The spacemen burned down into the system, trading stories, smoking cigars, and generally making asses of themselves while they were still timeslipping behind the rest of the known universe. The current conversation had been on relativistic velocities, as most conversations were, and how it made it impossible to report bad behavior
“We’ll be well into our hangovers, showered and spectacularly grumpy by the time the report gets in. Hell, they probably have entirely different linguistic systems by the time the report gets in. Jesus Christ, are you sure this is mescal?” asked the Flight Engineer, Parsons Dornan.
“Yah”, said the captain, forty-year old veteran Jing Wu Kierns, buried in a massive nebula of cushions, “but mind you don’t . . you know . . don’t”
“Don’t what?” asked the Executive Officer. When the only constant in life was other spacemen, bonds could go deep. The Executive Officer, a hermaphrodite of indefinite age known only as Wei, knew that his captain was beyond the reach of language, and only a precious few moments from being beyond thought itself. Being around and sober was the predominant duty of the XO.
It was a last moment of pleasure for these men. In a few subjective hours they would be streaking through the planetary defenses of the Human League. There was no hiding the fact they were about to sluice through a civilization born just a few subjective days ago. The same great things about hauling all over the galaxy at the speed of light suddenly turned into horrible liabilities.
“Now, the fantastic thing about coming in out of the Perseus belt is that it’s just such a fucking desert. Almost sticking right out of the galaxy”, said ordnance controller Lt. Xian Soon. “Last time we were in action, it was against the Rogue Iron, they were in the Core, and we were, like, crawling,” Soon mimed the action with his hands, laughing.
“Yeah,” said Kierns, when I later asked him about the Core, “Parking lot assault. Geriatric parking lot. Twenty percent C. We were firing off kilo projectiles that had the energy a microgram projectile would have at our current attack speed. But even at twenty shields were freaking out, the plume from the coolant was glowing like the big fucking bang. It’s the goddamn core!” Privately, Kierns admitted that the attack had made him nervous: twenty percent c was slow enough for defense systems to engage his ship. “Sometimes you do wonder if the hive’s systems are completely on the spot. I mean, we got our orders against Rogue Iron fifteen hundred slipped years before we attacked. We know the hive’s prophecy is ninety-nine point nine nine percent accurate, but it doesn’t take a whole lot to make us go nova. A gram of mass and we look like the first second of the universe, in miniature.”
Does it every bother the men, that they find themselves warring on civilizations that had come into being during their voyage? Planets they had never, and now would never, know?
“It’s a job, you know? You know. It’s hard enough, spacing, your only buddies are the hive and the sleepers, but the living worlds you’re seeing a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand slipped years after you were there last. You miss cultures, not people. But worry about targets? No, you shut that out, trust the hive.”
Not too much later, individual hydrogen atoms began sparking against the particle shielding like little suns. Though deflected hundreds of kilometers from the body of the ship, their roar bucks the hull and blinds sensors too dumb to look away. Subjective time is slowed to nothing compared to the system we are bombing through, but that doesn’t matter: no one has any way of knowing we’re coming. Our light is only ahead of us by a kilometer.
Dornan charges the mass driver and adjusts the ship’s flexing spaceframe for the recoil of a two gram projectile. “It’s yours Soon”, he says. For all of the high technology and good times the crew had in cruise configuration, once the vessel is belayed for a system assault it feels like a mosh pit in the torpedo room. Every piece of the vessel is contracted into a tight wad that could fit into a few Metro compartments. I can feel Soon twitch with the control he exerts through the glass tubes traveling from his nerve channels to the trigger housing, smell his perspiration as the dank space goes pitch black.
“Power on rail."
"Good good good"
"Grams down the track and . . away!” The lights come back on.
“Evasive, Dornan. Lay down some light between us and that plug,” says Kierns, in an urgent whisper that seems to carry for kilometers.
Everything creaks under another ratchet of acceleration. We are going very near the possible here, when the human nervous system begins to fail due to the differences in velocity between body parts. When you are traveling at orbital velocity, the relativistic difference between your throbbing cardiac nerve and your spinal cord is inconsequential. In the upper nineties of C the difference between the nerves in your throbbing muscles and the nerves in your spinal column can prove fatal. “The nerve is moving that much faster that the sodium pump doesn’t know if it’s coming or going,” Dornan had explained, “once you’re close enough to C an extra meter per second can make a big difference. We’re all medicated to the gills at this velocity, but there are limits”. It’s another reason why these flights haven’t been automated; printed circuits of any microscopic scale fail during routine course correction in relativistic flight, due to the local variance in relativistic effects. The fabric of space has necessitated that humans be the only interstellar actors. Despite the immense mental powers of the hive's intelligence, it remains locked in the subjective time of stellar gravity wells.
“Proximity flashes from the far shield,” notes Dornan. Calm. He could be taking my dessert order. “Blue shifted . . redding out, port side. Carbon? Wait. . wait”
“Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!”, screams Wei
Without thinking, Soon flinches several times next to me, more projectiles hurtling off into God knows where. In the dark that ensues, the temperature in the cabin rises twenty degrees in an instant. I am sure that I am about to be reduced to an extremely diffuse cloud of hitherto-unknown subatomic particles. Shocks ripple through my entire being. Did I just remember the future?
The lights come back on, and after a sweating heartbeat, everyone piles on Soon.
“Hahahahaha!” screams Kierns. “You crazy sumbitch!”
Wei dances to stations, “Cloud separated. Really separated. We’re OK. Sort of. OK, ha OK, everyone, let Soon check his scope.” I understand. Soon shot off all his salvos at the Human League’s defensive cloud, insanely close, but the blast had separated the hard stuff enough for us to pass through. It was quick thinking and decidedly un-military. “We’re not real soldiers,” Soon confesses, “we just play them on TV. But since the signal's right-” he points over his shoulder "-there somewhere, we just do what the hell we want."
Dornan marvels at the scale of damage to the vessel. “Big impact with the far shields, some stuff hit the hull material. Some sort of quantum tunneling mass went glissading through the crew compartment, some exotic. I think the shock front actually went back in time a little bit. Hoo-ah”. Dornan smiles. External armor had nearly broken down all over the leading edges of the vessel. Soon notes that the crew had taken on a serious amount of radiation; we would be dead in months without organ transplants. Luckily the next leg of the trip would only take days in subjective time.
After high spirits have passed, we look back on the planet we swooped by so quickly. The defenses existed outside the prophecy of the Hive, and that had bought the Human League another untold number of years. Soon's first shot must have hit other clouds further in and given this system an ephemeral new sun. The home planet sits there in dumb blue perfection. We don't have the fuel to turn around. Some other crew, armed with the new information, will take on this League.
Over the next hour the compressed vessel opens like a flower for the next leg of its tour, gravity ring spinning up and generators cooling down. Kierns looks forward to the next peaceful port of call, someplace near Antares, where "there's supposed to be beaches. Another woman-only planet, too. Won't they be surprised."
The acceptance of these young men in the face of unprecedented isolation and danger is something I don't think I can ever leave behind me, even when I land for the last time, and send them off to their eternal lives among the stars. For now we look ahead, to the blueshifted light of Antares.
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