Edge of Solace (A Star Too Far) (10 page)

“At ease, gentlemen,” Captain Khan said. “A leak?” she asked with a serious look on her face. She dropped a tablet lightly onto the table.

Reed looked to Huron who looked to William. William realized that the buck was on him, and as the XO it really was. “Mr. Huron and Mr. Reed were informing me of some maintenance tasking.”

Captain Khan looked at the three and nodded. “Is that the smell?”

The two engineers nodded. The focus of the Captain
’s attention was never pleasant.

“Get it fixed.” Her eyes held a distracted look as she looked down to the tablet.

The feel of the room changed subtly as the Captain stood with her hands flat on the cool alloy of the table. She stared down in silence.

William glanced at the tablet. It was nothing but a glare. He’d been waiting for orders to come. After what happened on Redmond and the assault on the Naval Stations
, there would be
something.

“About the same time the Naval Stations were assaulted the Sa’Ami launched an attack on the trade station at the midpoint of the DMZ.” She looked up from the tablet and scanned the staff. “UC Command had a feeling something would happen after Redmond
.” She nodded to William. “But a full blown assault wasn’t it.”

The silence in the room was broken only by the random clicking of a ventilation fan.

“Behind us is the dropship,
Aleutian,
escorted by the missile cruiser,
Scylla
. The bulk of the fleet is heading towards the most likely intercept point.” She looked slowly at each member of the crew. “For the time being, we’re it.”

William sat back and took a breath. The border skirmishes and tensions had come to a peak. He always knew something would happen, but had no idea it would be all out war. “Do we have any reason to think they’ll hit Canaan?”

“No, but we don’t have any reason to think they
won’t
either. But the Army will hold the elevator in case there is an attack.”

The response told William enough. Time had been short and the
Malta
was sent out with the first unit that was ready.

She cleared her throat and began to read from the tablet, “UC
Malta
, you shall, to the best of your abilities, protect the Canaan system from any threats. Of primary concern is the condition of the elevator and the orbital industry. Preserve the independence of the colony only if the orbital assets are not at risk. Once the remainder of the garrison is in system you shall coordinate under Commodore Clark.” She looked up and into the eyes of the staff. Her face was a professional mask.

So there it is, William thought.

“Ma’am, we’re abandoning the colony?” Lebeau asked in a whisper of a voice.

“He who controls the gravity well controls the planet,” William said as if from a textbook.

“Exactly
, Mr. Grace,” Captain Khan said.

William realized that this was, in the entire voyage, the first time she praised him openly.

“The orbital industry is on the far side of the system in relation to where any Sa’Ami would come in. There’s eleven asteroid miners out there with a single unit moving inward to offload at Canaan. We’ll head out near the fifth planet, a gas giant, and take position on the edge of the rings.” She slid the tablet forward to the center of the table. A hastily drawn route was plotted along a system map.

“All watches are to be
in full combat readiness, off watches will have duty station kits with them at all times. Mr. Grace, make it happen.” Captain Khan nodded.

Lebeau squirmed and looked uncomfortable.

“Midshipman, this system is a colony, and we’ll do everything we can to protect them. But if this is a long war, and I think it will be, we’re going to need those alloys,” Captain Khan said.

“Y-y-y-y-you can always d-d-d-d-drop Marines at your leisure on the planet,” Zinkov added.

Captain Khan nodded to the Marine.

“And Huron, find that leak, I’m sick of the
Malta
smelling like the beach.” Captain Khan scooped up the tablet. “This is what we’re here for. Let’s do our jobs.” She turned and walked out of the room.

The remaining staff looked at each other and absorbed the moment.

“You’d think the diplomats could, you know, negotiate this sort of thing,” Reed said.

William shook his head. “You can’t. Even with a high-G courier it takes a month, longer if you send an actual diplomat. Once your fleets are out
, there isn’t much recall going on.”

“So that’s it? We’re stuck fighting? Just because the dominoes are falling?”

William wasn’t sure what to say. Reed was right, he knew it, but it didn’t change the immediate problem. “For now, find that leak. Mr. Zinkov, can you spare some Marines?”

Zinkov nodded his large head slowly.

William cut him off before the stuttering started. “And Lebeau, spend some time with the simulator, especially near gas giants. Got it?”

Lebeau nodded quickly, “Yes
, sir.”

William’s tablet pinged. “Very well, send me a message in an hour on the status,” William said to Reed and Huron. “I’ve got to go
. The Captain calls.”

