Chapter III (Solid start but only two thirds finished)

III

For a better understanding of the events to follow, it would be well to introduce another character Commodore Kent and I came to know. The battle I am about to describe took place before we knew him, but it will serve as a good introduction to the man. My source of this knowledge is the recording of his experiences kept by his biological supercomputer.

Specialist Grade Seven Peter Markus Richter stepped out of the orchard behind the house in which he had lived for the past few weeks. The smell of ripening apples saturated the air and was quite intoxicating. Even more intoxicating was the western sky. The sun was setting, but the last light of day did not fall on clouds. Instead, it was an entire fleet of the Combined Navy of the UGC that flooded the atmosphere. Only through the space between the ships could the golden rays of the descending star reach the leaves of the apple trees.

The family with whom Markus (this was the name he went by) had lived would be evacuated within the hour. Their sympathies for the new galaxy wide Confederacy would condemn them to their current government, so instead, as thanks for their services to the UGC, they would become full citizens of whatever allied state in which they chose to carry out the rest of their lives.

But Markus’ duty lay not in this pleasant grove of fruit trees. Walking back toward the house, he reached up, picked a deliciously red apple, and adjusted the M41-Jupiter concentrated particle beam weapon slung over his back into a more comfortable position. He’d received special training in the use of this gun, primarily employed in strategic assassinations, and his was highly customized, with specially programmed target recognition software and a more variable power setting than the stock model. It could pick off a gnat buzzing over a carcass miles away provided a good line of sight and no interfering circumstances, though, in reality, it was impossible to find a battlefield without “interfering circumstances”. At his hip was a hybrid particle-plasma suppressed M17-Tempest handgun. It was very powerful and, more importantly, very stealthy. Plasma was effective against shields and particle beams devastated normal matter. Richter was supposed to carry a dual functioning assault weapon, but this he did not like using, so he did not burden himself with it. The guns were difficult to suppress, and silence was his modus operandi. It was meant for firefights, which he was not to get himself into. The sniper beam weapon was what he most frequently used, and when an enemy soldier strayed too near him, he would kill the enemy with a shot from the side arm. At his belt there were three plasma grenades and three “shock” grenades that produced very concentrated gravitational waves to devastate almost anything in the area around their detonation.

Markus Richter was a covert operative for the Feraustan Army. He worked alone as a spy, a sniper, and on reconnaissance missions. This was what he had been created to do. His DNA had been modified to make his brain some thirty times more efficient. He was stronger than an average human and his muscle coordination and agility were superb. His mind was completely integrated with the most powerful and compact supercomputer of the day, giving him an eidetic memory. In an instant he could take in and analyze all he saw, and then recall it at will, even years later. He could count the leaves on a rosebush that had grown below an airway he had travelled once as a child. Though nano-type biotechnology was a common luxury throughout the Feraustan Empire and nations with whom they had chosen to share their technological advances, such as the Augustonian Empire, the system used by the military and specifically Richter was of a significantly higher grade. He was one of sixty human weapons in the employ of the Feraustan Military.

Within the preceding month, rebellions against the UGC had sprung up all over the galaxy in various would-be member states. Each rebellion, even each rebel, had its, his, or her own reason for opposing the UGC. Many were outlaws. This new nearly all encompassing coordination of governments posed a grave threat to all serious pirates, smugglers, or other criminals, and there were many of these. The notorious Execronian Confederacy had been especially lawless, preying on the trade routes of many nations. Inherent in such a career of piracy was, of course, an at least somewhat well armed ship capable of fending off a police cruiser. So the rebels had the means to oppose the UGC.

Eventually, the many small and unorganized rebellions across the galaxy merged into one very large unorganized rebellion. At the time, this phenomenon was difficult to explain, especially the rapidity at which it occurred, but we now understand it better. The rebels were severely outnumbered, of course, and possessed somewhat limited resources, but they were proving quite the nuisance. Even in the heyday of the Execronian Confederacy, interstellar trade had never been so subject to disruption. Also, the rebels had been able to establish such a presence on some planets that the entire star system had to be surrendered.

