Cloak of War Read online

  The only ones that are alone are the cloakers, and no one sees them in a fight like this. They knife people in the alley without even a tap of the gloves.

  From where we are, I just follow the line. Commodore Bambeezi’s light cruiser stays on course and relays in some new coordinates. I don’t bother the old boy Larson on the astrogation control; he knows his job. The last thing he needs is this wet-behind-the-ears CO telling him anything.

  Larson is maybe a year younger than me. Math major, quick with the numbers, quicker with a bad joke. He wanted my job when the Old Man got promoted. I leave him alone; he’s a good astrogator and not a threat. He bitches, gripes, and whines, but he ain’t gonna shit on me.

  Instead, I focus—or try to focus—on what might be my job. The enemy is just a set of twinkling stars. Like a cloud of diamonds sucking up the beauty in life, chewing it up, and spitting it out. But I know those twinkling diamonds are mad as hell. We hit ’em hard off IC-774. I wasn’t with the fleet then, but in the posturing phase, a line of our Graphite-class cruisers slid in and bombarded some manufacturing facilities. The Tyroleans didn’t like that much.

  It’s hard to admit, but it’s a war of statistics. Some eggheads ran the numbers and decided that we were better off not actually fighting but just threatening to fight. A fleet in being, they called it. Sounded like bullshit to me.

  The first shots go off from somewhere down the line, probably the run-of-the-mill block battleships. Those boys are the heavyweights. Gorillas with gloves. Hooded eyes. Cauliflower ears. Got some loud bastard shouting out odds right on their asses and a posse of cruisers and destroyers. I love looking at the battleships. There’s Colossi Class, Dauntless, Indomitables, Gray Hunters, even a pack of the old Hannibals with the keel-mounted rail guns.

  Someone connects. One of those Tyrolean diamonds flares into nothing, a starburst that’s gone a moment after it’s born.

  AI says it was a rook. Good—they can lay out some jaw-breaking pain.

  An admiral thought it’d add some grace if they named the enemy ships after chess pieces. Obviously a man that never wanted to shit himself in combat. The real sailors have a dozen other names for them.

  It’s real. This isn’t a show now. I feel it in my stomach. The rest of the bridge, if you can call it that, focuses on what they’re supposed to be doing. Am I the impostor? I try and focus. I’m supposed to the boss, the old man, the commander. Officer training seems a thousand years ago—what was it now, one month?

  Another boxer connects with a bare fist, no gloves in this fight. Except this time, one of our ships goes up.

  “Course correction,” Larson says. He stays hunched over his display, green phosphorescence leaking past his thinning hair.

  “Thank you, Mr. Larson.” Do they hear the fear in my voice? Hell, I can hear it in his. No one wants to speak. The bridge was alive with chatter an hour before. Then the hostiles arrived and the crowd went silent.

  In the other corner of the ring is the Tyrolean Protectorate. Humanoid, thin, heavy in the chest, like a featherweight with the shoulders of a brute.

  Now I get to dance with my lightweight feet and hope some bully doesn’t take a liking to my ass and decide to crush my skull. These little missile boats are a work of art, with one purpose in life: to keep the hostiles from getting really close.

  You’d think we’d shoot a few hundred thousand kilometers like snipers, that it’d be a nice clinical affair. Nope. It’s a prizefight. Up in your face. At range, a laser, even in the vacuum of space, is a weak little thing. You need missiles. Kinetics. A focused blast of energy. This ain’t no place for a dainty laser.

  If you want to fuck someone up—and trust me, you do—then you’d best get up in his shit.

  The diamonds dance.

  I feel it in my gut. A tightening of the muscles. A sudden perspiration. I cough. But I’m not the only one. Larson shifts in his seat. Garibaldi scratches his head. Even the sour-faced weapons officer, Dmitri, starts to bounce his knee.

  It’s time. God’s about to ring the bell for the first round.

  Garibaldi is a foul-mouthed son of a bitch. Barely competent. Bounced out from the big ships and sent where he couldn’t do much harm. He’s a galoot, and his personnel file shows that he is three infractions over a career limit. If it weren’t wartime, they’d have kicked him out. Except I’ve got him at the Engineering station. The real engineers are in the back; he’s just a dial reader.

