War in the Galaxy
A Science Fiction Novel
Read Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16.
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17
The insurgency was short-lived. Or the first phase of it, if that's what it was. As soon as their commanders realized what was going on, the Merian forces surged troops into every part of the city, supplemented by Kridalians and local law enforcement. Within hours, they had retaken all of the contested ground and flushed the insurgents out block-by-block. Many of the insurgents, presumably members of the Raathi Front, melted back into the city as though they had never been there. Without their weapons and masks, they were indistinguishable from the other city residents.
But that didn't mean there weren't suspects. Every Raathi man between the ages of fifteen and sixty was a potential candidate, and some of the women. Merian commanders worried that in the aftermath of the attacks there would be reprisals against the Raathi community by Kridalian civilians. But racial tensions hadn't been high for years, and many of the attackers had been Kridian or mixed.
Commander Frayer, the officer in charge of the strike group in orbit around Jaff, flew down to meet with city officials and the highest-ranking officer on the ground, Brigadier-General Raclad. Frayer could have appeared by holo, but the nature of the attack demanded his personal presence.
Nearly eighty casualties among the Merians and twice that among the Kridalians. Enemy dead estimated in the upper eight-hundreds, especially since there had been several suicide bombings attempted against the front gates to Darthur Joint Space Base, where the Merian forces primarily resided. Anywhere from one hundred to two hundred civilians were reported dead as well. This was the worst attack by the Raathi Front since the Cahli Desert music festival.
"Chief Dynebolt," Frayer said to the Jaffan police chief who was seated directly across from him at a round plastic table in a secure compartmented room deep in the bowels of Darthur Space Base. The missile defense lasers around the base could shoot down a thousand missiles a second, so anything less than a sustained barrage by a fleet of spaceplanes or an army of tanks wouldn't disturb them. The walls of every building were reinforced with graphene and the walls of the base itself were ten feet thick, making them impervious to any vehicle attacks.
"Yes, sir," replied the chief.
"Do you think you can control your people?" the commander asked. There were ten men seated around the table. The commander, the chief, Brigadier-General Raclad, General Athgrad of the Kridalian forces, two Kridalian colonels, two Merian colonels, the captain of one of the Merian vessels in orbit, and the captain of the closest precinct in the city.
"Of course."
"I'm worried that with tensions this high, there will be temptation to target Raathis, especially young men. The last thing we want to do is have innocent blood on our hands. I'd prefer to keep as many of the Raathi population on our side and not push them into the arms of the Front."
"I've given orders that any of my men who try to take matters into their own hands be imprisoned without trial," said Chief Dynebolt.
"What about the local civilians? Don't you think some of them may be getting some ideas right about now? Especially those who lost family in the attack today?"
"Sir," replied the chief. "My men will maintain order as best we can, but we can't prevent some Kridian teenagers beating up Raathi boys."
"You can try," replied the commander, looking the police chief in the eye. "Our forces will assist you. We can put two marines on every patrol you do, and we will run our own patrols. We're flying down one hundred more assault vehicles, each of them armored against mines and makeshift explosives. We will have one third of those out in the city at any given hour."
"Do you think that's necessary?" asked the chief.
"Chief Dynebolt, I am worried about a lot more than teenage boys beating each other up."
The meeting ran well into the night. By the time the officers involved retired to their beds, Gurney and Heni were out on patrol again. This time, they were riding in an armored vehicle which skimmed over the ground along with their new captain, Brand Starstret.
The two men had reported to an infirmary after returning to base with their Kridalian colleagues and the bodies of Privates Stalfort and Raphi. But they were turned away because their injuries were minor and the infirmaries were all overwhelmed with casualties. Upon entering Joint-Base Darthur, the bodies of their friends had been taken away by robotic orderlies, where they were placed in a morgue and prepared for a mass funeral, which would be scheduled as soon as the Merian and Kridalian forces were done tallying their casualties.
The Kridalians reported back to their barracks to check in with their superiors and Gurney and Heni did likewise. They were told to await further instruction. Both of them, familiar with life in wartime, knew never to waste an opportunity to sleep, so they went to their bunks and slept until the mess opened for dinner. After departing the mess, they were told that the infirmaries were open again and that they were to report immediately to be fully inspected. Other than a quick-healing patch for a burn on Heni’s arm, they were both deemed unhurt, and – since the Merians would be running extra patrols and they were short on uninjured men – told to be prepared to go out on patrol again.
