By Other Means Page 16

  She was also well informed on the catastrophes consuming Earth’s countries one by one. Unlike the other bases, MO-226 seemed to have no problem getting news. She spoke often of the advancing glaciers and falling sea levels, and was particularly fascinated by the remnants of 20th century cities being exposed by the retreating oceans.

  “Manhattan won’t have to hide behind the ocean-walls anymore,” she said. “We can tear those ugly things down and have a proper city once again, looking out on the river.”

  “You from there?” Craig said. He was watching her face in profile, her full lips and long eye lashes.

  “Born and raised on Manhattan Island. Can’t wait to get back.”

  Craig had visited Manhattan Island once. End-to-end skyscrapers three hundred stories high. The weight of six million people on one tiny island had terrified him. “You’ll have to wait a little while longer. With billions starving, they don’t want one more live body down there. I’m surprised martial law’s held things together for this long.”

  She frowned. “In between the cities it’s gotten lawless,” she said. “You don’t hear about that so much. They’re building greenhouse fields as quickly as they can, but they have to defend them against desperate folks just trying to feed their kids. With Canada and Siberia iced over, we lost a big percentage of the agro-zones.” She shrugged. “As for martial law, starving people don’t have a lot of energy to riot.”

  “The atmosphere’ll clear. Won’t be long.”

  “The damage is done.”

  “To both sides.”

  Her eyes narrowed sharply. “You a Mars sympathizer?”

  “Civilian sympathizer, maybe. People sympathizer. You didn’t ask to be stranded out in that rock. Neither did the rest of those researchers, or people in their vacation asteroids, or Martians in their domes, or Earthers in their cities. What the Galileans are doing out here, that’s just a symptom. I want it to be over.”

  “Soon,” she said.

  Craig raised his eyebrows, but she said no more.

  The moment they’d been dreading came three days later. The freighter’s tracking computers picked up sunlight glinting from a moving body where there were no known asteroids. Craig immediately started flipping switches, shunting fuel from auxiliary tanks into the main tanks at the rear of the ship.

  He swatted the new man, who had only introduced himself as Specialist Brown.

  “Get your people,” Craig said. Brown sat up with a start, pretending he hadn’t been sleeping. “We got company.”

  In moments, Lt. DuLac had squirreled into Brown’s seat, and Brown and Ryan were leaning over the backs of the chairs. Everyone stared at the blip on the display panel.

  “How long?” Lt. DuLac demanded.

  Craig calculated fuel consumption rates and took new fuel readings as the auxiliary tanks gave up their reserves. “We’ll need to burn most of our fuel and grab as much speed as we can. The Ganymede’ll start a burn too as soon as she sees us light up, but she’s got a hell of a lot more mass to push. We can probably stay ahead of them long enough to approach the inner system. If the intel you’ve cooked up is hot, maybe the Ronald Reagan will enter the belt and haul us out of the fire.”

  “So you think we’ll make it?” Lt. Ryan said.

  “Only if they don’t shoot at us,” Craig said. “My hull is dark and slippery, so they’ll have a hell of a time locking on. They could wait ’til I start my burn, then do it the old-fashioned way—by sight. Most likely they’ll wait to get closer.”

  “How’d they find us?” DuLac said.

  “Probably laying low, watching. They must have picked a few of our acceleration burns, enough to flag us.”

  DuLac drummed her fingers on her arm. “Odds?”

  “Better than even. We’re damned lucky she was so far away when she picked up on our trail. The wild-card is how many other Galilean ships are in front of us, and how far away they are when they get the invite to the party.”

  “What do we do if they come at us head on?” Ryan said.

  Craig looked up at him. Ryan was sweating. Strange that Captain Routan would send someone on a dangerous mission with a case of the nerves. “Head on, we wouldn’t have a chance. We’ll have to discuss options if it comes to that.”

  “We will not be surrendering, if that was one of your options,” Lt. DuLac said matter-of-factly. “Our intel must get through to the fleet.”

