Cloak of War Read online

  CHAPTER ONE

  “What do you mean, drafted?” my father says across the table.

  I look up from the draft notice on my tablet. My old man stares at me with googly eyes and braces himself on the table as if he might fall over. He isn’t a man that enjoys surprises, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him before now.

  “I mean drafted. Into the navy.”

  “But you just graduated! You’ll be coming to the family business. Your mother is going to train you on her freighter run. Then in time—”

  I hold up a hand. “Dad.”

  He looks down, exasperated. “But you were finally coming home.”

  I swallow hard. Five and a half years to complete a four-year Starship Command Degree. That included two internships on some bulk freighters for the Salem Corporation. And a…well, how do you say, “bad idea”? A four-month stint as a cruiserweight boxer.

  The family business involves purchasing goods on one orbital and then transiting them to a colony. If we are lucky, Dad can swing a good deal on the pickup, and it’s profit both ways. Other times, we haul vacuum. Not quite so profitable there. I’d had my eyes on a new-old-stock Jovian-designed transit hauler, perfect to get me into the business.

  Our food comes, but neither of us touch it. Eventually our stomachs take over, and we eat in silence. So much for the celebration. Outside, synthetic fireworks pop on the displays with the bass thrumming through the floor.

  “Can’t your fraternity help?”

  “Dad, everyone got drafted.”

  He looks down at his food.

  There I was, about to start my life. Instead, the war came home. Sure, it was always in the news. But it never felt real. We weren’t anywhere near when the Tyroleans hit the orbital stations on the frontiers. What seemed like a golden age was but a veneer of civility on a history of war.

  Dad holds out his hands as if to speak and then drops them down again. I can see the anguish on his face. Can’t say I feel much better. I expected to walk into a nice, cushy freighter run. Relax for half the route, and look the dashing part as a starship captain the rest.

  Oh yeah, I’d be fighting the ladies off with a stick.

  Seems the only thing I’ll be fighting off now is an alien species that sucker-punched us four and half years before. Guess I was lucky to take as long as I did in school. If I’d gone into an apprenticeship, like my dad wanted, I’d already have been drafted.

  Or even worse, I could be stuck with the army or marines.

  “Your mother, she’s on the route. Fertilizer over to Volga Prime, rutabagas back home.”

  “I’ll write her a letter,” I say. Maybe getting drafted would have some benefits. Not much glamour in running fertilizer and rutabagas.

  He gives me a pained smile and then reaches over to grasp my hand. He’s never done that. I feel it in my stomach: fear. Like my first time stepping foot into the ring against some bruiser. I’ll be going to war.

  We step out onto the edge of the concourse. Drift wings swoop in the orbital’s currents and take advantage of the low gravity core. Ten years before, I’d been flying one too. Lights pop and explode as the fake starscape shifts into a beautiful display of fireworks more elaborate than any on land. Fake stars and fake fireworks.

  I’ll be seeing the real deal soon enough.

  ---

  I walk out of the too-nice restaurant and into the bustling halls of the orbital station. If it weren’t for the smell of reprocessed air, it’d feel like any old city on the planet below. Except it was like a donut, with the hole being open space for the low gravity.

  Pretty much every human colony is the same. Dirtside provides the food for the manufacturing up top. And they, in turn, mine the raws in the asteroid rings and refine them into all sorts of goods like tractors or new blenders. The corporations do a good job keeping the wheels of consumerism greased.

  Outside, there’s swarms of families, all with the same look on their faces. Anger. Shock. Disbelief. Everyone looks like they’re trying to have a good time, but how can they? It’s a different world when the war comes home.

  The route back to campus takes me through the old part of the orbital station. Low rent and lower standards. I hurry through with my head down and a bit of a boxer’s swagger. It’s not often I get any trouble. They know me here.

  The gym where I used to box is lit up with garish red signs and posters from last year’s fights. A few of the regulars loiter out front. I don’t feel like talking shop, so I keep moving.

