While Making Other Plans:
Chapter 33

  Kathryn found herself in a private room with the top leadership of all interested parties, desperately trying not to let on how drunk she was and uncertain if she was succeeding or not.

  Bill was there with her, and at her insistence she was also accompanied by Margaret and Emily while they faced off together against the current president of Haven and Bishop of Roma, as well as Admiral Woodrow Brinkerhoff, the most senior available member of what remained of Koboli leadership.  Earth had not been re-colonized and thus had no formal unified leadership.  It was not the first time Margaret had served as de facto representative for Earth as a whole when the need for such a person arose.

  “Supposing for the moment Mr. Bill that we agree to assist you however we can, what exactly are you asking for?” President Uzodimma asked.  The leader of Haven was a mocha skinned man with a flat nose and an imposing physicality despite being notably shorter than Kathryn.

  “We only require that you hand over to us your entire supply of anti-matter and ramp up whatever remaining production capacity you may have to maximum,” he answered through his mirror ball.

  “No,” Kathryn blurted out, reflexively pulling herself back at the partially alcohol induced reaction.  “Um, I mean no.  That’s unacceptable.” Kathryn clarified.  Bill’s mirror ball flashed pink and blue before returning to silver as all three of his eye stalks looked up at her expectantly.  “No Bill, I’m sorry.  We will not just hand over to you the entirety of our only defence and just send you on your way and hope for the best.  If we’re in this fight then we mean to be in, this, fight.” she clarified, sharply tapping her finger to the table to emphasize each syllable.

  “We have a long history of warfare to draw on, tactics and strategy potentially unknown to our enemy, things they might not expect.  We might see weaknesses in your plans before you execute them as well.”  Bill seemed to scoff with another flash of pink at the suggestion they could have any weaknesses in their plans humans could recognize.  Kathyrn noticed this and a touch loosened by drink reflexively countered: “Yeah, and how have things been going for you up until now without us Bill?”

  With a flash of green his eyes lowered in capitulation to her point.  “Being involved in your operations is a non-negotiable condition or our assistance, in your plans for how these weapons will be used.”  She looked over to Uzodimma to assess if she’d overstepped, but he offered her a single nod of approval.

  “You mentioned our remaining production capacity,” Bishop Rosales said, a tall woman with a face worn from age and experience but framing sharp blue eyes that betrayed no weakness.  “It’s negligible.  Don’t even factor it in.  Koboli was the only practical production hub; the other colonies only have a few scattered research reactors at universities where we were trying to develop our own domestic anti-matter technology.  We were interested, but it was never a priority since the Koboli had already mastered it and they were our allies.”  Kathryn felt a sting at how she framed the tightness of their alliance now that she understood the truth about how the Koboli felt about them all along, how Jaren felt.

  “What we have is what we have,” Rosales continued.  “When it’s gone it’s gone, at least for our purposes now.  “Bob seemed disappointed but nodded that he understood the reality of their situation.

  “What do you propose then?” Bill asked, turning his eyes up to Kathryn.

  Kathryn and Admiral Brinkerhoff exchanged glances.  She withdrew a hand from her folded arms to hold it out to him in offer to take first crack at it.  After stiffening sitting up straighter in his seat, he accepted the offer.  “Overwhelm and devastate,” he said.  “We commit everything to a single operation that can win the war itself.  If we start hitting them together with anti-matter weapons in multiple smaller engagements, they’re going to know where it’s coming from and they’ll come back to finish the job and wipe us out entirely.”  Kathryn felt a ping of deep existential dread at mention of the possibility, “It will immediately become their top priority to destroy whatever supplies and production capacity we have.  Hell, they may just do it out of spite even if they know we’ve given everything we have to you.”

  “We have to attack their central plexus, wherever their link is ultimately orchestrated,” Kathryn said.  

  Bill shook his upper head projection with green and pink.  “It’s too heavily guarded.  We don’t have enough ships left to mount that kind of attack.  To have any chance of success it would leave too many other positions unacceptably vulnerable, it would jeopardize our capacity for an intergalactic escape.”

