Cloak of War Read online

  Raj slams her fists onto the console. “Negative for iridium.”

  Captain Hallverson throws his tablet across the room. It clangs against the wall and falls to the floor. The reboot screen flashes and then it’s back, showing calculations.

  I exhale again. My lungs burn. So close. I feel the bile of frustration burn. All around me, the crew look close to murder.

  Hallverson is dark. “Stand down.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I walk down the length of the Orca and back again. My thoughts rumble on the mission, the future, a decent steak dinner with a bottle of cheap whiskey, and Captain Hallverson. The captain has surged back into his stormy self and is not pleasant to be around.

  So I pace in my off hours. The ship is just long enough to get a decent train of thought going, and then I have to turn around. It feels like I’m getting nowhere, figuratively and literally. Just like the Orca.

  Every day, Tyrolean freighters pass through. Big, bulky things with holds filled with all sorts of goodies. All headed to the same place: to support the fleet that is chasing after Admiral Roberta.

  And every day, we let them go.

  The mood of the crew matches that of Hallverson. Shitty. They sulk. They slam fists when the iridium detector is silent. They grumble under their breath about losing the war.

  Darkest of all is Hallverson himself. He takes to sitting in the captain’s chair with rings under his eyes. Hours pass, on watch and off, and still he stares at the signals moving in and out of the system.

  First, he orders the tech crews to inspect the iridium detector. Then we clear cloaking gas off of the detector port just to make sure the signal isn’t masked. Bertha, the empty torpedo, goes out with our test sample of iridium.

  It sounds like a church bell. Our detector is working perfectly.

  This doesn’t make Hallverson feel any better. He swears and runs his scarred hands over his head.

  How long can he function like this? He is a chained tiger, one that will eventually snap that chain.

  I try to patch things up with Henna. Her mood isn’t much better, but at least she talks to me. She watches me go past half a dozen times before finally calling out, “Halt!”

  “Hi, Henna,” I say as I look down at her.

  She pushes a strand of auburn hair off her brow. “Can you pace all day?”

  “Can you sleep all day?”

  Henna slides off her bunk and stretches. There’s a half-washed patch of grease on one arm that has stained her blankets. “Any excitement up front?”

  I shake my head. “Any excitement in back?”

  Henna frowns. “They’re grumpy as hell.”

  “Same up front.”

  “How you doing otherwise?”

  “This ship weirds me out.” She sits back down onto the bunk.

  “A ghost ship, I know,” I say back to her.

  “Jager,” she says in a quiet voice, “don’t mock me. I’m telling you, there’s nothing good that will come out of this tour.”

  I cock my head. “And how do you know?”

  “I’ve got a hunch!”

  I look back at her. She’s dead serious. “Henna, I can’t run a ship on a hunch.”

  She shakes her head and lies back down. “You probably should.”

  The intercom crackles to life. “Mr. Jager, to the bridge, please.”

  “Duty calls.”

  I walk away. One of these days, when we aren’t stuck on a tube surrounded by cloaking gas, I’ll ask her out on a date. Superstition or not, she’s cute. Why haven’t I already? I mean, back at the frat, I was a bit of a ladies’ man. Well, at least I tried to be. Then it hits me. She’s too good for a frat rat like me.

  On the bridge, Captain Hallverson prowls from one console to the next. He almost leaps back to the captain’s chair and slides in. “Jager!” His voice is excited.

  “Sir.” I scan the bridge. Everyone is focused on the consoles, but on the main screen there aren’t any contacts.

  Hallverson beckons me over. “How’s your knowledge of gravitational mechanics in relation to the bounce mechanism?”

  Has someone ever asked you a question that you’d rather not answer? Yeah, the only reason I passed GravMech 101 was because of a well-stocked test bank in the basement of the fraternity.

  “Uh…”

  Hallverson doesn’t even pay me any attention. He digs out his tablet and calls up a set of formulas. They seem to show a common plot point, a precise distance and vector from all incoming freighter traffic. His eyes sparkle as he points out the equations. “See? Look at the Q factor: all one convergence. But look! Look! A low-grade ripple on the intake. That means it’s a close bounce.”