  Craig forced himself not to glance at the compartment hiding his junk-thrower. He’d heard the No Retreat, No Surrender line before.

  “Maybe we can broadcast it to the Ronald Reagan when we’re close enough for secure communication,” she said, then shook her head. “Can’t let the Galilean Coalition get it.”

  The Ganymede battleship hailed them a short time later. Brown and Ryan hustled back to the hold while DuLac squashed herself down in the footwell, below the freighter’s camera-eye. She nodded for Craig to acknowledge. His screen filled with the image of a thin man in crisp, gray uniform.

  “You are operating an unauthorized ship in restricted space,” the man stated. “What is your name and purpose?”

  Craig frowned, hoping his scruffy appearance would lend truth to his voice. “Freighter AG-776 from the inner belt, no affiliation. I’m a food runner, shuttling potatoes.”

  “Shuttling potatoes where?”

  “To anyone who needs them.”

  The thin man leaned closer to his camera. “What are the coordinates of your last delivery?”

  “I didn’t make one. I picked up a mayday clear as day a few weeks back and came out. I couldn’t find the sender. I’m heading back in.”

  “You will halt and await inspection.”

  “My potatoes won’t wait. There are a lot of folks who need them farther in.”

  “This is not open to discussion. Hold for inspection.”

  The screen went dark. Craig looked down at DuLac in the footwell. “It’s a weapon, isn’t it?” he said. “That’s what you brought on board. And whatever it is you’ve cooked up against Martian fleet, it’ll work against our ships too, won’t it?”

  DuLac pulled herself out and pushed herself back down into the seat proper. She refastened her chest-harness. “The Galileans,” she said after a moment, “a bunch of religious fanatics, and isolationist fanatics, and just plain fanatics. You can’t imagine what it’s been like. They knew we were here, just not where, so they hunted. Always sniffing around, taking bombing runs at any old asteroid to see if they got lucky. We’ve been bombed three times. Our seismic dampeners held the base together, but we lost Bay 12 two months ago. Lost a lot of good people.”

  “And now you’re out here in a slow, tin can. Was this part of the plan?”

  “We didn’t know you were coming; we never got a response to our broadcast. I had an hour to pack up eight years of personal shit, and one duffel to do it with. I’m here, and Brown too, because we know the intel. There are others with seniority who would have come, but there was no time to brief them.”

  “Intel? Not a weapon?”

  “A little of both,” DuLac said. “This war should be with the Galileans, not the Martians. The corporations—they’re the ones who pushed the hostilities. Now the Galileans are circling. We have to end the war and direct our attention back out this way. We have to beat Mars’ fleet without losing our own.”

  “What does it do?” Craig said again. He never wanted to be involved in the war directly. Sure, he supported Earth if anyone asked, but he was a humanitarian more than anything. Not a weapons courier. Not a soldier.

  “Back in the early days of colonization, they had a rough go of it on Mars,” she said. “The crops weren’t taking well. Something about the gravity and the ozone levels in the domes and the UV leaking through the thin atmosphere. They depended on shipments from Earth, which was expensive.”

  “Was that when Baranto got involved?”

  She nodded. “Baranto crops. Genetically modified for superior yield on Mars. Sterile
so they couldn’t produce viable seeds, but cheap enough that the farmer’s didn’t care. Later, the Martian scientists broke contract and rejiggered the gene-set to make them viable again. But guess what—a lot of those old termination genes are still intact, sleeping. I can wake them up. One x-ray burst at a set of frequencies, harmless to people, and the crops go sterile.” She pointed back toward Hold C. “That’s the calibrated x-ray generator back there, waiting for a firing platform. We hit the Martian ships with that, and within a few weeks they’re out of food and begging to surrender.”

  “Jesus. Is this what you 200 Series outposts dream up?”

  “What we really do is classified, but after years of no contact, we were bored. We’re self-sustaining, so no food stress. We started tinkering.”

  “Why would your x-rays affect Earth ships?”

  “Baranto had a lot of modified crops, not just for Mars. They’re all mixed in with Earth’s current production lines. No way to pull them out.”