  “The Hunter, you ain’t gonna visit? Eh? Get in the ring with Pablo!” Pablo San Rodriguez says from the door. He’s a bantamweight with a crooked smile and an even crookeder punch.

  “Not tonight. I’ll knock you out next time, eh?” I give him a mock right hook.

  Pablo grins and cackles at me. His smile is like a broken picket fence. “You’ll be back mañana!”

  Pablo’s jeers echo as I walk away. I take a turn. Then another. And another. I’m stalling now; once I head back to the frat, it’ll be a grade-A drunk. All I wanted was my own ship, my own job, my own little piece of the sky. Now I’m off to the navy for God knows what. Space seemed so big until the war came.

  I grab a liter of cheap whisky. The label has a picture of a man in a fur hat. He looks like a good drinking buddy. I stop at the old tourist viewing window. It was popular back when staring out into the dark was fashionable and unique. Now it’s where the bums go to find some darkness and catch a nap.

  I stand and stare out at the starships. Beautiful things of iron and armor, with sleek lines like a Spanish dancer. I see a Tsarist Combine light cruiser docking up. On the other side is the Salem Corp yard filled with freighters. Beyond that a MaoQin destroyer, three EuroStar troop transports, and one of those slender ships from the Mitsubishi Compact. Through it all are a hundred private transports, all filled with people who came to get their kids. Except no one’s going home.

  An old man stumbles up from the shadows. His face has the permanent sunburn of an old spacer. “Spare some for an old sailor?”

  I pass off the bottle. “To the future, eh?”

  ---

  The fraternity house is tucked up against the hull of the orbital and shares another wall with Aldrin Hall. I spend most of my days in that wing of the campus, half the time with a buzz. Yeah, that joke’s not wasted on anyone.

  Inside, I find the usual suspects doing the usual thing. Drinking. Except instead of partying, everyone is power drinking. The underclassmen and a few pledges look somber. Old music crawls out of a speaker and falls dead shortly after. It’s like the worst party ever, but it’s still a party.

  I grab a beer and head upstairs. The halls are strewn with packed bags and corrugated graphite boxes. Everyone is supposed to move out tomorrow.

  “Jager!” Buggsy Wallace shouts down the hall.

  “Buggsy,” I say. “You get drafted?”

  “Pfft. They knew if you wanna win this war, bring in the biggest brass balls ya got, Buggsy.” He throws an arm around my shoulder and steers me down the hall. “You watch now. With ole Buggsy in the navy, this war ain’t gonna last more than a month. I’m gonna fly on over to Tyrol Prime, nut-punch them bastards, and whammo, we’ll be done.”

  “I’ll drink to that!”

  “Like you need an excuse?” Buggsy says.

  We boot out the underclassmen and spend the rest of that evening getting drunk. After polishing off a cube of beer, I’m sure the navy’ll boot my ass out. It’s all just self-pity merged with reckless bravado.

  I never do write Mom that letter.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Jager, Karl, 2.45 GPA, Starship Command,” says a woman in a dull-gray naval uniform.

  A man at her side checks off my name on a
tablet. “Do you know what they call a person that graduates med school with a D average?”

  “Hmm?” I say through the hazy fog of my hangover.

  “A doctor!” He looks quite satisfied with his bad joke. His enthusiasm wanes when no one else laughs. “Sixth fleet, reserve officer bay, you’re on the EuroStar transport Danube.”

  The woman hands me a flexible tablet. “These are your orders. Don’t lose them.”

  The graduation hall is lined with tables. Except instead of graduating into the real world, we’re graduating into the navy. I heft my bag, all twenty kilos, and walk out of the hall and toward my future.

  Ever tried to cram your life into twenty kilos? How about with a hangover bad enough to kill a cat? I feel like I’ve gone five rounds with Ali and Frazier, at the same time. I have clothing, a shaving kit, a few mementos, a personal tablet, and a flask of the best liquor I could buy cheap.