  I talk slowly, hoping he’ll solve the problem for me. “And so now we know—”

  “Exactly! They’ve got a deep space transfer station. It has to be! Otherwise, there’d be more random variation on the incoming location.”

  “Course set!” Abu Mas, the Astrogation officer for this shift, calls.

  Hallverson grins. “They know we’re here, and I bet”—he whacks a fist onto the armrest of his chair—“I bet they’re waiting for us to go before releasing more traffic!”

  “That first ship sent out a distress call and warned the others, right? And those first freighters we hit were already in transit?”

  Hallverson claps his hands together. “Exactly! Now sound the alarm. We’re dropping cloaking gas and bouncing to that location. Torpedoes ready!”

  I step off the captain’s platform and stand behind Katzen. The weapons station already has a dozen torpedo plots loaded and ready to go.

  “Now this is the problem,” Hallverson says behind me. “We’ll probably drop right on top of that location…”

  He lets the words hang. I catch the end. And if there are a dozen warships there, we’ll be dead meat. No room to maneuver, no time to deploy the gas.

  “Accelerate out of the gas, commence vacuum, lock it in, and go on my mark!”

  Mas acknowledges the orders. He holds a wire-thin finger over the engage button and locks eyes with Captain Hallverson.

  The sound of the cloaking gas coming back into ship pings throughout the fore piping. We’re clear and free now, out in the open like a naked babe.

  This is too fast. By proper procedure, we should have done a briefing, had planning meetings with all departments, done risk analysis—not just a by-the-seat-of-our-pants flight into the depths of danger. It’s reckless, maybe even dereliction of duty. But before I can say anything…

  “Go!”

  The starscape barely even shifts. The bounce drive punches us about fifty astronomical units out into interstellar space. As far as space goes, we’re barely out of that shitty little solar system. The zone is known as the Kuiper Cliff, a spot where orbital bodies drop off, and it’s deep, empty, nasty space.

  Our screens flare a split second later. All of the sensor banks absorb the data and show us our quarry. A few kilometers out is a dirty ball of ice and snow. Steel and iron cover it like old lace. Three freighters are docked up tight to a center bay.

  “Give me solutions on all three and the ice block! Jager, hit up the AI, see if our torpedoes have enough force to destroy the ice. Raj? Iridium?”

  I sit down at an auxiliary console and hurriedly enter in the dimensions of the dirty ice ball. Behind me, the crew works in measured precision.

  “Two neutrals, one Tyrolean.” Raj speaks in an even tone. “I’m getting a comms ping. One of the freighters is requesting permission to undock. Claims to be Hjonit, neutral.”

  The AI tells me that we’ll need a ridiculous quantity of torpedoes to thoroughly destroy the ice ball. More than we even carry. Ice has an enormous energy capacity. “We can’t destroy it. It’ll take more than our ordnance load.”

  Hallverson frowns. “Prepare to fire.”

  I stand up and put my hands on the railing beside his chair. “Captain, they’re neutrals. Our orders—”

  Hallve
rson slams a fist down onto his chair. “Orders be damned! If I get as much as a whiff of iridium, I’m burning them all.”

  “Sir! Another ping—the Hjonit ship claims to have human passengers.” Raj turns and looks at Hallverson.

  Hallverson ignores her. “Target a spread for each of the freighters. We’ll adjust our fire once we see how damaged that station is.”

  Katzen gives me a quick look and then enters in his firing orders.

  Hallverson’s eyes are wild. Both of his hands shake with a palsy. His fingers clench into a balled fist and then back out again. The only thing he watches is the iridium display. It’s about to register a result.

  The rest of the bridge works in a choreographed dance of coordination and planning. Engineering speaks with Weapons, who relays orders down to the reloading teams. Astrogation preps an escape route while Comms sit and waits for an answer.

  “Sir. They have humans on board.” I need to get that point across. A sudden warmness washes over me. Stress. That moment before a fight where you realize it’s real. Where it’s not just words but a fight walking up to you.

  “Combatants,” Hallverson says without looking at me. “Where’s that damned iridium!”

