Cloak of War Page 5

  It gives me plenty of time to feel foolish for transmitting at max power and completely giving our position away. This is my second chance. None of those other poor souls got a second round in the ring.

  Prior to entering the navy, I’d spent my university days poorly. It almost cost me my life. Had it cost the lives of the others in my ship? Hell, I didn’t even deserve that ship. But it was my command and my failure.

  I think I age longer in those few hours of darkness than in my entire four years in the university. The more I think, the worse I feel, until finally I decide to quit thinking on it and set my mind. My thoughts set like concrete, like a good punch to jaw, and from this point out I’ll be the officer I should have been all along.

  When the ship comes, I have a better chance to study her. Garbage scow comes to mind. At least when I can see her. In the videos, they always just suddenly appear, fire a salvo, and just as quickly drift off. Can’t say I ever knew how.

  With every meter it moves, I can see into a hole here, a pocket there. I even see the stars on the opposite side. The ship seems like one half mirror and the other half magician’s trick. It is a damned eerie feeling, like an interrupted window. The hull looks terrible. Pockmarks. Corrosion. Scabs of rust. But worst of all, one of the side tanks is punctured right through. A few older wounds shine through, but they look patched over.

  I wave again.

  A retrieval arm snakes out from the front. A rather sinister-looking actuator waves back at me. I cringe a bit. I’ve always had a fear of the robotic, but hey, I’d kiss a spider if it rescued me now. It makes sense: Why bother sending a sailor out when a perfectly functional robot arm can do the work?

  They also happen to be just in time. Water is starting to leak through the helmet seals. Whenever an errant drop strays near my mouth or nose, I give it a good gust of air. My face shield looks like I’ve sneezed thirty times.

  The arm deposits me inside of an airlock. Its exceptionally clean compared to the green verdigris streaking down the hull outside.

  The arm exits out. The outer door closes. In a moment, I hear the sounds of an opening door. Sound equals atmosphere. Safety.

  Finally.

  And, to my surprise, artificial gravity kicks in. Ships this small normally don’t run it; you find it on the sort of vessels admirals and other aged sailors frequent.

  I crunch right onto my back. All of that water that was stuck to my shield blasts right onto my face.

  Hands grasp me and help me to my feet. I blink hard. I feel hands on my face shield. They tug on it a few times. I can’t tell what anyone is saying. All I hear are garbled voices. Water in my ears, I think. Finally, someone tears open the emergency gasket.

  “Hullo there, welcome aboard.” The voice is muffled.

  I strip off my gloves and jam my fingers into my ears. Squishy squishy. “Thanks!”

  I turn and look at my rescuers.

  The closest is a man that looks like a cobbler from some children’s book. He wears spectacles, real glass ones. They hang precariously on the edge of his nose, propped against a black mole. The lines of his face are soft, kindly, with lines of age in all the right places. He isn’t fat but has lost that tone of youth and is slowly slipping into frumpy plumpness. I don’t see any rank insignia; a rated man, then.

  The other one is obviously a woman. She has a long, thick, auburn ponytail that wraps around her neck and is secured into her shirt. Tattoos flicker on her arms, chest, and neck. A set of coveralls is stripped down to her waist. She holds the robotic arm controls in one hand. A frown creases her face. She’s probably ten years older than me.

  I smile at the woman. Everyone loves my smile. “Thanks for bringing me in. How’s Henna?”

  The woman spits onto the floor. “Arc burns on her eyes. Gonna feel like someone poured sand into ’em for a while. But she’s fine.”

  “I’m Machinist’s Mate Harlon Hartford,” the cobbler-faced man says. “She’s Master Machinist Colby.”

  Colby just scowls at me.

  “Thank you, both of you.”

  The cobbler leans over a bit and peers down his nose, looking for my rank. There is none; I never had time to have a plate printed.

  “Captain Karl Jäger.” I try my best to look like a dashing missile boat captain.

  “Captain?” Colby spits again and walks out with a smirk on her face.

  Hartford helps me out of the suit. Water pours out and splashes onto the deck. I’m soaked through, my skin pruned and shriveled up white. I look like an overwet rat. Rather feel like one too.

