Stark's Crusade (23 page)

"That's two," Tran stated. "But she fired every weapon on her shuttles to get them."

The remaining metal-heads came on, still focused on the civilian shuttles. "They're not going to let go," Vic stated. "Those damned things are going to keep after those civ shuttles until they blow them to hell."

Stark saw the acceleration vectors on three of Wiseman's shuttles change as they altered course, angling back toward the Moon, but the armed shuttle carrying Chief Wiseman kept heading for intercept with the metal-heads. "Wiseman! What the hell are you doing?"

"Gotta get those things' attention," Wiseman noted, her voice strained by the acceleration of her shuttle. "Draw them off the civ shuttles before they reach engagement range. And that's any second now." A moment later, the symbology of her shuttle seemed to glow twice as bright.

The orbital systems watchstander stared at the display with a slack jaw. "She's . . . she's turned off all her countermeasures and is transmitting on every frequency."

Stark didn't need that information interpreted. "That's making her shuttle stand out like a target on a firing range." Survival in battle often came down to not being noticed. Countermeasures were designed to hide things that might make weapons notice you, and systems were kept passive to avoid sending out signals that weapons could lock onto. Chief Wiseman was deliberately drawing the maximum possible amount of attention to her shuttle.

Vic's hand was on his shoulder, her eyes sick. "That's the idea, Ethan. She's turning her shuttle into a decoy, to draw off the Navy metal-heads. They're bound to start shooting at her now, instead of those helpless civilian shuttles."

"A decoy." Stark clenched his fists in frustration. "A weapons magnet. Wiseman!"

"Here."

"Break off! That's an order! Reactivate your countermeasures and get out of there!"

"Got a job to do, ground ape." The Chief sounded oddly calm, though Stark could detect the tension underlying her tone. "Gotta shield those civ shuttles. Damn the torpedoes. It's a Navy thing."

"We've told the cruisers to break off! They know the civ shuttles' cargo includes kids. They're trying to stop their metal-heads."

"Stark, those metal-heads aren't breaking off action, and those cruisers can't stop 'em. Not in time. I'm gonna hold these space bugs as long as I can."

It all sounded so familiar. Stark gazed helplessly at the display, where the metal-heads had altered trajectories and spat out a swarm of threat markers that were converging on Wiseman's shuttle. He remembered his own stand to hold off pursuit of his platoon. Ages ago, and yesterday, it seemed. A miracle had saved Stark that day. A miracle in the form of reinforcements arriving at the last moment.
And I ain't got nothing else to send up there to save those squids. Please, God, if there's anything you can do for that crazy sailor, please do it.

Alerts sounded, pinpointing Wiseman's shuttle. "They're taking hits, Commander," a watchstander sang out. "Incoming weapons are getting past their point defenses."

"Chief Wiseman, that's enough! You've delayed the metal-heads! Break off!"

"Receiving reports of cascading damage," the watchstander continued. "Critical system hits."

"Wiseman! Get the hell out of there! Wiseman!" A hand on his shoulder brought his attention back to the command center, back to Reynolds mutely pointing to the marker on the main display. A blossoming cloud of debris dominated scan for a few moments, its heat and fragments showing up brightly against the dead space all around. Then the scan system corrected for the noise, screening out the debris to concentrate on threats, and the remains of an armed shuttle and her crew vanished from the display except for a bright marker warning of hazardous wreckage radiating out from the center of the explosion.

"Hell," Stark breathed. "Good-bye, Chief. Now, there's only one Wiseman left." He slammed one fist onto the console before him. "Get the rest of those armed shuttles back down here now!" On the display, the fleeing civilian shuttles were closing rapidly on the boundary of the Colony's anti-orbital defenses. The metal-heads were still in pursuit, but their initial volleys of weapons had gone after Chief Wiseman's shuttle, and the brief battle had delayed them just enough to shift intercept points inside the Colony's defenses. "Those stupid bastards are gonna make it now, aren't they?"

Vic measured the vectors for the civilian shuttles with her eye, then nodded. "Looks like it. If the metal-heads keep coming, we can take them and anything they fire at the civ shuttles with the Colony's defenses. Chief Wiseman bought them the time they needed."

