Future Shock, page 9
His lips twisted. He’d babysat an intelligence type once who had been as snobbish as they came, until it had dawned on him that he was actually going to parachute into the middle of a combat zone and he’d had a near-breakdown in the plane. John had privately made fun of the idiot at the time – it had been stupid beyond words to alienate the men taking care of you – but he thought he understood now. This was all old hat to Jenny – she’d probably made as many combat jumps as himself, perhaps more – but it was new and scary to him.
A dull sensation ran through him as the Jarhead landed on the hull. Jenny didn’t take any time to collect herself. She ran down the hull, activating a cutter and placing it against the solid hullmetal, effortlessly slicing into the alien ship. The rest of the marines joined her, fanning out in a formation that struck John as organised chaos, as she opened the outer hull and started work on the inner bulkheads. Something broke and a stream of atmosphere erupted, spewing out into deep space. John froze, training reminding him that air streams were never good news, before he gathered himself. More icons popped up in front of him as Jenny launched herself into the gap, weapons at the ready. The corridor inside managed to be both common and strikingly alien. It was understandable, of course it was, but the proportions were all wrong.
He blinked in surprise. “They’ve got gravity!”
“They cracked the secret a few years ago, but the power requirements are still staggeringly high ... for them,” Jenny said. She was multitasking, leading the marines down the corridor even as she spoke. Smaller drones launched themselves from the Jarheads, fanning out to survey the corridor and map out the starship’s internal defences. “Right now, only their biggest ships have any sort of artificial gravity.”
John nodded, feeling like a backseat driver as Jenny charged a solid hatch and cut her way through it. Someone on the other side was on the ball, he noted sourly, and had managed to assemble a blocking force even though they’d had no warning until the marines had started to breach the hull, but it was futile. The Jarheads were protected by force fields; energy weapons struck them uselessly as they plunged through and returned fire. Their sensors had no trouble picking through the haze, their stunners were calibrated to knock out ET ... the Diyang. John was torn between a sense of glee at the effortless victory and an odd feeling they weren’t being remotely sporting. But then, there was no such thing as sportsmanship in war. The aliens who were being picked off one by one would have destroyed Earth, if they’d gotten into range without being detected. It wouldn’t have exterminated the human race, but ...
And there are other aliens out there who nearly did defeat the human race, John reminded himself, grimly. The briefing had been short and intense, in a manner that made him wonder if it was an elaborate joke. Or a test. He’d had quite a few tests to see how far he’d go in following orders before asking questions, training exercises intended to determine if he’d blindly do as he was told until he assassinated the Prime Minister. This is real.
Ice prickled down his spine as the marines advanced, taking the time to seal the hatch behind them. Bodies – alien bodies – lay on the deck ... a sense of unreality ran through him as he realised, again, that they weren’t remotely human. Smaller, almost elfin ... big bulbous eyes, leathery skin, arms that looked weak, almost puny, and yet strong enough to do real damage if they took hold of him. He’d seen more alien aliens on the holovids, creatures that were closer to octopuses than humans, and yet these were real. He wanted to reach for a weapon he didn’t have, even though he knew they were harmless. For the moment. It was an instinctive reaction that bothered the hell out of him.
“You can get used to anything, given time,” he muttered.
Jenny kept moving, even as she spoke. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve never seen an alien before,” John said. The eerie sense of wrongness grew stronger. “Do you get used to seeing them?”
“Of course.” Jenny sounded surprised by the question. “They’re just people. Mostly. Some are too alien for us to have any sort of meaningful contact, others ... could be human, or something akin to human, if they tried. The Federation got over any sense of fear of aliens a long time ago.”
She blasted through another checkpoint and opened a hatch, accessing a chamber that reminded John of a datacore compartment. The tech in front of him was alien, but not that alien ... it might be oddly designed, clearly intended for smaller users, yet he had no trouble guessing its function as Jenny reached out, a strand of metal extruding from her Jarhead and slipping into the alien tech. John sucked in his breath as the icons updated rapidly, powerful hacking software tearing through the alien firewalls – or whatever they used for defence – and opening their datanet to inspection. And corruption. The primitive tech – it made his head hurt to think of it as primitive – was utterly unable to keep the marines out.
“I’m shutting down everything but life support,” Jenny told him. The gravity and internal lighting failed a second later. “I’ll be wiping their datacores too, to ensure they can’t bring the systems back online manually.”
John sucked in his breath. “It’s that easy?”
“The tech gap between us is too wide for them to have any idea of what we can do,” Jenny reminded him. “Their only real hope was to hit the self-destruct before it was too late and ... its already too late.”
“And if they did,” John said, “you and your team would be perfectly fine.”
“Quite.” Jenny spoke with heavy satisfaction. “Do you get it now?”
