I'd like to say that the ride to orbit in the shuttle was peaceful, but reality wasn't so accommodating.
Courtesy of four ships and who knows how many sats in orbit being reduced to slag and megatons of debris, Mars was now in the middle stages of Kessler Syndrome.
Imagine a satellite in orbit. Then two, then twenty thousand.
Not a big deal, space is big, and a little bit of active guidance and strategic airspace (space-space?) management means you can have enormous constellations operating without getting in each other's way. For proof, look at the Dyson Swarm in progress around Alpha Centauri.
Unfortunately, issues arise when one satellite, for whatever reason, blows up, is blown up, or gets hit by a meteorite missed by the scans. That satellite becomes anywhere from a handful to a couple thousand bits of debris, in a similar as well as highly eccentric orbits, which goes on to hit a dozen more sats, and so on, till everything around the planet is an unwilling contestant in the world's highest-stakes demolition derby.
It took time to get going, but a nasty orbital war would speed that up pronto.
Our craft took evasive measures when it could, exerting its engines to the max to avoid impacts that could seriously damage it. Smaller bits were largely ignored, that's what the Whipple shield was for. Even then, the occasional impact scared the shit out of me and the twenty or so other passengers strapped in for dear life.
My augmentations were extensive, but I wouldn't survive the hours and hours in orbit it would take for someone to retrieve me if I was spaced, assuming they could even find me in all the mess. I didn't think the emergency suits would hold up all that well to the micrometeors and other crap about either.
There. One of the exterior cams went out. A small dip in our acceleration only noted by my sensitive lace suggested the engines had taken a hit.
Still, we emerged intact, and I looked through the remaining cameras at the locked down space station that was my destination.
UNSS Here For Good was middling in size as stations went. On one end of the scale, you had the newer O'Neill cylinders, colossal beasts that could house millions, even if most were still far from full as governments coaxed and cajoled their citizens into moving off Earth. On the other, anything into which you chuck a human and a life support system for the same.
It was a rotating wheel the radius of a city block, with a perpendicular cylinder in the middle radiating spokes for the wheel, each end of the cylinder meant for docking with shuttles like mine.
It spun at a sedate pace, content in providing something similar to Mars gravity to help acclimatize new arrivals who hadn't taken the gene therapy or drugs to keep their bones and muscles intact during their slow boat over.
The wheel had another sibling under construction, this one further out with a wider circumference, probably to provide a single g for the weirdos who went to space and still demanded the same constraints as Earth. I found Mars gravity to be pretty sweet myself, good enough to keep you down on the ground without skipping about like on the Moon, and unlike proper microgravity, your cutlery didn't float away when you weren't looking. It also made taking a shit more convenient when you used a normal toilet instead of one that vacuum-sealed itself onto your ass.
The exterior lights lay dormant, the majority of the habitat compartments quiet and cold, with non-critical staff and transients bundled off to places out of the line of fire. Still, you could see activity, if you looked close enough. Several spacecraft, the majority a familiar shade of blue, clung to the umbilicals, with dim shadows on the translucent walls suggesting people making their way to and fro. Cargo drones gently ferried massive containers to and fro, clearing the vicinity of the accumulated construction material that now posed a risk if the station had to move in a hurry.
A casual observer could be forgiven for missing the UNSC Promises Kept docked on the end furthest from us, and even my augmented vision took a moment to spot it, though I cheated by knowing in advance it was supposed to be there.
It was large, as long as the station itself, another cylindrical Torchship made for getting to the furthest reaches of Sol in months rather than decades. The hull was coated in electrically manipulated metamaterial, capable of adjusting hue and brightness to pretty much any shade without something so old-fashioned as a coat of paint. So were most warships, in case you were wondering how they went from their usual color scheme to UN blue overnight when they joined an expeditionary fleet.
Right now, it was doing its best to meld into the inky blackness beyond, the reactor was in low power mode and my low resolution thermal vision provided by the pit viper organs embedded in my scalp couldn't distinguish it from the 3 or 4 Kelvin that was the average for our universe. When the droplet radiators unfurled their wings of molten tin, that would be a sight to see.
