B. Larson: Battle Station

My scattered fleet looked like broken shards of glass, glinting in the wan light of a distant star. Counting my own ship, the surviving task force consisted of twenty-three destroyers and seventeen frigates. I’d arranged them in a circular pattern around an alien artifact of unknown origin. This artifact was known to us as a ring, a vast loop of dark material, similar in nature to rock, but closer in density to the collapsed matter found at the core of dead suns.

The ring orbited a small world which was the last in a long line of planets, the furthest from the system’s single yellow star. While unusual, it was not unprecedented to find a ring associated with a planet. We’d found other cases that were similar. The Venus ring was buried in the planet’s crust, and a small ring back on Helios had been located at the center of one of the termite-mound cities of the native population.

The icy world below was composed primarily of nickel, iron and frozen ammonia. It orbited a yellow star I’d named Eden. The planet’s surface was heavily frosted by cyrovolcanoes that periodically spewed out unpleasant liquids. These events were dramatic spectacles. Ammonia and methane bubbled up from the planet’s guts when tidal forces heated up the interior. Once these liquids reached the surface, they quickly froze into vast crystalline plains.

The ring sailed around this inhospitable planet with us, as cold and dark as the world below. I’d spent a long week staring at this ancient alien structure which connected the Eden system to-somewhere else. It was galling, not knowing what undiscovered star system was on the far side. I’d thought about sending scouts through a dozen times, but had always vetoed the idea. I knew the Macros might be waiting to blast us on the far side. They often seemed to operate on the basis of a triggering event, and I didn’t want to give them the opportunity to come at us again with renewed vigor. We just weren’t ready yet. My current plan was simple: if the Macros poked their snout out of that hole, we planned to blow it off for them. Otherwise, we’d wait.

The waiting was not easy. The ring was like a siren’s call. To be instantly transported to another system was exhilarating enough, but not to know what was on the far side of a structure that was only a few miles distant was positively maddening. The ring was ten miles in diameter, and there was plenty of room to fly all our ships through it-but we didn’t dare.

After spending a long hour in my ship’s observatory, staring at the ring and the cold, dark world below, I decided I didn’t really like the name Eden-21. The name was only temporary, of course. I decided to allow my marines to name this dismal rock. I set up a pool to give the place a more suitable title.

My troops were bored, and bored people tend to become overly concerned with small things. There were arguments and lotteries. After putting it to a vote, the winning name was “Hel” the Norse name for a frozen version of an unpleasant afterlife.

I had to smile. It was a fitting name for this unforgiving rock, and those stationed here would at least have the pleasure of reveling in jokes that would never get old: At our duty-station, Hel has frozen over-permanently.

Two weeks passed, during which I conversed with Crow at Star Force headquarters twice. The round trip time for a message all the way to Earth and back was roughly three days. I was overdue for Crow’s next response.

The first message had been initiated by me, and had contained the welcome news of victory. I’d chased the Macros out of the Eden system, thus liberating the Centaurs as we’d promised to do months ago. Three days later, I’d gotten Crow’s reply:

Congratulations, Colonel! Fantastic work! Please return as soon as you secure the Eden system. Earth needs every vessel we have to defend our home skies. Again, congratulations, superlative work!

— Admiral Jack Crow

I’d waited a number of hours before sending my response. Somehow, I didn’t think he’d like my next note, so why rush things?

Admiral Crow: all remains quiet here on the far front, but it is not yet secure. First, we’ll have to clean enemy forces off the local worlds to free them for the Centaurs. Next, I plan to build a permanent fortification here at the ring orbiting Hel to seal off enemy access to our systems from this direction. We need heavy production facilities to build the new fortifications. Please send eight factories. Do not worry about providing raw materials, we have plenty of those in close proximity.

— Colonel Kyle Riggs

After sending off that note, I knew somehow I wasn’t going to be congratulated again when the next message arrived. Crow and I rarely saw eye-to-eye on strategy. His take on things was usually very defensive and, in my opinion, self-serving. He didn’t care much if we left Eden and the Macros came rolling back to enslave the Centaurs again. What he cared about was the number of ships defending Earth and his own personal posterior.

I couldn’t condemn him entirely for his conservative ideas, of course. In the end, maybe he would turn out to be right. Maybe trying to take four systems and hold them was too much for Earth right now. I would freely admit that I might turn out to be the fool today. But I couldn’t give up on all these territorial gains without a fight. We had the advantage, at least momentarily, and I wanted to seize it and milk it for all it was worth.

When Crow’s response did finally come in, it was as I expected:

Colonel Riggs, perhaps I did not make myself clear. You are hereby ordered to return all Star Force Fleet units to the Solar System. Feel free to leave a few ships behind, including one at each ring for purposes of communication and surveillance.

Kyle, I know you have big ideas, and I appreciate that. But I can’t spare factories or ships. We must rebuild, mate! You won by a thread out there, don’t push it!

— Admiral Crow

I sat in my command chair, brooding. There were three other officers aboard Barbarossa, and they were all avoiding eye contact. I heaved a sigh, read the message again, and then deleted it with gloved fingers tapping hard on the screen.

I had to make a decision. Was I going to obey what seemed like a reasonable order from headquarters, or was I going to ignore the recall and possibly shake up our command structure?

I sat there for several more long minutes in my contoured chair. Growing bored with that, I stood up and paced around the bridge. There wasn’t a lot of room for this, so it wasn’t terribly satisfying. No one aboard the destroyer spoke to me. Even Marvin, who tracked me with two of his cameras as I paced, said nothing. They had to have some clue as to what I was thinking. They may not know what the message from Crow said, but they could guess what it was about.

I thought about the men around me. They were loyal. Probably, most of them were more personally loyal to me rather than to Star Force itself. Throughout history, when a charismatic leader led troops into grim campaigns and won through, his troops tended to trust him more than their own governments. Julius Caesar had marched home with his own loyal legion from Gaul one day and crossed the Rubicon River. At that point, he’d become a rebel. Unlike most rebels, his rebellion was successful.

I wasn’t ready for that kind of thing-not yet at least, and probably never. I did feel some sympathy for old Julius, however. He must have gotten orders he didn’t like from distant Rome. He must have felt he was the unappreciated hero in the field, tired of the fat gray-beards back home who sought to micromanage him from afar. Interstellar distances had taken us backward in time as far as military communications went. It now took days for messages to be transmitted to headquarters and back. There was no instant, live-feed video, connecting us firmly to Earth.