  “We can’t fire on all three, we don’t know—”

  Hallverson’s gaze never wavers from the screen. “Don’t tell me what I cannot do!”

  Then I say it. “Sir, I will not give an order to fire on those ships.”

  By regulation, he “passes” the firing order to me, and from there I “give” it to the weapons station. In reality, I do none of that. Hallverson is a one-man show. I see now why Yao is on pins and needles. He has no station on the ship; Hallverson rules all.

  And now I’ve put myself on the line with the hostiles. Or maybe they aren’t? How the hell can we know? Our portable unit is dead, and the shipboard unit will only show the presence of iridium nearby. They are guilty by association. All of them.

  “Sir? They claim to be SouPac contractors, they are—”

  Hallverson waves his hand. He bellows out, “Where’s that iridium scan! Jager, check that station!”

  I march over to Raj’s station. There, on hold, is the iridium scan. Raj has prevented it from going to the main screen. I look down at her and she, back up at me.

  It’s positive for iridium.

  Raj has been stalling for an answer from the captain. I can’t stall any longer.

  “Sir. What of the SouPac contractors?” I say in a level voice. “We can fire on the Tyrolean vessel and then inspect the others.”

  Hallverson locks his eyes on to Raj. “Where is my iridium scan!”

  Raj looks away and down at her console.

  Hallverson makes a choking sound, as if the words are trying to escape but are caught in a vise of fury. Veins stand proud on his neck like pulsing tree roots. His face takes on a purple sheen; his lips lock with his teeth bared like fangs. “Now!” he bellows out.

  I’ve never seen rage like this. Never before has a human being erupted into an animal frenzy. It’s not wired into us anymore; it’s fight-or-flight, but at a primal level. Violence and anger bleed into fury, and all lead to survival. Thought is gone.

  “No, sir. I will not.”

  And in an instant, the rage flashes and is gone. It snaps like an overhardened steel beam. Once tested, it’s shot, broken.

  Hallverson narrows his eyes at me. It feels like I’m in the cross hairs. He raises up one finger. It stands perfectly straight and doesn’t waver a single bit.

  There is a pause. Will he see reason and take the prudent route? Good God, I hope so.

  “Raj, what is that result?” His voice is smooth, level, beyond anger.

  “Positive,” Raj says in a quiet tone.

  “Fire.”

  Katzen slaps his hand onto the launch button.

  Five torpedoes thunder out from the hull beneath me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The torpedoes strike almost immediately after leaving the tubes. The rate of acceleration is stunning. The explosions that shred all three are even more amazing.

  The Tyrolean freighter erupts into flames, sputters out enormous jets. This is pretty unusual as starship fires go. I imagine they have some sort of gas, oxygen maybe, or propellant.

  One entire side of the ship disintegrates amid the flames, and a sudden outpouring of liquid fire rolls across the surface of the ice block station. It’s like someone tossed gasoline onto a campfire.

  One of the freighters is engulfed by the raging flames. The melting ice makes it worse, not better. The explosion from our torpedo is fairly modest compared to the inferno that bores into the hull.

  It’s an amazing thing to watch fire roll and boil in zero gravity. It looks so unlike what we expect fire to be. Out here it’s pure chaos, like a solar flare gone wild. It’ll burn until every last bit of fuel and oxygen is gone.

  The Hjonit ship still struggles to move. The torpedo hit far in the rear, near the engines. You can’t just stuff an explosive charge of that magnitude and not expect some serious damage.

  Katzen had to have aimed it that way.

  That Hjonit freighter spits out a handful of escape pods, and then an enormous explosion shreds the hull. It’s piñata of armor plate and insulation. Secondary explosions rip through the expanding ball of gas.

  “Reverse thrust. Give us some space,” Hallverson says calmly. His composure is back; he’s as cool as deep vacuum.

  The iridium alarm clangs. The Hjonit freighter was obviously filled with Tyrolean ammunition.

  “I told you, Mr. Jager!” Hallverson says. He leans forward in his chair, the video display sparkling in his eyes. “There’s no mercy here. No mercy…Katzen, spool up the kinetic and fire on those pods.”