  “Oh, this won’t do. Can’t be going to the captain like this.” Hartford sets a concerned frown. “He’s old school, you know. Come with me.”

  We step out of the airlock, which is tight, and enter into a hallway that is so narrow my shoulders scrape the walls. Even the ceiling is tight. There’s rooms on either side, but they don’t go far. Oddly enough, most of them are totally empty.

  Hartford narrates as we go.

  “Been out for, hoo-boy, a shy past six months? Been a tight one, it has. Still patching up the port side. You weld?”

  I inform him that I do.

  Hartford nods. “Now, where was I…oh yes! We put out from Eighth Fleet’s base off of Bastogne. Then, huh, let’s see, a patrol into J113, AS665, and a rather nasty stint trying to infiltrate Tyrol Tertiary.”

  I give him a glance to make sure he’s not pulling my leg. He looks sincere. Both 113 and 665 are notorious Tyrol frontier systems. Tyrol Tertiary is approaching the core worlds of the Tyrol nation. Almost impossible. I didn’t know we could get so close.

  “Got a bit banged up on that one,” Hartford says. He beckons up to patchwork on the ceiling. In the tight spots, I can see smoke stains. “Step aside, duck in here,” Hartford says.

  Shift change. A stream of men and women push through the hall. I give them a simple nod and smile. All I get back is a hard eye. I know the drill. I’m fresh fish.

  I go to step out again, and Hartford pulls me back in. “Tight ship, Mr. Jager. Got’s to wait for the other shift.”

  Sure enough, a minute later, another line of weary-eyed sailors stream past. These ones look worse for wear. Bloodshot eyes. Pale faces. One woman yawns nonstop. No one pays me any mind at all.

  We follow in silence.

  Hartford pushes me into a bathroom that’s so small I don’t even know how people can use it. “Strip, I’ll bring a suit.”

  I shrug out of the wet clothes and do my best to wipe down. There’s an air wand drier with a sink beneath. A little sign reminds me to blow the water into the reclaimer. Closed loop. Gotta save every drop for soup tomorrow, eh?

  A minute later, I’m shrugged into a suit. The name says Winkelman on the tag. Third officer. I poke my head out. “Thanks, Hartford. I’ll owe Winkelman a beer.”

  Hartford looks away and rubs his chin. “Let’s go. Can’t keep the captain waiting now.”

  The tempo of the ship is different than any I’ve been on. The crew is quiet, subdued, relaxed. Nothing like serving time on the big boats or the ships of the line where it’s all rah-rah and bravado. When you’re on a bruiser, you rather feel like a bruiser.

  We pass crew quarters, a line of bunks five high on one wall. All of the crew are sleeping. It’s so tight their noses almost touch the bottom of the next bunk.

  I’ve never been one for tight places.

  Hartford sees me looking and pats one of the bunks. “Each gets it for a four-hour rest, then it goes to the next mate! But right now we’re shorthanded, so the bunk might go unused for a while.”

  I know what shorthanded means. Combat losses. Where else could they go?

  Finally, we come to a hatch marked with a bright red number one. Hartford steps up and hits an intercom. “Permission to come up. Bringing the survivor in.”

  The intercom rings back a moment later. “One coming out.”

  Hartford shakes my hand and steps away from the hatch. “Tight in there and all.”r />
  “Thank you, Mr. Hartford!” I shake his hand.

  The hatch creaks open, and a scraggly-haired man steps out. His face is tight. When he looks at my name tag, he does a double take. “Captain’ll see you now.”

  I step through the hatch and onto the bridge. The hatch closes behind me.

  The bridge is tight. In fact, it’s not much larger than the bridge on my missile boat. One station for astrogation, one for communications, one for engineering, a weaponry station, a sensor station, and a center station in the midst of it all.

  The only person that looks up is a man, in his midfifties, with salt-and-pepper hair. Except the pepper part is stark black, none of this gray nonsense. He is half leaned over and turned to face me. His eyes…I’ll never forget them. Hard, like ball bearings. A crooked smile fights its way over his face.

  I snap to attention. “Captain Karl Jager, Second Fleet, Ninth Squadron, Missile Boat Ace 19.”

