Greenies

sipping from cocktails as they sat in leather bound chairs before the huge picture window that looked out on the empty space before them.

'Not yet,' Jules sighed. 'The first group of search ships have passed beyond where the torpedo could have conceivably been fired from and the attack ships have run out of maneuvering fuel. They're being recovered right now.'

'So we lost them then? Almost forty thousand of my men dead and you can't find the people responsible for it? That's unacceptable, Jules! I want that ship dead!'

'The anti-stealth ships from our part of the screen will be coming into range in about twenty minutes,' he told him. 'And the entire wing of A-22's will be launching in five to fan out ahead of us. We'll find them.'

'Christ,' Wrath said, shaking his head angrily. 'How in the hell could something like this have happened? How in the hell could you let the greenies attack this armada with nuclear weapons? That's outrageous.'

'There will be a full investigation, I can assure you of that,' Jules said. 'Those responsible for the lapse in security will be punished harshly.' He was in fact already formulating just who would be blamed for the attacks. The on duty combat information center crew made handy scapegoats. They were, after all, the ones responsible for detecting enemy craft or weapons, weren't they?

'I want some heads to roll over this, Tanner,' Wrath said. 'And I want them to roll soon. Nothing like this has happened to the corps since the Jupiter War. And then we were at least fighting a real enemy!'

'They'll roll,' he promised. 'And we'll find that ship. You have my word.'

Wrath sighed and took another sip from his scotch and soda. He looked out at the stars for a moment and then turned back to his colleague. 'What did the executive committee have to say about this?' he asked.

'I just got their reply about ten minutes ago. We're still able to relay messages directly instead of sending them to Jupiter first. They were a bit upset by the news of course.'

'I take it that that is an understatement?'

He gave a cynical smile. 'Yes, perhaps the biggest of the trip so far. They were infuriated. They're very worried about what effect this is going to have on public opinion.'

'Understandable. What did they have to say? Do we have orders for what to brief the media on? They've already started picking up the rumors.'

'It was a collision,' Jules said. 'That's what the official story is going to be.'

'A collision?' Wrath said in disgust. 'You've got to be kidding me.'

He shook his head. 'One of our captains was trying to adjust his station in the formation. He let his engine burn a little too long and ran his ship into another Panama, therefore causing the rupture of the propellant tanks aboard Camel. The explosion completely destroyed Camel and caused severe damage to Mule.'

'Holy Jesus,' said Wrath. 'And just how are we to explain why we had to treat the survivors of Mule for radiation sickness? Did that occur to them? Or how about what's going to happen when one of the surviving bridge crew starts blabbing his mouth? Or one of our own CIC crew that was tracking this thing. Do they really think that something like this can be kept under wraps?'

'They didn't explain things any further than what they ordered,' Jules told him. 'They left that up to us. We could say that the surviving crewmen were exposed to intense solar radiation before being rescued. After all, we are near the sun.'

'Their suits have protection from that,' Wrath pointed out. 'That'll never fly.'

'They'll make it fly,' Jules insisted. 'Remember what we're talking about here. They can control the media if they really want to, if they really need to. They did it during the Jupiter War. Remember, the big three are nothing more than huge corporations themselves. And whose behalf are we really fighting this fucking war on?'

Wrath looked at him levelly. Both men of course knew the real reason for the war, but neither had ever mentioned it, not even in private. 'I suppose you're right,' he said. 'And I suppose we can let those men from the bridge know exactly what they're facing if they go around telling lies about how they were attacked by a nuclear weapon.'

'Such things have been done before,' Jules said. 'Many times. We'll place the blame for the collision on the captain of the Camel, since all hands were lost there. We'll portray the bridge crew of the Mule as heroic in the attempts to avoid the collision and in their diligence for saving the surviving men. As for our CIC crew, I'll speak to each one of them personally and make sure they understand what the stakes are. They stick to the story, they'll move up the ladder. If they go telling lies about nuclear weapons, they'll be destroyed, both in their career and their reputation.'

'Sounds good,' Wrath said. 'But in the meantime, you have to find that ship. And you have to make sure that there aren't any others out there.'

'I can't possibly imagine that the greenies could have manned more than one ship,' Jules said. 'I'm frankly quite amazed that they were even able to do that.'

'And I'm sure you're right about that, but we underestimated them once. Let's make sure we don't do it again.'

Sugi and Brett were watching the display of enemy vessels carefully, both of them very tense. For the past forty minutes more than sixty A-22's had been circling around them. They were teamed up in pairs and performing careful grid searches as they moved through the area. As their colleagues had been before them, they were somewhat hampered by the fact that they were moving roughly seventy kilometers per second through the search area, but they had also been given much more time to perform their search and were able to be a little more thorough.

So far, none had come within 10,000 kilometers of Mermaid, although they had passed on both sides and though their active systems were slashing all over her. Brett was certain that they had not gotten so much as a sniff from him yet, but that was only because all heat emitting systems had been shut down.

'Brett,' said Mandall from the helm, 'our waste heat is becoming critical. We need to make a dump soon.'

Brett nodded, stifling a yawn as he looked at the display. The excess heat should have been released into space more than twenty minutes ago, but to do so now was to risk giving the A-22s a source to lock in on. If those ships found their position, they would be on them in minutes, blasting them with heavy lasers.

'We'll have to hold a little longer,' he said. 'I don't want to risk it until those ships are at least 40,000 kilometers out. They're coming to the end of their search arc now it looks like.'

'Okay,' she said worriedly.

As if that wasn't bad enough news, Sugi soon had worse. 'Brett,' he said, 'I've just plotted out a course for target 46. It's a Seattle class and it's heading pretty much right towards us. If both of us keep on current courses, they'll pass within 12,000 kilometers. All of her systems are active too.'

'Are you sure on that plot?' Brett asked.

'I've run it three times now,' Sugi answered. 'It looks like the closure will occur in forty-three minutes.'

'That's well inside detection range for one of those vessels,' Brett said. 'Well inside. Especially if we don't get rid of some of this heat before then.'

Worried looks passed among the crew at these words. What were they to do? Just sit there and hope that the Seattle didn't see them? Try to fight it out and get destroyed by the A-22s? The fact that Brett, their commanding officer, the man who was supposed to know what to do in these situations, looked just as helpless as they felt, didn't make them feel much better.

'Brett?' Sugi said.

He took a few deep breaths, running the problem through his head. Until now he'd never really appreciated just what kind of pressure the captain of a ship was put under. What he decided now would make the difference between them living and dying.

'We can't just hope that it'll change course,' Brett said, mostly thinking aloud but wanting his crew to hear his thoughts. 'They seem to be on a search course. It's unlikely that they'll deviate from it.'

'It would seem so,' Sugi said.

'Helm, start calculating the minimum amount that we'd have to burn the engines in order to clear them by more than 20,000 kilometers.'

'Right,' she said, bending to her screen. She worked the numbers for more than three minutes before coming