  The hangover is so terrible that it overshadows the fact that I am in the navy. It sure doesn’t feel like it, but the orders say so.

  ---

  Two months later, and I see the Sixth Fleet. Well, I don’t really see it, not through the naked eye. All I can see is one ship. The supply transport Liberty 9.

  I expected to be on a cruiser or battleship, something that could punch! Instead, I’m going to be hauling chicken lips and assholes. At least I’ll get off this transport and be able to stretch my legs.

  In the two months it took to get us to the Sixth Fleet, we learned how the navy functioned. All of us had a pretty good idea as to how to run a starship. I mean, we were all Starship Command graduates. Then we were taught to know how to work on a navy starship. The ConFed Navy is a mishmash of human nations. Some very good at naval warfare, others not so hot.

  The plan was to give us the basics on the way out, and then we’d get apprenticed with the fleet itself, the theory being that real-world education was the best education. Wish someone would have told me that when I signed up for the university! Actually, someone did, but I was too dumb to listen.

  Luckily, the yelling was cut to a minimum. We spent most of the time in a makeshift cargo hold, listening to lectures, studying charts, and simulating combat. The commander that taught us lacked an arm and a leg. It’s not often you survive a tungsten sabot to the bridge. Which Commander Hall had no issue reminding us. She laid it all out in simple terms. Do as we say, as we’ve taught you, or you’ll die.

  That gets your attention.

  First, we studied orbital combat, the old sort from back in the days of ion drives and chemical rockets. It was a delicate dance where orbital mechanics ruled the day. You’d see a punch coming ten million kilometers out and then pray it didn’t land. We studied the battles that happened between the old United States and China. It was an elegant age of elegant combat totally dictated by math. Tungsten balls and nuclear warheads. It was like jousting in three dimensions.

  Then we moved on to modern combat.

  Once upon a time, explosive density per kilogram exceeded defensive densities. All that changed once they got fancy with the armor and the trans-Newtonians. Elementary physics and all. Now you can get up close because of the drive, maybe even take a few punches.

  But even better is that you might land a few too.

  I thought eight hours a day of classroom study was bad. On board that transport, we studied sixteen straight hours. That didn’t include homework. The only upside was there wasn’t anything else to do but study.

  Now, finally, I’m getting off and onto my first command.

  ---

  “Hurry the fuck up!” a woman yells as I pass through the airlock. She has a face that’d make a toad jealous.

  “I’m Ensign Karl Jager. Would you take my bag and tell me where to find the captain?” I hold out my bag. I drop it after a moment and take in the ship.

  Tight. I know the specs. It masses three thousand tons. Hitachi-Ford bounce drive. General Atomics reactor. Barely enough armor to stop a meteorite. Inside, it holds two thousand standard-issue freight containers. Profit tables skip through my head, and I picture it hauling something juicy like Albian whisky.

  It smells like old socks mixed with motor oil. How long will I have to serve on this little box of shit until I finally get the hell out of the navy?

  The frog woman stares at me with her mouth open.

  I nudge the bag with my foot. The help isn’t quite what I expected. You’d think the navy would be on the ball, right? “Please?”

  The woman grabs my bag, spikes it onto the floor, and shoves me against the hatch. “Stand at attention! My name’s Captain Dolores Lahtinen, and you just pissed off the wrong person.”

  Shit.

  “You listen to me, asshole. This ain’t no dainty university intern ship! You’re gonna work for your meals, boy. Do you hear me?” She spits as she speaks.

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  She leans away from me and frowns. “Specialization?”

  “Starship Command.”

  “Hah!” She turns and stomps down the hall, laughing as she goes. It even sounds like a toad croaking through the halls.

  It’s about then that I realize I need a transfer.

  --

  “Yes, that’s right, a transfer,” I say into the comms console. My voice is low; I don’t want Dolores hearing me. Her cabin is about four meters away.