  “Shit,” Craig said. If the Galileans knew about this, their isolationist stance would go offensive. They could knock down the fleets of both Mars and Earth. They could irradiate Mars’ remaining biodomes and Earth’s greenhouse fields. They could take over both planets.

  “You can’t openly broadcast it to the Reagan,” he said.

  “I said we’d only do it when we’re close enough for secure communication.”

  “That’s quite a risk.”

  “We need this to win the war.”

  “Like hell! You need it to win the war more easily. But if it gets into Galilean hands....”

  “No, Captain Tai, we need it to win the war.”

  He met her hard gaze for as long as he could, then turned back to the blank transmission screen. “What am I missing? What aren’t they telling us?”

  “Earth’s crossed the tipping point into a new ice age.”

  “Are you serious? How?”

  “CO2’s been dropping for years, ever since the atmospheric scrubbers went on-line. The planet’s already cooled a lot from the run-away global warming. Not that you’d notice it in the cities, but in aggregate. With all this new snow and ice, and the loss of the northern forests for farmland, and the low CO2 levels, it didn’t take much.”

  “How far will the glaciers advance?”

  “Does it matter? So long as the Earth is unstable and still losing real estate and population, there’s no way they’ll restock the fleet. It’ll take years.”

  Craig couldn’t get his brain around that. All of his heroics in saving dozens of stranded researchers, and it was a drop in the bucket beside the billions on Earth. “Why hasn’t anyone negotiated a truce?” he said.

  “The corporations. Why else? You think the merchant collective out of Mars is going to let this opportunity go? Right now they’re telling their governing council that they’ve got us by the balls. They figure if they wait a year or two more, the shipping lanes will be theirs for the taking. They’re probably right. It wouldn’t take much.”

  “Don’t they see how many people are dying?”

  “I doubt they care. Mars is nearly stable now; their die-off is almost over. But our merchant collective is the same—sitting in their palaces in near-earth orbit and wringing their hands over those shipping lanes. Any truce Mars negotiates will involve control of the lanes, and our corporations won’t stomach the loss.”

  “And the fleets go along with it?”

  “The fleets are under the directive of the civilian governments, in case you forgot.”

  Craig pointed his thumb over his shoulder, back toward the hold. “That thing work on the Galilean ships?”

  “We could try, but I doubt it. Back in the old days when missionary fervor swept across Europa, they destroyed most of their modified crops. They wanted to go back to what God intended. Their yields have been crap ever since, but it could turn out to be a lucky break.”

  Craig clenched and unclenched his hands, breathing the atmosphere of recycled air and poorly washed bodies. “That’s a lot of classified information you just gave me.”

  “It’s not related to what we were doing on MO-226, so it’s not officially classified. But yeah, it’s a lot. A lot I can’t let you tell the Galileans if we’re captured.”

  “You’ll scuttle my ship, won’t you?”

  “I always would have, but now you know why. We have to get through or get close enough for a secure broadcast to the Reagan. If we don’t, Earth loses the war and there’s no one left to hold the Galileans in check.”

  “Damn you!”

  “It’s what’s got to be. What we’re doing could save billions.”

  “Are you trying to motivate me, Lieutenant? Believe me, I’m motivated. I don’t want to be captured by the Galileans, but what do you think I can do in a freighter?”

  She climbed from the seat and pushed over to the bulkhead at the rear of the chamber, then gripped the acceleration netting. “I got shaken out of a sound sleep in my bunk and sent out here to die. You think I’m happy about it? I expect you to fire up your thrusters and get me close enough to the Reagan for a secure broadcast!” She slipped her body into the cocoon of the netting.

  Craig glared at her, then slapped the intercom to the holds. “Prepare for first-burn in five minutes,” he said, and started the countdown. She was still beautiful, but a lot less attractive all of a sudden. He climbed into his own shock-netting beside her and closed his eyes. “Maybe we’ll run through a micro-meteor and it won’t matter.”

  “That’s the spirit.”