  They’ve got a fancy name for the drive that’ll bring you into someone’s face. Tertiary Focal Propulsion Locus. We call it a bounce. I’m sure there’s some uptight, blue-blooded academy brat asking his nav team to engage the Tertiary Focal Propulsion Locus and bring him his tea, thank you very much. But everyone else just bounces.

  The Tyroleans are gonna close that gap and fast. It takes the drive a minute to finish spooling. You can feel it in your boots when it’s about to pop. Then poof, you’re closer. Sometimes we counterbounce when they bounce. Shit gets ugly. You gotta guess that other boxer. Is he coming close? Far? You’d hate to be on the backside of the line.

  Comms ring out. The tone scares me: it’s command priority. For me. Son of a bitch. “This is Captain Karl Jager.”

  Someone chuckles on the other end. Fucker. It’s the Old Man, the real Old Man.

  “Jager. Just stay in the second tier. This is gonna be a quick one. No way they’re gonna come and brawl. Just keep moving. Let Larson fly the ship. Let Dmitri shoot. Let the crew do their jobs,” the Old Man says. I hear that tint of a smile on his face, the one that’d inspire a man to dance on plutonium.

  Dmitri is the Weapons officer and a ball of damned nerves. Salemite, but I don’t hold it against him. He’s not all uptight like the others. He’s likable, a bit shy, and supposedly a wild man once you get a few drinks in him. The story goes he once drank so much that he ripped a toilet out of the floor dry heaving. Now that’s a sailor I can get to like. It takes a special skill to rip out a toilet.

  The course changes again. We run parallel to the battle line. Screening, they call it. Bullet magnets is what we are now.

  The dancing stars twinkle out, and my stomach tightens again. Someone swears on the bridge. They don’t like the fact that the Old Man isn’t here. Hell, a few of them asked to go with him right in front of me. I’d have done the same thing.

  Somewhere in front of us, the hostiles are closing. They engage the bounce; it takes a few seconds to bridge that gap, like a bad shot of vodka. Then whammo, thank you very much, here we are.

  Here’s the really tricky part: you don’t know how close they’ll come.

  Is it gloves tight, edge of the ring? Is it with one hand bobbing, the other an uppercut? Or maybe they’re gonna wait outside.

  The counter-ops boys engage our own snares. If they come too close, they’ll get dragged into some nasty little magnetic bubble. That bounce will turn into an anvil, and then the heavies will skull fuck the nasties. They love that. The trick is to guess that line and sneak in up close, but not too close.

  We had a good sixty years of practice shooting regular humans. If it’s one thing that mankind is good at, it’s shooting other people. Space travel opened everything up, exploration went hog wild, colonization was even crazier. Then, when it stabilized, everything went to piss. Eventually, Earth made a nice compact, a solid set of treaties, and kept a fleet bigger than everyone else’s. So we have our Confederacy, and it works quite well.

  Except all of those nations remember who they are. Be interesting to see how the ConFed holds up once the Tyroleans are finished.

  If we win, that is.

  I squirm in my seat. My shirt’s wet; I can feel it. That fireproof material is scratchy on my chest. Where are they? It shouldn’t take this long. Or should it? Maybe they just hopped a few kilometers? They do that sometimes to get us to bounce.

  My eyes dart from one edge of my display to the other. The bridge crew is silent. Everyone is tight, focused. I can see the muscles through t
heir shirts; everyone is like glass.

  “Keep us rolling. We’ll stick a punch soon enough.” I regret saying it as soon as I do. It sounds fake. But fuck, I’m nervous too.

  Larson turns and looks at me. He tries to smile back, like he’s saying nice try, but maybe he means it? No one else gives a shit. Not about some twenty-five-year-old captain.

  Behind us are, eventually, the core worlds of the Confederacy. Or as we like to call it, home. Out here is the donut of shit. Where all the weirdos, religious quacks, hippies, stoners, independence junkies, traders, relic hunters, and morons live. AKA colonists.

  Get past the donut, and you’re in the great unknown. Well, it’s not totally unknown; the Tyroleans live there. Are they assholes? Fuck yes. Did we deserve it? Eh, well, I don’t think so. Take the two big boys on the block, eventually they’re gonna square up.

