Duty, Honor, Planet

made Antonov just that much more desperate.

* * *

“…realize the consequences of acting prematurely,” Captain Patel said, gesticulating heatedly, “but we can’t simply wait for the enemy to become even more entrenched—we have to do something while we still can.”

“I understand what you’re saying, Arvid,” Joyce Minishimi argued, sitting back wearily. “But I’m not certain we have the authority, whether military or moral, to make that decision.”

“If we don’t, who does?” Patel protested.

Jason sighed, sinking into his seat. They both had a point, but they’d been bickering over the issue for over an hour now, and Jason was beginning to feel like a potted plant. He glanced around the table, wondering if anyone— or everyone—else felt the way he did.

Arrayed around the table in the Mineral Ventures Multicorporation conference room were Captains Minishimi and Patel and their senior staffs; Doctors Kovalev and Mandila from the scientific staff; Katherine Frasier, the Mineral Ventures Operations Director for the Pallas base; Lieutenant Shamir and Gunny Lambert; and Georges Kercok, the representative of the local independents—an unnaturally slim, Eastern European man with the characteristic close-cropped Mohawk and facial tatoos of the belt miners. He seemed uncomfortable with the assembled authority figures and hadn’t said more than two words since they’d arrived.

The atmosphere had seemed so momentous just a few hours ago, when he’d been strapped into Captain Patel’s private shuttle, fixated on the viewscreen image of the massive floating mountain that was Pallas, tumbling gently through the star-filled firmament with an angelic host of spacecraft surrounding it. They were little more than gnats to Pallas’ Olympian expanse, all but the Patton behind them and the Bradley to the fore—those Cyclopean pillars of metal loomed large and menacing in the darkness, the very spacetime around them shimmering as their Eysselink fields remained on guard against stray meteorites.

As they’d drawn closer to the asteroid, Jason could see the touch of man’s hand in the docking bays, communications antennae, weapons ports and sensor dishes that pocked its rocky face. It had taken over forty years to complete the installation, most of that in carving caverns deep into the nickel iron, far from the dangers of meteorites, solar flares and cosmic radiation.

A Twenty-Third Century cave, Jason had thought with cynical humor. We’ve come a long way, baby. 

As he understood it from conversations with Captain Patel, the base at Pallas was usually a beehive of activity, with corporate and independent miners, brokers, entertainers, smugglers and technicians pouring through the corridors and ships swarming around the rock. But the civilians had scattered at the approaching war like cockroaches skittering out of the light, tucking themselves deep in the “storm cellars” of their habitat rocks and pulling the hole in after them.

So they had found Pallas nearly deserted, its broad halls eerily empty. Jason had been hard-pressed to keep his feet in the asteroid’s microgravity, nearly launching himself into the—thoughtfully-padded—ceiling with each step as the group from the Patton had made its way to the conference room.

Captain Minishimi had greeted them at the door. The petite, gentle-featured woman seemed an unlikely starship captain, but he knew from experience that she was as competent an officer as any in the Fleet.

“Didn’t think I’d be seeing you again so soon, McKay,” she’d greeted him as he entered.

“I was hoping it would be under better circumstances, ma’am,” he’d said, shaking her hand—and that had been close to the last pleasant moment in the meeting.

After a replay of Colonel Podbyrin’s drugged interview, Mandila and Kovalev had fielded the many questions about the technological aspects of the story—questions ranging from the professional to the totally ignorant.

“What is a ‘nonclassical wormhole,’ Dr. Kovalev?” Minishimi had asked. “And why would they have to use a fusion device to traverse it?”

“A classical wormhole, Captain,” Kovalev had begun to wind himself up and Jason stifled a moan, “is the basic Wheeler construct, which was created during the Big Bang. Many of these may exist in our galaxy, connecting different parts of space, but they are useless to us as they are usually microscopic, making them intraversable—in theory, of course, since we still haven’t actually found one.