The order came shortly after midnight, and they were roused from their beds by robotic orderlies. They were given caffeine pills to keep them awake and sent down to join a patrol.
While coffee-drinking was still quite common in the Merian Federation, the Merian armed forces used slow-acting caffeine pills to keep their men alert during nighttime duties. These pills delivered a well-timed dose which would heighten alertness and prevent sleep without causing any side-effects. For any fighting which required extended time awake, the Marines were sometimes issued stronger pills with nonaddictive synthetic stimulants – much-improved derivatives of crude, ancient amphetamines – which could keep human beings awake and functioning at a high-level for weeks at a time.
But in all the centuries of space travel, despite medical advances which made most non-life-threatening injuries trivial and which made humanity’s single-planet era look medieval, nobody had ever come up with a way to eliminate the human body’s need for sleep, or even to reduce it materially. All that could be done was to stave off sleep for lengthy periods of time. But these were usually followed by recovery periods in which a person could be rendered practically comatose for days, depending on the length of the waking period.
There were three armored vehicles patrolling together, with Captain Starstret and five privates in the lead vehicle, and six men in each of the other two. Quite a contrast from that morning, when the marines had strolled along the street in teams of six without even substantial armor.
Captain Starstret was a short man with big jaw. He seemed to be one of those officers who prided himself on taking any risk he ordered his men to take, or so Gurney surmised from the fact that he was riding in the front vehicle on a patrol without any other officers, and that he’d joined the very first armored patrol sent out into the city following the fighting that morning. In Gurney’s experience, these officers didn’t last any longer than privates, but then again they couldn’t if they were taking the same risks. In Gurney’s experience, officers and privates who tried to prolong their life by avoiding difficult missions and refusing to volunteer for anything didn’t last all that much longer anyway. It had been a tough war so far, and this new front was shaping up to be another tough fight.
Privately, Gurney was beginning to think that Stalfort had been right. This Kridalian business was a distraction. It wasn’t clear there was any connection between the Raathi Front and the Xing Coalition. Although, on second thought, it wouldn’t be all that unsurprising if there were. The Coalition no doubt wanted to force allies of the Merian Federation out of the war, and if there was a way to pull some Merian troops along too, that would be worth substantial investments.
This was where Gurney decided to stop his train of thought. Thinking could be dangerous on a mission like this one. It seemed to him as equally likely that there was a good reason for being here as not. His job wasn’t to work this out. His job was to go where he was told to go and fight whom he was told to fight. It took quite a bit of intelligence and mental fortitude to control one’s thoughts and to focus on little details in the environment around when on a tedious patrol, even one supplemented by caffeine pills and the too-recent memory of intense firefight. But Gurney forced himself to concentrate his mind on the houses outside the reinforced windows, with their wind-shutters and their dome roofs.
How different the city looked now, in the dark. No residents walked down the streets. No vehicles moved anywhere within ten blocks. Already that morning the city had felt deserted and empty. Now, it felt like an abandoned world – one of the failed projects from early in humanity’s star-flying days, a planet where the atmosphere collapsed before it had time to stabilize and unfinished cities were swept clean, their residents killed instantly.
Gurney was sure eyes were watching them from the houses. A citywide curfew had been ordered, as if the presence of thousands of foreign marines wasn’t enough to keep everyone inside their homes. But there had been no general evacuation, and so each of these homes, though their lights were hidden from the outside, must have residents. And with nowhere to go, what must those residents have been doing except watching the armored vehicles pass by outside?
Centuries ago, anti-light-pollution screening technologies had developed to the point where any city in the universe could be as dark at night as if it had never been inhabited by human beings. Most cities chose to have some streetlights, and many homeowners or apartment operators chose to have decorative lights or security lights at night. These latter had come about in direct reaction to the era of natural darkness, in which cities found that when light at night was cut to zero, criminals had free rein, even when police were equipped with night-vision visors. But modern cities were still much darker than the ancient Terran ones, where every building let its ambient luminescence bleed into the surrounding atmosphere as if to destroy any natural rhythm of day and night.
But while modern cities were darker than ancient ones, they were almost never completely dark. Jaff was completely dark. And though Gurney could see well enough between the light of Quinque’s two moons – Jasper and Redblue, one of which was full – and his night-vision visor, he felt the darkness settle on him like a snowfall on an empty day with a cold breeze. It was hard to believe this was one of the civilized systems with a standard of living almost as high as the outer-worlds in the Merian Federation.