John said nothing. He’d practiced boarding and counter-boarding operations, of course, but every space-qualified soldier knew it was incredibly difficult to board a starship if the crew didn’t want to let you. It was easy to seal off the section that had been boarded and isolate it from the rest of the ship, easier still to turn internal defences against the boarders or use the datanet to coordinate a response. Hell, cracking an encrypted datacore quickly enough to keep the enemy from hitting the self-destruct was nearly impossible. The Diyang had done everything right, as far as he could tell, and yet the Jarheads had overwhelmed them, subverted their datanet and won a bloodless victory. They hadn’t needed to storm the bridge to win. They’d just ...
His heart sank. War had changed. He honestly wasn’t sure what to make of it.
These people might be allies, he mused, but weren’t there Mexicans who thought the same about the Spanish Conquistadors?
The thought mocked him. He’d been the modern soldier working with primitives. He knew how easy it was to look down on them for their lack of advanced technology or to despise them for ‘minor cultural differences’ that excused child rape, forced marriages and any number of horrors that had no place in a civilised society. He’d had to work with monsters who were worse, objectively speaking, than the rebels they’d fought; he’d wondered, bitterly, if they weren’t creating more enemies through empowering forces that preferred to prey on their own people rather than fight for victory. The future folk might feel the same way about him, he reflected sourly. What ‘minor cultural differences’ would repulse them? What would make them detest and despise him as much as he’d detested some of his former allies?
Something to put in my report, he thought, as Jenny spun around and left the chamber. The alien ship was darker now, but the Jarhead had no trouble seeing through the shadows. Jenny had shut all the hatches and code-locked them, isolating the alien crew and making it impossible to coordinate any kind of counterattack. What’ll happen when these people rebalance themselves and start thinking about the future?
He cleared his throat, mentally. “What now?”
“I have hacked their network and posed as their commander, ordering the crew to offer no resistance,” Jenny said. “Some may do what they can to stop us” – she sounded dismissive – “but most will do as they’re told. They’re a very ...authoritarian species. Their crews aren’t taught to think for themselves.”
John blinked. “Do you think that’ll actually work?”
“It should.” Jenny gave the impression of a shrug. “We used their own communications protocols and authorisation codes. They don’t realise their datacores have been compromised and so have no reason to think the codes have been stolen. Even if they do, we’ll see trouble coming and deal with it before they can put together a real threat. This isn’t a real battle. It was over the moment we boarded their ships.”
John felt a moment of mindless terror. The gulf between the Aztecs and the Spanish had been wide, but Spanish technology hadn’t been incomprehensible, and the Spanish had come very close to being wiped out several times. The gulf between the Royal Marines and the Terran Marine Corps was far wider, to the point he couldn’t even imagine what they could do in a real fight, against a real opponent. Jenny was right. The whole engagement had been laughably easy. One might as well pit a heavy-armed Royal Marine kill-squad against children armed with water pistols and paintball guns. It would be a slaughter.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
Jenny chuckled. “Is that all you think of?”
“No,” John said. “I’m just thinking about the future.”
“The future will take care of itself,” Jenny said. “Right now, we have other problems.”
***
Hamish hadn’t been sure what to expect, as he’d watched the future ships prepare for war against their primitive foe. Energy weapons wiping out the supercarriers as if they were insects, super-fast missiles arriving hard on the heels of any warning ... the files he’d read had talked about the wars the future folk had fought, but they hadn’t gone into detail about their weapons and defences. Watching the marines deploy had left him feeling unsure they knew what they were doing, watching them board the alien ships and take over almost effortlessly ... he’d been assured it would be an easy victory, but he hadn’t quite believed it. Not until now. To call it ‘easy’ was a gross understatement.
“All ships secured,” Boswell said, as if he hadn’t just won the most one-sided victory in human history. “Their datanets have been subverted, their officers and crew isolated.”
“Sir,” an officer said. “Long-range sensors are picking up two scout craft, powering up their drives!”
Hamish glanced at Boswell. “How did you miss them?”
Boswell ignored him. “Tactical, target them both with FTL missiles,” he ordered. “Fire!”
“Aye, sir,” the tactical officer said. Both icons vanished from the display. “Sir ... one ship managed to jump clear in time.”
Hamish repeated his question. “How did you miss them?”
“They weren’t noted in the history logs,” Boswell said, after a moment. “They were holding position too far for us to easily detect, yet close enough to see what we were doing and run.”
“Oh.” Hamish resisted the urge to smirk, or to tease. “Will the warning do them any good?”
“It depends how much they saw, and how much they were told.” Boswell sounded more annoyed with himself than anyone else. “We’ll interrogate the prisoners, find out if any warning was broadcast through an isolated communications network. And recheck the files to see what other historical warnings we might have missed.”
Assuming the historical records are accurate, Hamish thought. His glorious victory was gone now ... no, it had never been. He had a sudden impression of each change in history birthing other changes in history, a chain reaction that would eventually create a completely unrecognisable world. The heroes of the original timeline could be the villains of the alternate world or vice versa ... someone caught committing a horrible crime in the first world might never commit it, let alone get caught, in the second. The historical records will be useless sooner than we think.