The feeling that things had changed, maybe for the better faded quickly. He
hurried to the Captain’s office, passing by the dim lights of the bridge and giving a nod to Avi. His friend, he was sure he could call him that, was on guard duty.

He knocked on the half open door to the Captain
’s office. There was something that always bothered him about a half open door.

Inside
, the Captain sat reading the tablet.

He was about to knock once more when she looked up and shook her head. He slid the door closed and stood in the hallway.

His eyes closed and he let the sounds of the ship wash over him. Footsteps plodded nearby. A compressor fired up to a turbine whine and shutdown. A fragment of a conversation about the Brazilian soccer team and a moment of silence broken only by a harmonic from the grav drive.

“Come.”

William snapped out of the moment and entered the Captain’s office.

Captain Khan had slouched against the back wall with an arm resting on a padded pipe. The tablet was slid to the side and skewed at an odd angle. She didn’t invite him to sit.

He waited a moment before speaking. “Ma’am?”

She ran a hand through her hair and dropped it to her lap. “We’ll be doing twelve hour rotations, I’m pairing Lebeau up with you,” she said without looking up.

“We’re expecting visitors?”

“Fleet finds it likely.” She stretched her arms out, a dull pop sounded from her back. “I’ve been short with you Mr. Grace, I’m not sure you deserved it.”

He shifted. The room felt warm. Her words said one thing but her tone and body language another. He waited to see what she would say.

“You are…” She smiled slightly. “This sounds archaic
—maybe racist—is that the word?” She nodded to herself. “You’re not from Earth, you’re a born colonist.” She relaxed her shoulders and nodded. “There are more people in India than there are on all of the colonies combined.” Her shoulders pushed forward. “And yet you people have managed to worm into command positions across the entire fleet, especially after Farshore.”

A bigot, he thought.

“Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of qualified people, it just well, you shouldn’t be in a command position.” She sat back and sighed.

“You think I’m going to side with someone else when the shooting starts?”

“Would you if it were your people?”

The question cut deep. “No.”

“What do you believe, Mr. Grace? Colonies for Earth or Earth for the colonies?”

“This isn’t about the colonies, this is the Sa’Ami. Or the Hun.”

“How different is it? The cast-off children of Earth, does it matter if they come from Mars or Sa’Ami?”

“But the Covenant.”

Instead of replying, she stood and walked across the room to her door. “Alert me about anything, I’ve got my own bridge crew prepared. That is all.”

William stood and looked out into the hallway. He wanted to stand, to argue, to fight. He was too shocked to do anything but walk out.

The air in the hall seemed cooler. He closed the door behind him and stood, wondering what the hell was going on. Her last words stuck with him:
‘my own bridge crew’.

The troops found the billets to be about what they expected. Faris had a delightful factory that had been, from what they could tell, part of the original colony buildings. It was too small, with ceilings too low.

Outside of the low walled building the yard turned into a yellow slick mud after the first rain. The great containers that had come from across the stars were now stained with gobs of clay.

The one redeeming feature was the proximity to the elevator. Which meant that they were in a zone that neither the Maronite Lebanese or the Anabaptists frequented. The two groups kept to themselves on the ground.

“What do you mean I can’t launch the drones?” Lieutenant Yamaguchi said to Ambassador Gratham. He leaned towards the Ambassador.

“The Anabaptists won’t allow it.” Gratham turned and looked out the yellow-tinted window.

“Have you explained that without drones we don’t have shit? We’ve got no eyes. We’ve not no air support. We’ve got no counter
-drones. We don’t have. A. God. Damn. Thing!” Yamaguchi slapped his lunch off the table. Red bits of grilled tomato plopped against the wall.

Gratham snapped his head back. “Yelling at me isn’t going to change anything.”

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“The Anabaptist who runs this show, I need to talk to him.”

“He won’t see you.”

“
Hoffman!
” Yamaguchi yelled.

The call of ‘Hoffman’ echoed through the inside of the barracks.

Yamaguchi stared down at the tablet and looked at the tasks to be done. Without his drones he was finished. The only thing that was promising was Mcrager and his operational additive cell. The crazy Scot was making a tank.

“How went the exercise in the forest?” Gratham asked.

“Don’t change the subject, I can only be mad at one thing at a time.” Yamaguchi sat on a wooden chair and avoided thinking about the ground exercise. It had gone about as well as the exercises onboard the
Malta
.

“Sir?” Hoffman asked as he stood at attention in the door.

