War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, and 14.
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15
Lilia made her way down to the engine rooms, which lay deep in the lower levels of the starliner. The agency had, of course, furnished her with the requisite papers, so all she had to do was flash her badge at the right guards and scan an access card at the right doors and she was inside the nuclear plant. If anyone checked the logs later, her credentials came with a self-erasing feature which automatically deleted any log entries. As far as the starliner was concerned, she was a ghost.
Lilia had once been told as a child that on Old Earth in the American Republic there had existed a regional divide over what one called the sugary, carbonated beverage popular in those days. Similarly, a regional divide in the Merian Federation existed over whether one called the great ships which sailed through the eternal night “starliners” or “spaceliners.” (For that matter, there were several dozen minor languages recognized within the Federation.) Lilia found herself constantly switching between the two. She needed to remember which word her alias would have used and stick to that one.
By the time she arrived in the nuclear plant, she had donned a blue and gold suit which would protect her from the radiation. Blue and gold were the colors of the uniforms of the Nebulae Company – who owned the starliner she was traveling on.
She walked with purpose and no employees paid her any notice. Lilia had always found that if she maintained the right cast to her eyes, everyone around her assumed she knew what she was doing and was in the right place.
She passed parties of men wearing overalls under their anti-radiation uniforms. They were whistling and a few were singing one of those songs of workingmen everywhere – fifty percent of which are invariably about mythical places far away where you can fish all day and you never have to work and the sun always shines and food and alcohol never run out. The other fifty percent are about women and beer. This song was one of the former, and it ran along lines she had heard before. Clothing magically cleaned itself and no one ever had to take a bath. Policemen all came up lame or let off minor offenders. There were no taxes or duties. No one ever had to dig a ditch or push a plow.
She walked through a breakroom, where there was a newly-printed book lying on a coffee table next to a ready-to-order cup of chilling coffee and a packet of nicotine sticks. The loud cover caught her eye. It was a copy of Think – How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Greatness with Your Greatest Superpower, which had come out the previous year. At ninety-eight pages, it was exactly the right length for modern attention spans, and its message was sufficiently easy to comprehend that it sold ten trillion copies. Every spaceport sold it.
Written by self-described “guru,” Mat Juansen, Think told a simple story about how ordinary people could tap into the ninety percent of their brains which went unused, all by using the power of positive concentration. Positivity, it turned out, was the forty-fourth dimension, which had only recently been discovered by researchers on the planet Ant-Hrax. Nobody had ever heard of Ant-Hrax, but in a galaxy as large as the Milky Way, there were kingdoms which had existed for centuries the name of which most people never encountered.
Think demonstrated through a series of short, pop-up holographs in the twelfth chapter how three mental exercises performed for five minutes every morning could allow a person to effortlessly tap into the forty-fourth dimension, which would unlock access to the dormant ninety-percent of their brains, which everyone knew contained the abilities of levitation, telekinesis, and telepathy.
“Try it for yourself. It worked for me,” declared one blurb on the front, from a science journalist at one of the weekly periodicals out of Kenthorpton.
“Just wait until you realize why they’ve been keeping this from you,” declared another, this one from a popular holovision host.
“Stop what you’re doing right now. This is the most important book you will ever read,” proclaimed a book reviewer at a prominent mainstream newspaper.
Lilia continued on past the breakroom into the control room for the reactors. Here, she was greeted with skepticism.
"Hallo," said a man with a thin mustache and an even thinner face. As soon as she opened the door, he hopped up from the terminal he'd been crouched over. "What's this? Who're you? Are you supposed to be here?"
Lilia strode confidently into the room. "My name is Lilia Trasker," she said. "I work for the Clandestine Agency of the Merian Intelligence Services." This time she flashed her real badge.
Two taller men wearing guard uniforms were at that moment walking up alongside her and all of the technicians had jumped up and spun around to face her. The pencil-mustache man nodded to the two guards. "Check her badge," he said.
They closed on her. Their heads nearly touched the low ceiling. Lilia extended her badge, her arm relaxed, her eyes watching theirs. One of them took it for a moment, flipped it over, then handed it back to her. He nodded.