  On the seventh day of the run, long after the freighter’s thrusters had gone silent, the tracking computer picked up multiple ships on approach vectors.

  “We got two coming in on our eleven o’clock,” Craig barked. “One on our two o’clock high.”

  “Calm down,” DuLac said, joining him at the copilot’s seat. “Time to intercept?” Ryan and Brown joined them.

  “Can’t tell! They’re too far out. The tracking computer hasn’t got enough of a lock on them to calculate velocities.”

  “See?” She gripped his hand and pulled it away from the maneuvering thruster control deck. “They’re too far out. Let the computer run; give it a couple of days. The two o’clock might miss us. Hell, the eleven o’clocks might miss us.”

  “They’ll adjust. They won’t miss.”

  “Calculate the trajectory that’ll give us the longest run.”

  Craig laughed bitterly. “Then what?”

  In response, she energized the freighter’s high-gain antenna and rotated it forward. “Freighter AG-776 to Ronald Reagan,” she said into the audio pick-up. “Freighter AG-776 to Ronald Reagan, mayday mayday mayday. We are approached by four hostile ships. We require assistance. Mayday mayday mayday.” She repeated the message, then turned to Craig. “Broadcast our coordinates.”

  “They’re not going to rescue us,” he said as he forwarded their coordinates. “We’re too far.”

  “Just keep us flying for as long as possible.”

  The Ronald Reagan acknowledged within half an hour. She was coming—she broadcast her reply loud and clear to everyone in the sector. Captain Routan declared the freighter the sovereign property of Earth and ordered the Galileans to back off. None of them responded.

  “You think they’ll back down?” Craig asked. “I mean, there’s four of them against one of us.”

  DuLac shook her head. “The Galileans haven’t dared fight our battleships before, but I don’t like how this looks.”

  With attitude thrusters and directional changes, Craig bought them almost three weeks. He had shunted fuel from most of the attitude thrusters to the main tanks, enough for a two-second burn. Enough for one last change in velocity. He practically slept in his captain’s chair, listening to the Reagan’s periodic threatening broadcasts. One of his three minders stayed at his side constantly, keeping the Ronald Reagan updated with their coordinates.

  Craig could see the Reagan now as a very bright dot beyo
nd the converging Galileans—still a good ten days out. Too far. The timbre of her broadcasts had changed in the past week while the Galileans adjusted their trajectories to match Craig’s.

  “You are in violation of the Treaty of Io,” the Reagan transmitted. “Any attempt to interfere with Freighter AG-776 will be construed as an act of war.”

  Galileans maintained radio-silence. The ship approaching from two o’clock high was clearly a battleship, plumes of gas and flames pouring from her bow as she slowed herself. Both eleven o’clocks had the silhouettes of destroyers, though they were still too head-on to be certain. Those three ships together would be a match for the Reagan. The chasing Galilean battleship that had started it all was weeks behind and would only serve as a witness and maybe salvage.

  “The near battleship will be on top of us in about thirty hours,” Craig said to Lt. Ryan in the copilot’s chair. “The destroyers are starting their turn. Probably going to give cover when the battleship grabs us.”

  Ryan shook his head. “If they stop to grab us, they won’t be able to outrun the Reagan. They’ll have to fight.”

  Craig tried to judge the mass of those ships and how quickly they could add momentum. “I guess they like their chances. Too bad Lt. DuLac’s going to blow us up. We’ll never know who won.” He felt exhausted and helpless.

  “I haven’t scuttled us yet, Captain Tai,” DuLac called from the end of the corridor where she was just emerging from Hold B. “We’ll eject in vacuum suits. The rebreathers and extra tanks will give us almost forty-eight hours of air.”

  “The Reagan’s farther away than that.”

  “Pessimist.” She joined them at the front, staring out the window at the faint shapes of incoming ships.

  The communications array pinged an incoming message. It was from the Galileans, their first contact in weeks. Craig looked at DuLac with his best ‘What do I do?’ look. DuLac gestured Ryan back toward the hold while she wiggled down into the footwell of the copilot’s seat again.