Some of the stress I'd been understandably feeling faded, there were no good places to be in or around Mars right now, but within the confines of a space craft that was meant to stand up to the insanity the Centaurs threw its way in AC was close enough for my liking.
We docked, and the passengers streamed out, most of them eager to board yet another shuttle and get as far as they could away from our planetary neighborhood. I looked over at Mars, which looked much the same really, but consulting the shuttle's systems revealed that the atmosphere had gotten a whole degree warmer, a testament to the energies being poured down from orbit. Looking closer, I could see changes. That crater hadn't been there yesterday, nor the next. Many of the cities had dimmed their lights, as if that would help in the least.
I had a welcoming party, a sizeable one, a collection of UN officials ranking below and above me, with the most notable being the station's Director, Melanie Hicks, a short woman with a tan and shoulder-length hair neatly made into a ponytail held to the back of her suit by clips, a sign she had been about the parts of the station lacking rotational gravity.
"Sen. I honestly couldn't believe you were still alive. I've been reading your testimony while you were coming over, what on Earth is going on down there?" She asked me, looking at me with honest concern. We were acquaintances, if not friends, rubbing elbows in one event or another in cislunar space. I remembered drunkenly telling her about my dog, Gator, and being delighted to know she had three labs of her own. I wondered if they had been brought to Mars, most habs allowed pets, but a government installation might be stricter.
"Hey Mel. If you don't mind, I'll talk as we go, I'd like to speak to Admiral Francis in the ship."
"Right, I'm coming with, assuming my INDIGO clearance isn't an issue." She told me, as we walked through the halls, more officials deciding they'd tag along. Even if she outranked me in the org chart, UNSEEN and Space Command were different entities, and we usually spoke as equals. I was surprised she was still INDIGO like last we met, but clearance levels weren't the same thing as seniority. For someone usually running one station or another far from AC, it more than sufficed.
I disclosed my doctored story to her as we went, sending a copy ahead to Francis, who told me that he would meet us in the bridge. He wasn't flaunting his position in our faces, in a combat scenario, the captain was expected to remain aboard the ship at all times. While nobody had shot at us, yet, the same rules apply. UN forces were on max alert, ready to meet whatever came their way.
It was obvious where the bulk of the UN budget went, the Promises Kept was state-of-the-art, no bit inferior to the best that nations like the US, China or the richer half of the EU operated. While it was cramped, both mass and volume at a premium, the small human crew had plenty of amenities, VR or otherwise. Robots whizzed by on rails, their manipulators tucked close so as to not decapitate the human crew jogging about. I noticed the graviton generators were active, or we'd be floating about, going from rail to rail. I suppose that any expenditure of the exotic particles needed could be topped up later in one of the many logistics stations beyond Mars, even if I was a bit iffy on how they actually work. The maths made my brains hurt when I last tried to understand it, even if the tech hadn't been built with metahuman fuckery.
At any rate, gravity was a luxury we didn't need to dispense with just yet, even if, in an actual battle all of if would be diverted to augment the acceleration produced by the engines running off antimatter bottles. If the crew didn't perform to spec without it, they wouldn't be aboard.
We arrived at the bridge, nestled well inside the ship, since nobody was insane enough to put it on the surface where any stray shot could end us all.
It was opulent, Francis had opted for a neo-Renaissance look, pleasing gold accents and soft curves where the furniture didn't need to accommodate more utilitarian needs like keeping the crew safe. At full burn or during aggressive maneuvers, they'd be immersed in tanks full of non-Newtonian fluid anyway, to make it easier on their bodies, even if the extensive cybernetics helped.
Francis was listening to something important, so he gestured to us to take a seat on one of the chairs articulated to fold away when not needed.
I looked at an archaic whiteboard covered in indecipherable scribbles, roughly gleaning from the associated diagrams that they showed various fleet dispositions and practised maneuvers. Not that it was in regular use, I could see references to the Moon, the crew used their laces to communicate most of the time.