“At ease Hoffman, get in here.” Yamaguchi waved the Sergeant in. “We can’t use drones.”

“But
—”

“I know. I’m going to talk with Thomas Yoder. Get everything ready, we’re launching when I come back.” Yamaguchi stood and slid on his jacket.

“What if they say no?” Hoffman asked.

Yamaguchi shrugged the jacket for a better fit and walked to the door. Nothing but yellow mud greeted him. “They won’t.”

He struggled out of the yellow mud yard and walked past the elevator complex. The ribbon rose skyward where it disappeared into wispy clouds above.

The Anabaptist section greeted him with the smell of apples and sawdust. A short distance past the elevator the houses were simple, white, almost blocky. Wood planks made up the walls with roofs of cut plank. It took him a second to recognize the design from the history books.

Around him were men with varying degrees of beards. Some were short and thick while others frazzled out like a wild bush. They looked at him with curious eyes and greeted him with silence. Only once did he catch a glance of a woman, she was sheathed in a light blue dress with a bonnet to match.

The road went straight away from the elevator before ending at a church. The walls were ivory white with a steeple like something out of an old calendar. A man stood on a low platform at the entrance with his arms crossed over his suspenders.

“May I help you?”

“I’m looking for Thomas.”

The man looked back at him. His face was creased like a piece of buckskin. His beard mostly gray with the ends twisted and bent wildly. “Down on your left, it’s a large hall, there’ll be planks stacked up high as a man.”

“Thank you.”

Yamaguchi stopped when he heard a loud clanging. His hand tapped his pistol, but he caught himself.

Around
the corner a man was framed through a rough door. He was bathed in an orange glow as he hammered onto a piece of forge heated metal. Sparks and bits of red hot metal sprayed off.

Yamaguchi watched. He’d never seen anyone work steel.

He found Thomas inside a low roofed building with a pile of sawdust on the side. The interior was faded with age to a dull red color. The air smelled like a rich cedar chest.

Thomas was knee deep in wood shavings. His arms guided a long tool like a chisel
-tipped Roman spear. A piece of reddish wood spun at a rapid pace before him.

Yamaguchi stepped forward to speak
, but stopped and watched instead.

The tip of the tool dove into the rotating piece of wood with a staccato pulse that slowly turned into a soothing hiss. Reddish-white shavings erupted as the cut went deeper until a final continuous shaving issued forth. He stepped slightly to the side and continued.

The tool looked like an extension of his body. It was rigid, connected, but he only steered the chisel, his body was still relaxed. The steel did the work, the man guided the blade.

When Thomas finished a simple shaft hung from a machine that Yamaguchi had never seen before. It was simple, all it did was spin something. On one end was a clamp, the other a spike that was pressed into the wood.

“What is it?”

Thomas smiled slightly. He set the tool down and waded out from the chips. “It’s a lathe.”

“Lathe,” Yamaguchi said as he tested the words out. So simple, it did but one task, it spun a piece of wood.

“I know why you’re here.” Thomas’s voice was level and tinted with a slight German accent.

Yamaguchi leapt in. “I need to have my drones, without them…” He faded out as Thomas rested backwards and leveled a hand with the floor.

“Do you know why?”

“Religion.”

Thomas nodded
. “In a way, yes, but there’s a reason.”

Yamaguchi shifted uncomfortably. He felt embarrassed, he knew the most minute details of the colony, but little of what the colonists believed in. “I didn’t, well, I thought you saw it as evil.”

“We choose our way of life not to soothe a religious requirement, but with thoughts of our community.” Thomas looked around. “There is electricity here, we buy it from the Maronites.”

“So one tool is fine, but another isn’t?”

“If it was a tool this would be a simple argument, but it’s not, it’s a weapon.” Thomas wiped the chips off of his suspenders.

“You know
, if the Sa’Ami come, I’ll need those drones to protect you?”

“No, you’ll need those drones to kill the Sa’Ami.”

Yamaguchi shook his head. “But you don’t understand, they are the exact opposite of you, they implant and control with machines, they use nanites even more than we do.”

“We would speak with them
—they’d know we are pacifists.”

“Self
-defense? You must defend yourselves?”

Thomas looked sideways at the Lieutenant. “But I say to you: don’t use violence to resist evil!”

“The Bible, I assume?”

“A man named Matthew, and yes, from the Bible.”

Yamaguchi nodded slowly. This wasn’t an argument he was going to win. “Do you know why we’re here?”

“The Covenant?”

“The UC was attacked. They’ll be coming here,” Yamaguchi said.

