Back in the briefing room, we continue our meals and exchange data to piece together the big picture. Carrier Battle Group Sixty-Three dropped out of Alcubierre roughly four hours ago, and approached our last known location above Willoughby at Combat Stations, ready to do battle with the Sino-Russians. What they found instead was an orbital field of proximity mines that wouldn’t show on radar, and looked like nothing listed in the Spaceborne Weapons recognition manuals. The drop ships of the Manitoba are still shuttling stranded Versailles sailors up from the surface, and rumor has it that the Shrikes have been emptying their ordnance racks at the alien terraforming structures, only to come back for bigger warheads.
“What’s going to happen now?” I ask the Commander later, when we’re finishing the last of the food, and waiting for the rest of our marooned crew to trickle in.
“Well, they’re going to take care of business down there. I expect we’ll see half the freakin’ Navy in orbit around this rock before too long. Then I guess we’ll head back to Gateway. We’ll all end up in the Transient Personnel Unit until the Navy figures out what the hell to do with us. You may yet get your wish about that laundry-folding job, Mister Grayson,” he adds.
“Any chance for some leave, you think?” I ask, and he barks a laugh.
“We just had a run-in with a sentient alien species,” he says. “If you think they’re going to let us back to Earth, you’re in for some disappointment. They’re going to keep a lid on this until they’ve figured out how to break the news to the folks back home.”
He stuffs the rest of his sandwich into his mouth, and washes it down with the last of the juice in his cup.
“You know, it’s kind of funny, in a weird sort of way,” he continues. “Back at Staff Officer school, they have all these wargames and scenarios they throw at you, to see how people deal with command pressure. We used to call the scenarios for alien encounters ‘bug levels.’”
He puts his plastic dishes on the floor next to his chair, and leans back in his seat with a sigh.
“Now here we are, in our first real bug war, and we’re the bugs.”
When Halley comes back from her debriefing, she waves me toward her as soon as she spots me in the back of the room. I walk up to join her, and we claim a pair of chairs in a quiet corner of the room. By now, everyone in the room is stretched out in a briefing chair or two, dozing or talking.
“They’re loading fucking nukes on those attack birds,” she says to me when we’re sitting down. “We cut across the corner of the flight deck when we got back from the debriefing, and I got a good look. Mark Sixty-Five guided nuclear missiles, fifteen kilotons.”
“Holy crap,” I say. The last time a military used nuclear arms in battle was forty years before I was born, during the last global fracas with the Sino-Russians that left half a million dead, and led to the signing of the Svalbard Accords that put an end to direct Earthside conflicts between the two blocs.
“Guess they couldn’t crack the stuff down there with the rack-grade stuff.”
“That’s going to mess up the real estate down there,” Halley says. “If those things set up half the number of atmo exchangers we did, there’s going to be close to a hundred nukes raining down soon. Nobody’s going to farm down there for a few decades at least.”
The idea of rendering a planet uninhabitable just to pry off a competing species seems ludicrous, but that’s how I know the military is going to do precisely that.
We’re assigned a few empty enlisted berthing sections far away from the flight deck to get some rest. At this point, I’ve slept only six hours out of the last thirty-six, and I’m starting to have auditory hallucinations. There’s a pair of medics outside of the berthing section, handing out pilot-grade No-Go pills to anyone who wants them, but Halley and I pass on the sleep aids, since we’re both tired enough to sleep standing up if needed.
The Manitoba is a much newer ship than the Versailles was, and everything is far more modern, but the enlisted bunks aren’t any bigger. Halley and I try to occupy one of the bunks together, but we conclude that the space