John Ringo - Claws That Catch

Which was why he’d been shanghaied one Saturday afternoon to explain physics to the National Security Council when an experiment in same had gone wrong.

Subsequent to the explosion in Orlando that had created the Chen Anomaly, he’d been blown up, shot, travelled to other planets, gotten stuck between universes and ended up saving the world. The Chen Anomaly, a black sphere that sat precisely where the University of Central Florida High-Energy Physics lab used to reside, had spawned a host of magical particles. The particles, at first referred to, incorrectly, as Higgs bosons, had the ability to link two particles and create a gate, one that looked very much like a mirror, between any two points. Some TV reporter had called them Looking Glasses and the name stuck. Since there were inactive bosons, apparently left over from some predecessor race, on other planets, the vast horde of particles spun out by the Chen Anomaly had created multiple gates to other worlds.

Some of those worlds were inhabited. Notably, some of them were inhabited by a species humans called the Dreen. The Dreen used biological forms for most of the processes humans used machines for and were apparently ravenously consuming Earth’s corner of the galaxy. They’d linked to some of Earth’s bosons and were intent on conquering the planet.

One of the bosons, however, had linked to a more friendly race called the Adar. About a hundred years ahead of humans in most sciences, the Adar had a weapon that could close the gates. The only problem being, it had to be shoved through one and if it went off on the wrong side it was going to destroy the sending planet. Though they had had a run-in with the Dreen as well, they’d chosen to go for stopgap measures rather than risk losing their planet.

Humans, with multiple attacks coming through and the Dreen seemingly unstoppable, had taken the chance. Weaver, with the help of a SEAL team and nearly a division of troops, had managed to get the device through the Looking Glass and saved the world.

The Adar also had a strange little device they’d picked up on one of the previously inhabited planets. The most they’d gotten it to do was explode on a very large scale. Weaver had figured out that rather than the suicide box it appeared to be, it was probably a drive system of some sort. After seven years, the humans and Adar had managed to create a warp ship with the little black box at the heart of it.

Along the way, Weaver quit being a Beltway Bandit and joined the side of light, taking a direct commission and, after lots of schools and several normal cruises, became the astrogator of that warp ship. Just before its first mission the Adar, who while technically and even philosophically advanced over humans still didn’t quite get marketing, had named it the Alliance Space Ship Vorpal Blade .

Weaver had spent two tours as the Vorpal Blade ’s astrogator and while both had been hair-raising and life threatening, he’d enjoyed the challenge. And, of course, he got to run around in space and see and do some really neat stuff.

But after the second cruise, when they’d finally located the Dreen, found another even more advanced race that was fleeing from them and generally gotten the chither shot out of themselves by a Dreen task force, he’d been offered a promotion to executive officer of the Vorpal Blade II. The latter had been entirely built by the new race, the Hexosehr, and was superior in every way to the original. So how bad could it be? Especially since the Navy threw in a wholly unlooked for promotion to captain. Hell, he could be looking at commanding the Vorpal Blade if he did a good enough job in the XO’s slot.

But at the moment, that didn’t look likely. If he couldn’t get a few hundred rolls of…

“We’re leaving in a week,” Weaver said, as patiently as he could, to the woman on the other side of the counter. “If we don’t have these supplies, experience tells me that our mission is going to go from possible to difficult if not impossible.”

“Well, you’re not getting them,” the distribution clerk said, clicking her tongue. “For one thing, you’re over budget on this class of item. For another, you’re asking for our entire stock. I need to ensure that there’s some for others, you know.”

If she clicked her tongue one more time, Weaver was going to go all postal on her fat ass. She used that annoying tongue click as a grammatical mark. At the end of each sentence, “click,” each comma point, “ click .” He’d been dealing with her for the last two months and he was going to strangle her if she didn’t stop…

“This material is very expensive you know (click). And the last two times that your boat went out (click) you used up nearly your entire stock (click). You need to learn some supply discipline, Captain ( click ).

Weaver tried to stop, but he was beginning to flinch in anticipation of her finishing a sentence. He felt like a hound dog that had been beat too much, no good for sniffin’ nor treein’.

“And that is your final answer?” Bill asked, flinching at the fact that he’d actually asked for a reply. He’d encouraged her to…

“That is my final answer (click!). Unless you get a budget variance and authorization to entirely deplete the stock (click) the amount you’ve already drawn is the maximum you will be allowed ( Click !).”

Bill felt beaten. It wasn’t that he couldn’t find a way to get the variances and even the authorizations. The missions of the Blade were almost always of such high priority that variances were more or less automatic. But even if he got them, he’d have to deal with the click. That bloody, revolting, monstrous, infernal click! The horrid, wretched, ghastly, hideous, disgusting, VILE CLICK! THAT BLASPHEMOUS MONSTROSITY THAT ROSE FROM THE NETHER DEPTHS OF…

“Thank you very much,” Bill said, nodding to her politely. “Have a nice day.”

“I will ( click ).”

“You don’t look so good, XO,” Captain Prael said.

Captain Charles Prael was a submariner, and a good one. The previous skipper of the Vorpal Blade had been an aviator, a compromise reached among the admirals when it became obvious the navy was going to space. While the Blade I was built around a submarine, the former USS Nebraska , SSBN 739, there were aspects of both underwater and aerial maneuver to its actions. At least, that was the argument the carrier admirals had used. The argument had carried weight for several reasons, among which were that the carrier admirals were all former fighter jocks whereas the sub admirals were bubblehead geeks. In a way, it was right back to high school.

But Spectre had turned out to be a great CO for the mission. Each of the branches had their own priorities, cultural issues that seemed built right into the steel of their ships. And whereas with submariners, the boat always came first, fighter jocks were always willing to go to the mat. It was vastly unlikely that any submariner would have kept fighting the Blade after the pounding she took at the planet designated HD 37355. Their tendency would have been to back off and get fixed. Submariner tradition, due to the conditions under which they fought and especially since the days of Rickover, was that the boat came first.

Spectre, Captain Steven Blankemeier, though, was from the fighter tradition. No carrier ever shut down flight ops because they lost a bird. Hell, they wouldn’t shut down unless they took so much damage they couldn’t get planes on and off the deck.

On the other hand, at one point in the first mission, when they weren’t all that far from Earth and had taken some damage, he was ready to turn around. That was what carriers did if they got dinged. They headed into port to get the dings hammered out. They’d finish the mission, if at all possible, but they’d head for home just as soon as it was done.