  There’s nothing but silence. The captain stares back at me, still wearing that same smile, still staring with those ball-bearing hard eyes.

  Someone in the front calls out a contact. The smile is suddenly gone. “Sit.” His voice is smooth, deep, right on the verge of bass.

  There’s only one open seat: astrogation. I sneak past and sit down. It’s the same model as damn near every ship in the fleet. Except there’s a few things I don’t recognize.

  “Do you have it?” the captain says.

  I forget the protocol. “Astrogation, green!”

  “Very well, hold course.”

  I can feel his eyes boring into me. The woman sitting beside me at the sensor console doesn’t even sneak a glance. She’s totally focused on her set.

  “Thank you for picking me and my crew member up, Captain.”

  Silence.

  I swallow hard. No one else speaks. What have I walked into? I want to look at the other consoles, but I don’t dare. The whole room is tight like string. It feels like the moment before a punch, and I have no idea who’s throwing it.

  “Mr. Jager,” the captain says in a deep voice. “You played a good role as bait for us, and for that I commend you. A most resourceful little trick steering those missiles like you two did.”

  “You watched, sir?”

  “We did.”

  My face flushes red. “Then why didn’t you—”

  “Because there was a Tyrol destroyer on the line.”

  “But they were shooting survivors!”

  “As they do, as we do.” His voice is calm. “We couldn’t approach the line. Our course was set.”

  “Then you should have changed it, sir!”

  He clears his throat.

  I’ve gone too far. “Apologies, sir.”

  “Are you familiar with the Orcas?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Do you know how our cloaking system works?”

  “No, sir.”

  His voice takes on a monstrous boom. The deep bass is terrifying, like a roaring bear just behind me. The mass of it shakes me to the core. “Then be quiet on my bridge and learn, Mr. Jager!”

  “Yes, sir,” I manage to squeak out as meek as a church mouse.

  As the anger fades, I think on my position. I know not the ship I’m on, her mission, her crew, or even the name of her captain. For that matter, I’m completely ignorant of how this ship functions. Am I at the mercy of the crew? Maybe. I definitely owe them for my life. All I know is they rescued me, and that is enough.

  “Raj, status on contact?” the captain says.

  The woman next to me replies quickly in a deep NorAm New York accent. “Inbound to that destroyer’s last position. Three kilos per second. They’ve gone active.”

  “Sound the alarm,” the captain calls.

  A bell, a real-world, old-school bell rings out. It’s almost too loud on the bridge.

  “I’ll explain this to you, Mr. Jager. Another Tyrol ship is coming in. Possibly more. It’s hard to resolve them at this range if they are in a tight pattern. The thermal signatures all bleed together. They know their friend is missing. And since they can’t see any of our ships, they know that an Orca is out.”

  “Course change,” Raj says. “Down blip, under prowl.”

  The captain slows his pace of speaking. “Now they hunt for us. And we’re at a disadvantage; we’ve got holes in our cloak. A few from picking you up, Mr. Jager.” He lets the words hang. “Did you manage to hit anything with that missile boat of yours?” His tone is almost condescending.

  “The White Queen.” That should settle his whiskers.

  Suddenly every person on the bridge is looking at me. The captain almost leaps out of his seat. I feel a hand, a very strong hand, squeeze my shoulder. The captain’s breath is on my ear, and his voice deadly serious. “The White Queen, son? She was here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His fingers tense and then release. “Is your log in your suit?”

  “Yes, sir.” It’s standard practice for the log of the ship to be live-fed into the exo-suits of the survivors.

  “Hartford.” The captain’s voice is loud. “Get me Captain Jager’s log. Now.”

  “Destroyer is slowing. Two kilos per second,” Raj calls. She studies me with curious eyes.

  “Raj, tell Mr. Jager his duties. Notify me if that destroyer comes close, otherwise evade. You’ve got the bridge.” At that, the captain steps off the bridge with a quickness.

  Raj makes a clicking sound and shakes her head. “You best not be full of shit, boy, otherwise the captain will fuck you up.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The Tyrolean destroyer moves about at different vectors, all around the wreckage of the first ship. No one seems particularly concerned about it. In fact, once the captain steps off the bridge, they all become quite talkative.

