Armored Tears
Authors: Mark Kalina
Armored Tears
by Mark Kalina
Copyright 2015, Mark Kalina
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
The names, places, characters and events portrayed in this book are the
products of the author's imagination or else are used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual persons, living or dead, or to any organization, group, event or
location is entirely coincidental.
— Much thanks to
George H. Hepker, for his work in editing. He found many mistakes, typos and
bits of confused phrasing.
— Likewise, a huge "thank
you" to Douglas D. Collins, for invaluable help with formatting, editing
and feedback.
Any mistakes remaining are
the author's own fault and persist in spite of George's and Doug's good work.
Without their help, there would be a
lot
more mistakes.
— The cover art was
created by Murry Lancashire, whose fine artwork can be found online at
http://muzzoid.deviantart.com.
Mr.
Lancashire was a pleasure to do business with and created what I think is a
very nice cover.
Contents:
Major
General Jose Salvator Bannerman of the United Earth Nations Peace Force watched
from the passenger seat of his new Benz-Maybach S1000 staff car as the looming
edifice of the gate building grew closer and closer. It was deceptive, the size
of the thing. The gate building was a dull gray concrete dome built on a vast
scale. At 200 meters tall and 400 meters across at ground level, it was one of
the largest man-made structure on the surface of the Earth. True, the tallest
skyscrapers reached up more than a kilometer, but they were nowhere
near
as massive as the gate dome.
For
almost a hundred kilometers around the dome there was nothing but the searing
scrub-waste of the Mojave desert, crossed only by the battered old road and a
spray of old railway lines. Gate buildings were always placed in locations like
this; empty places, far from anything valuable.
Inside
the dome was a chamber, a hundred meters across, maintained in a state of
almost perfect vacuum. And at the center was the spot that, sometimes, held the
gate itself. People called it a Tannhauser gate; he'd once been told the name
was a reference to a passing line of dialogue in a twentieth century science
fiction movie, which struck him as odd enough to have a ring of truth. Formally
it was called a "Morris–Thorne wormhole," but he'd never heard
anyone other than a scientist or a technician call it that.
There
were nineteen working Tannhauser gates on Earth, and another fourteen in high
orbit, leading, altogether, to fourteen other worlds. Three of those were
within the Solar system; Mars, the Jovian moon Ganymede and Titan, a moon of
Saturn. The other eleven were worlds that orbited around other suns. Most
worlds got just a single gate, but important ones often had more than one, and
one world —Elysium, a habitable world orbiting the star Tau Ceti, 12
light-years distant— had a half-dozen gates leading to it.
The
discovery of gate technology had, without a doubt, been the greatest
breakthrough in human history, allowing mankind to explore and colonize worlds
that would otherwise be utterly beyond mankind's grasp. Even at the speed of
light, the nearest other world outside the Solar system would take almost five
years to reach. Using the fastest possible spacecraft that humanity could
actually build, the trip would take thousands of years. But though it took a long
time —years— to set up a new gateway, once it was established a
journey across the light-years through a Tannhauser gate took only seconds.
The
gates provided fourteen other worlds for mankind to explore and exploit...
though only three of those could support human life outside of sealed,
pressurized habitats. Even so, the gates had given mankind new frontiers, and a
new age of discovery, far beyond anything in prior human history.
At
first glance, building gates on the surface of the Earth could seem like a bad
idea. In deep space, there was no need to maintain an artificial vacuum in the
gate chamber, and no danger to nearby populations from the huge energies
involved in generating a gate. On the other hand, putting a gate in space meant
that you needed spacecraft —rockets— to get to and from it, which,
paradoxically, made space-based gates a lot more expensive to use than surface
based gates.
It
had been forty-five years since the first experimental gate had been opened.
Bannerman remembered hearing about it, though he'd been just a little child
then, back in 2032. The actual discovery and exploration of new worlds hadn't
begun till the late 2030s. He remembered watching the vids of the newly
discovered worlds as a teenager in the early '40s, just a few years before he'd
started his term at the Jose Maria Cordova Military Academy in Bogota. He
remembered how, as a young junior officer, he'd desperately wanted to be one of
those explorers.