  “Sir! At the very least we can search for information.” This is a tactical point; we could get real, live intel.

  “No traitor sets foot on my ship.”

  “Captain—” I yell out in protest.

  “Mr. Jager! To my quarters!” Captain Hallverson bellows. “Katzen, you have the bridge!”

  I march stiff backed off the bridge and stand before his quarters, waiting. His voice echoes down the short hall as he gives the orders to fire and then to depart. There’s nothing more for us to do to that burnt-out hulk of ice and steel.

  As I wait, I go through the events. Am I in the right? Absolutely. But a nagging doubt comes over me. What if a destroyer had bounced in? We’d only have moments to decide and fire. But that would be different. It was a purely military target. No ambiguity. No neutrals. No SouPac civilians.

  The Hjonit definitely carried a cargo of iridium-based weaponry. Which we could have found and gone through in the proper way. Were there really SouPac human citizens on board? Once Command goes through our logs at the end of the tour, the SouPac ambassador will shit a coconut.

  Captain Hallverson walks past me and opens the doors to his quarters. I march in and stand at attention before his desk.

  He ignores me, sits down at his small dining table, and pulls out a bottle of amber liquid. “Sit, sit. We’ll wait for Yao before we drink.”

  The captain pours a splash into three glasses. He beckons again for me to sit.

  “Sir, I—”

  “Karl, may I call you Karl?” His tone is conversational, downright pleasant.

  “Uh, yes, sir.”

  “Karl, I’ve served long enough to see some tense situations. You made some good points, and that’s your duty as an officer. But,” he says as he leans over the three glasses, “we were in a very tense combat situation and did not have the time to second-guess.”

  I swallow hard on a dry throat.

  Captain Hallverson continues, “what if they’d opened fire from that ball of ice? Or what if one of those freighters were armed? My guess is they were armed, but none were ready to fight.”

  Slowly his anger grows like a perking kettle.

  “This is my dominion. This is my ship! By God, I make the calls an
d you follow them. We don’t have time for debate!”

  “What of the SouPac civilians?”

  Hallverson waves the remark away. “Buying time to escape. It’s the same as using a false flag or changing your ID frequency. They didn’t need much more time to escape. Time you were giving them!” He shakes his gnarled fingers as he speaks.

  “Sir, our orders were to avoid firing on neutrals. We also had the potential for human intel. I feel that your desire for revenge is going too far.”

  Hallverson cocks his head slightly, like a bird of prey. “I have a duty to this crew, to the navy, and to all of humanity. I shall execute my orders in a way that fulfills my duty. This is not the regular navy, Karl. This is not a world of black and white. We deal in gray, in sneak attacks. There is no honor in our duty—only success or failure.”

  Yao knocks gently and steps inside. He slides into the seat and plucks up the glass.

  Hallverson does the same without taking his eyes off me. He sniffs the glass. “This is not a boxing ring; this is a street fight in a dark alley. If you lose, there’s not another match. Now sit and drink.”

  I sit with a wooden back and sip on the cognac with Yao and Hallverson. The attack was a success, a damned good one. There was no luck involved, only cool calculation. I don’t agree with how we executed the mission, but as the drink warms my stomach, I appreciate the method.

  Maybe he is right. Was it a ruse? Maybe there aren’t a few dozen SouPac humans floating in burnt shells. Areas of gray. I much prefer the boxing ring of black and white. Rules and boundaries. But, I have to admit, there’s a certain seduction to the power that comes with hunting from the shadows.

  Raj knocks on the door just as we’re finishing up.

  “Come,” Hallverson calls. His eyes take on a glimmer. Maybe it’s the drink, but I think he’s drunk on his success.

  Raj enters and hands a tablet to Captain Hallverson. I only catch a glimpse, but it has the spot for three thumbprints. New orders.

  Hallverson’s smile leaves his face, and he nods to Raj. “Thank you. Close the door, please.”

  This time, the only place we can get orders is from the AI. Some condition has been met, and the computer decided it was time for a new mission. The AI is like some ghostly coach, always steering you into a new fight.