More interesting was a panel covered in the guileless yet touching artwork of children, paper cards and posters with school logos at the corners carefully attached with pins and then locked into place so that they wouldn't come loose.
"Hi! I'm Riha, from Mumbai. Mr. Francis, we love you, please keep us safe. My mom says that if you come to our home, she'll make biryani for you too ❤️"
"Thank you for saving my daddy Mr. Francis, that's what my momma said"
"亲爱的弗朗西斯海军上将，
您好！我是中国空间站的一名小朋友，我叫小明。我想感谢您和您的团队救了我们。我们在空间站里遇到了很大的危险，我们都很害怕。您们是我们的英雄，您们让我们安全地回到了地球。我很高兴能见到我的爸爸妈妈和我的小狗。我希望有一天能亲自见到您，给您一个大大的拥抱。谢谢您，弗朗西斯海军上将！
祝您身体健康，万事如意！
小明"
"When I grow up, I want to kill aliens be a captain like you 😈" Someone, likely an embarrassed teacher, had struck through the middle, but you could see it just the same.
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Ah kid, I hope there are no aliens to kill by the time you're grown.
I felt a distant ache in my heart, while Anjana and I had put off kids for a while, both being extremely busy, and knowing that modern fertility treatments could let us snooze our biological clocks, when we married, we'd expected to have at least one child of our own by now. Maybe we would have, if she wasn't four lightyears away, and maybe we still could, it wasn't impossible in the least, she'd frozen eggs (I hadn't told my parents) before departing. Still, I wasn't ready to effectively be a single parent with my workload, and her having a child in AC was even more inadvisable, even if the embryo would have to be transferred to an external womb and then to one of the rearline outposts.
I resolved that I'd fuck her till we ended up with a kid, one way or another, as soon as she was back. Yeah, I think that would help with the pain of our endless separation.
There was a portrait of Francis shaking hands with the previous captain, photos taken in the burning bush in the Outback, more awards and memorabilia, usually just images, because while the crew has a healthy mass budget, there were more important things to spend it on.
Francis ended his call, and turned around in his imposing throne, before coming over to shake my hand.
"I'm impressed, Dr. Sen. I just used FTL comms to get back to HQ, and did my best to convey the importance of your actions." He was taller than I was, just as cybernetic as Administrator Shen or Director Van Der Waals back at UNSEEN, but more discreetly so, almost passing as a rather handsome and muscular baseliner, if you didn't look too closely at the seams in the artificial skin. Unlike me, he'd consider damage to the ship that vented the atmosphere and flooded it with hard radiation to barely be an inconvenience.
"Has Space Command decided how to proceed?" This was critical, the UN had largely sat this one out to the best of its abilities. I didn't know how long that would last.
He sighed deeply. "When this cluster-fuck commenced, we were of the opinion that you were how we were going to proceed. Send a field agent of respectable rank to Mars, make sure he tags along with the locals so they don't get too trigger-happy, kick the can down the road for a few more years, you understand right?"
"I'm with you so far." I told him.
"Then, we got concerned. You have to understand, Task Force Gangaputra isn't even supposed to be here, we were to link up with US Space Force assets and bulk out the fleet, then meet whatever the Indians have ready in Ceres and the Chinese around Jupiter. Instead, as we waited for our American comrades to switch colors and link up, they began a campaign of orbital bombardment on civilian settlements. The only reason I didn't tell my men to fire a warning shot past their prow is because we're still in the interdiction range of Deimos, even if these are their own towns they're torching. I didn't sign up to watch my fellow man murder each other, not in the least."
Franconi was a true believer, committed heart and cybernetic soul to protecting Mankind against that which would lay it low. Without him in charge of the UNAUS peacekeeping campaign, Australia would look very different today. From another, this would have sounded like an attempt to deflect blame, claim their inaction had principle on its side, and I wouldn't have hated them for it, the list of countries on Earth that had held their peace even as the US had violated it was long with many luminaries on it.
I wondered who would win in a fight between a Turing Kill Star and the floating fortress that was Deimos, but I hoped to never find out, at least while I was within an astronomical unit of distance from it. Oh dear, I was going to have to disclose some things, and now, which drastically increased the odds of me witnessing Armageddon.