It
had now been almost forty years since humans had set foot on worlds that
orbited other suns, and Tannhauser gate travel was, if not quite routine, then at
least almost routine. Millions of people had travelled through Tannhauser
gates, exploring, mining, trading and founding new colonies. And the
exploration wasn't done; new gates were being opened all the time.
There
were, of course, limits. Setting up a gate was a chancy process and the initial
connection propagated at the speed of light. So a gate from Earth to, say,
Alpha Centauri would take almost four-and-a-half years from initial activation
to actual opening. And since gates had to be opened into vacuum, initial
contact gates were always orbital, and hence useless for anything but small
scientific missions. To make real exploration and colonization possible one had
to, at great cost, build a gate station on the surface of a new world, and then
wait however many years till a new gate was propagated to it. But once a gate
was established, it could be reopened instantly.
Perhaps
a more profound problem was making sure the other end of a gate opened
somewhere that was worth going. There were at least a few gates initiated every
year, now, and had been for decades; hundreds of attempts. But only fourteen
had succeeded so far... and only three of those were
actual
successes, in terms of finding new worlds for mankind to
live on. Even the best long range astronomical surveys could only guess at the
nature and precise location of an extra-solar planet; sometimes gate attempts
missed. Other times they reached their targets, but found useless worlds, no
better and no more useful than the airless rocks that were available much
closer to home, in Earth's Solar system. Just three livable worlds, so far...
so that even the least of them was a prize beyond price.
General
Bannerman pulled himself away from his musings and put his mind to the task at
hand. The huge gate building was getting closer. The face of the great dome was
all but featureless, so that as he drove towards it, it was possible to imagine
that it was a fraction of the size, and much closer. The handful of
multi-wheeled trucks parked in the kilometer-wide paved staging area near the
dome could have passed for scale models or children's toys.
A
spray of rail lines converged on the huge structure, crossing a vast, concrete
apron that stretched several kilometers in all directions out from the dome.
All but one of the lines were derelict; rusted or even missing sections of
rail. The lone intact line was empty now as well; today wasn't one of the
scheduled gate openings.
When
the gate was open, the single line would be fairly busy. Pressurized train cars
would be lined up with goods and passengers, ready to be fed into the
Tannhauser gate, or else rows of cars would be coming out, full of people and
goods from Arcadia, a planet that orbited Luhman-16A, a very small dwarf star
almost seven light years distant from Earth.
Arcadia,
first reached in 2039, was the third —and so far the last—
habitable world discovered and explored via the Tannhauser gates. The discovery
of Arcadia had been a surprise; no one had expected that tiny, relatively cool,
dwarf stars like Luhman-16A could harbor habitable worlds. And yet, Arcadia was
there. Orbiting very close to its very small, relatively cold star, Arcadia's
mass was close to that of Earth, as was its atmospheric pressure, and
crucially, its atmospheric composition. As with Elysium —orbiting Tau
Ceti— and Xanadu, which orbited Epsilon Indi, humans could breathe the
air of Arcadia without life support equipment.
On
the other hand, that was just about the limit of Arcadia's hospitality. Arcadia
was a water-world, with only a small, equatorial landmass. Its seas teamed with
oxygen-producing microbial life. The water was mildly toxic to Earth life,
though not beyond being filtered and purified. But, as if to mock the promise
of its vast blue seas, the only landmass on Arcadia —two irregular
peninsulas linked by a narrow, rocky isthmus, with a combined surface area roughly
on par with that of Japan— was a lifeless desert; searing, rugged and
utterly barren.
When
the Arcadian Tannhauser gate was closed, as it was now, the entire facility
would normally be all but deserted. Which was just as well, mused the general;
a security leak this early in the operation would be a disaster.
The
area around the gate structure was not deserted now, though. There were a
half-dozen articulated, 12-wheeled trucks on the vast concrete apron; vehicles
from the 1099th field engineering battalion, painted glossy black with a single
white "lightning bolt" stripe running down their sides; the colors of
the UEN Peace Force. Several dozen Peace Force troops in black-and-gray "digital-pattern"
camouflage uniforms stood around, looking at the towering bulk of the gate
building dome looming over them. The general was old enough to remember when
the paint scheme had been all white, and the troops had worn the uniforms of
contributing nation-states with pale blue helmets; a long time ago. A few of
the troopers were looking in a desultory way at a disused rail lines that tracked
across the cracked face of the concrete, but other than that, there was no sign
of any work or activity.