A thought struck him, a moment of fear all the more unpleasant because of his earlier relief. Is my family going to survive ...?
He shook his head. That was a problem for his future self. “What now?”
“Now?” Boswell leaned forward. “Now we have to take the alien crews into custody, finishing the job. And then we need to figure out what to do next.”
Hamish felt a stab of sympathy. Boswell’s world was gone. His ships and crew were stranded in a very alien universe, an era they’d read about in history books but never truly experienced. What would they do, when they came to grips with the realities of the new-old world? Would they try to integrate, as difficult as that would be, or seek to establish themselves as a separate faction? The hell of it was that he was torn between advising them to seek an alliance with America – it was his duty to try – and suggesting they stay well clear of Earth’s poisonous politics. If they got too deeply involved ...
Someone will try to seize their ships, as sure as eggs are eggs, he thought grimly. And that will end very badly indeed.
His communicator pinged. He tapped it automatically.
“Captain,” Georges said. “We have finally received updated orders from Titan Base. We – all of us – are to proceed immediately to Titan and report in.”
“And that includes us, I guess,” Boswell said. “At least they know we’re here.”
Hamish had to smile. The first set of orders had been vague to the point of uselessness, sent more to cover the commander’s ass than in any hope they’d be obeyed; the second had carried a very clear suggestion that his superiors thought he’d gone dotty. It wasn’t really a surprise – the time delay was too great for any sort of realtime updates – but it was still unpleasant. He guessed the reality of the situation had finally sunk in, word washing across the system as signals darted from military base to military base. Earth would know soon, if they didn’t already. And who knew what would happen then?
“I guess so,” he agreed. “Shall we go?”
“Of course,” Boswell said. “We need to make contact as quickly as possible.”
Chapter Ten: TFS John Birmingham/ HMS Vendetta/USS Grant, 2308
Ethan couldn’t help thinking, as he studied the fleet crawling towards Titan Base, that it was the oddest formation since the historical fleet review, a tradition that had died with Earth and the Federation itself. Ten hyper-advanced starships, the most powerful units in the system, flanked by seven primitive spacecraft and over a hundred alien ships. The latter were firmly under his control, their command systems thoroughly subverted and their senior officers isolated from the rest of their crew. He hoped the shocking and near-bloodless defeat would cow the Diyang into ending the war, before the human race had to carry the war to their home system and make it clear that further aggression would not be tolerated. Perhaps it would. Like most aggressive species, bullies on an interstellar scale, the only thing that would convince them – had convinced them, in the original timeline – was a bloody nose.
The original Battle of Earth wasn’t enough to shock them, Ethan mused. This engagement might just convince them to change their ways.
He sighed, inwardly. It wasn’t the first time the Federation Navy had intervened to teach a species that might didn’t equal right, no matter what they thought, and in any case the Federation was far mightier than they could ever hope to be. Such interventions were always massively disruptive when a race that thought itself at the top of the technological tree discovered it had a very long way to go ... but better they suffered culture shock than exterminate an innocent race that had never done them any harm. It was good for them, the xenospecialists had insisted, when the morality of such operations were debated in front of the Federation Senate. Sooner or later, they would have encountered someone far more advanced than themselves, and if they’d approached with that attitude they’d be squashed. Or worse. But now ...
The die was cast, the moment we were thrown back in time, he mused. He would have been happier knowing it was going to happen, knowing enough to make sure he obtained all the supplies and historical knowledge he needed to ensure everything went according to plan. Hell, he would have made sure to have a plan! Instead, he was making it up as he went along. His historical records would be untrustworthy eventually, if they weren’t already. We need a solid plan, and we need it fast.
He keyed his terminal, bringing up the reports. Repairs were still underway, but it would be weeks – at best – before two of his damaged ships were FTL-capable and probably much longer before the final starship was ready to set out again. Their self-repair functions had been badly damaged too, forcing the crew to fabricate the missing components in their machine shops. There were no modern shipyards here, not yet. It would take months, if not years, to build the industrial capabilities they needed to repair the ships completely.
Which means our options are dangerously limited, he mused. Hamish Anderson might be impressed – and intimidated – by how easily the Diyang had been stopped, but Ethan knew it had pushed their resources to the limit. There would be no new Jarheads until they rebuilt their industrial base, no new starships or FTL missiles ... hell, devoting what few fabbers they had to replenishing their arsenals would slow down everything else. If we don’t manage to get properly established ...
Rachel materialised in front of him. “What do you think is waiting for us?”
Ethan shrugged. By now, Earth knew what had happened ... although he was unsure if Earth believed. The report Hamish Anderson had sent did sound absurd to someone who hadn’t witnessed the future fleet’s arrival and the one-sided engagement, and it was quite possible the reason they’d been ordered to Titan was to give the locals time to prepare their fleets in case the whole affair was some kind of trap. Ethan didn’t approve of such paranoia, though he understood it. The human race of this era didn’t have the technological superiority to take risks ...