Despite the possession of entire planets, a major aspect of rebel strategy was discretion. Bases were located deep underground on moons or in asteroid fields. There were a few permanent non-orbital space stations the size of small moons at which many ships could dock located in open space, over a light year from the nearest star. Even with the finest military sensors, these bases hidden in the middle of nowhere were difficult to locate. When a base was found, the battle was already lost. The superior military might of the many powerful nations of the UGC could crush them, but it was not without cost. Though some rebels were naturally cowards, governed by the instinct of self preservation, and put up little fight, others would fight to the death out of pure spite, inflicting painful injuries to the naval forces sent to dispatch them.

Finally, the most recent development in the conflict was the involvement of independent nations. Though enough of the largest nations in the galaxy had joined the UGC that the majority of the human species was UGC citizens, many smaller nations had chosen not to join the Confederacy. Some simply wished to keep to themselves. Until the Plontian War, the Feraustans had been extreme isolationists, so the Feraustan Emperor had no problem with nations wishing not to join with them. However, some violently objected the idea of unification, especially since it had been proposed by the Feraustans. A few had been former allies of the vanquished Plontians. There were now various independent nations that had begun supporting the rebellion with their far more organized militaries, most of them relatively small, with the largest in control of only a dozen planets. This last expansion of the conflict created a galaxy wide war. The Milky Way was a big place. In some places, it was independent military against UGC military, and in others, asymmetric warfare between rebel forces and powerful, developed navies. One event in this series did end up aiding the cause of the UGC. The initial idea behind the UGC had been that member nations could interact to further the greater good, pass universal laws, and eventually begin functioning harmoniously as a single peaceful state, all side by side with non-member nations that had chosen to remain independent. With these, foreign affairs would be as always, and hopefully peaceful. They may quarrel between each other, but the UGC would remain at peace. Now, though, with the rebellion, UGC and neutral independent nations alike were affected, sparking many independents to ally themselves to combat the rebels and their independent support

Currently, it was for one of these friendly independents Richter was fighting. A rebel-supporting planet had recently been badgering a nearby independent state aiding the UGC, so the UGC had sent a fleet to take the planet. It would be occupied until the war ended and it was determined no longer a threat, but it was not taken yet.

Markus reached a transportation flightcraft he had brought with him when he had first come to the planet. It had been hidden underground during his entire stay in anticipation of the invasion, and now he would be using it. It had an excellent cloaking function, and was very agile; perfect for his purposes. Richter’s job would be to fly beyond the front lines and serve as a forward scout. He would relay enemy locations and movement to commanders. His own movements were, of course, subject to their command, but for the most part one with as much expertise as Richter was given freedom to do whatever he felt most beneficial to the Empire. On occasion, upon receiving his report, Markus would be ordered by his superiors to eliminate this target or that based on his description of the situation.

Twenty operatives like Markus were stationed on the planet, but the Feraustans, who were leading the invasion, did not rely solely on them for intelligence. Many scout flight craft were sent over the planet, along with a few intelligence satellites temporarily put into orbit just outside the atmosphere. Still, it was often advantageous to have units on the ground to eliminate strategic targets as necessary and report on enemy action on a smaller scale.

Flying to the East, Markus noted the state of the night sky. It was cloudless, and the moon was full. He cursed the moon. All the light from the sky would make his task of remaining undetected all the more difficult. His camouflage suit could compensate for most of the difference (modern meanings of the word camouflage went far beyond cloth dyed different shades of green), but it was still a nuisance.