  Kathryn and Brinkerhoff exchanged glances.  “Well, I mean we’ve got ships,” Kathryn pointed out, noting that she’d slurred a little bit but feeling decidedly more sober now.

  “They didn’t fare too well against our technology as I recall,” Bill pointed out through his ball.  Kathryn wasn’t sure if he’d meant it to come off as snide as it had.  

  “Then augment them,” she suggested.  “I’ve seen what your shadow matter can do, how it repaired New Horizon.  You must be able to dissociate some of your ships to augment ours in such a way that they’d be useful in such a battle.”

  “A force multiplier,” Brinkerhoff urged, “a way to amplify and further distribute your own forces advantageously.”

  Bill paused and his mirror ball turned black to indicate he was in communion with the link.  It turned a light shade of orange when he looked up at them again.  “Such a thing might be possible,” he tentatively offered.  “Maybe,” he further hedged.  “We could probably find a way to innervate shadow matter into the structure of your ships.  Its function in such a configuration would be limited, but it could in principle allow your ships to make a difference in such a battle if we were lucky.  It could enhance your propulsion, maneuverability, shielding…  But it would take time to make the modifications and build an appropriate control interface.  How many ships do you have?”

  “A few New Horizon class ships,” Brinkerhoff answered, “a couple more almost finished construction which we could rush into service.  Half a dozen older Deseret class ships, and some even older ships from our original separate flees that could still fight if properly augmented.”

  “That… could be enough,” Bob considered.  “We’d need to bring crews through the portal to you with the required supply of shadow matter…  We’d also need to figure out a way to deploy your warheads.  Your own missiles as they exist could too easily be shot down by Bobbin weapons before reaching their target.  We’ll want to dismantle all of them and incorporate the raw supply of anti-matter into our own projectiles… as well as even smaller bullet type projectiles with even smaller amounts…  We’ll need to stretch the available supply as wide as we can and appropriately distribute them out to all of the ships in our combined armada.”

  “Be straight with us Bill,” Margaret leaned forward to demand in an uncharacteristically sincere tone.  “Is this a fight we can actually win?”

  “This remains unclear,” he answered matter of factly.  “As I’ve told you before, my people have already largely resigned themselves to the idea that we can’t win this war and as a result have instead been preparing to abandon this galaxy altogether.  To win this war, to engage in this strategy, it would almost certainly require us to sacrifice our opportunity to do so.  It would mean recalling our readied transport ships and reconfiguring them to warships or dissociating them for donor shadow matter.  This would require us to commit everything we have, to risk everything.  Committing to this can mean only either total victory or complete annihilation.”

  “For all of us,” Kathryn reminded him, fighting back that same existential shudder.

  

☼   ☼   ☼

   

  Jaren looked around at all of the Bobbins working on the New Horizon II bridge as they rushed into service all of their new upgrades to the ship rushing their upgrades into service.  A veritable armada of shadow matter ships had come through the rift with an army of support engineers, and once they’d arrived at Orbital One they immediately began integrating the technology into the human vessels.

  Those near completion looked strange, as though the ship phased somehow and while flying through a cloud of the stuff came unphased halfway through and got stuck in the stuff.  It didn’t encase the ship, but instead had odd protrusions and domes of shadow matter extending out from the hull.  At a minimum the human ships were all equipped with a weapons array which could do some light damage to enemy shadow matter ships as a defensive back up to their antimatter weapons, along with engines at the rear which allowed the ships to travel fast enough that if they weren’t likewise outfitted with the Bobbin inertial dampening systems no one onboard would be able to survive the accelerations which were now possible.  Several of the domes of shadow matter were shield generators which would project the material into a protective shell around the ship if necessary, but build up more matter into a thicker shield in the direction of the shooting.

  Kathryn could tell how uncomfortable it made Jaren to see the aliens everywhere.  He knew they were helping, giving them the capacity to take the fight to his enemies, but in a way they were still his enemies as well.  “Office?” she invited.

  Jaren nodded and the two left the bridge through the doorway to her private office, now enjoying the more consistent artificial gravity granted by the alien augmentation to their ship.  When the door closed behind them, Kathryn turned around in front of her desk, half sitting on it and holding herself up by her palms.  “It must be tough for you to see them all out there like that.”

