Fermi's War Read online

  He walked into his office, looking around to make sure that there was no evidence of the helmet visible, and sat down behind his desk, taking a moment to compose himself before tapping 'accept'. On screen a balding figure appeared, wearing the light green Republic uniform, sitting behind another desk that looked rather similar to his own. The delay between replies was going to be half a minute at this distance.

  "This is Lieutenant-Captain Marshall, commanding the Triplanetary starship Alamo."

  A long pause, "I am Captain Jian, of the Fast Frigate Ma Kong, speaking for the Lunar Republic. I must inform you at this point that we have a prior claim on the Uranian moon of Desdemona, and one that we intend to enforce. On behalf of my government, I officially give you thirty-six hours to withdraw all personnel and equipment from the surface of the moon and leave Desdemonan orbital space."

  Marshall noted a reluctance at the back of the words, as if he was reading from a script that he didn't agree with. His own next words had likewise been laid down by others, but for form's sake, he had to say them.

  "Captain Jian, my government has instructed me to defend Desdemona. We have registered a formal claim under the Treaty of Quetta, and are prepared to respond with deadly force to any acts of aggression against us, or any attempt to place a landing team on the surface of Desdemona."

  "The Lunar Republic is not a signatory of the Treaty of Quetta, Captain, and our claim is based on the first landing on the moon by Chinese taikonauts in 2061. As the Lunar Republic is the successor state to the Republic of China, we have a valid claim, even under the treaty you describe."

  "Nevertheless, Captain, I have my orders. I formally warn you that my government will not permit the Republic to take possession of this moon."

  This time the pause was longer than simply the transmission lag. Briefly, there was a flicker across the screen, then Captain Jian leaned forward, shaking his head.

  "I do not want to fight your ship over this Captain. My tactical experts assure me that such an encounter would not lead to a guaranteed victory, and that casualties would be unacceptably high. To say nothing of the diplomatic consequences of such an action."

  "I feel the same way," Marshall replied. "I do not want to fire the first shots of the Second Interplanetary War out here. not for this. I have some leeway in my orders, however. I would be willing – as would, I suspect, my government – to take this to arbitration. Nothing to be removed from Desdemona by either side until the final decision has been made."

  Shaking his head, Jian replied, "With our increased deep space efforts, we need these resources as much as the Belt. I tell you this honestly that you might understand that compromise for us is an expensive luxury." He paused, smiled, and continued, "Neither of us are diplomats, and it is showing. We are both soldiers, and soldiers in this generation – as in every generation – are the last ones to seek war out, yet usually are the ones ordered to begin them. My government wants Desdemona, Captain, and you must admit that we have the legal claim to the moon. Your government is in the wrong here."

  "A claim based on a hundred years ago, Captain. Titan hadn't even been settled then, the Lunar Republic was still nothing but a dream."

  "Nevertheless. We will be entering orbit in thirty-seven hours. I fear that my deadline stands. No doubt we will both be consulting our respective superiors to be given further instructions."

  "No doubt," Marshall replied, quietly.

  "I hope to speak to you again under better circumstances, Captain. I sincerely hope our next encounter is not in battle. Ma Kong out."

  As the channel went dead, Marshall shook his head, the rage drained out of him, replaced simply by frustration. Shaking his head, he started to compose a new report to Mariner Station.

  Chapter 18

  The crawlways and corridors underneath Shakespeare Station seemed to go on forever. While she had been confined to the populated areas of the station, Orlova had failed to get a true sense of how large the station actually was; it was only now that she and Esposito were deliberately trying to get themselves lost that they could appreciate the scale of the construction. EuroFed had obviously had big plans for the place, but had never even finished building it – often promising corridors would end with a 'warning – depressurized ahead' sign.

  She'd cursed not taking her datapad with her, but it would have been far too obvious a way of tracking her down. Not that it would be much consolation if the two of them managed to get completely lost; all the old stories about people trapped in forgotten, abandoned space stations that her mother had taken an almost eager glee in reading to her as a child started to seep back into her mind. The air smelled strange down here, as if it hadn't been breathed or recirculated for decades; for all Orlova knew, it hadn't.

  "It must be more than an hour now," Esposito said. "We're going to have to chance heading back up into the occupied levels now. All we have to do is make sure that we go straight to the security office, and we should be fine."

  "Straight to the security office? How? I'm not even sure which level we're on."

  "I had two semesters of spatial awareness training, Maggie. I could find my way around here in the dark; and I spent weeks memorizing the layout of the place on our way out here."

  Orlova looked at her friend, shaking her head and smiling, "I guess ROTC had something going for it, then. Lead on."

  Esposito took the lead, opening a maintenance hatch that Orlova had managed to miss, and started to climb. She gestured at some faded writing on the wall in a language the pilot could not immediately recognized, and gestured up. Their muscles ached under the unaccustomed heavy gravity as they scaled the ladder, climbing up level by level until finally Esposito raised her hand, panting for breath.

  "That's quite a climb," she gasped. "We're about there. Hatchway one level up, and that takes us right behind the security office. We'll be in the main corridor for about thirty seconds before we can get to Gomez, so I suggest we sprint it, just in case."