On he flew for half an hour, traveling at relatively low speeds. Though it gave the enemy less time for detection, flying at speeds too great actually made him easier to discover. So, he stayed a bit under Mach 1. Woodland stretched out for miles under the flightcraft. The flats eventually grew into rolling foot hills, and then into a mountain chain. On the other side of these mountains, nestled in the mostly deciduous woodland, was a rebel base. Though it seemed sleepy from the sky, it was bristling with activity. Richter landed his craft two miles from the base, in the middle of dense forest. It then switched to autopilot and flew up and west, closer to allied forces. It knew where it was and where it needed to go. It would hide in orbit until it was called back by a signal from its pilot, remembering the coordinates of its last landing and accounting for planetary rotation.

During this invasion, the normal tactic of “chasing the terminator” – that was, beginning the invasion at a latitude where night had just fallen and moving steadily westward to remain in the dark – was ignored. In simple fact, the enemy had prepared for it, and so spontaneity was advisable.

The specialist crept through the forest. A recent rain had dampened the leafy carpet covering the forest floor and the earthy smell of decomposition was everywhere. The soft organic matter quieted his movements as the chirping of various nocturnal insects further masked any sound of his approach. A cool breeze swept through the area. Water droplets fell off agitated leaves and landed on Richter. He glanced up at the sky. The wind hadn’t blown in any clouds to enshroud the overly luminous moon. Ahh well; it had been a vain hope. A drawn out fifteen minute hike brought Markus a mile closer to the enemy’s location. During such an invasion, time was valuable, but, then, retaining it was not worth exposing oneself. Military tactics aside, Richter was a patient man; he had to be as a sniper, and he could stand to wait. A half a mile more and the enemy stronghold was in sight.

The fort was no pirate joke. Large hangars for computer controlled fighters and powerful ground to air weapons littered the area. The UGC intelligence flightcraft sent over would document as much. In days gone by, this would still leave the question of troop movements up to operatives like Richter, but no more. Along with the invasion fleet came swarms of small, orbital, highly accurate, and geosynchronous sensors that floated in the lower stratosphere, maintaining both their unvarying coordinates and their proximity through the use of artificial acceleration. These were of such a quality that they were unaffected by atmospheric effects like Rayleigh scattering that could cause distortion, and could provide a detailed, real-time view of a point on the planet’s surface. So, when Markus opened a communication link with a navy officer, one Commodore Hector Leonard, to whom he would be reporting for the duration of this operation, it was only to announce his arrival by the base, something that Leonard would already be able to tell from his GPS system.

“Sir, this is Specialist Markus Richter reporting. The enemy fortifications are in sight.”

“Good. We’re not going to try infiltration on this one until the battle’s started, so move slowly toward the South West, where we’ll be landing most of our forces. Take your time and learn the area. You’ll meet and join the primary entry force along their advance toward the base, as you know.”

“The area’s topological and geographical information is already available to me on my personal computer archive, sir. I’ll move directly to a suitable location to meet with the entrance team.”

“We don’t need you there too early. Besides, nothing’s as good as seeing the place, eh?”

Markus smiled at Leonard’s naivety. He was an Augustonian.

The UGC’s military communications technology, based on an improvement to what was originally Feraustan technology, was really something remarkable. It used neutrinos, a system that in the past had been plagued by interference, but this had now been eliminated, while retaining the virtue of it being, theoretically, impossible to jam. Of course, for long range communications, the old photon-graviton combination was necessary to use. This was when the message was sent via electromagnetic waves and escorted with a spatial distortion device allowing trans-galactic travel in minutes.

Approximately an eighth around the fort, still at a distance of a half mile, a patrol drew near Markus. It was necessary for him to take cover in some nearby bushes of thick mountain laurel. The camouflage suit he wore made him indiscernible to thermal scans and did a good job of hiding him from the unwary eye, but he was not completely invisible. The patrol consisted of about fifty percent humans and fifty percent robots, and luckily passed without incident.