"Sir,"
said a man with a lieutenant-colonels' rank badges, offering a crisp salute as
the general got out of his staff car. The colonel seemed to ignore the driver,
Major Hafez, who got out a moment after. The general was a tall man, blocky of
build and square featured, with olive-toned skin and silver at the sides of his
raven-dark hair. His adjutant-driver of was much the same skin tone, but a dozen
years younger, thin and shorter than average. Major Hafez wasn't an
impressive-looking man; his face had a receding chin and an oversized hawk-beak
nose, but as far as Bannerman was concerned, that was just a matter of
effective camouflage; Hafez was a man of rare qualities; both utterly loyal and
very competent... not least with the little Beretta officer's service pistol he
wore at his side.
"Report,
Colonel," the general said, perfunctorily returning the
lieutenant-colonel's salute. The lieutenant-colonel was pale-skinned and
blond-haired; North American or North European, the general thought with mild
distaste, though Bannerman's own family name came from North European roots; a
distant ancestor in the early 19th century had been a Scottish mercenary in the
service of Simón Bolívar. Not that it mattered; a politically unreliable man
would never have risen so high in Peace Force service, so this colonel's
political connections and bona fides must have been good enough to overcome his
ethnic disadvantages.
"Sir,"
the colonel said, in an voice that perhaps held a hint of a modern British
accent, "infrastructure is, as you can see, mostly intact. Of course,
there's been some degradation since the... ah, unscheduled shutdown, seven
years ago. The single line that's been maintained is at full capacity, of
course. But the other lines are... ah, not yet ready for operation. But I'd say
that we could get the rail systems up and running fairly quickly. No more than
a couple of years... ah, assuming that we have real cooperation from the labor
unions involved in the project, of course."
Years,
thought the general. The man wanted years to repair a dozen rail lines laid on
flat desert ground; the old
norteamericanos
had built most of an entire transcontinental rail system in less time than
that. Still, the estimate wasn't a surprise. Long, stretched-out projects meant
larger budgets and more pay and benefits, not to mention more political clout
from handing out the largess of those swollen budgets, which was something the
labor unions were very keen on. But with this project, years simply wasn't an
option.
"You
have three months, Colonel," the general said. "Ninety-two days to be
precise. And labor cooperation won't be an issue," he added, to the man's
shocked expression. "This will be a Peace Force project exclusively. No
civilian labor involvement."
The
colonel's face was still frozen in slack amazement.
"But
the unions..."
The
general allowed himself a slight smile. "The Permanent Oversight Council
of the United Earth Nations has given this project a green light. Even the
unions should know better than to interfere with that, Colonel."
"Sir,
I, ah, I understand... but this is the FSNA... the, ah, the unions here enjoy a
great deal of support. Even with pressure from the Permanent Oversight
Council... I'm not sure how quickly..."
"The
politics of the situation are not your concern, Colonel," Bannerman said
in a mild tone.
"Yessir,"
the colonel said quickly, and then paused again. "Sir, my... that is to
say, ah, my people don't have the skill sets to rebuild the rail system,
sir."
"Your
battalion is a military logistics unit, is it not, Colonel?" the general
said, with a certain wry amusement in his voice.
"Yes,
sir."
"But
you lack the skills to repair and make ready a railway system that was designed
to carry military supplies... among other thing?"
"Ah,
sir, we... well, the unit has never been trained for that sort of work. I... I
believe my predecessor may have been tasked with the relevant training, but
since I took command, the training schedule has never covered..."
"Never
mind, Colonel," the General said. "This project has been designated a
class three security matter. You have authorization to invoke the Emergency
Conscription Acts and draft the required labor from the local union
representatives. Drafted personnel will be retained in service for the full two
year term and given the full pay and benefits of Peace Force service, of
course."