"Yeah, she's good," he said. "She's the one they told us about."
Given that the spaceliners were often the size of small moons, and carried enough nuclear payload to irradiate a small planet, the agency was in the habit of sending its agents to check up on the starliners' safety measures, among other things to ensure there wasn't another terrorist attack like 11/22. On November 22nd, 2745, a group of radical Buddhist terrorists had hijacked a spaceliner headed for Quom IV and crashed it into the surface of Beorjn - a large moon orbiting the twelfth planet in the Sindari system. Beorjn had a population of nearly a billion at the time and the terrorists set off a nuclear meltdown in the engines immediately before impact. Every person onboard, and every citizen of Beorjn had died. In the intervening centuries, nobody had tried to re-terraform its surface. To the present day, vigils were held throughout the Sindari system on that date.
The agency had its nuclear team, but they also liked to have any of their agents onboard starliners for any long duration stop down in the engine room to check on things. Lilia had been given a list, and as she had walked past the automated control rods and the robot stations, she had glanced to see that everything was in order.
"It was too easy for me to get in here," she told the man with the pencil mustache. "There wasn't a single alert sent to any of your surveillance systems, even as I clearly had never been inside before."
"Noted," said the man with surprise. He looked around as though unsure what happened next. "Do you have any other recommendations for us? I assume this is one of the periodic checkups? Your agency notified us that one of those would be happening this week."
"Yes," said Lilia, striding forward towards the holoscreens. "I'm not on the nuclear team, but I am here to do some inspecting. So far, everything seems to be in order, but again, I'm not an expert. Do each of you have your credentials?" She pointed around at the various technicians, all of whom were still standing in place, staring at her. "Sorry," she added. "It's just that, as far as I'm concerned, the most likely threat isn't going to be any malfunctioning of the equipment, or any rogue automated system, but people."
They continued staring at her for a second. Then, simultaneously, they began furiously rummaging through their pockets. One man held out his badge to her on a lanyard he'd pulled from his neck. She inspected it.
"It's obvious," she said. "The most likely sort of attack isn't going to be a Xing interdicter spinning up and hacking us here in the middle of hyperspace. Besides, our navy's got twenty fighters aboard to prevent that. And your systems are isolated, and unlikely to be penetrated by even the most sophisticated of Xing swarm networks. If there's going to be an attack on a spaceliner of any kind within Merian space, it's going to come from an insider."
She handed the badge back to the man and turned to take one from a five-foot woman wearing old-fashioned glasses – which these days were only for style.
"Wait, did I pass?" asked the lanyard man.
Lilia turned back to him. She smiled. "I don't know yet. I'll run your names through my database later and see what I find on each of you." She turned back to the short woman. Lilia enjoyed this part of the job.
After reading everyone's credentials, she asked the pencil-mustache man to take her on a tour through the rest of the facility, which he obliged. Throughout the tour, he gave the flustered impression of a man trying to let her know how flustered he was without coming out and saying it. She must have caught him in the middle of something important. When she left, she went back to her room and punched the names of all the technicians – which she'd memorized – into her private access port, which connected her to the agency's secret databases. Each port stored the latest version of the database, and it automatically updated whenever it was brought within agency headquarters. She had to go through five rounds of biometric security and put in two separate passcodes to verify it was her. Then she went through each of the names.
They were all good.
16
On their first day, Privates Stalfort, Gurney, and Heni were assigned to patrol a neighborhood in the city of Jaff alongside three Kridalian infantrymen – Raphi, Gurio, and Adayam. They moved in a loose formation down a dusty street, past stucco houses, holding their weapons ready, unsure whether to expect any attacks or not. There hadn’t been any bombings in Jaff, but it had a high Raathi population.
The stucco homes were mostly the same – round rooves, arched doors, yellow-grey walls. The street itself was yellow with dust, barely passing as paved. Since most vehicles in the Kridalian Republic could skim lightly over the surface of the ground, streets were rarely built out of magnetic conveyers – or even asphalt. If the ground was packed hard enough, the pressure from the passing scooters and skimmers would keep the surface stiff. Walking on it gave one the illusion of walking on paved, yellow asphalt. But it was nothing more than hard-packed sand with a binding agent sprayed on it.