  "Assuming they haven't got us on internal motion sensors already."

  "I doubt they'll have them set up yet. If they did we'd already have been captured."

  "You have a point at that."

  "One minute to get our breath back, then we run for it."

  The two of them waited in the darkness for a moment, counting down the seconds in their heads, before with a simultaneous nod they made their way up the final rugs of the ladder, coming out into a narrow, cramped hatchway. The air was a lot fresher here, and smelled more of people; it was comforting to get some confirmation that they were not the only ones on the station, but also unnerving to think about what those people might be planning. They paused at the final hatchway, hardly believing that they had made it this far without someone detecting them, and with silent agreement opened the door.

  Leaping out into the corridor, narrowly missing a surprised maintenance technician who was about to open the hatch, they sprinted the fifty meters to the security office, attracting the attention of the few passers-by, none of whom seemed to actually be looking for them. The security office was closed; Esposito was the first to the door, and slammed her hand down on the lock release, taking a step in before thinking, then stopping frozen at the door, her eyes widening.

  Orlova was just behind her, and barely managed not to throw up; lying on the ground, blood slowly running down grooves in the floor, was the body of Corporal Gomez, killed by a knife in the back. The cameras had all been smashed, cables dangling from the ceiling, and as the two of them quickly surveyed the crime scene, alarms started to ring. Orlova grabbed Esposito's arm, pulling her towards the door.

  "We've got to get moving, right now."

  "Damn it, Maggie, we need to report this."

  "There's nothing we can do for him locked in a cell. Let's get out of here."

  The espatier looked down at the corpse, then up at Orlova, and nodded, the two of them running into the corridor. She snatched a pair of handguns out of the weapons locker on her way pa
st, tossing one to Orlova who plucked it out of the air.

  As they ran down the corridor back towards the maintenance hatch, no particular destination in mind, Orlova heard a crack past her ear – turning her head while she ran, she saw one of the security guards, handgun out and aimed towards them. He was distracted by an ear-piercing scream that indicated the death of Gomez had suddenly become extremely public knowledge. The maintenance technician looked wide-eyed at the pair as they leapt into the hatchway, scrambling down the ladders as fast as they could move.

  Neither of them had any direction or goal in mind, simply to get as far away from the inhabited areas of the ship as possible, as rapidly as they could. Finally, after fifteen minutes of racing in random directions, the pair raced into an old mess room, obviously long abandoned, and sat down at one of the long tables, panting for breath.

  "Should we keep moving?" Orlova asked as she struggled to get her breath back.

  Esposito shook her head, "No need. They could have had both of us up by the security office if they wanted us."

  "You think they want us on the run?"

  "I think they need someone to frame for Gomez's murder. We're the obvious suspects."

  "Until Alamo gets back, anyway. The Captain wouldn't buy it for a moment."

  Sighing, Esposito replied, "He might not have a choice. They'll be manufacturing evidence right now with no-one to stop them. I have a feeling you're right, though; at the very least we'd end up back on Alamo with a chance to tell our side of the tale. They won't want that."

  "They might not care. Gabi, if we just disappear, the Captain will tear the station apart. They'll have a copy of his psych profile, so they'll know that. That leaves them with two choices.

  "Kill us or turn us back over to Alamo when it gets back. Which could be days or weeks."

  "By which time the Republic might own Desdemona. We need to stop that from happening."

  The espatier nodded, "Which means finding out how far the conspiracy goes. That operations officer, certainly. We've got no idea how many others in the command staff."

  "So we can't trust anyone." Orlova paused. "We've got to get a message to Alamo about all of this. I don't expect that the Captain could drop everything and rescue us, but he needs to know that the station cannot be trusted."

  "Worth trying for a shuttle?"

  "With three fighters in the launch bay? Warren wouldn't have any choice but to take one of them up, and it would be child's play to shoot us down after that. Not an option."

  "Main communications array, then."

  "If we had our damn datapads, we could link in from anywhere on the station," Orlova fumed.

  Esposito smiled, "And they would already have tracked us down. Same reason we can't go back into the inhabited portions of the station. Even if we could get to a terminal, it would give us away in a few seconds. If they got to us before Alamo could get the message, then it would just be our posthumous testimony."

  "Assuming they haven't locked out the array. I would have."

  "We could try accessing it directly."

  Orlova looked at her friend, shaking her head in disbelief, "That's a long way up. Assuming it isn't guarded."

  "Only one way to find out."

  The two of them stood up, and made their way to another maintenance corridor to climb the many steps back up. Esposito pushed a button, opening up yet another maintenance crawlway, and Orlova looked up to the top of the shaft – it faded away into inky blackness above. With a smile, Esposito stepped in and started to climb, hand over hand once again.

  This time, at least, they weren't in any particular hurry; one or another of them called for stops every ten minutes to regain their breath, with a frequent topic of conversation the idiots who designed the station to spin at Earth-normal gravity. The further into the station they got, the easier the climb became, and the gravity began to get more comfortable. They reached the top of the shaft at last, only to find the access at the top welded shut, obviously fairly recently. Some writing was scrawled across the door, but without their datapads they couldn't read it.