"She paid too much. Tell Campbell I
want
those pilots the instant those shuttles touchdown. They're gonna pay for costing us a damn good ship and a damn good crew. And I'm gonna want to talk to Campbell about this. About losing good people and risking kids' lives just because some idiots couldn't send the right notifications to the right places. I'm gonna want to talk." He paused, gritting his teeth. "And tell Chief Gunner's Mate Melendez he's not second in command of our naval forces anymore. He's in charge, now."

"Yes, sir," Tran responded. "Anything else, sir?"

The Navy robotic combatants were still coming, seemingly oblivious to the Colony defenses in their pursuit of the civilian shuttles. "Yeah. Tell the anti-orbital defense guys I want those metal-heads blown into so many pieces that God Himself couldn't put 'em back together again."

He sat in his darkened room, a cup of coffee forgotten by his side, staring at nothing. "Ethan?" Vic stood in the door, waiting for his permission to enter.

"Yeah. Come on in."

"Thanks." She sat heavily, something weariness and sorrow could achieve even in lunar gravity. "I've confirmed that every metal-head followed those shuttles down and everyone was blasted by our defenses. They won't be going after any more kids."

"Great. Maybe the damn Pentagon will rethink how smart it is to use the flipping things."

"I wouldn't bet on it." Vic bowed her head. "Wiseman and I never got along that well, but she was a real professional. I'm going to miss that squid."

"Me, too. But maybe I needed this. Maybe I needed to fall off a mountain."

"Fall off a mountain? What does that mean?"

"It means maybe I needed to be reminded how much it costs to win or to lose. And maybe to be reminded I can't make anything I want to happen come true just because lots of people take orders from me."

"If you say so. Ethan, you've always cared about the people who work for you, and you've kept your head on pretty straight despite being in charge."

He shook his head, looking away from her. "Yeah, but. There's so many of 'em now, Vic. So many people. It's not easy. You lead a squad, it's easy. By comparison. You know every guy in it. You know their names, their faces, the names of their wives and husbands and boyfriends and girlfriends, the names of their kids. Every one of them is an individual. We've got a bunker to take down. Who do I send? There's a sniper out front. Who's the steadiest shot? Everything you do is based on who they are."

Stark took a long, deep breath, staring into a darkened corner. "But up here, at headquarters, they're all symbols. And you don't know them. Not really. Maybe a face here, a name there, but otherwise it's just so many hundred or thousand privates, so many corporals, so many sergeants. They ain't people anymore, not in your head. They're units you shove around on a big map to do things for you. Vic, if you're a squad leader and you lose five soldiers it rips you up. Almost half your squad is dead, and you'll be writing to their families to say 'damn, I'm sorry.' But from here? You can lose five hundred and not really feel it, 'cause you don't know them, don't see them die, and they're just a few. Just a few compared to all the other people you're moving around."

Vic sat silent, as if sensing Stark had more to say.

"And that's just combat! Vic, at headquarters you got people falling over themselves to do stuff for you. You're the boss. Get him some coffee, get him a beer, make sure he's got a comfy chair, make sure he never has to wait for anybody else and everybody's waiting for him. And if he gives some order that screws over the people under him, well, hell, you do it anyway because he's the boss. After a while, if you're not real careful, you can start thinking that's the way it ought to be, that you're somethin' special and the treatment you're getting ain't special, just what you deserve."

Stark finally looked at her, his mouth a thin line. "It's a helluva corrupter, Vic. Your soul disappears in little pieces, and you don't even know it's gone or even realize what you sold it for."

"I see. That's why Wiseman's death isn't affecting you at all." He glared back at her, but Vic continued, her voice scathing. "Ethan, if you'd let all this get to you like you're saying, then you wouldn't be so torn up by losing Wiseman and her crew. You'd cry some crocodile tears in public, then set up some grand ceremony to say great things about her sacrifice at the same time as you maneuvered to take credit for what Wiseman did. And if anybody raised any questions about screw-up's, you'd appoint an investigation with a wink-and-nod mandate to cover up what went wrong and blame any problems that couldn't be covered up on somebody else."