In modern warfare, as always, human lives were valued, and spared whenever possible. Fighters did not require pilots. Turrets could locate and fire on enemies without a human to guide them. And companies could be composed of robots as well as humans. These robots employed in warfare did not resemble soldiers. For example, they were not bipeds. In fact, they had no legs. A floating sphere with a radius of about a quarter of a meter containing a powerful computer would have twelve satellites, six weaponry and six sensors. The sensors would take in all manner of data, including visual, audio, radio, infrared, and others. The computer would then analyze the data, identify targets, determine which weapon to fire with, and then attack. The targeting system was excellent. These weapon and sensor modules could be switched out in favor of different weapons or sensors, making the robots very adaptable. The rebels generally used three beam weapons and three plasma weapons, while the Feraustans used two concentrated gravitational distortion beams, very similar to the shock grenades carried by some infantry, but they were focused and had actual range to them, though it was not comparable to plasma weapons, and beam weapons had still greater range.

Eventually, a spot that appealed to the specialist caught his eye. The base was at a bit of a low spot in the terrain. On the edge of the forest bordering the base was a stream, flowing quickly down the slope, toward the enemy. In the area around the bed plants flourished. The grass in front of the area was particularly tall and thick, and it would be easy for him to conceal himself there. He would move back toward the LZ as the time for the invasion grew closer. This route would put him in an excellent position to cover the allied advance. They could not be inserted too close, or they would be too vulnerable to enemy anti-flightcraft fire while landing.

Finally, the first UGC ships reappeared on the horizon. They moved quickly. Troops had to be landed in their designated positions before the rebels had time to reposition themselves accordingly. Because they were staying out of range of the base’s artillery, the primary threat to the UGC soldiers was enemy infantry. Enemy fighters would be a threat as well, but UGC fighters would keep them occupied for the most part.

Moving back through the woods, Markus found them deserted of all normal fauna. The skittish deer that so densely populated the area had fled at the first sign of unordinary disturbance. The woods were eerily hushed. The wind that had earlier stirred the trees had been stilled, and the chirping of the insects was subdued. In the distance, he heard the faintest sound of combat. It was normal for the defending force to send out a few platoons of robots accompanied by a squad of human soldiers to both probe and harass the attackers. As time past, the sounds grew both closer and calmer, as this exploratory force was crushed, as was inevitable. The humans were meant to escape, but the robots were a measured sacrifice intended to buy the defenders a small advantage.

The sounds of silent footsteps reached Markus’s superhuman ears. His positioning software did not indicate friendly forces in his vicinity. He dropped down to his knee and raised his Jupiter beam weapon to the firing position. The footsteps were to his left. His targeting system picked up the faintest heat signature. It was nothing at which to fire. It might have been the soldier’s breath. Markus moved noiselessly toward the enemy.

He drew in a deep breath then exhaled half of it. This was a technique he’d learned when he was young to steady himself and his aim. Modern weapons could lock onto targets and compensate for some inaccuracy, but an unflinching arm always helped. His finger paused on the trigger of the beam weapon. The sweet air was the essence of night. There was a scientific explanation for the difference; plants continued to undergo cellular respiration, producing carbon dioxide without being offset by photosynthesis, which used carbon dioxide and produced oxygen. But there was something more to the air. It had a magical quality to it. One could smell and taste the darkness.

Young children were afraid of the dark. The absence of daylight hid reality and exposed their fears, normally confined to their imaginations. This was the fear of the prey for the unseen predator. In contrast to this, Markus loved the dark. It was a veil hiding his being from the enemy. It was power. His was the confidence of the predator.

A bolt of lightning flashed out and the rebel soldier fell. Richter left the scene.

When the real battle began, one of Richter’s chief responsibilities would be to lead the team that would be the first into the compound, spearheading the thrust into the enemy. Now, he would rendezvous with this team. The location was set on a digital map accessible to everyone participating in the invasion, but the marker could only be seen by those to whom it pertained.

