Rangers of Sol: Firestorm (Working title)

Chapter 1

The ship shuddered under my hands, as I gripped onto the hard steel rungs of the ascending ladder. Sharp labored breathing echoed through my helmet, before I wrenched my will to focus and control my lungs. Fear threatened to rob me of movement and reason entirely, but to give in to it would be death. I moved my arms and legs laboriously against the increasing gravity as I climbed to a higher deck, it was an omnipresent reminder of the ticking clock I was working against and it wasn’t the only one.

The remaining lights were flickering, dimming, some went out. It was alright, my helmet lights lit with a focused thought to my suit. Not switching them on had been a power saving measure, since there was no telling what the coming hours would bring. Either the ship could be saved or we would all die. The atmosphere resonated with more impact echoes. The air brought with it a smell of burning plastics and carbon polymers. The sharp tang was strong enough for me to switch off my suit’s olfactory sensors. That there was a fire on board as well was no surprise to me.

Then over the radio, human shouting, it became garbled before I could recognize who it belonged to and the signal devolved into static, then the EM signal cut off entirely. I switched off the suit radio, I couldn’t afford to be distracted, if anyone else was alive and wanted to reach me, there were other ways. The gravity was thankfully lessening as I climbed higher and the flight deck entrance was now mere feet away.

In the flickering darkness, I wondered if there was anything really that could be done. That it was too late to make any difference. There was a point where no plan or procedure could do anything. Nothing the smartest people on Earth or the entire solar system could dream up would be able to compensate for having your ship shot out from under you, no clever patch or bypass to stop your RTG melting down or any of the numerous ways you could die in the hostile environment of space.

Beyond a certain point it was just pointless to do anything. You threw your dice, the enemy threw theirs and that was it. In this instance, it was perhaps more accurate the enemy had thrown their dice and we hadn’t even known we had to throw. The surprise had been complete. The only thing still keeping me going was the faint hope the on-board computers were telling me via augmented reality displays in my vision.

The bulkhead door to the flight deck was flickering a red warning light and my mind interrogating the systems revealed a pressure differential. The deck wasn’t in complete vacuum, that would take another hour or so, but the computer recommended that I not go in there. A leaky flight deck was the least of our worries at the moment, so the computer yielded to my override. The door opened and shifting air rushed past me and into the flight deck.

My own entry onto the deck was spent trying not to throw up in my helmet. It took a precious number of seconds for me to master the urge. Here on the flight deck, the simulated gravity was low enough that it took a while for the blood to fall to the floor, and the centrifugal force caused a bizarre sideways spiral in the flow. The escaping air also further added to the bizarre blood pattern. Whatever weapon the enemy had hit us with, one part of it had been targeted here, leaving a hole the size of my fist in the hull and it had gone on to hit the ship’s navigator.

Her legs and lower torso were still in the seat, while the rest of her body had settled on the floor to the left.

I tried to put the ghastly sight out of my mind, carefully moving to the right to avoid most of the blood. My hand found a patch kit strapped to the wall and I got busy sealing the breach. It took an agonizingly slow minute working with a spare tile and silicon gun, but I could immediately hear the air flow settle into normality.

Pulling myself into the co-navigator’s chair, I surveyed the touch panel displays and took in the full state of the ship. The computer helpfully displayed a graphic with highlighted parts where damage had been taken and even theorized what kind of weapon we’d been hit with; a ship to ship fragmentation missile or what a layman would call a shotgun in space, if that shotgun had been mounted on an extremely fast missile.

I dismissed the computer’s musings and brought up the navigation controls, switching off the attitude thrusters completely.

The computer prompted me if I was sure and I almost stabbed my finger through the screen on the YES button.

I breathed a sigh of relief when it complied and I could feel the ever encroaching artificial gravity stop in its tracks. It was already almost three gravities at the lowest part of the ship and had been climbing up to nearly two gravities on the flight deck.

Now the question was, do I play dead or try to reduce the ship’s spin to normal levels. That the malfunctioning thrusters that imparted centrifugal gravity had cut off could be explained as an automated system or the computer kicking in as gravity levels went into unsafe territory. The enemy would surely know that someone was still alive if I tried anything overt like that and send yet another missile to finish us off, perhaps even a nuke.