"I believe you, Admiral. Your reputation speaks for you. I did have some very important things to disclose that you'll find I didn't tell USMA, for reasons that will shortly become clear."
I laid it onto him thick, the violations of global treaties surrounding unilateral research into alien technology, the rampantly unsafe meddling with their AI, the use of metahuman powers to interface with said AI. It ought to convey the magnitude of this claim that the Admirals magnificent eyebrows were trying to climb into his hairline, while the cooling pumps hooked up to the lines in his chair and then his body began whirring, suggesting that whatever thinking his overclocked brain was doing was running past the cooling provided by mere blood. I didn't just submit my testimony in words, my lace had been neatly loaded up with enough additional information to corroborate what I said, with things that were personally damning encrypted and hidden so well that it was exceedingly unlikely anyone could find it, unless they knew what they were looking for, and them cracking the code would require one of the five or six hypercomputers available to man, which had better things to do, and a normal supercomputing cluster would take about as long as it would for all the stars in our cluster to die.
(Hypercomputation is a an entirely different beast from merely having a ton of processing power, these weren't just unusually powerful regular ones)
"Damn. I'm sending this over, poaching a FTL package." He turned to look at the crew, they were only a dozen or so, but already looking expectant, reading their leader's subdued emotional affect better than I could.
"All crew. Combat stations. Warm engines, deploy the radiators. Wake Iskra up, he's going to need to prepare for combat teleports."
I had noted the unaugmented Slavic man amongst the crew, since he didn't come from the station, it was smart money to expect him to have one kind of power or another. The vocalization from the Admiral's mouth was largely for his benefit, the rest of us had been informed via our lace or were currently talking to the man, his brain more than capable of a dozen real-time conversations without losing its stride.
Centauri ships were almost entirely automated, whereas it was a mix for human ones, our current doctrine was the result of devastating losses in the initial skirmishes and the First Oort War, where the almost entirely AI controlled fleet was defanged by their infowar prowess. These days, the flagships were usually manned by a contingent of cybernetic crew dragged to the bleeding edge, past the point where most didn't even bleed anymore, assisted by metahumans who helped shore up the dramatic disparity in acceleration, firepower and numbers we suffered from. There were still plenty of entirely automated vessels, usually smaller and more nimble, but slaved to nominal human command when the light lag wasn't unbearable.
Casualty ratios for a unaugmented human ship versus a Centauri one of the same mass was around 5:1, it was harder to beat a million years of steady climbing up the technological and industrial tree. With metahumans in the mix, it was 1:3, far more palatable, but the Centaur ships still outnumbered ours by anywhere from several hundred thousand to a million. They'd made the most of their almost year-long uncontested reign in AC, before we built a fleet large enough that they wouldn't be fodder fed in piecemeal. And yet, 12 million people died that day, to just barely secure the proximity of the wormhole we managed to drag under fire along the way.
At least our best ships often had FTL, which made picking our engagements in the outer system easy, whereas the inner system was an impenetrable swarm of orbital fortresses, antimatter mines, and other nasty greeblies you didn't want to meet even if you could depart in the next millisecond or two. You think we let them keep building a Dyson Swarm and the associated Nicoll-Dyson laser for fun?
Reply from Earth was swift and decisive, bare minutes at most. FTL was sweet when you could afford it. I wondered if any humans had been in the loop at all, at least non-uploaded ones. The message was clear, the UN fleet was to form up in combat formation, guns pointed at the USSF armada that had yet to join them.
Very pointed questions were being asked, if Chang had been in bed, in the unlikely event that one of the most powerful men in the world did something as wasteful as sleep, he'd be out of it by now, his brain concussed with information from advisors human or otherwise.
Yes. The UN moved fast when it had to, even a toothless tiger still had claws. It's dysfunctional, the One World Declaration did far less to unite the world than could be hoped, and this comes from someone who works there and has seen how the sausage is made. But like I told you before, it did far more good than harm, or I'd have taken my package of skills and gone corporate, I valued principle enough to swallow the 200% payraise I was foregoing, even if I whinge about it on occasion, I'd become used to the ridiculous dough my wife brought in.
