Virtues of War by Bennett Coles (free novels to read .txt) 📕

Virtues of War

By Bennett R. Coles

EXCERPT: CHAPTER II

Finding an object the size of a boulder in the vastness of space was no easy task. This, Sublieutenant Jack Mallory concluded as he eased his control stick to the left and moved his little ship into another slow turn, was probably why micro-asteroid mining had never really taken off, despite all the gaian propaganda over the years. Checking the settings on his dipping probe one more time, he hypothesized that those “save the worlds” protestors had never actually suited up and tried to pinpoint – let alone rendezvous with – one of the millions of micro-asteroids that infest every star system.

And with micro-asteroids you only have to deal with three spatial dimensions: child’s play, really.

Jack centered his control stick and settled into his new course. Training automatically drew his eyes up to sweep the starry sky before him, then down to sweep his flight controls and hunt controls. Everything was clear. His new course had put Sirius astern of his Hawk anti-stealth plane, and it was a relief to not have the sun’s glare in his eyes. The Hawk was steady on course, with enough fuel for another few hours of hunting. No sign of his quarry yet, but with a bit of luck that was about to change.

“Viking-Two ready for dip,” he said over his radio.

“Rog, Two, go for dip.”

The other Hawk, flown by Lieutenant Dan “Stripes” Trifunov, was holding position at the edge of the search sector. Often the two birds would work together to prosecute a contact, but Jack needed to be proficient at solo searches if he was to earn his permanent anti-stealth wings. And today his target was a boulder-sized, automatic device that would simulate the movements of an enemy stealth ship.

“Deploying big dipper.”

He tapped the button on his console and waited for the expected readout of the probe as it began to trail away from his boat. Instead, a red warning light began flashing. Jack cursed and stopped the probe deployment. His eyes scanned the flight controls, the hunt controls and then up for a visual. Nothing seemed out of place. He tapped the button again. The same red warning light flashed. He pursed his lips in frustration. Deploying the damn dipper wasn’t supposed to be hard…

It was not only hard but impossible, he suddenly realized, if the safety lock wasn’t released. Snapping off his restraints he floated out of his seat and pulled himself aft through the Hawk’s cramped interior. Behind him there were two more seats for observers, then two benches lined fore-and-aft along the four cubic metre passenger/cargo space. The dipping probe was mounted on the belly of the Hawk, two-thirds of the way along the hull, and Jack moved with purpose until he was floating above the appropriate deck hatch. He clicked it open, made a simple turn to unlock the dipper, then retraced his path forward to his seat.

He pressed the button to start the dipper deployment, then strapped back down into his seat. Exhaling a long, frustrated sigh, he watched as the familiar blue digits of the probe readout began to populate his hunt control readouts.

“Viking-Two, what’s your status?”

“Big Dipper deploying.”

“A little slow. What’s up?”

Jack shook his head, and forced himself to smile. No point in getting angry – there were lots of other people who were plenty capable of doing that.

“Forgot the safety lock.”

There was a slight pause.

“Rog.”

Not a good way to start the day. Jack turned his attention to the multi-dimensional picture that was now beginning to form on his hunt controls. Despite its innocuous name, the big dipper was one of the most sophisticated pieces of equipment in the entire Terran arsenal. It had already phased into the Bulk and was relaying gravimetric information via its brane-straddling relay system. Jack’s eyes did one last sweep of the visual and the flight controls, then focused in on the hunt controls.

Anti-stealth warfare had not been Jack’s first choice in flight school, but once the choice had been imposed upon him, he had learned to appreciate the wonder of the revealed Universe. Perched in the three-dimensional brane that made up humankind’s perceived existence, Jack could now look deep into the Bulk where gravity ruled and the laws of physics displayed their true nature. Humanity had known of the Bulk’s existence for centuries, but only in the last fifty years had men and women actually begun to venture forth from their sheltered brane. Stealth ships risked their very existence every time they dove into the Bulk, but their complete invisibility in the normal three dimensions made them powerful military weapons. Terra had been the first to develop such ships, but some of the more advanced (and ambitious) colonies had not been far behind. And with these ships had come a whole new arena of warfare – one which Jack was now learning to be a potent part of.

Studying his 3D readout, Jack identified the knuckles in spacetime that indicated gravity wells. Viking-One was too small to really bend spacetime, but because Jack had a recent radar fix he was able to pinpoint the minute knuckle. A larger knuckle was moving slowly across the brane on a bearing low off the bow –

Kristiansand

, the Terran destroyer to which both Vikings belonged. Irregularities down one bearing suggested recent activity at the jump gate back to Terra; the dark energy used to hold open that extra-dimensional portal emitted weak but very specific waves in the Bulk when a ship passed through. A shallow bending to starboard gave evidence of the large terrestrial planet Cerberus, detectable even at this distance, and the entire region was warped slightly by the background gravity wells of both Sirius and its tiny (but massive) white dwarf companion.