Combat in space had thus far always been a theoretical exercise. No one imagined that anyone would be stupid enough to pull that trigger, despite the weapon systems that had been developed and mounted on the ships that flung themselves through the solar system. The enemy had started the new arms race, despite all the treaties and fancy words on paper that supposedly prevented it. Prudence and deterrence meant that we were forced to arm our ships as well.

Now here we were, in an actual shooting war in space.

It was madness.

There was no targeting radar or lidar hitting the ship, but the enemy had to be watching optically at least. I set the computer the task of finding them in the night, only to find it had already been done. They were a vague silvery dot in the scopes, hanging at about 25000 km and rapidly fading away. The computer had tracked the incoming missiles and even extrapolated the enemy’s course, which had given them enough time to fire a volley of five missiles to bracket and intercept my ship. The performance of their missiles was crazy and suggested a fuel mixture that I wouldn’t want aboard any spacecraft. This combined with the stupefying disbelief of the situation had been enough for surprise to be achieved and our own late antimissile counterfire to be ineffective. The enemy had also thrown an electronic warfare missile that had even added further insult to injury.

A gesture to the touchscreens brought up the ship’s own weapons.

Just a single launcher was operational, a total of ten missiles, most of them were antimissiles,  but there were three shotguns and two nukes.

I put the past out of my mind and focused on what I could do. A brief query to the computer showed me there were six survivors left on the ship, all of them busy with some form of damage control that if it failed had the potential to kill us all anyway. Now I was left with the dilemma, do I retaliate or raise the figurative white flag and let the enemy go? Would they even be satisfied with the damage done? Would they finish us off?

I input a query to the computer.

Given the discretionary Delta V the ship had available and the max Delta of the missiles, could it plot a firing solution to strike the enemy?

The answer returned was yes, but only for another twenty three minutes. Then they would leave the powered range envelope of the ship’s weapons. The enemy had plotted their course well. Not that it was very difficult on the Earth-Mars run. The two planets only came into position for an efficient Hohmann transfer orbit every two years and that had made it easy to preposition their ships for intercepts. I idly wondered how many other ships were facing similar situations or how many had been utterly destroyed. This couldn’t be an isolated attack.

The enemy had been spilling their propaganda for years now across all the settled planets in the solar system. Now they had put actions to their words and it wasn’t going to be half-assed. Forget the concept of the old World Wars, this would be the first Solar War!

I looked at the pieces of the crew member next to me then just as quickly focused on the screens in front of me.

Screw this.

For so long the enemy had encroached and wormed their way into everything. Using their unconventional soft power to undermine, convince and pull people into their way of thinking, all the while working on enhancing their hard power for when the time was right, and now that time was upon us.

No more.

This far, no further.

I programmed the RCS thrusters and weapon systems in concert with the computer.

The anti-missiles would lead the way and screen, whilst the rest would follow and the nuke would be last.

Soon enough the computer was displaying an angry red button labeled ‘Execute’.

My gloved hand tapped it.

The hull of the ship echoed and rumbled as a full launcher worth of missiles were ejected out into space. The RCS thrusters came alive against the spin of the ship, starting the slow process of pushing the centrifugal gravity down.

The missiles oriented themselves using their own RCS in brief, sharp bursts before lighting their main rocket motors and shooting themselves at the enemy. Their 3.7 kilometer per second accelerations would burn for thirty seconds before shutting themselves down to conserve fuel for their terminal intercept phases.

The computer threw up a tactical render of the local battlespace and began a three minute fifty second countdown to intercept.

The enemy responded to the threat immediately, orienting themselves to burn their main engines and altering their own velocity relative to the incoming missiles to stretch the intercept solution as much as possible.

The next few minutes was a game of me lighting off the missile’s engines to correct the intercept versus the enemy throwing in course alterations. It was now a matter of how much propellant my missiles had left in their tanks versus how much propellant the enemy was able to use to evade without killing themselves by running out. It was also a mystery why the enemy wasn’t throwing antimissiles at the incoming threat.