I felt an upwelling of pride I had gradually forgotten how to feel, even with my divided loyalties, I'd brought most of the nations on Earth around, even nominal American allies keeping mum and falling in, at least until the USA provided answers.
I felt great about myself, and I had begun daydreaming about Assistant Directorship while escorting the chattering delegation when the Empire Struck Back.
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Iskra was a Class 4 Teleporter, a tier below my wife, and his jump wasn't nearly as seamless as hers. There was a discontinuity, a jolt in the internal graviton flux that made the less adroit among us miss their footing and stumble, not that they had time to fall, because the next moment a colossal wall of emergency shock foam engulfed us like an onrushing tsunami. I was running hot, watching the hissing green wave approach me like I was diving into the jacuzzi of the kind of chick who insists on candles everywhere, including the closet, but I couldn't move nearly as fast as needed to run from it. Assuming I wanted to, because the foam wasn't a trap, it would melt away in minutes.
No, the restraint was for our protection. The ship bolted, warm engines going hot and bright enough to blind anyone looking, we hapless humans lurched within the foam, dragged along by more g-s of acceleration than I cared to count, only barely coming to a stop before we crashed into the other end of the hallway.
I floated there, in the foam, wondering why I hadn't had a good day in years.
The ship was doing evasive maneuvers, juking and dodging in a manner entirely incongruent with its size, the hardened alloys of its frame groaning as they contested the force from an acceleration that would have had fighter pilots knocked out, any higher, and I knew the ship could go higher, and many of the people beside me would be dead. I was thankful that the Admiral hadn't felt that was a price he needed to pay.
I waited impatiently, not bothering to claw my way out of the foam until it began to thicken, then loosen, timed microcapsules inside vomiting out enzymes that liquified it rapidly while only tickling human skin. It was almost relaxing, if I hadn't amped myself up with all the combat drugs I had in reserve.
Then I was almost loose, helping the dazed civilians pull themselves free while clinging to a handhold. I checked, and I'd already been granted access to the sensor net belonging to the ship, so I decided to take a look outside and see what the fuck had just kicked off.
There was more blackness than I expected, no stars either, let alone a sign of Mars, but then I realized that camera I had chosen had burnt out, even its hardened electronic eyes blinded for good. It was being replaced, pulled back into the hull to be swiftly switched out for a fresh one, but I didn't wait, cycling through others till I found one with a combination of functional and looking at something I cared about.
Or had cared about, in this case. The Here for Good, presumably, if I correctly identified the incandescent ruins of one of its cylinders flying away, not tracked by the cam, which preferred to rapidly scan for live threats. Did I feel angry on behalf of the two hundred and thirty six people still aboard when I'd stepped out barely twenty minutes ago? No. I was numb.
I saw that Melanie had tuned into the same feed as I had, and turned in real space to find her staring at the blank walls, tears welling up around her eyes, only beading bigger and bigger in the microgravity.
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"Dr. Sen. I saw you brought your gun. Use it, we have boarders, navigate to the port auxiliary maintenence tunnel, oversee the bots, I can't spare the crew." Francis was in his command throne, a Prince of War sitting unmoved as tendrils squirmed around his skull. He wasn't just himself, not anymore, I knew that he'd begun the process of subsuming himself into the ship's systems, mind merging with AI till the thoughts of one were polished to a sheen by the other. Without time to head to their berths, the bridge had been flooded with shock fluid, the crew drowned dead brought back to life and tied to the mast.
The bridge was just a formality, Francis had full control even if he had been caught with his pants down on the shitter.
I had deja vu from the day I'd met and said goodbye to Hu Junya, now Tieyi. Yes, I had stalked utilitarian corridors before, fighting bitterly for our lives. This time, it was a different captain, a different world. The same enemies, I didn't care to differentiate anymore between the frankly stunning assortment of individuals who sought to kill me.
Let's save the day, eh?