  Things haven’t gone well after that first meeting. It seems that what they teach you in the university isn’t actually how to run a starship. Sure, I knew the basics, but on my first watch I was like a fish out of water. What few crew we had all realized I was an idiot. Or at least that’s what Captain Lahtinen told them.

  “But you just arrived,” says the sweet-sounding personnel technician. Does she have blond hair, or maybe brunette?

  I don’t bother explaining to her that in the hierarchy of this ship, I’m just beneath the stainless steel toilet. “Yes, well, I was hoping you could accommodate me. There’s a bit of a personality clash here.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her tone says she is working and not in the mood for small talk. “Oh my. With that GPA, I can’t transfer you into line ships.”

  “What?” Suddenly those late-night parties are catching up with me.

  A hatch groans. Captain Lahtinen is coming out for her morning constitutional. Lately she is calling it “taking a Jager.”

  “You gotta get me off this ship! Please!” I whisper.

  “Oh, I have an opening for a second officer on a—”

  “I’ll take it!”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Have you ever seen a schematic for a Hobson-Boeing MDV-27? Take a steel spine, strap on a reactor and two massive missile launchers, and then wedge in a closet for the crew to live in.

  It is heaven.

  The Old Man—that’s what he tells us to call him—is about two years older than me. He is sharp, witty, and on his way to a bigger command. He is also a Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity brother.

  Suddenly things are looking up.

  “Jager,” the Old Man says. “Don’t try and swagger in here with bullshit, all right?”

  I shift uncomfortably in the tiny galley. It is the only private space to talk. Not that a thin aluminum corrugated panel offers much privacy. A pinup hangs from one torn corner and sways gently.

  I’ve always followed the theory that if you don’t know it, don’t show it.

  “This crew knows more than you do. Just let them run your watch and see how it goes. We’ve been on patrol for six months. I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time to go over everything.”

  Yeah, about that. The Tyroleans must not have gotten the memo.

  The blunt nose of the missile boat plunges through the vacuum of space. Stretching out for a thousand kilometers on either side is a steel wall of violence and grace. It’s not night, or day, but whatever it is in space. A dirt ball of a shit hole planet is the only scenery. I always thought I’d die somewhere beautiful.

  We’ve been prowling the system fo
r a hair under a month. Space is a damned empty place when the only thing you get to watch are the ugly mugs of your shipmates. Every day, we rotated watches, checked in at the beacons, and watched. This Boeing missile boat was light, fast, filled to the brim with angry-looking missiles, and armored as well as a refrigerator.

  Admiral Roberta Klaus had us spread out until we knew the vector that the Tyroleans would come from. Those aliens were sharp. She’d picked a hell of a brawl and gave ’em a bloody nose and two black eyes. Now they had to repay in kind.

  A few of our light cruisers found a scout detachment a month ago. Except it wasn’t just scouts, and our little flotilla got shredded. Then I got promoted. Actually, I think a lot of people got promoted. The Old Man was transferred off in a heartbeat.

  Not that I knew the first thing about being a starship captain. Hell, I didn’t even know if my little missile boat was a starship. It didn’t even have a name.

  So we waited. They knew we were there.

  Then they came.

  Lots of them. We danced between planets for a week. Each side jiggering, sidestepping, dancing, disappearing, posturing. It’s the show before the fight. Commit? Split? Hit? Nah, not yet.

  Then we both converged, and it was on like Donkey Kong.

  It’s a tough thing to watch, really. There, on both sides, the fleets stretch out. Take a boxer, a thousand of his friends, and set them out into a massive ring. No, sir, you can’t be brawling; line up orderly like. Now, fight. The punches are coming, you know it, you can feel it right in your gut. Now, swing! The only thing that makes it easier is that your punch might connect too.

  Is it a siege? The fuck if I know. I probably wouldn’t call it that. Any of the ships could burn a different vector and get out. But they won’t; it’s not how it works.

  A lone ship is a terrible thing. Soon your boxer will bring in friends, and while one goes for the haymaker, another swings in with the rabbit punch. Sorry ’bout those kidneys, mate.