Adayam and Gurio carried projectile weapons which fired silent darts. Raphi was carrying a minesweeper and scanning the ground and buildings ahead of them as he walked along. The Merian marines had been issued old-fashioned ballistic rifles.
“Remind me again,” said Private Stalfort, “Why we are carrying these things? The dust could get inside and jam them. Probably already has. I think I’ve lost the ability to taste with all the dust in my mouth.”
“Maybe if you didn’t walk with your mouth open,” said Private Heni. The joke was twofold. Their helmets enclosed their entire heads, all the way down to them armor on their necks. The helmets automatically filtered any air which came inside.
“Maybe it’s payback for me opening my mouth when that rich bloke came to talk to us.”
“You did give him rather more detail than I think high command would have liked.”
“Well, he seemed to like it,” replied Stalfort. “Maybe when I get out, I’ll go look him up and see if I can get a job.” He shook the rifle he was holding. “But seriously. These are archaic. What are we doing carrying them? I think they carried these weapons in the world wars in the twentieth century. I’m sure there’s no point.”
“The Raathi Front wear electrum shields,” said Gurio from across the street. It was so quiet where they walked, that they could easily hear him. “No laser weapons.”
The electrum shield, as it had come to be known as, created an interdiction field around a human body which repelled fire, shockwaves, percussive explosions, and any blade over an inch. A direct hit from a mortar might kill the wearer with a concussion, but it wouldn’t penetrate the shield. But the worst effect was its reaction with lasers. Any laser which crossed the shield would set off a chain reaction which reversed back up the beam and created an explosion at the source of the laser. The shield itself would explode, too.
Generally, electrum shields were only worn by the suicidal, given the prevalence of laser pistols among the general population. Small-caliber bullets and thin darts could penetrate them anyway, so they were rarely used by law enforcement or militaries. According to the history books, the electrum shield had been invented in the twenty-fourth century. But Heni had read a twentieth-century novel about a desert planet with gigantic sandworms in which the author described a reaction between lasers and protective personal shields which caused explosions in much the same manner, and so Heni assumed the technologies in question must have been developed much earlier and only come into common use in the twenty-fourth century.
A small vehicle drove by. This one was on wheels. The six men stopped and stepped back from the street. They held their weapons ready. All of them wore armor, but a well-timed vehicle explosion would leave them concussed nearly to death if they were lucky.
The vehicle passed by without incident. None of the men had been holding his breath, but they relaxed in the manner of ones who had just resumed breathing.
Then a grenade fell out of a second-story window and another came out of a doorway which had only opened that moment. The vehicle stopped at the end of the street and the doors were opened just enough for two gun-barrels to poke out.
Heni tossed a grenade-catcher onto the first grenade and Raphi deployed his minesweeper’s magnetic shield which could dampen a grenade’s impact. The first grenade detonated softly inside the grenade-catcher and the shield took the brunt of the second grenade, although small pieces of the road rattled all over the six men’s helmets.
More gun barrels poked out of the windows of the houses above them and men with guns appeared on a roof ahead and to their left. Gunfire came from an open doorway ahead to their right. The six men tried to take cover in doorways and against walls, aware that at any time more terrorists might appear behind them. They returned fire, aiming especially for the parked vehicle, which probably had no armor. They were rewarded when bullets from twenty-second century rifles ripped right through the vehicle and two bodies slumped out of the doors, their guns falling uselessly to the ground.
Gurney saw on his feed that similar attacks were erupting around the city. It appeared a large-scale, coordinated insurgency was in bloom. But he had no time to focus on it, because he had to train his fire on the men on the roof, one of whom had a laser rifle. More grenades were tossed and this time there was no grenade-catcher to throw on them. Raphi managed to stop two of them, but they broke his minesweeper and he had to pull a pistol out of his belt and dodge into a nearby alley.
He never made it to the alley. Another grenade went off near his head, tearing his helmet from his shoulders and throwing fragments of his body all over the street.
