So It Begins Page 17

  Grim glanced sideways at the scattered, tumbling bits of irregular blackness and greyness that were the trash stream—and suddenly he knew the answer: the attackers’ “ship” was floating past him right now. Their ship was now part of the junk. Sure: each of them had been sealed and launched in a self-disassembling pod. It had had a hull of composites and plastics, rudimentary thrust, life support, comestibles, and was set on a ballistic course, so it required no guidance. When the attackers neared the range at which Eureka’s arrays might pick them out, they—figuratively speaking—pulled their ripcords and let the pods fall, or rather, float, to pieces around them. That way, they could probably have approached to within about 300 kilometers before getting into their vacc suits and preparing for—

  The attack began with a sudden burst of vapor, centered on a bright flash which bloomed and then arced out from the midst of the attackers: a rocket, speeding toward the rad shack. Grim flinched away as a blinding flash coronaed up from the far side of the boxy module, knocking it into a slow tumble as papers and pulped electronic parts vomited out of the huge, jagged rupture in its side.

  Time to return the favor. Grim reactivated the targeting system, leaned into the Cochrane’s sights again, ready to fire—but was surprised to see a question mark glowing on the right margin of the display overlay, underscored with the legend “0G opt?” Grim wanted to spit: goddamn, was this weapon busted already? Goddamned tinkertoy piece of sh—

  Oh, no, wait: Mendez had told him about this. The weapon sensed strong changes in ballistic conditions—such as gravity—and would ask if you wanted an optimum solution. So: “0G opt?” was obviously offering him an optimal firing solution for zero gee. Well, that seemed like a good idea: he edged his thumb up to the “accept” button behind the handgrip, pressed it. The query blinked away.

  Grim focused on the four attackers again: they were still clustered, and at 1400 meters range. He reasoned he might get two of them with the flechette grenade. But how to access the launcher?

  The needed information arose as chapter and verse from Mendez’s endless worship of the Cochrane: “You’ve got three settings, Sarge: main weapon, launcher, or integrated. Just adjust this dial down here—”

  Grim did. The Cochrane identified the ready round in the launcher (the laser-controlled, range-detonated flechette grenade), computed the ballistics (which were pretty clean in free space), and superimposed the firing solution on the current scene: it painted a dim red cone on top of two of the attackers’ vector-projected plots at the time of warhead discharge. Then the image faded, almost blanked out: EMP overload. Damn: moment of truth. Grim snapped the safety off, lined up the weapon until the guidon told him his aimpoint matched the indicated firing solution, and squeezed the trigger—just as the image fuzzed, flickered, and winked off for good.

  For a split second, Grim was sure—again—that the weapon had malfunctioned: the almost imperceptible jolt from the underslung launcher barely tumbled him. But no, he could see the grenade moving briskly downrange. But wait a minute: he could see it? How was that possible? Why was it going so slowly—?

  And then he realized that, in zero-gee, the optimal firing solution was not so much a matter of maximizing accuracy, as it was concerned with minimizing recoil: the munition had been fired with only a tiny bit of force.

  Grim, now moving backward more rapidly, and in a very slow tumble, entertained the brief hope that, because of this minimum downrange bump, he would also remain undetected by the attackers. No such luck: a mere second after he had launched his counterattack, the infiltrators turned toward him, weapons flickering. He twisted his head to keep them under observation: the muzzle flashes were very small, and seemed to occur in short, angry sequences: probably small-caliber weapons, with a maximum three-round burst setting. All common features in zero-gee firearm designs that—ever unsuccessfully—tried to minimize the recoil of conventional rounds. A few self-oxidizing tracers indicated the vector of the fire, which dropped off: having seen that they were wide of their mark, they were no doubt using their own MMUs to correct their tumble before reaiming—

  Almost precisely where Grim had seen the sparkle of their weapons, there was a barely-visible flash, from which extended a small, lateral vapor plume: his flechette grenade. As Grim rolled up slowly toward direct alignment again, he brought the scope up to his eye.

