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Ashley Browning swings a daughter around as a pregnant Laelkii and another child look on. This random sketch is, of course, set years after the vignette below. Paradox created by M. C. A. Hogarth and used with permission. Artwork is not necessarily canonical.
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Collateral Damage
A vignette by Dave Bryant
Characters and background created by MCA Hogarth and used with permission
This work is copyright 1998 and is not in the public domain
For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue.
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Locksley Hall, l. 119 [1842]
War is chaos. This fundamental, universal truth had always been hammered into human officers and ratings throughout their terms of service. The Alliance Fleet, in horrified dismay, was rediscovering it. Fortunately, the shape-shifting Chatcaava seemed equally surprised by it—else the war, and the Alliance with it, might have found a speedy and ugly end.
The Fleet was actually fighting on two fronts; the empire that had challenged it was only one of its opponents. The other was its own organization and inexperience. Officers, vessels, and newly raised regiments were shuffled in an atmosphere of thinly disguised desperation, and the Terran Army and Space Navy scrambled to provide the lessons and cadres that would stiffen and reform a service that, previously, had seen duties more akin to those of a coast guard than those of a blue-water navy in the Age of Steam.
A number of hulls, some of them major assets, had been lost to suddenly inappropriate doctrines—most notably a tendency to operate alone rather than as part of battle groups or squadrons. This problem was being rectified, but it would take time. Until then, individual commanders were forced to rely on guile and wit to preserve their ships and to strike at the enemy. Some were better at it than others.
One of the best was Alysha Forrest of the Paradox-class battle cruiser Star Dancer. She had the sort of mind that characterized so many of history’s military legends: cool, quick, razor-sharp, analytical, and equally importantly, possessed of that ineffable, ruthless quality often labeled “killer instinct”. It had already brought her a handful of victories, even this early in the war, and such success is always noticed. Unfortunately, not all the rewards attendant to this notice are as welcome as citations or commendations; along with the congratulations often comes new assignments—the nasty, deadly ones requiring the sort of skill and survival instinct that earned them in the first place.
The current mission was a classic example of the kind. Deep, stealthy penetrations by manned and unmanned intelligence-gathering forays had uncovered evidence of enemy activity in a small, otherwise unremarkable system well back from the Alliance’s side of the battle zone. The profile provided to Forrest and her staff was long on speculation and short on hard information, a common failing in wartime. It was up to them to gather more of the latter in order to clear up some of the former.
And so it was that Star Dancer, its duster fully operational, pursued a carefully plotted cometary path into the system, intending to swing close around the battered planetoid that seemed to be the focus of the alleged “activity”, whatever it was, and then out again, its sensors drinking in all the data they could absorb. Analysis could come later, once the ship was safely away again. The largest complicating factor was the relatively dense accretion disk that made up most of the rest of the system.
Refining the high-speed parabolic pass had taken considerable effort. Even in a dense asteroid belt, debris larger than gravel is widely scattered, drama videos to the contrary. But Star Dancer’s passive defenses, powerful as they were, would not stand up to the impact energies of a single small asteroid at such closing velocities. Without a reliable ephemeris for the system, Navigation was forced to play a conservative game, rejecting projection after projection, seeking one that yielded the best chance for avoiding any such collisions.
Best, however, is a relative term. Everyone aboard knew their voyage could end suddenly in a fireball large enough to be seen by the remaining ELINT assets in the region. Voices were low and tension was high as the battle cruiser, under full combat alert, hurtled toward her target, all passive sensors wide open, all active systems locked down to avoid betraying their presence.
Submunitions Drone Three One Three was typical of its kind. It and its stick-mates, like dozens of other sticks of drones, floated among the raw stuff of future planets, nearly as inert as those chunks of rock. Only its communication receptors and a small, inefficient duster operated, reducing its sensor cross section to that of a small boulder; other “stealth” techniques, known for centuries by nearly all spacegoing cultures, further shrank the apparent image it would register. The idea was to escape the notice of even a scientific vessel sweeping through the area.
All the real intelligence was invested in a nearby drone crammed with a high-resolution passive suite trickling a steady stream of data to multiply redundant expert-system computers. At the vanishingly short ranges a dusted ship could be detected even indirectly, there would be only seconds to reach a decision and act on it. The designers were fully aware of this and had done their best to meet the challenge. Their efforts were about to undergo the acid test.