  There’s more than just them out here, but who gives two shits about the frog people of Kovik VI or the lizard tribes on Daedalus IV? There’s a hundred minor races. We trade with them. They trade with us. Everyone is happy.

  This is about the time it sinks in that this isn’t some two-bit fight. This is the championship, the cup, the ring, the big one. There’s one fleet kicking around here that’s big enough to take them head on, and it’s us. If we lose, they’ll make a run inward. This is like a regional championship, and then they’ll have to face a bigger fleet with a shorter supply line.

  Admiral Roberta Klaus has her hands in the pot—how much is she gonna bet? Safe thing is to fall back, rally, cede the system.

  “Line’s forming,” Larson said. “Bringing us tight, second tier.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  “Captain, permission to go weapons hot?” Dmitri sounds annoyed.

  “Do it,” I reply. Of course, I feel like an idiot. We run drills for this all day long, and I’m missing my cues.

  The missile tubes prep; I can feel the hiss of fuel running beneath my boots. I try and remember tech specs. We’ll be primed in about ten seconds. After that, the missiles are good to go, or should be.

  “Engineering, prep for contact. Weapons, lay out close-quarters sweep. Con, follow right on second tier, prep to break in.” I have a hunch. The Old Man is wrong; they’re coming in to fight.

  The diamonds are back. It’s a three-quarter jump. Almost close enough to box. They’re in the ring now.

  They twinkle for a second, and then they’re like us, carbon black, sharp edges, a nose of pure violence. Except one. Oh shit. It’s the White Queen.

  Way down the line, so far away I don’t have to worry, is the Queen. She’s one of the ships that massacred the orbital stations on Pishkov. She was the one who slaughtered the colony transports headed for Abalone. That one battleship has caused more misery, pain, anguish, and suffering than an entire fleet.

  She’s special. Whoever is running that pig bastard has balls. A white ship in a line of black. Shoot me first! But still, she always survives. Last I heard, she ran into the core worlds, right past our pickets, and did an orbital bombardment on a tourism world.

  A fucking tourism world.

  How’s that holiday love?

  Now the line’s moving. The orders are coming in quicker than Larson can process. He’s hands off now. The whole battle line is being tugged and pushed into order. You feel helpless when it happens; some stuffy AI is calling the orders. Even Klaus, God bless her soul, is just adding objectives.

  Red light. Here it is. Put up, get ready to punch—the bell is about to ring.

  “Seal compartments. Suits up. Evacuate atmosphere in one minute. Prepare for contact!” The words come out like someone else is speaking. Hell, someone else is—the captain of this tub. Still hard to believe it’s me.

  The face shield comes up, and I get that gritty little overlay in the corner of my eye. It just reinforces how tiny I am in the scale of things. There’s a thousand red dots all converging on our line. The atmosphere meter hovers in the green. A few little alerts pop up, and I dismiss them all. Like I care if the moisture separator needs cleaning.

  “Captain,” Henna calls from Engineering. Her voice is tinny in my ear, though it’s like that even without a suit. She looks serious like a surgeon, with hands like a sailor. Somehow she manages to get dirty and oily in a place with very little dirt and oil. Of everyone on the ship, I find her the most tolerable. She’s also technically my second in command, but I get the hunch she’d rather keep stirring the reactor.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Venting atmosphere on your call.”

  Of course, they need me to order it. “Sound the alarm, vent ten seconds after. How’s the cooker look?”

  “She’s fine. Reactor is puttering away, Captain. Are we, uh…is this going live?”

  Is it? Garibaldi gives me a glance. Larson is watching me too. “It’s looking that way. They just did a three-quarter bounce.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The alarms sound. Now I know the air is gone. It doesn’t feel any different inside of the suit. Not much between me and space now: a few centimeters of nickel alloy, some reflective layering, insulation, and my wimpy little suit.

  “Mr. Dmitri, are the batteries ready?”

  “Yes, sir,” Dmitri says. He’s a nervous type about now. Both legs bounce like a perpetual motion spring.

  “Course change,” Larson squeaks.

