sir,” Elliott said, trying
to lighten his own mood if nothing else. “Not much of a swimmer, though.”
Circitor Hellmer nodded, and passed over his Slate. Elliott took the clunky
tablet—despite the name, a throwback to the days of the oneroom schoolhouse,
it was the most secure portable device available, radiation-hardened and nearly
indestructible—and barely registered the circitor’s next words.
“Well, you’re in the navy now. We all are.”
Elliott could not get his mouth to form the question for a moment. He used
the time to glance over the decrypted orders on the screen, but the elements of
the message seemed jumbled. Solar Guard Cutter Belmont, Circitor Huston
Hellmer commanding, transferred to operational control of Inner Solar Navy
Headquarters Annapolis, redesignated as Solar Navy Vessel—
“What?” he asked.
Circitor Hellmer tilted his head. “Is something about this unclear?”
Elliott clamped his mouth shut and processed the data as quickly as his
suddenly fog-filled brain would. He read through the message again.
“We’re not just in the navy, are we, sir? We are the navy.”
“That’s it in a vacuum-sealed pouch.”
The implications careened through Elliott’s mind. The Solar Guard had only
been in place a little over a decade, primarily operating shortrange vessels near
the Moon and the asteroid outposts, as a rescue force with a nod toward
smuggling and a wink toward piracy—interplanetary commerce in the Solar
System might never be highly enough developed to attract much in the way of
piracy—but neither Earth nor Mars nor the farther-flung outposts had yet
determined that a full-fledged navy was needed. The orders said, “Inner System
Navy.” The phrase barely made sense.
Circitor Hellmer gave Elliott little time to consider the implications. “Did
you notice anything unusual about our intercept’s orbit?”
“The trajectory looked a bit flat, sir, but I haven’t studied all the numbers.”
“Oh, it’s flat, all right, enough to look almost parabolic.”
Elliott squinted for a second as he tried to visualize the orbit. “Is it a comet?”
“Worse.” Circitor Hellmer gestured for the Slate, took it, and pulled up
another page of information. “In addition to the command-encrypted orders, a
second encrypted message was interleaved in the first. The Trojan outposts sued
for their independence again, if you recall from the news, but at the same time
they sent secret dispatches... with a threat. It appears they weren’t bluffing.”
Elliott remembered the reports of the Trojans’ latest attempt to break away
from governance by the inner planets; the news was about a month old, but
neither Earth nor Mars had responded so far as he knew. The Trojan
Confederacy, as they called themselves, loosely bound the tiny settlements in the
Asteroid Belt and among the Trojan asteroids out in Jupiter’s orbit. The news
reports had seemed unimportant at the time, since the last two independence
requests had been quickly refused, and Elliott had dismissed them. But now
“Inner Solar” was organizing a defense against the Trojans? Whatever the
Belmont was tasked to intercept came from there.... He squinted again as he
visualized where Jupiter was in its orbit compared to Mars and Earth, and
therefore where the Trojans—Jupiter’s leading and trailing orbital companions—
were. Then he focused on the screen the circitor was holding up and saw the
answer.
“An asteroid?”
“Not just an asteroid. An asteroid with a mass driver. You would’ve figured
it out from the ephemeris once you looked at the history, because the course
changes, ever so slightly, every few hours. That thing isn’t, strictly speaking, in
orbit, heliocentric or otherwise. It’s in powered flight.”
“That’s crazy,” Elliott said. “Sounds like they’ve read too much Heinlein.
They have to know that if they drop something like that on Earth, someone—
maybe everyone—will retaliate.”
“Desperation can make people do crazy things. Their messages are included
in here, too, and the tone is pretty conciliatory. Reluctant, even. They use
phrases like ‘last resort’ right alongside the old classics: ‘when in the course of
human events’ and ‘dissolve the bonds,’ that sort of thing. They seem to be
hoping that the governments will grant their request, give them a seat at the table
as it were, at which point they can divert their projectile”—the stress the circitor
put on the word expressed an anger Elliott rarely heard from him—“and say it
was all a big misunderstanding. And I get the impression that some factions on
Earth are in favor, and not just the ones that supported their independence
previously.”
Elliott decided he’d rather think about the political implications later, but
asking the next question galled him almost as much. “So we’re a navy. Does that
make me a lieutenant?”
“And me a commander?” Hellmer asked. His voice took on a harder edge.
“Not on my ship. The volunteers set up our ranks to be unique, and we’ll keep
them that way.”
That was good enough for Elliott. “Vindex” meant “defender,” among other
things, and he rather liked the sound of it, but just asking the question pained
him. It reminded him that he was a vindex filling a defensor’s billet, and would
have been promoted a year ago except for... it was better not to dwell on that. He
returned to the main topic. “So we’re supposed to intercept a rock and do what,
exactly?”
“That’s the puzzle. Our orders don’t extend beyond the intercept itself—”
“Which is going to be damned difficult.”