  “It wasn’t them,” he answered dispassionately.

  “No,” Kathryn sighed as she looked down.  She wanted to pry, wanted to get into a conversation about how he was feeling, which neither of them seemed willing to have.  The contrast between how readily they would have in the past compared to now stung.  They’d known each other intimately long enough that most of it needn’t be said out loud anyways.   He’d always had a xenophobic nationalist streak which made him inclined to dislike Bobbins in general, and it made it difficult for him to separate out a distinction between one faction and another within a group he could only broadly consider as alien.  But he was also an incredibly bright man who understood all the relevant realities well enough to see a distinction and was disciplined enough to act accordingly when in control of himself.

  “I want a ship,” he said.  His tone was almost shameful.  He knew it was obvious why he wanted to lead one of the attack ships, and equally obvious why it was a bad idea.

  “Well, no.” Kathryn stated with as little ambiguity as she could.  “Obviously.  Let’s just get that right out of the way.”  He didn’t seem sad or angry as much as just resigned.  “But I also won’t take you entirely out of the fight.  That wouldn’t be fair either.”

  He looked up at her quizzically.  “We’re going to war,” she shrugged.  “I need my XO.”

  Jaren pursed his lower lip as he slowly nodded, looking past her as he thought it through.  “Okay,” he said, looking up at her again.  “I can do that.”  

  Kathryn nodded as she offered him a warm smile.  “Okay then, welcome back.”

  He stood and walked over, taking her in his arms and hugging her tightly, gently rocking her side to side as they often did before this all started.  She hesitated before reciprocating in putting her arms on his back and returning the hug, but then indulged in the ancient comfort the embrace still provided.

  “I guess we have a lot to talk about when this is all over,” she heard him lament over her shoulder.

  “We do.” she nodded.  “But it can wait.”  He pulled back and she noticed that his tears were wet, but he wiped the tears away before they could breach down his cheeks.

  “You think it’s fair for us to go into battle together?” he asked.  “I mean for Maggie.  If our ship gets taken out we’ll orphan her.”

  “If we don’t succeed no one will survive at all,” Kathryn pointed out and Jaren nodded.  “Anything in between, and we—” she cut herself off, but she remembered that the entirety of his extended family had just been killed but it was too late.  “I have a cousin in the other city who could take care of her.  We’re not close, but…” Kathryn shrugged.  “He’s family.”

  “Right,” answered softly, lost somewhere in his thoughts again.  After a long mournful sigh, he stiffened his posture as he stood straight and slowly brought his hand to his head in formal salute.  “Orders, Captain?”  He signaled that all the rest could wait.  For now he was just ready to get to work and entrust himself once again to her authority.

  “I want you to oversee the construction of the control interface between our systems and theirs.  Make sure they’re not overly complicated and actually usable to us in the heat of a battle.  Make sure our personnel know how to use them.  Drill them hard on it Jaren, crew responsible for operating them need to be able to do it in their sleep.  I want everyone else who might have to take over in an emergency to have at least a passing familiarity with them as well.”

  “Yes, sir.  Anything else?”  He was never so formal with her in private like this.  She figured he must be holding a lot in and it was just easier for him to default to professional mode.  

  She approached him and stood closer.  He was decimeter taller than her and she had to look up at his forward facing eyes for a few moments before he looked down to meet hers.  “You’d tell me if you weren’t up for this, right?”

  “I would,” he answered with a softness as her husband.  “I am.”

  “Okay,” she said.  “Okay, I believe you.  But Jaren I swear to god if you go off book for just one moment…”

  “Won’t happen Kat,” he assured her.  “I got this.  I wouldn’t agree to serve with you if I didn’t.  I won’t let you down.”

  “Okay,” she nodded.  “Then get to work.”

  It was small and reflexive, but he smiled for the first time since before they’d learned about Kobol before turning and exiting the office.  As the door opened, she saw Felix and Bob at the doorway waiting to speak with her and she motioned them in.  “Well?”

  “Four New Horizon class cruisers, eleven Deseret class frigates,” Bob reported, “all being outfitted with shadow matter augmentations.”

