19
Rev sat, his back against the bulkhead, trying to make sense of the holo display. They weren’t in their berthing space anymore. A few minutes after general quarters, a harried sailor had yelled at them to get away from the cannon.
They didn’t argue.
They were jammed in with most of the other Marines in the engineering spaces where they claimed whatever patch of deck they could. Rev spotted Malaika and grabbed a spot by her, with the rest of the team scrunching in around him.
The mood was subdued as Marines quietly wondered what was happening. After another five minutes, a petty officer came into the space with a holo repeater, which she set up right in front of Rev and the rest.
“You deserve to know what’s going on,” she announced. “I can’t stay and explain this all. But the blue are our ships, the turquoise our N-ships. The red are the tin-asses. From the looks of things, I’d say we’ve got about twenty minutes before the battle is joined. Sorry, but that’s all I have time for.”
She left the Marines to their own devices, and Rev stared at the lights. It looked like a slow dance, like a school of anchovies maneuvering en masse. Rev forced that idea out of his mind. If they were the anchovies, then the red lights were the sharks. He didn’t like that analogy. No, it was more like they were the sheep, the turquoise were the shepherd dogs, and that made the red the wol—”
Damn it, Reverent, that’s worse than the anchovies! Snap out of it.
“I thought these battles were supposed to be quick,” a Marine from Alpha Company said.
Which is what Rev had heard, too.
“The battle itself is quick once we engage. But there’s lots of maneuvering, like wet-water Navy ships of the line back in the day,” someone else said.
Rev could see the man’s face, so he asked Malaika, “Who’s he?”
She leaned in to him and said, “That’s Chief Apel, the company corpsman. He served aboard N-ships before he came to the Marines.”
Rev perked up. This was a man he wanted to listen to.
The chief stood up and walked through the sitting Marines up to the repeater platform.
He reached up with a forefinger, and one of the turquoise lights got brighter, and PUNS LaSalle appeared under it. “This is us. As you can see, we’re trying to interspace us between the fleet and the tin-asses. But that isn’t our main mission, as counterintuitive as that might be. What we will be doing is trying to get position on the tin-asses to take the fight to them.”
“How far away are the tin-asses right now?” someone asked.
“Ah . . . it isn’t that easy. They’re no distance at all, and they’re all distances at the same time. It’s . . . I can’t really explain it. What you see here are just representations of the situation so that we can understand it. We are really located off the . . .” he reached out again, and another light got brighter, and the words PUNS Pinto flashed on above the platform. “We aren’t off the Pinto’s starboard.”
“But I can see we are.”
“That’s the point. This is just a representation. In null space, we’re really all over the place,” he said, sweeping his arm to encompass the entire display. “And no place, at the same time.”
Rev knew all of that. At least he’d been told that. It was really beyond his comprehension, so he just had to accept it. And he was grateful for the display. It might not reflect null space reality, but at least he could understand what was happening.
“So, what we are doing now is positioning ourselves for the clash. As soon as we have a superior aspect, then the real shit will happen, and it’ll be decided in a flash.”
“And now, the skipper is putting us in the right position for that?” one of the Alpha lieutenants asked.
“No, sir. She’s already out of the picture. All of this is being done by the ship’s latticed AIs. No human brain can run the calculations quickly enough, and that includes what’s happening now.”
“Chief, if we’re positioning ourselves now, are the tin-asses doing the same thing? Do they fight in null space the same way we do?” Rev asked.
“Good question, and the answer is, we don’t know for sure. But as you can see, they are not engaging yet, and they seem to always engage at about the same time and positioning as we do. Maybe a little sooner, and they are more effective, but from the results and from what we know about null-space physics, yeah, that’s the assumption. So, if they’re better than us, we’ve got to rely on superior numbers to prevail.”
Rev frowned. If the display was an accurate representation of the numbers involved, then there didn’t seem to be many more turquoise lights than red.
“Why don’t we just drop out of null-space?” Gizzy Incrit-Cole asked.
“We could. The calculations have been made and entered, but we can always adjust those to make new ones and drop out pretty much anywhere. Every ship has the emergency calculations for just that reason. But then, Beacon is lost. We’d be spread out over half the galaxy to keep as many ships as possible from being picked off. And if we tried to drop together in some semblance of order, the tin-asses would follow, and with their range advantage in deep space, well, it wouldn’t be good.”
He looked around the gathered Marines, but there were no more questions. “It’s going to get hot soon, and it’ll happen quickly when it does. So, just watch what ships, theirs and ours, get hit.”