“—and I expect to get clarification as we get closer. We may be tasked to
observe and report—a scouting mission—or we may be tasked to... intervene.”
Circitor Hellmer paused to let that sink in. “One thing is certain: we know
something that most of the Solar System doesn’t know, but a secret only lasts as
long as everyone thinks it’s to their benefit to keep it.
“This will come out eventually, and it will become a news sensation. They
can’t hide the thing from every telescope, and the Trojan faction is likely to
release news about it whenever they think it will put the right amount of pressure
on the powers that are. But that’s not our problem.
“By now any of the crew who are paying attention will have noted the odd
ephemeris, at least, and they’ll extrapolate from there: They’re a smart bunch,
but don’t tell them I said so. I suspect we’ll have to clamp down on all outgoing
comm traffic.”
“They won’t like that,” Elliott said. And, truthfully, he didn’t much care for
the idea himself.
“Of course they won’t. I won’t either. But it’s not ours to like or dislike, just
to do our duty.”
Before he spoke again, the circitor’s gaze ranged around the tiny cabin, as if
he were gathering his thoughts from its curves and corners. “You said the
Trojans’ scheme was crazy, but I wonder. Something like this is a major
undertaking.... They had to make a lot of sacrifices out there, in the Belt and
beyond, in order to pull it off. The fact that they did it in secret and issued a
warning—again, in secret and only to people at the highest levels— seems like
cold calculation to me. They may not expect capitulation, but they probably
expect negotiation.”
Elliott took up the thought. “And if they get something close to what they’ve
asked for, even with some concessions...”
“Like I said, they’ll probably adjust the trajectory, and the Earth can go back
to worrying about natural disasters instead of political ones.”
“‘Probably.’”
The circitor shrugged. “Probably, possibly, maybe. Who can say?” He fixed
Elliott with a gaze he usually reserved for junior officers at the mess, when he
had tossed out a topic and wanted to see how they would respond.
Elliott returned to his previous “do what” question. “So we burn for an
intercept, presuming they can’t deviate much from their course, match up
enough to be in the same vicinity for... wait, are the governments going to try to
stall until we can get close enough to reconnoiter?”
Circitor Hellmer smiled. “Well thought. If Earth answers while we’re on
approach, the Trojans might call off the whole thing—or at least shift their rock
into a different orbit—and evade a rendezvous. That much mass is hard to move,
but also provides them a lot to throw away on course changes.”
“More than we could ever carry,” Elliott said. The Belmont was effectively a
collection of huge propellant tanks with the minimum of living and working
spaces; her excess propellant was for rescue maneuvers, which thankfully were
rare. She patrolled routinely between Earth and L4, the orbit-leading Sun-Earth
LaGrange point, and even though her engines could generate sufficient delta-vee
to get into different orbits, she was still bound to long, fairly low-consumption
routes. Her normal patrol was about 180 days out, about 120 days in. She carried
a modicum of freight to offset operating costs, mostly refined metals from the
mining outposts on asteroids orbiting near that gravitationally stable point.
Whenever L5 developed, Belmont and her sister ship would have to patrol that
part of Earth’s orbit as well.
Elliott continued, “It’s one thing to kick an asteroid into a new orbit, but
something else to keep kicking it all the way along. I don’t recall anyone ever
doing that before. And anything large enough to be a threat would be extremely
hard to handle. Even so, I doubt we can match their powered flight for long.”
“The Belters have done multiple kicks before, but not like this. And from the
specs we’ve got, it’s fast but not blazing fast. But you’re right: the incident angle
is all wrong for a good approach, and we can most assuredly not come about and
match their pace for any length of time.”
“And a flyby isn’t an intercept.”
“No, it isn’t,” Circitor Hellmer said, and his smile turned into a grimace.
“Noted,” Elliott said. “With your permission, sir, I’ll see what the smiths can
do to fab some extra grapples and cables.”
“Let me burn the grapevine first, or at least prune it back. Then talk to the
master smith, and inform the officers that from here on in we will have status
briefings and discuss tactical options at the close of every evening meal.”
“Aye, Circitor.”
“And, Vindex...”
“Yes, sir?”
“You can never read too much Heinlein.”
Chief Engineer Derronen Robertson tried to read the expression on the XO’s
face. Not exactly worry... resignation, maybe? The XO was doing a good job of
hiding his real feelings.
But what Robertson had just heard sounded like a bad joke.
“You want to grapple the ship to what?” Robertson asked. He wondered if
he should express his opinion more respectfully, but only for an instant. This
called for directness. “Mark, that’s insane.”
Robertson—the Belmont’s “master smith” in the solar guard’s less formal
nomenclature— did not stand on ceremony, certainly not in his own fabrication
shop, especially when faced with a scheme no sober officer should ever propose.
Considering all the XO had told him, he felt as if his entire career outlook had
changed phase and become decidedly less solid. Part of him regretted reacting