Jack paused the big dipper at seven peets, which was the ideal depth for an initial search at this particular place in the Bulk. In general, the deeper the big dipper moved into the Bulk the clearer the spacetime curvature became, but Jack knew he had to tread carefully with his depth depending on the depth of his target. Targets on the brane were best tracked between five or ten peets, but stealth ships could move above or below a second brane in the Bulk, the “weakbrane” which could mask their movements. The weakbrane varied in opacity at different places in spacetime, and could exist anywhere from ten to fifteen peets. Jack didn’t know where his target was resting for today’s exercise, and standard procedure was to look shallow first. Things started to get weird in the Bulk past twenty peets and only a very brave or desperate stealth captain went even close to that far in.

“Dipper steady at seven, confirm you have my picture.”

“Affirm picture. Report.”

Jack studied his hunt controls carefully. His Hawk had uplinked its info to Stripes, and the senior pilot was looking at exactly the same information as Jack. There would be no blaming the equipment if Jack missed something that Stripes could detect.

“Initial sweep is nominal – only contacts are Viking One and Longboat.”

Mentioning

Kristiansand’s

callsign suddenly reminded Jack that the destroyer’s anti-stealth team was observing the exercise as well. He breathed deeply: no pressure.

Stealth ships were specially designed to minimize their own gravimetric signature, but even so they had to move slowly to avoid causing ripples in the spacetime curvature. A stealth ship at full speed might as well drop gravibombs in its wake for all the spacetime “noise” it created, but a stealth ship moving at slow speed in the Bulk was like a particularly quiet fly’s shadow moving in a pitch black stadium. Jack doubted that the training pod in today’s exercise was expecting to do any sprints. Jack was too advanced in his training for things to be that easy.

He studied the spacetime curvature lines that traced across his 3D display, and compared his own intuition to the hunt control info screens. With his Hawk on a steady course and slow speed he was in good shape for detection, but nothing obvious was leaping out at him as a possible contact. There was a slight irregularity on a bearing low off his starboard quarter – perhaps an indication of stealth ship movement. He tapped in a series of quick commands and a red line stretched away from the center of his 3D display along the bearing in question.

“Viking-Two fishing true one-four mark one-two.”

To navigate, all ships worked in a coordinate system based on two imaginary, perpendicular 360-degree circles fixed in space. Jack’s bearing line was 140 degrees clockwise in the horizontal by 120 degrees clockwise in the vertical. The coordinate system was anchored on the main star – in this case, Sirius – and gave all space ships a common frame of reference. It was invaluable to navigation, and just as useful to anti-stealth warfare.

No military term ever survived long without being reduced to a TLA (Three-Letter-Acronym) and anti-stealth warfare was no exception. ASW, as it was called in official documentation, had grown in importance over the last two generations from being a curious and confusing peripheral of Fleet doctrine to being the premier arena of astral war-fighting. Or at least, Jack thought wryly, that’s what the instructors at the ASW school on Pluto had preached. While no-one doubted the deadly effectiveness of stealth ships, the pace of the hunt left most Astral Force members yawning and reaching for more coffee. Fleet-wide, ASW was known as Awfully-Slow Warfare and Jack often wondered if his surprise assignment to ASW was due to his laid back nature. The thorough psychometric exams that all members of the Astral Force undertook in their early years were generally praised for their accurate placement of members in the best-suited occupations, and as he started lowering the big dipper for a sub-weakbrane sweep, Jack pondered not for the first time whether he should have adopted the arrogance expected of a star fighter pilot during his tests.

The big dipper was just passing 11 peets when Jack noticed something. He halted the dipper and let the picture sharpen.

A shallow but unusually elongated knuckle was warping spacetime along a bearing 09 mark 10. It was moving fast enough for Jack to actually see the relative bearing shift before his eyes, which meant either that it was very close or moving very, very fast. His eyes darted to his flight controls, then up through the cockpit windows for a visual sighting. There was nothing but stars to see.

“This is Viking-Two: one fast-mover zero-eight mark one-zero, drawing left. Investigating.”

“Viking-One, rog.”

Jack shifted in his seat, suddenly interested. Stealth hunting was very different from regular astral warfare because all information was based on bearings: distance was impossible to judge based on one observation only. And while most normal contacts were moving slowly enough that Jack could maneuver to get multiple bearings, this contact was tearing across spacetime. Jack locked in the last thirty second’s worth of readings, then pushed forward both his control stick and throttle. The Hawk shuddered with the sudden acceleration and Jack grinned as he felt his body being pressed back against his seat. He sprinted at full speed for twenty seconds, then reversed thrust to kill his speed and stabilize on a new course.

Within moments he was able to re-establish his spacetime picture. The fast-mover was still blazing across his scope, and his computer quickly compared his new readings with those from his previous position. The triangulation was rough at best, but Jack estimated the contact’s distance at somewhere between two and three million kilometers. His eyes widened. Even before he read the computer’s calculation of contact speed he knew it was going to be high. His hunt controls confirmed it: the contact was moving at nearly one tenth the speed