Greetings were between concise and nonexistent, and closer to the latter. Markus did an about-face and began heading back through the woods. The bulk of the UGC forces were more to the North. Markus’s team was, to a degree, covering the flank, though it did push ahead of the line. The team would remain with its leader for a time as he moved back toward the fort. Then, the members would flatten out against the line, in this case the very tangible wood line, and move again back into the woods. All this moving to and fro and uniting and splitting up probably seemed a little confused, but it was in fact carefully thought out and meant to give the most support to the rest of the troops, this being the unit’s foremost task until all was ready for entry.

Markus’s senses were aroused to the point of ecstasy. Never was he more alive. His unit was spread out behind him, no one within three meters of anyone else. He heard everything, anticipating the materialization of a hostile soldier every moment. The needles of the occasional pine raked across his skin. They were subtle, barely making contact, but the specialist was acutely aware of their presence.

“Cover!” The order was all but silent, so quiet it had to be carried by neutrino signals to travel ten feet. It was imperative, but not desperate. There was a small probing force moving in their direction.

The men, moving stealthily already, vanished. The patrol was advancing from the North East. It was probably one hundred fifty meters away. Markus sent a fraction of the team to the North in front of the enemy. When the time to fire came, this would allow an attack from both sides. Richter himself then crept to the East South East to complete the trap. The locations of all nearby allies were superimposed on the normal vision of all team members, helping to prevent shots at unsafe angles.

Richter was leaning against a large rock with brush on his right. It was almost ironic; all the information about the ambush, practically down to what each person was thinking, was being sent around and even through the advancing rebel force, but they were unable to detect it.

The moment to fire arrived. Markus gave the order to fire as he threw a gravitational shock grenade. For the briefest of moments there was chaos, and then there was stillness. Signs of movement slowly resumed. The senior specialist rose to his feet slowly and looked about. Something in the environment around him gave him a feeling of unease.

Later

It certainly would have been satisfying to see the fortress annihilated by a large antimatter bomb, but such a thing could easily have been intercepted by the rebel defenses unless practically escorted by a division of ships, and even then, any bomb sufficiently large to destroy the defenses would also destroy the UGC ships, not to mention the incidental damage to the surrounding countryside.

Instead, such attacks as this one were necessary. To destroy sections of the fortifications, what was really and antimatter beam was used. A ship would project a powerful but isolated gravitational field pushing mass out of a thin, cylindrically shaped volume, creating a vacuum between the weapon and the target. Then, another gravitational field was created that would pressurize the air on the edge of this volume and rotate it quite rapidly, and on such battlefields as this, an energy shield would be projected down through this pressurized layer of air to protect nearby friendly forces from any stray gamma rays. Finally, what was called a virtual interchange field would be created inside the vacuum and a concentrated antimatter stream would be fired. This artificial “virtual interchange field” was such that it would harness the energy from the annihilating particle pairs to grab some of the dense virtual particles, usually fermions, always flitting in and out of existence in such vacuums, and thus replace one particle with another at random. Thus, rather than annihilating the matter of the base in a dangerous and continuous explosion of powerful gamma rays, the mass was simply converted into something else. Almost always, this something else was a great blob of bubbling black goop which would quickly solidify; it was only a liquid because of the extreme temperatures. Before it solidified, though, it would pushed out into the dense, swirling air around the beam, and would usually harden into interesting shapes as the beam roved over the walls of the enemy structure. In the more impressive anomalies, the virtual interchange field would randomly harvest multiple gamma-frequency photons to create extremely charged particles, and, when created in clusters, great arcs of static electricity, as if from some horrifyingly malevolent Tesla coil, would soar out through the air, distorted by the complex gravitational field. Sometimes they would appear a very bright blue due to the gravitational field’s blueshifting effect. In even more uncommon anomalies, sparticles had even been detected, but their presence did not result in so spectacular a show as electrically charged particles.

The ultimate effect was an awesome disintegration that was almost like a sort of melting, but much more sinister. Anything from an enemy rampart to a beautiful statue would be turned into the same disgusting, gurgling, crackling slime.