  “And they’re all fuck-ugly bitches,” Felix described with a mixture of disgust and admiration, “but bitches with teeth.”

  “Good,” Kathryn nodded.  “We need teeth a lot more than we need beauty queens out there.  Any problems?”

  “Surprisingly few actually,” Felix answered.  “I mean it will take us years to understand exactly what they’ve done to our ships and would have taken decades to figure out how to do all of this integration ourselves, but with Bill’s engineers it’s been quick work.”

  “The hardest part has been figuring out how to integrate it into such a primitive technological substrate,” Bill lamented.

   “I think we’re insulted,” Felix said after he and Kathryn and Felix looked at each other with some amusement.  

  “Will it be enough?’  Kathryn asked Bob.

  “That remains unclear,” Bill answered.  “Our best estimates are that with the addition of your ships, the loss of three of ours as shadow matter donors, and the remaining fleet we can bring to bear for such an operation, we will still be outnumbered three to one if we attempt an attack on the enemy Link’s central plexus.  The addition of anti-matter weapons makes it possible, but not assured.”

  “We’re stretching the anti-matter as far as we can,” Felix added, “but even with it things are lining up to basically be a coin flip as to whether we can pull this off or not.”

  “And how is that going?” she asked.

  “It’s crazy,” Felix answered clearly impressed.  Exhausted, working for days underfed and under slept, his body was animated by little more than excitement at this point.  “They can create such small magnetic bottles for the stuff that we can almost make handheld weapons with them.”

  “Not exactly practical,” Kathryn frowned at the thought of them devoting any time to such a thing.

  “Say that when we’re boarded,” Felix guffawed.

  “Your conventional weapons will be effective against enemy Bobbins themselves if you are boarded,” Bill assured her.  “But you’ll need to target the mirror balls first if enemy soldiers are accompanied by them.  Both sides have been working on animating shadow matter as combat drones but neither has had much luck to date.  We are currently studying your mechanoids to see if it can do anything to advance our research, but making combat ready models before the final confrontation remains unlikely.”

  It took a moment for Kathryn to realize he meant Margaret and Ralph when he said ‘mechanoids’, but she nodded once she understood.

  “The real problem is delivery,” Felix continued.  Simulations are clear that our native anti-matter tipped missiles would be destroyed ninety-nine times out of a hundred when launched against their ships, so the Bobbins have been rushing to modify their own projectiles to house anti-matter and calculating the most practical yield to be effective while stretching it as far as we can.  We need a good chance at being able to disable their ships with one shot and no more.  Vaporizing them entirely would be a waste of—”

  The entire room shook violently all of a sudden and kicked over to emergency lighting as alarms started blaring.  Before thought could motivate her, Kathryn’s instinct has sped her past them through the doorway onto the bridge.  “Report!” she yelled, terrified that the battle they were still so woefully unprepared had already come to their doorstep.

  On the viewscreen she saw that a section of the Orbital One habitat ring was gone.  At the edges of where it used to be, a lattice of mangled structural material apologized for their disuse, and the remnants of an expanding debris cloud could be seen radiating out spherically from the centre of what used to be there.

  “Fuck,” she uttered, understanding what had happened without needing to be told.  She ran to the comm panel on the captain’s chair and pressed the button to open a general broadcast channel.  

  “All ships with working Bobbin shields raise them now!”  She pointed at Lieutenant Tarsus at the ops station, who dutifully turned back to his station and projected a shell of shadow matter around New Horizon II.  She could see it close a curtain of darkness in front of them on the view screen before it switched to a wavelength which could see through the material.  It limited the colour contrast but still offered a fairly clear view.  

  Kathryn held her breath for a few seconds as she waited for the impacts of the debris but when they came they were less than she’d feared.  She closed the broadcast channel and pressed the button on the panel which silenced the alarms and they all listened to the sound of stray pieces of the station striking their protective shell.  Another explosion rocked through the tight fleet and the viewscreen automatically rotated to see one of the smaller frigates explode.  It was much nearer to the original blast.  Whether through damage from the initial explosion or not being able to raise their shields in time, their fusion reactor seemed to have lost containment.

  The bridge was silent as they waited numbly for the second wave of ejecta to start striking the shadow matter shields.