Thomas shifted. “Maybe, but they are not here yet.”

“My job is to protect this planet. I’m going to do it with or without your approval.”

Thomas stood and walked to the edge of the door. “I am glad you came to speak.”

“Why? Neither of us achieved anything.”

“No, but we know each other better now.”

Yamaguchi looked at the bearded Thomas for a few seconds and walked out in silence. There was a gap too far for him to cross. He stopped in the middle of the street and sighed.

“LT!” Hoffman’s voice was loud in his ear.

“What is it, Hoffman?”

“You better get here
, sir, the
Malta
called in, Sa’Ami came into the system.”

Yamaguchi broke into a run passing by the buildings of white and plank.

Behind him Thomas walked back into the shadows without glancing back.

*

Abraham stood on the edge of a pile of wood shavings and listened. He wanted nothing more than to leap out, to leap out and tell his father.
Listen! Listen to this man!

Anger grew inside of him. How could he keep so quiet? They were coming. Coming
here!

The sound of boots echoed on the wooden floor. The room was silent except for the hissing of wood being sheared.

“Come Abraham,” Thomas boomed.

Abraham looked to the floor and stepped out from behind the wall. He felt ashamed but also angry. “Why aren’t you helping him?”

Thomas looked back through hard eyes.

Abraham knew the answer but had to hear it, again.

“Son. We do not use violence,” Thomas said.

“Father, how can we stand by? This is our home,” Abraham pleaded.

“What would we do? We are not soldiers. Ours is to trust our faith.”

Abraham felt the tug of a challenge. “Eye
-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth, hand-for-hand, foot-for-foot, burn-for-burn, wound-for-wound, stripe-for-stripe.”

Thomas raised his chin slightly. The beard lifted off his chest and hovered. “You have heard that it was said
: ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

Abraham looked down at the floor. He felt empty inside. There was a pit that the faith didn’t fill. Not then. He thought of his mother.

“Son, you are young. Listen to me on this.”

The pair locked eyes. Abraham's eyes were filled with the defiance of youth. He saw the hurt in his fathers eyes. Neither understood the other.

“Stay by me. No harm will come to us,” Thomas said softly.

Abraham shook his head and looked down at the curled shavings. “We should stand. Stand with the Maronites.”

Thomas looked at his son with eyes that hurt. “Then said Jesus unto him, put up again thy sword into his place. For all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.”

“But
—”

“No, this is our faith. You’ll be baptized soon as an adult. This is who we are.” Thomas stood and came close
to Abraham. He clapped his heavy hands onto the his sons shoulders. “Please, as your father.”

Abraham looked at his
father and wished he could see strength in his eyes. In that moment he saw only a weakness, something he didn’t understand.

*

The watch was long before it was half over. William stretched his neck and stared up at the ceiling. Tense muscles relaxed before tensing again from fatigue.

He leveled his head and watched the screens above him. The near system view showed them stationary. Parked in the midst of crystalline rings. The visual camera showed a slight ruddy brown edge to the gas giant. They were bathed in darkness. Only the occasional star sparkle in the rings betrayed any light.

“Sanjay, how are we looking?” William asked a man with bright eyes set into a dark face.

“Emissivity and radiation both below threshold
, Mr. Grace,” Sanjay said as he fought back a yawn.

William nodded and scanned to the next feed. The
civilian announcer was positioned near the entry point. Any ships entering system would come somewhere near and be reported. The feed showed nothing. Though he didn’t expect it to last long, it would be one of the first things the Sa’Ami shot.

The final screen showed a narrow window of starlight
with an overlay of radio data on top. The satellites they launched a few days before were bathing the area in a stream of radio waves. Anything coming in would be lit up.

All looked
quiet, silent, and mundane. Only the smell, the damned inescapable smell, broke up the moment.

Lebeau sat upright and stretched her hands over her head. “Mr. Grace, will you check the last round?”

William stood and his knees popped. There was a moment of tightness in one knee—the scar tissue still felt odd. He walked across the bridge and looked down at her console. “Start it.”

The icons pulsed in and surged towards each other. The green icon, for the
Malta
, ran into the gravity well before being intercepted by a pack of Sa’Ami frigates. The
Malta
didn’t fare well at the end of the engagement.

“Why did you go in?” William asked as he poked a finger at the display.

Lebeau cocked her head. “Well, sir, I had to engage.”

William shook his head. “Not there, you ran in. They knew you were coming. You’ve got an entire system to brawl.”