Star Dancer closed the gap on the utterly ordinary-looking rockball on which so much attention had been lavished. Her bridge crew and scientific section were openly puzzled. Signs of construction had been duly recorded, but even looking at the raw data in real time revealed little more than foundations and clusters of prefabricated structures—certainly not the degree of completion implied by the amount of traffic detected by the intelligence operations.
“Something is very wrong here,” muttered Alysha Forrest. The charcoal-furred digitigrade feline leaned forward in her seat, narrowed eyes flicking up and down over video displays. There were engineer crews at work, but no sign of significant combat forces. “Where is the guard force?”
“Off the far side? Or scattered through the disk, perhaps?” Commander Alastar Virgil responded coolly, her own gaze locked on smaller displays at her workstation.
Forrest sat back absently. “Maybe. Do we have enough bandwidth to spare for a quick scan of the surrounding area?”
The other Karaka’an smiled faintly. “We’d better.” Her fingers danced purposefully across the console and displays, diverting some of Star Dancer’s considerable sensory capability to a wider search. As she worked, she commented jokingly, “Perhaps we could consult with our resident civilian expert.” That earned the response for which she’d hoped: muted chuckles diluted the bowstring-taut mood in the air.
The civilian “expert” in question was decks below and well aft, trotting along behind a damage-control party busily conducting a last-minute pre-action check in its assigned sector. Ashley Browning was clad in an ordinary space suit, more flexible but less armored than the hard-suits worn by the ensign and ratings he followed. Occasionally he paused to aim a hand imager. As part of the artist-observer program, it was his job to set down in words and pictures his impressions of life and battle aboard Star Dancer. Somewhere between the Terran officer who’d alluded to combat correspondents and the actuality, something got lost in the translation—many of those swept up in the program weren’t journalists—but overall it seemed to be working well enough, the tall, thin, black-furred Asanii man mused.
The party worked efficiently despite the slight clumsiness of their armor, doing what they could to prepare for the possibility of battle. Ash knew, perhaps more so than the young ensign, that there was very little that hadn’t already been done and checked—but activity reduces the tendency of the mind to dwell on unpleasant imaginings. So they worked.
“Right. Okay, let’s work our way outboard.” The anonymous humanoid forms, only the occasional tail or digitigrade legs showing who was what, turned a corner and jogged down another corridor, then found another paralleling the first. Like all large Fleet vessels, Star Dancer’s interior was nearly as luxurious as a passenger liner, the passages green with plants, landscaping softening the hard angles of many interior spaces. It was a powerful sign to distinguished visitors of the Alliance’s wealth and philosophies, and made long-duration assignments easier to tolerate psychologically. Unfortunately, it also made securing the habitable sections against battle damage nearly impossible; vegetation and decorative structures would not survive precautions like depressurization or shutdown of gravity control.
As he passed a small observation lounge, Ash took a moment to get a shot through one of the ports of the haze of sand and gravel marking the accretion disk just minutes away. The ensign stopped and turned as her team continued on. “Mister Browning,” she said with mild impatience. Bad enough the man was dogging their heels in the first place, but they couldn’t keep up their schedule if he insisted on stopping like this.
“Okay. Sorry.” The middle-aged plantigrade feline actually did sound apologetic, she was gratified to note. He lowered the imager and moved around her as she turned back to catch up with her team.
Three One Three’s controller focused on a transient that shivered momentarily across a small arc of its view. The datum was evaluated. It was well out of the plane of the ecliptic, a value-neutral piece of information, but everything else about it fit, within acceptable limits, the profile of a large duster field close by, enclosing a large mass under power. And no recognition codes had been received. The orders under such circumstances were very clear indeed. The controller pulsed out a single omnidirectional microwave chirp of highly compressed, highly encrypted data, telling its stick of submunition carriers—mines by any other name—where and what the target was, and releasing them to weapons-free status. Three One Three and its fellows needed nothing more.
The duster field went down. Its task was over, and the considerable electrical power it consumed would be better used elsewhere—namely in the railgun frameworks caging the submunition dispensers ringing the small lattice-and-module structure, and in the position control system. The latter was very little more than a huge, heavy gyroscope at the drone’s center of mass. It spun up from its normal rate of rotation to a blur and was gently and carefully nudged, causing Three One Three to precess on its axes, pivoting smoothly to track on the approaching contact. No jets spurted from the small vehicle, illuminating it to observing sensors.
The moment Three One Three’s comparatively simple onboard targeting achieved a solution, the gyro was braked, bleeding off energy that was converted into yet more electrical power and, along with nearly all the small power plant’s total output, surged in a massive spike to the railguns. If anyone had been present to see, the submunitions would have seemed simply to vanish from their cages, so rapidly were they catapulted toward the intruder.