If I had been in their shoes, I would’ve launched against my attack immediately. The further antimissiles did their job away from your spacecraft the better, otherwise you risked debris strikes from the two competing missiles smashing themselves to pieces on each other.

I fired up the lidar and lit up the enemy like a Christmas tree. The hi-res wireframe of the enemy spacecraft the computer resolved revealed the answer. It only had a single launcher with 5 tubes, yet the diameter of the missile it could fire was crazy big, not to mention the size of the launcher relative to the ship itself. This was not something that could be reloaded quickly, even with an autoloader mechanism, which itself was problematic to design on a spacecraft which experienced variable gravities of acceleration.

My missiles were four thousand kilometers from the enemy when doors began opening on their spacecraft, and what emerged had to be some kind of point defense cannons. They also settled on a steady course, stopping their evasive maneuvers most likely to give their fire control systems an easier time of tracking the incoming threat.

My mind was struggling with what kind of point defense system this was. There was nothing the computer could discern to definitively give an answer. It would either be a traditional autocannon setup, as that would be the most compact and efficient or it would be railguns. The latter would be quite power intensive, but the heat profile of the enemy showed they were running nuclear thermals as their main engines, so could theoretically power railgun systems.

Then they began to fire those guns as soon as my missiles reached three thousand kilometers.

These weren’t just traditional bullets, because they fragmented a couple of seconds after launch into a fine cloud of even smaller projectiles, effectively becoming like a cloud of hypervelocity shrapnel that bore down on the incoming missiles.

I swore and was forced to use the RCS thrusters on the missiles to push upwards on the z-axis to try and avoid the shrapnel. This also had the effect of just further whittling down the maneuvering ability of my weapons and shortening their effective range.

The enemy responded by shooting more defensive fire.

I idly wondered if perhaps my missiles could make it through the shrapnel clouds but dismissed it as ridiculous. They were traveling at roughly 111 kilometers per second at this point and the shrapnel was bearing down in the opposite direction at a much more sedate 3.5 kilometers per second, but it would tear the missiles to shreds.

The computer projected that the missiles would be hit 157 kilometers short of the enemy spacecraft. The missile debris would cover that distance in less than two seconds and still make mincemeat of the enemy. It would render the nukes useless and turn them into more shrapnel, in effect making a super shotgun missile.

The raw numbers of what I was seeing gave me a sense of relief. The enemy had made a mistake in trusting upon their point defense. Humanity was still very new to the realities and practicalities of space warfare. It was hard to wrap your mind around the distances and velocities involved and the variability and intricacies of weapon systems that were involved, not to mention the factor of the varied performance of the ships mounting the weapons.

I gave up on maneuvering the missiles and plowed straight ahead on a least time vector through one of the defensive shrapnel clouds. Instead I had the antimissiles come closer together, as close they possibly could and create a physical shield for the missiles that would follow in their wake.

Just as predicted the antimissiles slammed into the shrapnel field. What fuels were left mixed with the remaining oxidizer and a wonderful flower of ignited propellants was generated. The debris cloud continued on towards the enemy, knocking the remnants of their defensive fields out of the way. The rest of my missiles reached terminal attack phases and detonated, sending a conical array of projectiles at the enemy spacecraft.

Two seconds later a storm of debris and dedicated attack projectiles slammed into the enemy like the hand of God.

The spacecraft was utterly rent asunder into two distinct pieces that tumbled out of control, but still going on their original trajectory. Further debris spilled out into space, some which the lidar showed had to be bodies as well. Something also lit off in the aft section and it turned into further debris and the lidar signature indicated that that had been the ship’s liquid hydrogen cooking off.

To add insult to the injury, the nuke came in and its onboard computer judged the forward piece of the enemy spacecraft to be good enough and contact detonated.

The heat and light release caused the scopes to polarize and the computer had also turned off every sensor looking at the enemy. The liberated gamma and x-rays expanded in an unbroken sphere and anything close to the blast point was incinerated instantly. Their lethal power would be spent a mere kilometer from the blast zone though and anything that reached me less than a second later was even less than a medical x-ray in terms of radiation.