  New lights and noises started up from Tarsus’ operations control panel.  “Reports coming in Admiral,” he offered.  “It was the Lorenzo Snow.  The Miltiades and the Wandering Dream were critically damaged, but… looks like they have the situation under control and emergency teams are responding.”

  “That part of the habitat ring…” Kathryn said as she turned back to Felix.

  “Was where they were working on the new anti-matter delivery systems, yes.” he acknowledged, pale and seemingly in some degree of shock.  

  Bill’s eye stalks looked back and forth between them trying to assess the consequences of their reactions, seemingly confused.  “We… are fortunate to have only allowed a few micrograms aboard for study.”

  Kathryn’s eyes blazed at it, and its mirror ball flashed pink and orange indignance.  She had enough sense to restrain herself, and to hold her arm out to prevent Jaren from getting any ideas of rushing towards him.  It proved to be unnecessary, and she was glad wasn’t going to relieve him of duty already.

  “Jaren,” she said, turning to him.  “Please go and take lead on rescue and recovery.”

  Tearing his eyes away from Bill, he turned and saw his outrage matched in Kathryn’s.  He breathed in deeply through his nose and slowly exhaled his breath through his mouth with his eyes closed.  “Yes sir.” He answered before walking past Bob and out of the bridge, already on his scroll coordinating efforts.

  “We evacuated the rest of that section, but…” Felix muttered, “Fuck.  Some of my best people were on that.  Some of the brightest people we have were in that lab.”

  “Mine as well,” Bill reminded them and Kathryn saw his mirror ball display full green and brown anguish for the first time.

  Kathryn put her right hand to her forehead and rubbed her temples with her thumb and middle finger for a moment.  “Nothing’s changed.” she reminded herself.  Somebody else was already managing this crisis, she had to tend to her own.  “Lieutenant Tarsus.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “We’re going back to the ready room.  Forward to all reports about the ongoing response there and call me if I’m needed.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  Kathryn held out her arm towards her office, inviting Bill and Felix to join her and resume their conversation.  “Shall we?”

   

  Behind her desk Kathryn had her scroll opened to it’s maximum size and docked into the desk to glance at the information scrolling past.  None of it was unexpected, clarification on damage to other ships, names of the missing, confirmations of the dead.  Some of the names she knew, most of them she didn’t, a couple were of people she’d known personally.

  “How badly does this set us back?” she asked Bill.

  “Fortunately, our work was nearly complete,” he answered.  “The data gathered was continuously backed up and we’ve learned enough to begin testing some designs.  I can only express my deepest regrets and sympathies, Admiral.  I also had colleagues working there whom I was close with.”

  “Thank you,” she nodded.  “I understand.”

  “Felix?” she asked.  He hadn’t spoken and the colour had yet to return to his cheeks  “Felix?” she sharply demanded.  He snapped out of it and looked at her but still seemed in a daze.  “How much sleep have you had in the last few days?”

  “Sleep?   I uh… I don’t know.”

  Bob’s eye stalks looked up at him and then back at Kathryn.  “He hasn’t slept.” he answered for him.

  “Can’t have that,” she frowned.  “I’m ordering you to bed for at least 8 hours, you’ve done all you can for now.  Stop by the medical bay and have the doctor give you something to make sure you actually sleep.”  He seemed to want to protest, but didn’t have the energy so he instead just slumped in place with acceptance.  “Go home to Taj,” she urged.  “Let him take care of you.  Do what you need to do to recharge.  I need you fresh for what comes next.  Bill’s people can finish the upgrades and the new weapons.”  Felix slowly rose to his feet and left through the door without any energy left for another word.

  Kathryn bit her thumb as the name of another colleague she’d known well scrolled past the incident report as confirmed dead.

  “The weapons, Bill.”

  “I don’t believe you’ve had much more sleep than your friend,” he pointed out.  

  “And you would be right,” she sighed.  “Don’t worry, I’ll be fresh when the time comes, but right now please just tell me about the weapons.”