“Multiple inbounds!” Commander Virgil shouted, even her normal calm broken by the sudden appearance of entirely too many small, fast-moving missiles beelining unerringly toward Star Dancer’s course. Immediately, a low babble broke out as officers bent over their controls, frantically working to answer the abrupt assault.
Captain Forrest snapped out cool, crisp phrases to bring direction to their actions. “Point defense, pick your targets. No point in trying to hide any more. Bring down the duster. Put up the shields. Brace for impact.”
That took most of the time left before the first waves reached the battle cruiser. Three One Three’s load was not among them. Short-range defensive weapons, mounted specifically to move rapidly from target to target, tried to stem the tide. Explosions blossomed, and the sudden noise across much of the electromagnetic spectrum both alerted the nearby installations and half-blinded Star Dancer herself. Those few munitions that punched through the pandemonium arrowed in, only to be caught just short of the ship’s defensive fields, against which their death rattles flared brilliantly.
“What do we have?” Alsyha asked, tone urgent, but only slightly less unruffled. She spared a quick glance at Alastar, who did not even look up.
“Short-range torpedoes, it would seem. But there are a great many of them. We may reach target saturation very soon under these conditions.” The first faint trace of worry underscored the scientist-officer’s words.
“That’s a damned big number of entropy packets to be throwing around,” came the rhetorical reply.
“I don’t think they’re packets, Captain, but I’m not quite sure what they are yet.”
Volley after volley raced in toward destruction, seeking to visit it on the ship still closing at tremendous speed. Alastar Virgil was right. Entropy packets were the best offensive weapon around, but they were expensive. These were not. Based on proven, centuries-old technologies scaled up to starship-killing sizes, they were cheap and easy to manufacture in numbers great enough to overcome their lesser effectiveness—and to marry them to small, sophisticated platforms scattered across space in silent minefields.
Three One Three’s warload plunged into the red and yellow inferno now raging almost continuously around the battle cruiser. Most of them were picked off or detonated prematurely in warhead fratricide. But two ran the gauntlet all the way to the field perimeters. At the last moment, the first tumbled, smearing across the shimmering network of energy in a long, narrow tongue of searingly bright energy. This would tell the commander everything she needed to know . . . but the second warhead was much too close behind the first for any kind of warning to form in her mind, let alone be spoken.
The deceptively small projectile, with a final nudge of attitude cold-jets, lined up for a square-on impact with the fields limned by its predecessors. The instantaneous deceleration it experienced, measured in hundreds of thousands of Gs, was exactly what it needed to function properly. A slug of metal about the size and shape of an old fifty-five-gallon drum, precisely shaped and doped, vaporized into a jet of plasma that was effectively needle-sharp, spearing into the energy field, which suffered a momentary partial failure under the horrific load. Like the glowing finger of an angry god, the jet blazed across the gap separating it from the hull itself.
Where it struck, it was the next best—or worst, depending on one’s view—thing to a very localized fusion explosion. The hull armor, such as it was, resisted just enough to turn the jet into an expanding cone of fire flooding inward; gobbets of white-hot melted hull metal spewed across an even wider arc. The ship’s outer skin glowed and softened meters beyond the round, slumping penetration itself.
Star Dancer shuddered; rolling thunder rang her like a bell. Whole compartments simply disappeared in the near-thermonuclear violence. Debris sleeted through internal bulkheads that were not destroyed outright. It took more than a second for the blast to expend itself. But events were far from over.
Explosive decompression blew through damaged sections, causing brief tornado-force winds, multiplying the destruction. If it could move, it went. If it could not, it was battered and warped. Power failed in skipping blackouts, and gravity control wavered here and there; where it cut off entirely, what few unattached objects remained pinballed lethally.
On the bridge, ship diagrams suddenly bled with warning icons, and the frantic activity reached a fever pitch as the damage claimed still more attention from officers already much too busy beating off the remaining bombardment. Damage control parties converged, quickly but carefully letting themselves through the isolation doors from undamaged segments into scenes from hell.
One team had its hands more than full already. Heading back inboard at the moment of Three One Three’s last gasp, they had no time to react before secondary fragments showered into the compartment. The phenomenon, called spalling, results when a thick metal surface is subjected to hammer-force blows; the opposite side sheds flakes and scabs of metal. If the blow is hard enough and the surface large or thick enough, those flakes become deadly projectiles in themselves.