  We’re all waiting for it now, that moment when we venture out into the center of the ring. That’s how it works, and we know it. Once they come close enough to throw punches, we go out into the mix, center ring, and make sure they can’t get close enough for a grade-A square blow. No chin chops or ball breakers when we’re on the job.

  They’re afraid of us in our tiny little missile frigates. Or at least that’s what the commodore keeps telling us.

  Comms click. Command priority. My mouth is dry; it takes me two tries to acknowledge. Then it comes: “Hold formation. Follow on the lead of the Omega line. If they come in, and this is a big if, we’re splitting the middle.”

  Omega line is a half-spherical formation with a light cruiser right in the center. Great if you’re that cruiser, shitty if you’re in the front.

  “Omega,” I say to Larson.

  Garibaldi swears a particularly ripe line. Dmitri elbows him with a grin.

  The diamonds burn and dance.

  “Here we go!” I call out on the open comms. There’s a half-dozen support crew in the back of the ship. I imagine how shitty it must be not knowing you could die at any moment until it was over.

  Our brawlers open up with torpedo and missiles. They burn for a second and then go dark. All of those little bundles of love are just waiting for them to come in close. It’s a nice way to bridge that gap. We know they’re coming. Like a minefield they might drop onto.

  I can smell myself in the suit. This part I hate. I always do. You smell different. Fear. It’s almost like piss. It’s a terrible reminder.

  “Two to one they’re gonna back off,” Larson says to Dmitri. The two mates take a special pleasure in running the odds. Neither one ever lays down any chips. They’re already all in.

  “Three to one,” Dmitri replies quickly.

  How close? Are they gonna dance? Odds are they’ll skip on the edge of the noose, bounce just close enough to fight, and then we brawl. They could do a double bounce. Or they might even bounce away. Maybe they don’t want to fight today?

  More torpedoes flare out. How many sit in that gap now? “Admiral’s bringing them in close,” I say to the bridge crew. “Lot of ordnance floating in the middle.”

  Dmitri grunts. His hands tap on the edge of the console.

  Then they’re gone; the diamonds disappear. The entire line enters the bounce.

  Comms goes wild. Orders stream out quick-like. I hear the chatter and focus on our formation. Still Omega, still on the commodore’s ass. Still to break a flank. If we can get through, drive that wedge, then they’ll have to turn. Flanks turn into wins.

>   “They’re right on us!” Larson yells.

  I can see he’s on the edge. “Keep formation!”

  The line materializes right in the midst of the snare. Fuck it, they said, if they want a fight, we’ll give them a fight. Just before me, the commodore drives ahead. The flank we’re to break is barely fifty kilometers out.

  Sweet Jesus.

  Fifty kilometers is microscopic range in space; we expected more like five hundred or even five thousand. This shit is surgical now.

  The Tyrolean line is standard formation, a corrugated ripple of starships. In the lead of each peak is a heavy, and just behind them the snipers, the punchers, the neutron boats, the e-war decks. Rooks. Knights. Bishops. Queens. Kings. Pawns.

  We’ve got bantamweights, welterweights, a few midweights, all with that big fucking gorilla right in the front. Except there I am, dancing like a butterfly out front, ready to sting like a bee.

  Alarms scream. Someone grazed us with a single-point weapon. There’s a streak of molten nickel running down one side. Then we take a laser right on the nose. Larson is good, and we spin and get us a fresh edge, and all without killing our Delta-V. God forbid if we drop formation.

  All around us they fire. The lead battlecruisers slug out another batch of missiles. The pricks of light hammer out and slam into the enemy line. They’re so close. They never come this close. Ever. They dance on the border, on the edge, right where they like to shoot.

  One punch. Two punch. The carrier Jericho goes to hell. Someone clipped it with an epic haymaker. Iridium torpedo maybe? Wicked fusion blast in those. One second it’s there, another, poof and gone.

  We haven’t even fired a shot. Omega is running parallel. The hostiles are already too close. Now all we’re doing is keeping them afraid.

  “Prep to fire!”

  Dmitri acknowledges with a grunt.

  We’re not close enough. Some of the missile boats on the outer edge open fire. I watch the plot and the spread, study the formation. Half are intercepted, a weak dodge. The other half give someone a bloody nose. The wider spread made it through.