Yamashiro believed this, but he still felt the need to explain. “As you will see from the video feed, Master Chief Illych destroyed A-361-F by detonating his stealth infiltration pods. We did not fire on that planet. Perhaps the master chief and his team would still be alive if we had.
“Illych and his men launched from a cloaked transport, flying stealth infiltration pods. We do not know anything about the aliens’ technology; but there is little chance they could trace the landing team to our ships. If we fired on the planet instead of sending a team, the aliens would certainly be aware of our ships.
“We have invaded an alien empire with four ships. We are badly outnumbered by an enemy with superior technology. If I must lose men to keep my ships hidden …I am willing to make that sacrifice.”
“Yes, sir,” said Oliver.
Yamashiro nodded, and said, “Master Chief, as the highest-ranking member of the SEALs, you will oversee the operation from this ship.”
There was neither hostility nor complaint in Oliver’s voice as he asked, “Sir, wouldn’t that qualify as a dereliction of duty? As the highest-ranking man on the team, I am supposed to …”
“Master Chief, you will be violating a direct order if you assign yourself to this mission,” said Yamashiro.
Oliver did not raise an eyebrow or cock his head. His lips did not twitch, and he did not look away from Yamashiro though his gaze still fell just below the admiral’s eyes.
“Sir, if you are concerned for my welfare …”
Yamashiro scowled and raised a hand to stop the SEAL.
“Sending your highest-ranking man into an action is inefficient. Commanding officers remain with the fleet and coordinate the movements. I was not aware that Illych accompanied the team to A-361-F. If I had been, I would not have allowed it.”
“Sir …” Oliver began.
Yamashiro shook his head to signal that he did not want to continue the discussion. “You have your orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
A moment of silence passed, then Yamashiro asked, “Do you have any questions, Master Chief?”
“Yes, sir. Did Illych accomplish anything on A-361-F?”
Yamashiro kept these thoughts to himself, and said, “We’ll be in position by A-361-D in twenty hours, Master Chief. Have your men ready.”
“Yes, sir,” said Oliver.
Yamashiro looked away from the SEAL, and said, “That will be all.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
If Yamashiro did not want Oliver to show the video feed to all of his SEALs, he should have voiced his preference. The SEALs shared information unless given orders to conceal it. Oliver routed copies of the video feed to the senior chiefs on each of the four battleships; and they, in turn, held mass briefings in which they showed the footage to their men.
Master Chief Oliver sat in the back of a large auditorium with his two closest friends watching the video feed along with his men. No one in the auditorium spoke a word until the feed ended. When the lights came on, the SEALs divided themselves by platoon and discussed what they had seen. Oliver and his two friends, Senior Chief Jeff Harmer and Senior Chief Brad Warren, remained where they were.
“What did you see?” asked Oliver.
Down in the gallery, chief petty officers led similar discussions.
“We can’t outgun them,” said Warren. “It doesn’t look like we can even touch them.”
“Agreed,” said Oliver.
“They only sent five defenders,” said Warren.
“What’s your point?”
“They must have had a pretty good idea about how many men we had, or they would have sent a larger force to intercept us.”
“Maybe they didn’t have anyone else available,” said Harmer.
Warren shook his head, and replied, “They always sent armies of fifty thousand soldiers on New Copenhagen. It didn’t matter how many men we sent, they always sent fifty thousand.”
“But if we caught them by surprise,” Harmer began.
“They could only find five men …Are you joking?” asked Warren.
“Okay, so you think they counted our caskets?” Oliver asked.
“Aren’t the caskets untraceable?” asked Warren.
“They are to us …with our technology,” said Oliver. “Who knows what they have. For all we know, they may be able to track us by our brain waves.”
“How would you track an S.I.P.?” asked Warren.
“Light field, vision, and sound tracking are out; but who’s to say they don’t have technology that senses every time anything breaches their atmosphere,” said Harmer.
Warren gave Harmer an incredulous glare, and asked, “How in the world did you come up with that?”
“It’s Occam’s razor, yes? The simplest explanation …
“Their technology is more advanced than ours, but from what we know, it’s centered around the use of tachyons and particles. Invisible or not, infiltration pods are still made out of matter. They still caused a physical disruption when they entered an atmosphere. Matter displaces matter, it’s going to cause a disruption.
“The simplest solution is that the aliens counted the disruptions.”
Senior Chief Warren muttered, “A tachyon early-warning system …like a burglar alarm. How do we get around something like that?”
Oliver asked, “Do either of you see any holes in the theory?”
Neither of them did, so the discussion moved ahead.
“They may have been bulletproof, but that final explosion did them in,” said Warren. He enjoyed looking for holes in everything Harmer suggested. They were friends, but they were also rivals.
“We don’t know that,” said Oliver. “We know what it did to the planet, and we know that the tachyon curtain dissolved, but the alien avatars may have survived.”
“The avatars are made of tachyons. If the explosion dispersed the tachyons, then we can take it for granted that the individual avatars were destroyed,” said Harmer.
“That is the first time anyone has detonated a field-resonance engine. We don’t know how much radiation it generated. Maybe it was the radiation that destroyed the curtain,” said Oliver.
“But we all agree that the caskets did the job, right? I mean, come on, those babies zapped the whole planet,” said Warren.
Harmer agreed. He said, “They are our best weapon.”
“They may be our only weapon,” said Oliver.
“So do we win the war by blowing ourselves up?” asked Warren. He did not seem bothered by the idea, just curious.
“We win the war by any available means,” said Oliver. He thought about using them as torpedoes instead of transports. They flew themselves. So long as they were preprogrammed to overcharge and explode, they did not need live cargo for seek-and-destroy missions.
Harmer and Warren agreed.