18
When the spaceliner landed in Taranto Spaceport, on one of the more civilized worlds in the Wildprong Province, Lilia Trasker was ready. Dressed in a simple black dress, with shoes that looked fashionable without preventing her from running or jumping, her dark hair combed to fall past one ear and over her shoulder, she waited for the departure call for her cabin section and took her suitcase in one hand.
Long ago, the shipbuilding firms which designed and manufactured the great spaceliners had learned to build their largest ships to be easy to evacuate. This had the added benefit of making exit and entry a simple matter. Despite carrying thousands of souls at a time, the boarding process usually took less than an hour and exit could take a matter of minutes. Large bay doors opened in the hull at dozens of points on each floor, such that hundreds of ramps and stairs emptied out of the ship at any one time. As Lilia joined the throng climbing down these ramps, she looked up and down the gigantic spaceport.
Two other ships were letting out their passengers at that very moment and three more were boarding. On the floors above and below, this same procedure must have been occurring on other ships. She could see on a holoscreen high above the crowds – one which was so far it should have been impossible to read, but due to new screen developments in the last decade, could be read perfectly from a thousand feet away, even without larger letters – that two more ships were incoming and one was preparing to take off. Four more orbited, waiting for their turn to land.
Taranto Spaceport was at the top of an immense space elevator. Once she had reached the floor of the port, and merged with the crowds streaming out towards the foyer and the open air beyond, she would still have to descend forty thousand feet to the planet below. A series of elevator cars, each of which could transport nearly a thousand passengers, made this the short work of ten-minutes ride. Lilia understood than in centuries past, the speed and pressure of these ten minutes would have been unpleasant at best and dangerous at worst. But with the advent of dynamic stabilizing magnetology, any ill effects of the quick drop to the surface were smoothed out, so that the only disturbance a passenger in any of these cars might notice would be the sharply rising landscape out of the complimentary windows.
Mothers held their small children’s faces against their stomachs to protect them from the sight, but Lilia spotted several children sneaking a glimpse at the frightening speed of the clouds outside, a sight which could cause vertigo in the uninitiated. She didn’t bother watching the clouds speed by and the land rise to meet them. She was too busy watching the crowd.
She hadn’t met with Dr. Sideney for the rest of the voyage, despite telling him that she planned to do so. And he hadn’t rung her or stopped by, either.
Lilia was sure Sideney hadn’t forgotten about her. Whomever he was working for must have given him orders not to contact her again.
It was very difficult, but not technically unfeasible, to send and receive messages while in hyperspace. Lilia understood that this had something to do with quantum entanglement, but beyond the basic principle children learned in school, she wasn’t entirely sure how this instantaneous communication worked, other than that it allowed for instantaneous communication with anyone anywhere in the universe.
Even the most sophisticated instruments couldn’t send more than rudimentary messages this way, but Lilia was sure that once the technology improved, the galactic network would grow more robust and livelier than it was today. From her study of history, the network communications technology linking all of the planets in the Milky Way was approaching the computer networks developed on old Earth in the late twentieth century. In the early twenty-first, the digital revolution had suddenly linked all corners of the globe in instantaneous communication, breaking down the barriers of time and space and allowing everyone to participate in a sea of information and conversation.
It was well known that this had led to many unforeseen problems, but that by and large it had allowed for the subsequent revolutions in artificial intelligence, space travel, and regenerative medicine. Lilia wondered what a similar network would do to the Milky Way. She could already send a message to her boss from anywhere in the galaxy, as she had done so as soon as she stepped off the spaceliner. But there was a lag before he could receive it and respond. And it could be expensive, depending on the distance and the size of the message. She wondered what it would be like to make a video call with someone on the other side of the galaxy, and to do that every single day for close to free.
Right now, some solar systems had their own networks. All civilized planets did. Within a planet, you could look up any information you wanted, chat via satellite or wireless with anyone else on the planet, or attempt to hack into any linked computer system on the planet – provided you had the tools to do this, which the agency generally provided its agents as a rule.
But any information you learned on a planetary web was dated. Hard copies of drives with data updates from other planets had to be physically transported from planet to planet and then connected to the local network in order to share news. Beyond breaking updates, there was a delay between events in other corners of the galaxy and learning about them via planetary web.
Lilia had an archaic device which fit into one hand, a small rectangle which could connect with local networks and perform web searches, make calls, send messages, take pictures, and record data. It was very similar to the devices Terran citizens had begun carrying in their pockets in the early twenty-first century when the Earth internet had first exploded in popularity.