“Thank you, Chief, for the explanation,” the Alpha Company commander said as he stood up. “I know it’s hard to just sit here, not being able to contribute.”
You can say that again.
“But our job now is to just sit here and let the Navy do its job. And, the Mother willing, we’ll get through this to take the fight to the tin-asses on Beacon.”
The ooh-rah reverberated within the space.
“So, for now, don’t get worked up. Sit back, relax, pray if you want, and keep preparing yourself mentally for when it’s our turn in the breach.”
“You feeling confident?” Malaika asked him.
Rev just shrugged. This was totally out of his control, so anything he said would be a guess. He just had to trust the skill of the Navy crew—or by what the chief said, the skill of the technicians and programmers who designed the ship’s AIs.
On the display, the lights started to shift more, leaving the more structured formations. The turquoise and red came closer together, but in a weird, mirrored dance, as if they were looking at their own reflections.
Nix had been standing by the hatch into the space while the chief had explained things, but now he made his way over where most of the Raiders were sitting. Tomiko scooted over to give him space to sit, which pressed her against Rev’s right side.
“This is better. I couldn’t see the display from over there,” Nix said as he wormed himself in between Tomiko and Strap. “Hey, relax, Miko. You’re as stiff as a board. You heard the captain.”
“I’m fine,” she said, but to Rev’s ears, she was tense.
He put his hand on her shoulder and leaned over to tell her to relax, and she flinched ever-so-slightly. He dropped his hand.
She sure is stressed. Can’t blame her, though.
When Tomiko was upset, it was best to just let her be, he’d learned over the years. She’d come around.
If we even make it out of this fight.
And it was obvious that things were happening. The ship movements were becoming more erratic. Talk died as eyes were locked on the display. Marines jockeyed for position to get a better view. Rev could feel the tension as a palpable force, thick enough to cut with a knife.
Beside him, Malaika was breathing heavily, and Rev gave her knee a squeeze with his social arm. “It’ll be OK,” he said.
She looked at him with a half-hearted smile before turning back to the display.
Rev could feel his warrior start to claw his way to the surface, but there was nothing for him, no mission, no killing tin-asses to suck up that energy. He tried to push the warrior back, but by nature, warriors are not very amenable. He needed help.
“You got a joke for me, Punch?”
<What did the father do when he caught his son chewing on an electrical cord?>
“I don’t know. What?”
<He had to ground him.>
Rev laughed aloud, and Tomiko and Malaika spun toward him in unison, staring at him like he was crazy.
Maybe I am.
“Sorry, sorry. Yes, inappropriate,” he told the two, trying to look serious.
But to Punch, he said, “That was so bad my warrior walked out on me. So, mission accomplished.”
<He did that to teach his son how to conduct himself.>
“OK, that’s enough.”
<But the boy is currently doing fine.>
“Oh, geez. Enough already, Punch.”
But it had worked. Rev knew the situation was serious, but his heartbeat was dropping back to the normal range. He had a sneaky suspicion that it hadn’t been just the jokes, which really weren’t that funny, but maybe a little calm-juice had been released into his bloodstream. Looking around, he wondered if anyone else had been artificially calmed down.
“Any moment now,” the chief shouted.
The stress immediately came back, even if muted. Rev leaned forward, as if that could make a difference. One minute passed, two minutes.
“Just start, for the Mother’s sake,” Malaika whispered.
Another minute passed, and still, the dance continued. Move and countermove.
And then, there was a flurry of action, none of which made sense to Rev. But names started popping up as blue and turquoise lights went out.
Trieste.
Gopher.
Mount Elba.
Utica Prime.
Nuthatch.
Housley Station.
Kearsage.
“The Kearsage,” Rev said, grabbing Tomiko’s arm. “Isn’t Fourth Team on her?”
“Yes,” she said with a gasp.
Rev felt light-headed. Staff Sergeant Khumalo and Fourth Team were gone, just like that. His friends, people he knew. And Wheng! Gone!
More names popped up, one after the other for another ten, fifteen seconds, when the display went dark. Shocked shouts filled the space.
“They’re censoring us, don’t want us to see,” Hussein shouted as he stood up.
More people shouted until the chief stood and screamed at everyone to shut up. It took a few moments, but finally, he could be heard.
“They’re not censoring us, although I wish that was it. This is a null space display. It doesn’t work here.”
And it hit Rev what that meant.
“We dropped out of null space,” the chief continued. “The order was given to save as many of us as possible.
“We lost the battle.”