“A so-called nonclassical wormhole was a conceit of late Twentieth Century physics which fancied that the fabric of spacetime was a froth of constantly appearing and vanishing wormholes and singularities on the Quantum level. Later, this theory was expanded to predict that macroscopic wormholes could be created during the formation of stars—still fairly small, but large enough to keep track of, though shorter in span than a Classical version. As to why they would be able to traverse it by using a thermonuclear weapon—well, I can only assume that there may be some way to expand the entrance of the hole using a fusion explosion of correct intensity. I would have to examine the actual process to elaborate further.”

“What about the machine Podbyrin described, the one they’re using to duplicate their weapons?” Patel had asked, looking at Mandila. “Is such a thing possible?”

“Pretty far beyond our present technology, but certainly possible,” was the researcher’s reply. “We’ve been using nanotechnology since before the Sino-Russian War—you’re carrying some of the little buggers in your blood right now, injected at birth to patrol against blood clots and cancerous growths. In another thirty years or so, we might be able to use them for simple manufacturing processes. But what Colonel Podbyrin described is centuries beyond that.” The man shook his head, frowning deeply. “If they discover how to fully make use of such technology, they could roll over us like we weren’t even there.”

Then the real debate had begun—a debate unlike any Jason seen in his military career. Minishimi and Patel shared a rank and a nearly identical time in service, but not one opinion of what their strategy should be. Patel was all for an immediate attack—he felt the threat to use nuclear weapons was a bluff. Minishimi was more cautious, favoring a scout mission to evaluate the enemy forces.

The two commanders had stated their positions early on and had been arguing them for the last hour, either person-to-person or through the proxies of their staff officers. Jason had barely been able to get a word into the debate and Shamir and Lambert had sat silent as zombies—Ari seemed vaguely amused by the whole thing, while the Gunny was clearly losing patience.

Jason knew what he wanted to say: Stop arguing, Goddamnit, and come up with a course of action! But the Captains outranked him—though most of the Fleet retained traditional naval ranks, the Intelligence Division, due to Mellanby’s background in the Corps, had adapted the Marine designations, so a Fleet Captain was the equivalent of an Intelligence Colonel. The upshot was that he was two steps in rank below the shipmasters and one below even the First Officers, which put him in an uncomfortable position.

Which, he supposed, was just the position Colonel Mellanby had chosen him for.

“Excuse me, sir, ma’am.” Jason stood up suddenly, grabbing the edge of the table to keep himself from bounding to the ceiling. The two of them broke off in mid-bicker and looked at him, every head in the room swinging his way. Great. “Now, I may be speaking out of turn,” he ventured carefully, “but I don’t think you brought me in here to keep the minutes.”

“Go ahead, McKay,” Minishimi urged. “You’ve had more experience with the enemy than anyone else here.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” He nodded gratefully, trying to work up his courage. “You’ve both spelled out your positions thoroughly,” he went on, “and you both have good arguments—but I think that this kind of discussion is counterproductive. This is a military operation, not a democracy, and one of you needs to take control.”

“Of course, we’ll need an operational commander,” Captain Patel allowed, “but until we settle on a course of action…”

“That’s just the point, sir,” Jason interrupted him, seizing the moment. “A commanding officer can consider the suggestions of his subordinates and accept or refuse them, but the ultimate decision and responsibility belongs to him or her. Without that responsibility, there is no decision.” He leaned forward, taking a breath. “A lot of people here and on Earth, soldiers and civilians, are going to die because of the decisions that are made right here, today. We owe it to those people to be unified in those decisions. They have the right to know who’s responsible for either our defeat or our victory. I don’t know if either of you have ever sent good men and women to die, knowing that they went to their deaths because they trusted your judgment and your decisions, but there’s a special kind of pain you feel afterward, a doubt that claws at your soul…” He trailed off, sitting back in his chair, visions of Inferno haunting the back of his mind.