  The first thing they tell me is how lucky I am. They normally don’t pick up bait. A few are angry because by picking me up, they had created another hole in the cloak. This seems to bother them more than anything.

  “What do you mean, a hole in the cloak?”

  Raj takes a deep breath. “We use an energy-absorbing gas. Anytime we drop out of bounce and are in hostile territory, we deploy a cloud of it. Over time, the gas is depleted and we have to do add more. Bit by bit, it depletes. If we hit a speck of dust, it’ll take a bit out. Even just elemental hydrogen floating around since the big bang degrades it. In your case, we lost a whole bunch by picking you and your crewmate up.”

  That explains why it looks like a floating special effects rig. It is. “Why not just deploy more?” I ask.

  “We’re out,” a man with an overly large nose says. His face is squat like a brick. It’s all perched on a body that’s too thin. They’re all thin.

  “Or damned near,” Raj says. “Normally we pick up from friendly freighters, top off supplies and such, but we’ve been deep chasing after mining ships.”

  Basically they deploy a cloud of polarized argon mixed in with a matrix of a dozen different chemicals, polymers, carbon fibers, and a mélange of assorted solid-state goodies. Any energy that strikes it is recreated exactly on the opposite side. It halts energy only barely. Someone looking on the opposite side would see the slightest drop, barely different from what is normal.

  The videos always show a bubble of energy that cloaks the ship. It is most mysterious and makes for a good movie. In reality, it is finicky, touchy, and most of all, fragile.

  “Only got gravity to hold the sauce,” the large-nosed man says. “By the way, I’m Katzen, weapons specialist.”

  “Without the sauce, we’re just a big, fragile, slow target,” Raj adds.

  Sauce. What a picture. The ship isn’t cloaked; it’s sauced up. The coating isn’t degraded; it’s being licked off. A chunk missing. A bite. Going in for a resupply? Hitting the sauce. I love it.

  A rat-faced woman with a nasty scar leans back from the engineering console. “You take a shot at the Queen?”

  I tell her I did.

  �
�You hit it?” Raj says.

  I nod.

  “Owe you a drink, boy,” Katzen says.

  Suddenly, across the bridge, they all agree. Seems I have a grade-A drunk coming up. It seems odd. It’s just another ship. What significance does she have? They all seem quite excited, and the tension I felt on the bridge melts away.

  I can’t quite say I’m fitting in, but the new-fish smell is gone.

  “Don’t take offense, Jager,” Raj says. “We’ve been out for a while. Itching to get in, load up, and get back out.”

  That’s odd. No one looks forward to going back out. At least I’ll get back on with my career. A short stint in the silent service won’t look bad on my record… “We’re headed back?”

  “That’s right,” Raj says. She hooks a thumb at the tactical display. “Once that spider heads out, we’re out too. Maybe a bit of mischief, but we won’t be sneaking in anywhere too nasty.”

  “Spider?” I’ve never heard of them called spiders. They definitely aren’t bug like.

  “You know why we call them Tyroleans?” Raj says. She has a look that says she knows the answer, and I don’t.

  I shake my head.

  “They live in mountains. Home planet is one big tortured set of mountain ranges. Like the Tyrolean Alps.”

  “As in old Austria? Sound of Music and all that jazz?”

  “Winner winner, chicken dinner,” Katzen calls.

  I can’t help but smile.

  “So they tunnel, climb, shimmy about, live vertical, you know,” Raj says.

  “How do you know?” I can’t help but be skeptical. I’ve never heard of any of this.

  Raj glances over at Katzen. A few of the others break out nasty smiles.

  “Simple, Mr. Jager. We went there. Right after this whole war started.”

  I swallow hard. They ran a Doolittle raid right after the Tyroleans hit our orbitals and colonies. We were on the ropes and sent out a flotilla to strike their home planet. They took volunteers from those who’d lost families in the orbitals. Millions gone, poof, flashed away. The biggest sucker-punch mankind ever took.

  I never figured any of those crews would survive. It seems this crew not only survived but went back for more.