Lilia spoke into hers now, making a note of where she was and what she was planning to do. Strictly speaking, this wasn’t necessary. However, she had developed a habit years ago of recording such notes on dangerous missions, when safe return wasn’t sure, in order for her superiors to have something of her side of the story if anything ever happened to her. Lilia did not yet know whether this was going to be one of the dangerous missions.
Lilia spoke in a code language which was only spoken by members of the agency. It had been developed several decades ago, and it was one of the closest-held secrets in the Merian Intelligence Services. Even MIS members outside of the Clandestine Agency didn’t know the language.
For one thing, it had been designed to be very difficult to master. Only after years of training did agents fully understand its odd grammar and cumbersome vocabulary. Still, Lilia spoke in a shorthand which would make it even more difficult for someone to decipher what she was saying. She finished quickly and put the device away inside her jacket.
When the doors of the elevator opened and Lilia stepped out – along with dozens of individuals with wildly varying skin and hair and eyes – into the world of Marielus, she first noticed the copters flitting about between impossibly tall arches. There were only a score or so that she could see, but they stood out against a teal sky so irresistibly stunning it caused her to catch her breath. Around her, she could hear the gasps as the other travelers took in the thin clouds, the soaring trees the size of small mountains, the deep green of the land, and the great columns and arches of the city.
Marielus was known throughout the Federation for its beauty, but to citizens who had known only the bare deserts and cold wastes of harsher planets, or even to those who had known only the mechanized worlds and the interiors of starships, words and pictures couldn’t capture the effect of first setting foot on its ground. They said only Old Earth in its most majestic moments rivaled Marielus, although some preferred the endless oceans and coasts and islands of Raelium, or the snowy forests of Borne. By some combination of geography, proximity to its two suns, orbit, and mild terraforming, the climate on Marielus was so hospitable that Lilia found herself relaxing even though she hadn’t realized she was tense. The weather was nearly always temperate here, and the soil yielded easy harvests every year.
Because terraforming had required so little work and natural resources were so abundant, the cities on Marielus had been built not with an eye to the practical, but rather with an eye to the spectacular. So Lilia found herself staring around as she walked on white streets between soaring columnar structures covered in half-domes rising every thirty feet from the ground to the rooftops. She smiled at staggered arches which dwarfed even the gigantic columns. As luck would have it, her hotel was in one of these arches, on a room very high up near the apex. As she was whisked upwards in another elevator, she could either choose to look out and watch the fading ground below, or obscure the glass with a touch of a finger or a spoken word. She chose to watch the ground.
Her room was similarly designed with an eye towards awe, in that the floor was entirely transparent, such that she could look down through it and see colorful pedestrians nearly one-thousand feet below. It was almost unnerving, because it looked as though she were standing in the middle of the air, with nothing holding her aloft except some unknown current of Marielan wind.
By playing her hand over one wall, she could obscure the floor, too, so that it resolved into a dark paneling resembling obsidian or marble. Or, she could choose something in between, so that she could see the floor under her feet, but still dimly perceive the immaculate streets far below. She kept the floor transparent at first, but eventually decided it was too distracting and obscured it.
Lilia wondered how many visitors kept the floor transparent. She guessed it wasn’t many. Maybe those who wished to wake in the morning to natural light. But one would have to expect that some of these would step out of their beds to relieve themselves in the middle of the night and experience momentary panic attacks as the world seemed to drop out beneath their feet, into the ripped skies of Iaver City at night. She suspected that the vast majority of visitors dimmed the floor very quickly, and that it was left transparent for every new guest not because this was the most common mode, but in because it created the right effect in new visitors – a certain combination of awe and thrill.
When she obscured the floor, the room was plunged into near-darkness. But within seconds, light began to slowly fill the room. A century earlier, innovations in interior illumination had made it possible to light up an entire room without a single defined source of light. Rooms like this one had no overhead lights, no floor lights, no lamps, no bulbs. Instead, a vague and undefined illumination filled the room, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. It wasn’t so much that the walls were all lit as it was that the air itself was lit.
This, too, could be unnerving, so most buildings used traditional light sources instead, even if these provided an uneven and inferior light quality.
There was a small receiver sitting in the center of the desk, which the hotel provided to guests free of charge. It could access local computer networks, send and receive messages, and place calls. As she looked at it, Lilia noticed that she had a message.
Read Chapters 19 and 20.