It was through this slime that Markus charged as he led the assault on the interior of the rebel base. He received little fire as he made this first rush toward the cover of a nearby building; soldiers who looked a little too ready to shoot were sometimes targeted by the navy lieutenants overseeing the artificial intelligence guiding the antimatter beam during this phase. Luckily for such soldiers, to do so was not at all conducive to the general order of the attack, and, besides that, they would be ripped apart by the gravitational field before the actual antimatter beam could hit them.

Later

“Richter, move back out of the perimeter.” Leonard was speaking again. “The commandant has eluded us…”

“You mean you,” Richter thought to himself.

“…And he’s significant enough to deserve you chasing him. The reason doesn’t matter to you. He flew to the West, and we have patchy tracking on him. He’s in a personal transportation flightcraft like yours. You should be able to handle it. We can’t spare too many reconnaissance units for his purpose, you know, and perhaps we could send one attack ship to swat him, but that’d be one less attack ship participating in a battle, so, considering your presence, there’s really no point. You’re getting all the information on his position we can send you, so you ought to be able to go now. Oh, and if it matters, his name is [].”

His personal flightcraft had already descended from orbit, and fifteen seconds after receiving the message, he was flying back in the direction from which he had come. The landscape he had seen while flying toward the fort passed back under Richter, and then there was more that he hadn’t seen since he’d arrived on the planet. [] flew so far that eventually, then sun rose again, and the moon slipped behind the horizon. There were still no clouds, probably due to some deficiency of the planet’s atmosphere, Markus thought. Finally, while approaching yet another mountain range, the sun very low in the sky, the specialist had gained enough distance to initiate an attack. The beam weapons built into his own flightcraft began flashing on and off while roving over the image of the rebel flightcraft on the horizon. It was not very effective, but if allowed to continue without the use of a shield, they’d eventually hit something, and use of the shield would mean diverting power away from the engines, and slowing down more, making an engagement unavoidable. The commandant inexplicably chose the first option, probably in hope that he would be rescued by allied forces. He was mistaken.

After some minutes of seemingly futile firing, the fleeing craft’s power source was damaged, and it began losing altitude quickly. Almost immediately, a dark capsule dropped out of the bottom of the vessel. This was a small MPT device. Just before crashing, the occupant of the craft would activate an MPT device built into the cockpit, which would then send him or her to the one dropped out. The Plontians, midway through the war, had developed this piece of technology, had figured out how to make it almost totally untraceable, and furthermore, had distributed it to almost all reaches of their control, practically ensuring any pirate could pick one up for little expense. Thus, while the doomed flightcraft may be tracked, the pilot would find him or herself perhaps miles from the crash, providing valuable time to escape. Due to the inherent risks of such a maneuver, however, Feraustan pilots and later UGC pilots generally referred to the act as “jumping into the fire.” If momentum were not accounted for correctly, a serious crash would result inside the MPT unit. If the device had not come to a complete stop, the landing could be even worse.

The flightcraft crashed on the near side of the mountain, but judging from the initial trajectory and the fact that the craft had lost altitude exceptionally rapidly, the MPT chamber had probably flown farther. Markus flew low, just over the tops of trees, looking for a sign of his quarry’s presence.

Lands (justify) and travels to the top of the mountain…

The sun had set again. Markus could almost hear Mussorgsky playing. The sky was not yet dark, though; it was a dirty silver. A wispy [name for higher atmosphere clouds] cloud ornamented the sky a fraction of a radian above the horizon. Below it, clouds the shape of splotches of paint [lay or whatever the intransitive past tense is] between two shadowed peaks. The color of the sky turned the water of a nearby stream into a resplendent mercury.

Despite all this lingering light, there was an intangible darkness to the area. It was nothing so profound as such a description may make it sound, but it was a sort of fog of mystery. It was as real as such an abstract idea can ever be. It seemed that the shadow, rather than the thick brush, concealed [name of rebel commandant].