  Seen at the visual equivalent of fifty meters, one of the figures he had targeted was thrashing spasmodically; whether or not he was wounded, it was pretty clear that his suit was vented, probably multiple times. The other figure was a stark contrast: motionless, arms widening slowly, some object—his personal weapon?—had begun to free-float away on a slightly altered vector of its own. The third attacker, who had been at the edge of the area of effect, was also engaged in rapid motions, but these were brisk and methodical, not desperate. Probably one of the missile specialists trying to change over to his personal weapon, realized Grim as he selected the Cochrane’s primary barrel.

  He was approaching the end of his first full 360 degree tumble, briefly wondered if he should use his own MMU to restabilize, then realized that if he did so, he would lose the advantage of getting in another shot before they were ready to respond. But taking that shot would also make his own tumble worse. Mendez had mentioned something about a rear-jet compensator for zero-gee firing stabilization—sort of like a mini-bazooka backblast—but Grim couldn’t recall the details. And since Grim had no time to screw with it, he used what he knew: he spun the propellant dial to the lowest setting—minimum recoil, in case the automatic optimization system has been fried. Then, as he rolled up into correct alignment, he quickly lined up the attacker who had been outside the cone of flechettes, and fired four quick rounds.

  Grim was surprised—and relieved—to find that most of the imparted thrust vectored him directly backward; as he fired, the muzzle brake’s cruciform nozzles selectively vented the weapon’s exhaust to precisely counteract any pitch, yaw, or roll changes to his trajectory. But the Cochrane’s system wasn’t perfect: possibly because Grim had rapped the rounds out so fast, there was still enough off-vector impulse to increase the rate and skew of his tumble.

  As he came around on his first faster, slightly cockeyed rotation, Grim panned the scope across what he estimated had been his target area. At first, he saw nothing—then a faint white plume: he swept back toward that. The plume disappeared briefly, then appeared again, evidently rotating back into view. It was a punctured air-tank, the rapidly venting gases throwing its wearer into an accelerating spin and carrying him on a very divergent trajectory. Judging from the figure’s already muted writhings, he wouldn’t live to see where his new heading took him: Grim guessed that he had hit more than just the backpack unit.

  But now, as Grim continued his own knees-over-nose rotation, he faced two alternatives—neither of which had promising outcomes. Grim could either wait until he completed another somersault, try to access the last target through the Cochrane’s scope (unlikely, given his increasingly erratic tumble) and score some more hits (profoundly unlikely, for the same reason); or, he could let the Cochrane float on its lanyard while he grabbed for his MMU controls to correct his tumble—and thereby allow the other guy to finish getting his personal weapon readied and aimed, and thereby beat Grim to the probably fatal punch. But wait: Mendez had once said, “And here’s the beauty part, Sarge; you can use the Cochrane to correct your tumble—”

  —And then Grim was following his memories of Esteban’s instructions, just as they came to him, word by word—

  “First you set the magazine feed to ‘off’—”

  —Grim did—

  “—so that when you squeeze the trigger, the Cochrane’s muzzle works just like a little rocket. And to counterboost, all you do is reorient yourself—”

  —Grim swung his left arm out, imparting a little spin to his body—

  “—then aim into the vector you need to correct—”

  —Grim aimed down in
to the direction of his roll and slightly to one side—

  “—and fire.”

  Grim squeezed the trigger, leaned into the light recoil, felt his rotational speed drop, saw that the yaw had almost disappeared. He straightened out the tube, fired two more times. And was almost perfectly stabilized. He threw his left arm back across his body to turn around again—toward the enemy—and brought the weapon up to his right eye.

  He got his left hand back on the forestock, saw the starfield sweep past in the scope, caught a glimpse of movement—and then spotted a silhouette against the stars, head hunched down as if taking aim. Hail Mary, now. Grim thumb-selected autofire, twisting at the waist to keep the barrel on-target. He saw angry little flickers coming from the silhouette as he fired.