Gurney deployed a miniature drone he carried in his belt, no larger than a quofle ball. It flew up into the air, dodging around the small shells and laser fire. The automated control system which operated it could sense trigger pulls, plot trajectories, and react faster than it took a bullet to travel six yards. Its propulsion system could move it out of harm’s way in nanoseconds, and so it usually managed to avoid incoming fire for several minutes.
It only had enough battery life for ten minutes of this quick maneuvering, and the only weapon it had was a small incendiary device better for little beyond a quick explosion. But the little drone did manage to find its way into the building over Gurney’s head and the subsequent explosion blew all the windows out. He ignored the glass trickling off his helmet and looked over at Heni, who gave him a thumb-up.
The anachronistic thumb in the air to signal something was good had died out several centuries ago, but various militaries had kept it alive because of how useful it was in conveying quickly a short message in the heat of a firefight. Heni was at that moment lying against the roadway on the right side of the street firing up at the windows on the opposite side of the street. Gurney and Stalfort were in the doorway next to him crouching low. Gurio and Adayam were flat against the wall on the opposite side of the street firing at the doorway ahead of them on the right side.
Stalfort was managing to keep the heads down on the roof ahead, but the man with the laser rifle kept sticking his barrel over the side and firing indiscriminately. Some of the others did that with their automatic rifles. Some of these shots came too close for comfort.
“Does anyone have any exploding rounds?” asked Gurney over his mic. But nobody did.
Just when things were beginning to look grim, three drones flew up the street from the south branded with Merian flags. Their automated targeting systems made short work of the men on the rooftop and the men at the windows drew back inside the house. Shield-screens slammed up against the inside of the windows just as tiny missiles detached from the undersides of the drones. The missiles exploded off the windows, shattering the glass, but making no impact on the shields. Glass and pieces of the windowsill rained down on the men below.
Gurney took control of the drones once they were within range. He had them shoot the doors in on the houses where the insurgents were hiding. Heni had said he thought some shooting came from a third house, so Gurney had the drones blow that door in as well. He sent one drone inside each house. Within seconds, he'd lost contact with two of them. The third drone explored the entire house Heni had indicated and found nothing. Gurney sent it up into the air to look down on the other two houses and watch to see if any insurgents tried to make it out the back or out the windows. Then he nodded to the other four men.
It was agreed that Stalfort would be the first man through the door. They tossed a few grenades and waited until the explosions died away. Then Stalfort dashed inside and Gurio was right behind him. Gurney and Heni positioned themselves below the windows on either side of the door. They shot the windows in and dove through, entering mere seconds after Stalfort.
The gunfire had started before they came through and Gurney could feel his armor absorbing hits. It was difficult at first to pinpoint the location of the shooters in the smoky darkness, but his helmet found them. He dove behind an upholstered armchair while firing back into what appeared to be a kitchen.
A laser rifle sliced through the armchair and nearly took his arm off. He dropped to the floor and rolled as the laser passed over his head. As he popped up, he took aim at the shooter, but already small darts were ripping the shooter to shreds as Gurio and Adayam trained their fire on him. Heni was shooting up the stairs at two insurgents, and was rewarded when both tumbled to the base, their weapons dropping from their hands. When they stopped firing, all of the insurgents on this floor were dead. They looked around.
Private Stalfort was lying on the floor near the front door with a smoking hole through his chest where the laser had caught him. Adayam and Gurio were crouched just behind him inside the door, but other than a burn on Adayam's right shoulder, both were unhurt. The man with the laser had taken aim at Gurney as soon as he'd come through the window and that had allowed the two Kridalians to make it inside the front door.
They had no time to breathe. Another insurgent appeared at the top of the stairs, but Gurney brought him down before he opened fire. They climbed cautiously to the upper level, but found it deserted. The drone killed two men trying to climb out of one of the back windows of the other house. When they cleared that house, they found only one insurgent left alive, wounded in the upstairs bedroom.
All across the city, similar incidents were taking place as firefights ended and the Merian forces took stock of their positions. The bodies were carried back – Stalfort, Raphi, and others from around the city – and buried on the base outside the city walls.