  "Remind me to learn Japanese when we get back to Alamo," Orlova said, looking down the shaft and shaking her head.

  Esposito peered over her shoulder, "Two levels down there's another entry point. It's a longer route through the corridors, but it might be accessible."

  "How did you learn all this stuff?"

  "I did a couple of semesters out at Carter Station at Callisto Tech's annex. This is basically the same design, and the NOTC out there spent most of its time chasing round the corridors on exercises."

  "All this time I thought you had some sort of phenomenal memory."

  "Come on, let's go."

  Two levels down, and they swung into a long, narrow corridor. The air was a lot fresher here, and there were signs of recent maintenance everywhere – as well as a discarded ration pack which Orlova grabbed, stuffing into her pocket for later. Most of the rooms on this level seemed to be technical storage, and she briefly considered looking into a few of them.

  "I hope you've got that magic crystal of yours," Esposito said, turning her head as she approached a door at the end of the corridor.

  "Science, not magic. I'm just glad that this station still has century-old encryption. Hopefully they won't have updated this part of the system."

  The door slid open, revealing banks of unattended equipment and monitors. Clean, new equipment was dumped almost randomly across the room, obviously placed into compartments not designed to hold it, linked together with jury-rigged connections. On the surface, it looked like an untidy mess, but Orlova could appreciate the difficult task the engineer responsible for this must have had getting such disparate equipment to even talk to each other, never mind mesh properly together.

  "Where do we send the message?" Esposito asked.

  Orlova looked across the room, frowning, "We should have brought Quinn with us. I think the master control set-up is over there. The trick's going to be taking control of the dish without getting the attention of the control room; there are going to be all sorts of security safeguards built in."

  "Think you can do it?"

  The pilot walked over to the connections, nearly tripping over a bundle of fiber-optic cables that had been tied loosely to the floor, shaking her head. A couple of experimental button presses triggered nothing but gibberish on a screen on the other side of the room, but she did tug an old keyboard out from under a testing rig.

  "I don't think so. We'd either need to get hold of the engineer who built this thing in the first place, or spend a couple of days trying to work out how everything fits together. Longer to disable the security systems; I'll have enough trouble just sending a message, never mind doing it covertly."

  Esposito sat on a convenient chair, shaking her head, looking around the room as if the answer might rise from the ground. Orlova dragged another chair out from under a pile of components, sending them crashing to the ground, and pulled the ration pack out of her pocket. She had no idea what it was, only that it smelled like fish; taking an experimental bite, she smiled, took another one, then passed it over to Esposito.

  "A whole hour wasted. Maybe we could get to one of the fighters, send a message from there? Even if they picked us up, they couldn't stop us sending," Esposito said.

  "We'd never get out of the station. And guarantee that we'd be caught."

  "Yeah." She paused. "I wonder what they'll tell Alamo when it contacts them for a report. Hell, I wonder what Warren's doing right now; both of his pilots are on the run, accused of murder. That's going to look great."

  Orlova smiled and stood up, tossing the pack down onto the chair; Esposito could barely grab it in time to stop it spilling out. The pilot raced over to the controls and started furiously typing into the keyboard, the computer recognizing her words and switching its operating system accordingly.

  "We don't have to move the dish, Gabi. They'll do it for us. Alamo's bound to contact them sooner or l
ater – if nothing else, there's a twice-daily message packet between the two. All we have to do is queue a message quietly to be sent in the next package of transmissions."

  "Won't they be looking for it?"

  Orlova pulled out her crystal, and slid it into the panel, pushing a pair of wires aside to put it in, "Not if we don't actually send it until the antenna is actually pointed at Alamo. I don't need to feed it through the main system at all – we can bury it up in the initial electronic handshake. It won't show at this end, but Alamo's computers will register that the signal density at the start of the packet is a lot bigger than normal."

  "Where did you learn all this stuff?"

  "My mother's idea of flight training was rather outside the normal curriculum. She spent some time on e-warfare testing during the War, and put it all to rather more lucrative use later on." She finished typing with a flourish, and turned to Esposito. "Done. We can't make the message too long, maybe a hundred words or so."

  "I think we can condense it down that far. Let me at the keyboard."

  The two of them spent the next five minutes refining a short message; boiled down, they were warning Alamo that the upper levels of the station administration had been compromised, and that they had been accused of a murder they didn't commit – as well as the details they had uncovered about the previous landings on Desdemona. Looking anxiously at the clock on the wall, Orlova entered the message into memory, then shut down the terminal. Pulling a knife out of her pocket, she cut a pair of cables, and a couple of panels went dark.

  "What did you do?"

  "Creative sabotage. The only way to undo what I just did is from up here, and I just made it a lot harder."

  "Won't it show on the systems monitor?"

  "With all the work they've still got to do getting this station fully operational, some minor damage up here that doesn't affect system performance is going to be pretty low on the priority list. I don't think the technicians will want to be up here any more than we do."