  Even the Cochrane couldn’t keep up with that insane barrage of thrust-generating discharges: Grim tumbled backward, felt a sharp slap to the back of his head as the spinning began. And that slap was probably death’s calling card: the attacker’s first accurate round had hit his helmet—luckily in the tough rear-plating, probably burrowing into the command electronics for his now useless computer and HUD. But the next round would probably hit something that was soft, would puncture, would release air, would leak blood: would kill him.

  But that next round never came.

  After correcting his madcap cartwheels with the MMU, and maneuvering into the solar lee of a little loping rock that dutifully followed the ruined Rad Shack Four in its slow orbit of the distant sun, Grim waited. And waited. And contemplated his probable wholebody rem dose. And waited some more.

  Almost a full hour later, base finally sent a shielded away boat out to nose among the rocks in the vicinity of Rad Shack Four. When it got within 500 meters, Grim toggled his radio, heard the faint hum of the carrier wave under the EMP static, and said, “Hey. Over here.”

  After a moment of silence, there was the inevitable request for the day code, the countersign, and a curt request from a new voice: “Sitrep, Sergeant Grimsby.”

  “Uh—who is this?”

  “Sergeant Grimsby, my name is Darryl Wilder. I’m—”

  “Yes, sir; I know who you are, sir.”

  A pause.

  “Very well. Proceed.”

  As the away boat made its slow approach, Grim proceeded to give the most respectful, thorough, professional, and utterly boring sitrep of his entire career to date. At the end, he even managed to forget about the rads sleeting through his body long enough to ask, “Any idea who was behind this, Mr. Wilder?”

  “No hard evidence yet, but I’d say it was the megacorporations.”

  “Corporate? Why? They afraid you won’t let them sell Big Macs on Alpha Centauri?”

  There was a long pause. “Sergeant, you seem very sure that our construction project at Eureka has something to do with interstellar travel.”

  Oops. “Uh . . . sorry, sir.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Shouldn’t have said that on open channel, sir.”

  “Hmm . . . no, you shouldn’t have: but your conclusion, and your presence of mind, is promising. So, it seems, is the Cochrane.”

  Grim stared as the gun; the approaching bow lights of the away boat glinted off its selector switch: it seemed like a bright, conspiratorial wink. “Yeah, well—it was okay.”

  “`Okay’? Sergeant, from what our first readable scans are showing, it seems like it was the star of the show.”

  “Sure—but, with all due respect, Mr. Wilder, what if the Cochrane hadn’t worked?”

  “Just be glad that it did work, oh Ye of Little Faith,”—Grim’s Grandmama Rayshawne had used that same expression; didn’t sound right coming from a man—“because if you had had your old Armalite-6, you would have had to conduct a full MMU tumble correction after every shot. How many shots do you think you could have taken that way?”

  “Uh—two. Maybe.”

  “Yes, ‘maybe’—with a capital ‘M.’ Either way, two shots would have been two too few: they came at you with four attackers. A conventional zero-gee weapon couldn’t have engaged them all. But the Cochrane could—and did. You were right to have Mendez leave the Cochrane behind, even if it was against regs.”

  “Uh, sir—”

  “Yes?”

  Grimsby paused: the smart thing to do was to take the credit for keeping the Cochrane at the shack. But—maybe because he had just recalled Grandmama Rayshawne belting out “Sweet Bye and Bye” at First Baptist—he said, “Sir, I didn’t think of keeping the weapon at the shack. That was Mendez.” With any luck, that would earn Esteban enough brownie points for his OCS nod, allowing him to become a less-than-typically detestable shave tail—if he lived long enough. But luckily, Mendez had spent a little time coming up through the ranks, knew to listen to sergeants (usually), and so had a better than even chance of dodging both enemy bullets and the tender ministrations of a late-night latrine fragging.

  Wilder was still talking: Grim tuned back in as he was commenting, “Well, you certainly proved that Mendez made the right choice.”

  “Yes, sir, but I did break a few regs.”

  “Well, I’m not your CO, but it seems to me that if they don’t bust you, they’re going to have to decorate you.”

  “Why’s that, sir?”