The ensign, at least, did not suffer. A flat, wickedly ragged shard sliced like a buzz saw into her armor and upper torso and stuck there, imparting its kinetic energy to her body and flinging more than two hundred kilograms across the corridor to slam Ashley Browning solidly into a bulkhead. Decompression hurled both of them around like peas in a box. No soft-suit was designed to stand up to this abuse, and Ash’s faceplate starred. He didn’t notice; unconsciousness claimed all his attention.
It was long minutes before the barrage slackened. By that time, Star Dancer was on her way outbound. Only one other warhead had found its mark, skimming a ragged trench across the hull, but causing less damage than Three One Three’s. The crew did not reduce its pace—there was still far too much work to do. There were ships to evade, ships that had suddenly lit up and accelerated to pursue from their lazy drifting in the disk. There was damage to deal with. And there were casualties to attend.
The pursuit was easily outpaced, especially as half-hearted as it was. Damage-control parties quickly had matters as much in hand as they were going to be. Endless-seeming hours later, Alysha Forrest tiredly threw herself into the chair behind her desk, taking a brief respite in her office from the after-action havoc. She had good officers and a good crew. They knew what to do, and hovering over them wouldn’t help and might hurt.
A chime sounded, followed by a somewhat shaky voice. “C-captain?”
“Yes?” Alysha’s reply was as crisp as ever, leading by example. But the action just past was enough to rattle most people, even trained professionals, so she let the other’s tone slide. “What is it?”
“This is the Medplex. I, ah, think you’d better come down here. Sir.”
The dark Karaka’an sighed. “Is it urgent?”
“Um. Yes. I think it is, Captain.” By now the voice was recognizable, though still stressed, and Alysha frowned. One of Chief Medical Officer Laelkii Takara’s assistant physicians. She started to wonder why it wasn’t the CMO herself who’d called.
“All right. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
The purposeful bustle of Medplex did not surprise her. The absence of her good friend, who should be directing that bustle, did. She caught the arm of a passing nurse. “Where is Doctor Takara?”
The younger woman blinked at her with an odd, almost frightened expression. “She’s in ICU two, Captain, right over there.” When Alysha looked over at the indicated door, the nurse scurried off to continue her errand. The captain dismissed her from consideration and strode determinedly toward the intensive care unit.
The scene that greeted her explained a great deal. The efficiently designed chamber held a halo-arch bed, fold-down surfaces and cabinetry that would turn it into a small operating theater, and a gel-tube. Sitting in a desk chair, rumpled and somehow shriveled-looking, was Laelkii, her gaze locked on the gel-tube. Alysha’s eyes were perforce drawn to it, and the breath went out of her.
Floating in the tube was a nude male figure. Since there was only one man on the ship, Alysha knew immediately it had to be Ashley. The Asanii’s blunt-muzzled face was mostly covered with a breather mask, but his body clearly showed considerable abuse. “Oh . . .” was all she said. No curse seemed vile enough.
The white-furred physician looked up blurrily. “A-arii. They brought him in. He . . .” She took a deep breath. “He’s got a chance. A good one. I’m not losing him, too.” There was a sudden fierceness to her tone, and Alysha knew the Asanii woman wasn’t just referring to other patients who’d slipped away from her. She was a widow, had suffered through another disastrous relationship—and yet another never quite had a chance. It had taken her an eternity to find someone else, and clearly she was determined to defy the gods if need be to keep him.
“I know, Snowhide.” Many of her junior officers and ratings would have been astonished to hear such a gentle, quiet tone from their captain. “You’re the best there is, and you have the best there is.” She squatted next to the older woman’s chair and put an arm around the slender waist. “How long have you been here?”
“I . . . I’m not sure.”
“That’s too long. You need to sleep, or you won’t be able to help him or anyone else. You can trust your staff with his life—you’ve trusted them with yours, and mine, and everyone else’s on this ship.” The ring of command steeled Alysha’s otherwise velvet-soft words.
Laelkii’s tired eyes wandered from the gel-tube to Alysha’s face and back again. Finally, she sighed and nodded, her shoulders slumping. She rose with little of her usual grace, her long braided hair hissing behind her where it brushed over the chair’s back, and leaned over the tube, palms laid on the thick Lexan surface. Her human-flat face nearly touched it, breath from her delicate nosepad visible where it clouded the curved transparency.
After a few more moments, Alysha led her out, catching the attention of another physician, and issued her orders. Laelkii would sleep nearby . . . and she, after checking with the bridge, would steal a few precious hours for herself, along with those senior officers she could spare, now that Star Dancer was safely under Well drive. Ω
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