Ten seconds later I turned every sensor back on and surveyed the battlespace.

I smiled in triumph and pumped a fist of victory.

Then the computer made a sound that I didn’t want to hear.

It helpfully brought up a display of the entire solar system and my eyes found the position of my ship on the Earth-Mars run, which was still twenty three days away from Mars. Then it began populating every ship it could detect via passive sensors. The solar system was a beehive of activity these days, but the difference in the map from what I had seen just the day before was obvious. The ships belonging to the enemy were highlighted now in an angry red halo, while the others were painted in a broad swath of colors to designate their nationalities.

There were still a bunch of contacts in the outer solar system that were indeterminate, but that was mostly due to range and the computer hadn’t bothered with the processing power or using active systems to interrogate a target that far out. It was generally considered rude to be bouncing active emissions to the level needed that far out, but since the attack the computer had started an ‘aggressive’ catalog of every contact in the space between Earth and Mars.

Already we were starting to receive the emissions of battle closest to us.

There was an enemy spacecraft behind me, about two million kilometers on the Earth Mars run that had started an engine burn to catch up. The computer estimated it could achieve an intercept, if we didn’t start our own burn. The problem was, could I accelerate enough to stay out of an intercept and not kill myself by going too fast and not leaving enough fuel to decellerate into a Mars orbit.

I began calculating the problem and the answer the computer returned had my stomach clench in knots.

This new enemy ship would catch up and…

The flight deck around me vanished into nothingness and a blissful oblivion that I vaguely recognized as sleep.

My eyes snapped open and I regarded the interior of my personal sleeping capsule blankly. My thoughts were sluggish at first but then comprehension hit me like a ton of bricks as it usually did after a neura-game.

Stupid game. It was like the designer had taken inspiration from old classics in terms of punishing almost self-flagellating levels of difficulty when designing this one. The difference was that it roped you along with just enough success before slamming the door in your face.

I rubbed my eyes wearily and sat up, propping my back against the pillow. Raising my arm I let it fall to the bed. It still fell at the same speed as yesterday. I really wasn’t looking forward to the further reductions in centrifugal gravity to come. The zero gee of Earth orbit before our departure had been a horrible experience. The elephant that had sat on me when the Tranquility had performed its Mars transfer injection burn was more preferable.

The experiences of astronauts from extended stays in zero gee aboard places like the ISS had left me with a near phobia of full weightlessness, but fulfilling a childhood dream had overpowered that thankfully into not throwing this opportunity away.

My eyes were drawn to the touch screen in front of my head and a slight flick with a finger brought it into life. Earth was barely a speck on Tranquility’s scopes at this point and it would be another fifty one days, two hours, twelve minutes and ten seconds before she would reach Mars, as the ever present countdown clock informed me. Nine days of the journey were behind me and in distinct contrast to how life had seemed to speed up for me as I got older on Earth, now it seemed that someone had slammed on the brakes and time on Tranquility seemed to just stretch and stretch. I knew it was all in my head. My dives into neura-games was probably not helping matters at all.

Get a grip, Jase, I thumped my head against the pillow. Many now had made this trip in ships vastly slower, taking six months to make the journey and they had survived. Tranquility was part of a new breed of starship that used nuclear electric engines, which allowed for a much faster transfer orbit to be taken. It was still two months in space beyond the protective embrace of mother Earth and all the dangers that implied.

I sniffed into the air of my sleeping pod and poked my nose briefly under my arm.

Yeah, gotta clean today, I thought ruefully.

Ablutions in space and handling cleanliness in general had to undergo a major rethink with the advent of the interplanetary age. It all boiled down to the one simple fact that water was utterly too precious for drinking to even think about using it for the cleaning of body and clothing. Even on Mars, the process, time and infrastructure of getting water from the polar regions meant that it was too valuable in oxygen generation, drinking water and starship fuel generation to even think of using it as wastefully as people on Earth did. It was one of the primary topics that was hammered into your head during training over and over, to never waste a drop and local Martian bylaw these days counted water wastage as a criminal offense that would see a repeat offender shipped off back to Earth and banned from coming back. So far it seemed that no one had run afoul of that law yet.