  “Well, in addition to single-handedly defeating a sabotage attempt on what you will soon know as Project Prometheus, you just gave the Cochrane a field test the likes of which no weapon has ever had—either in terms of what was demanded of it, or how well it performed. And that in the hands of an untrained operator. Back at Eureka, the testing team all look like they stole grins off a Cheshire cat, talking about how no amount of careful planning can beat plain old dumb luck.”

  “Huh: in my case, very dumb.”

  “Suitably self-deprecating, Sergeant, but not very convincing. When you emerge from your debriefing—which they claim will last a week—we should have a talk about your future. How does that sound?”

  That sounded almost as good as the week-long debrief, which mean a soft, solo bed in officer’s country and real chow, instead of the grey walls of the brig he had been expecting to inhabit for the foreseeable future. “That sounds fine, sir.”

  “Good. Now, one last thing. The fellows up here from Picatinny are so eager to find out if there were any failures or shortcomings with the Cochrane, that they refused to wait for the debrief. So I promised them I’d ask you: did the Cochrane fall short on any of its design parameters, or did it perform to spec?”

  Grim looked down at the gun. “Yes sir, it performed to spec.” Then—because no one was there to see—he grinned. And he thought:

  Yeah; definitely to spec.

  TO SPEC Acknowledgements: For expert opinion and information on the topic of solar weather in general, and the effects of coronal mass ejections in specific, the author gratefully acknowledges the expert input of: Dr. Gordon Holman, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center; Lt. Col. Peter Garretson, USAF; and Russell Howard, a principle investigator in the USN’s SECCHI (Sun-Earth Connection Coronal Heliospheric Investigation) initiative.

  GUNNERY SERGEANT

  Jeffrey Lyman

  (The events in this story take place directly prior to those in “Compartment Alpha”, Breach the Hull, 2007.)

  I dragged my fingertips across rows of sensors mounted just below the gun access-plates. The half-meter hatches at the height of my head had once been yellow, but heat had blistered and chipped the paint. Information flowed from the sensors up through the uplink-pads on my fingers as I walked from one end of the chamber to the other. Everything was in order. Each of my twenty-four guns held a warhead. Twenty-four ordnance conveyers were poised to feed them more. Waiting on my call.

  It was cool in the chamber, but in a day or two, or whenever we ran into the Aylin raiders, it would be a cauldron of ejected gases. I would hang in my gravity harness, shielded from concussion-vibrations, helping Fire Control find weak spots in the Aylin shields.

  I pressed my ear to the ha
tch at gun seventeen. My primary gun, my baby—Lucinda.

  “Gunner Kirchov,” barked a hard, familiar voice. “Are you making love or taking inventory?”

  “Taking inventory, sir,” I replied to the Lieutenant on the screen above me.

  “Get yourself cleaned up. The captain wants you in his conference room.”

  “Sir?” The captain had never spoken to me before.

  “Admiral Geltier’s ship is docking now, and you’re to meet him in thirty minutes. You’ve been reassigned.”

  “But we’re due at Zed Station, sir.” The ship didn’t have enough competent gunners. This reassignment must be important. My heart beat fast.

  “I wasn’t given a choice. Get moving!”

  “Yes, sir. Thirty minutes.” I started a countdown timer behind my right eye and ran for the showers and my dress uniform.

  Twenty-eight minutes later I climbed off of an intership transport near the captain’s quarters. I had never been this far forward. I saw a familiar face as soon as my shoes hit deck.

  “Sergeant Conner,” I said, grinning.

  “Ain’t this the shit, Kirchov? You know what this is about?”

  “No idea.”

  “I hear the admiral needs gunners,” Conner said. “This could be an attack mission.”

  We high-fived. About time. Fleet had been floundering for a year, trying to defend far-flung worlds from the aggressive Aylin raiders, unable to engage the enemy in a meaningful battle while they scourged system after system. Rescue ships couldn’t pick up citizens fast enough. Refugees were piling up.

  My countdown timer reached one minute. “Don’t want to be late,” I said, and held my palm over the scanner at the captain’s conference room door. It slid aside and we stepped through.