Stark sat silent for a long time, looking down at his hands where they lay clenched in his lap. "That's not the way I work, Vic. You know that."

"Duh. So do the troops. Why do you think the troops like you, Ethan? Excuse me, they
respect
you, which is a helluva lot more important. They think a lot of you because they know you care more about them than you do about yourself. Or your precious career."

"They're just grateful I haven't killed 'em. How's that for a great job? As long as you don't kill too many of your own people, you're a goddamn genius and your soldiers love you. Am I wrong to think maybe I oughta be judged by a different standard than that?"

"What standard do you want to be judged by? You command combat troops, Ethan. They have to be willing to sacrifice themselves, and you have to be willing to sacrifice some of them. It's a weird bargain, I grant you, but there's a lot of different ways to handle it. Getting the job done while taking minimal casualties is something to be proud of."

"That's the other thing." Stark gazed morosely downward.

"The other thing? You're depressed because you keep winning? Ethan, you'll never cease to amaze me."

"I'm serious. Winning too much can be dangerous. I was talkin' to Mendo a while back, and you know what he told me? All the big shot generals in the past, even the very best, a lot of 'em got to think they could win regardless of the enemy and the terrain and the fortifications and the weather and everything else. So they all ended up doing something stupid. Not just ordinary stupid. Spectacular stupid. And thousands of their soldiers died for nothing, and maybe they ended up losing the war they were supposed to win."

"That's called a reality check, Ethan."

"So how come their troops have to be the ones who get blown away when the generals get their reality checks?"

"I don't know. Are you asking me why the universe isn't fair?"

"I guess I am." Stark raised his head, determination replacing the moodiness of a moment before. "I'm grumbling about things not being fair like I'm some private just out of boot camp. Okay, maybe I can't fix a lot of stuff, but I can change things right here and now. First I'm gonna tell Campbell if he wants our trust he damn well better trust us in return. Then I'm gonna make sure everyone's sacrifice up here matters, Vic, and I'm gonna make sure heroes like Chief Wiseman get remembered. Maybe get a monument built, maybe get something big named after her. What do you think?"

"I think losers don't get to build monuments or name things, Ethan. Only the winners get to do that."

"Then I guess I'm gonna have to make sure we win."

Stark sat grimly in his chair, his bearing for all the world like that of a man before a firing squad. Off to one side, Vic sat facing him with a cheerfully encouraging expression. Stark took a moment to glower her way, then tried to fix a more positive display on his face.
You promised. That's what Campbell kept saying. You promised you'd talk to people if I asked you to. So here I am waiting to go on vid. I'll probably say something so stupid they'll show it in reruns 'til hell freezes over. They won't call 'em bloopers anymore. They call 'em Starks. Just watch.

Vic gave him a thumbs up and received another glower. "You'll be fine, Ethan." Another display not far from Vic showed Colony Manager Campbell sitting with studied calm at his own desk, waiting patiently for the interview to begin. "Just think of it like you're talking to your troops."

"Sure. Did you find out anything about how the commercial vid networks are planning to get this interview to the people back on Earth? The government will jam it for sure."

"They'll try. The vid networks have a pretty impressive setup, Ethan. The interview will go out as a scattered, broadband, frequency-hopping transmission, each little piece of it tagged to be relayed by any receiver within line of sight."

"That's a lot of receivers. But if all they pick up is government jamming it won't amount to a hill of beans."

"Yup. I said it's a scattered transmission, broken into a gazillion little packets, each repeated any number of times and carrying sequence tags. Unless the government jamming puts out a nova's worth of noise, it won't be able to catch them all. Not that the government could afford to do that, because it would shut down all communications. Imagine how that would play on the World. Anyhow, when the packets arrive at a receiver with the right software installed, they fit themselves back together using the sequence tags and you've got yourself an intact interview."

"Huh. That's neat stuff. It's like that story about the monster that breaks into little pieces to get into any place, and then reassembles itself and eats everybody. How come the networks are going to so much trouble to help us?"