  “Very well,” he said, with a weary sigh translated as green and brown.  “We have essentially designed small ships with powerful thrust and maneuvering engines which contain an antimatter core.  They should be able to effectively outmaneuver the enemy defenses and strike with a success rate of over 80 percent.  Even if shot down before striking directly, upon losing magnetic containment the anti-matter material will still detonate and shower the target ship with a destructive radiating cone of high energy particulates.  If we had months more time, we could design something more reliable, but this is our best option given such a tight timeline.”

  “What intelligence reports are you getting from your people on the enemy?” she asked.  She was waiting for an estimate to scroll past indicating how long it would take to repair Orbital One, but instead what she saw was skepticism that the station could ever be safely repaired after sustaining so much widespread structural damage.  ‘Well shit,’ she thought.  It was understandable, the station was almost a thousand years old, but it had still been her home for the better part of a decade and was the most impressive surviving monument to the old Terran civilization and still more impressive than anything they’d been able to construct since. Looking back at the feed she saw that it looked like the Mitiades was also beyond repair, at least soon enough to matter for the assault.  ‘Damn,’ she thought.  ‘We already didn’t have enough ships… Damn.’

  “We have obtained a thorough assessment of the strength of the central plexus’ defenses.  They appear to be fortifying their positions, which could indicate they are expecting some sort of attack which is bad for us.  They have some sixty ships guarding the facility, at least half of their total fleet.  Five icosahedrons, over a dozen dodecahedrons, and the rest octahedrons, cubes, and tetrahedrons.  Our side has only two icosahedrons, four dodecahedrons, only a handful of smaller vessels, and yours.  Even with the anti-matter weapons victory… will be a challenge.”

  “But not impossible,” she sought to clarify.

  “No.  Not impossible.”

  “Then it’s what we’ve got.  So how are your people responding to all this?  To our plan.”

  “Mixed, I’m afraid,” he answered with green.  “I apologize that we are not committing more of our forces to this battle.  If it were up to me, we’d be committing every gram of shadow matter we have to ensure the success of this operation, but a full third of our combined fleet is guarding the home world and another third is guarding out intergalactic rift crystal, which I consider to be… well frankly, insane.”

  “Absolutely, it is,” Kathryn agreed.  “But if we hadn’t been attacked directly, I’m afraid you likely wouldn’t have gotten even that much from us for the effort.”

  “But I assure you Admiral,” he said, “if we manage to pull this off, it will be a long while before you find the depth of my people’s gratitude for your efforts and sacrifices.”

  “I’m sure we’ll hold you to that,” she answered plainly.

  “So tell me Bill, how is this battle going to have to go for us to actually win?  Do we need to destroy every last enemy position?  What happens to them after we take down their central plexus?”

  “I’m afraid we really can’t say,” he answered with another pulse of apologetic green.  “Those within the system will be disconnected, but there’s no way to know how they’ll react, whether they’ll continue fighting us afterwards or not.  Either way, whatever changes there are will propagate to any system we subsequently open a rift to.”

  “What if we reprogrammed it?”

  Bill’s eye stalks looked at her expectantly.  “How do you mean?” he asked.  “If you mean what I think you do, it goes pretty deeply against everything my people are fighting and dying for.”

  “Sure but consider the stakes here.  I’m not talking about permanent influence or control, just a kind of suggestion in that moment.  Before destroying the link altogether, can we propagate out a final message?  Just something that would stick with them after the link was gone.  A simple urge to surrender maybe, emphasize to them the harm they’ve suffered in relying on the link the way they have, and the futility of continuing to fight for it once it’s already gone.  I mean even just something to make them less scared and angry at us when they wake up from their nightmare would be helpful.”

  “I… I’m not even sure how I feel about that myself,” Bill admitted as his mirror ball turned an uncertain blue, “but I will relay the suggestion to my superiors.  You’re right though.  Given the situation they may be willing to bend the rules in this way, provided as you say it is just a temporary suggestion to leave them with once the link is taken down.”

  “Good,” Kathryn said as she looked out the window as the ugly mess of Orbital One’s damaged section revolved into view.  “Because we’ve got to win this one Bill, we just have to.”

  “Indeed,” he affirmed.  “And to that end I feel I should bring to your attention some rather unusual requests your simulant has made…”