The primary method to get clean was a liquid sanitizer, specially formulated that it would remain liquid for about a minute before it evaporated. This was combined with a 3D printed washcloth that wasn’t actually made of cloth, but a smart polymer that had the same properties and feel. The washcloth would get too dirty eventually and was promptly fed to Tranquility’s 3D printer for recycling. The soap also doubled to act as a deodorant and the scent was thankfully up to personal preference. Brushing teeth also got an overhaul by changing the toothpaste so that it could actually be safely swallowed and therefore producing no gooey waste that way.

With all that behind me I got dressed into my… miniskirt

There was no other word for it.

Clothing for long duration space flight and on Mars, consisted of three things; the EMU biosuit, which allowed for full vacuum EVAs and walking on the Martian surface, the LES, worn during launch and reentry of a starship and finally 3D printed clothing. Weight saving consideration also meant that a starship only had so much 3D printing feedstock and the clothing had to be as simple and small as possible.

That had meant a total rethink of what being ‘clothed’ and ‘decent’ meant. For men, it was goodbye to shirts and underwear, and only wearing a miniskirt. For women, it was the same, except with the addition of a boobtube that was usually tight enough to support their chests.

Any notion of embarrassment at only wearing so little was another thing drilled out of you at training.

The clothes came out of the printer with a black-gray tint, but it was also possible to put patterns, images or any design you wanted on to them. It was the closest Mars and those going to live on the planet would have to express themselves via fashion. I preferred a skirt that had a streaked fractal pattern of blue, white and red. After wiggling into the skirt and belt, and stuffing my feet into a pair of sandals I opened the sleeping pod and emerged into the cramped confines of the circular crew deck. None of the other pod doors were open yet on the deck, so it seemed I was the early bird today.

A glance at my watch told me it was still an hour till official breakfast time but nothing stopped me from grabbing it early. I walked around the circular deck and approached the deck transfer tube. Before climbing on the ladder I pulled at the belt of my skirt, wound out the cord and hooked on the runner that would anchor me as I climbed up. It wasn’t strictly necessary, but it was always a tricky business changing decks on a starship that was under centrifugal gravity. You had to make sure you never left contact with the ship itself and that included jumping, which would result in possibly serious injury and in a worst case it could even be fatal.

The Tranquility with its hooked up cargo starship partner was suspended about ninety meters away from each other’s noses. If the ships spun at a rate of three revolutions per minute, it would produce a perfect Earth normal gravity of 9.81 meters per second of acceleration that humans had evolved at and preferred. That spin was currently at 2.7 revolutions and would steadily decrease until it reached a simulation of standard Martian gravity at 3.72 meters per second. The example the trainers on Earth gave us of the situation was to imagine jumping off a high speed train only for another train to smash into you coming the other way in midair. It wasn’t truly an accurate equivalent but it did enough to hammer home the potential danger.

The Mess deck did have some occupancy, in fact it seemed a meeting of the ten member flight crew of Tranquility was happening. Generally the Mars ships needed at least two navigators, one of whom was the captain of the ship itself, a chef and two engineers, one of whom specialized in life support and the other working the ship’s reactor and propulsion. Then this was doubled into two shifts who would be on duty twelve hours each.

Twelve hours might seem a lot, but most of the time there wasn’t really much to do for the crew and that was generally a good thing, because if they were busy then it meant that usually something had gone wrong. Their workload would increase as time went on, as the time delay for communication with Earth got longer and mission control could no longer monitor the starship in real time.

I was about to head further up the transfer tube to give the crew their privacy but the captain shook his head and gestured for me to come in.

“Ranger Phillips, good morning. Don’t worry, we’re about finished, come in, get your chow,” Captain Martinez’s ruddy face stretched into a smile.

I sighed in exasperation, unhooking myself from the transfer tube only when I had both feet firmly planted on the deck. I had given up on protesting the title after the third day of our journey. Yes, I had been a Texas Ranger for nearly eighteen years, but those days were firmly behind me after a gunshot injury in the line of duty had taken a neat chunk out of my left thigh. The result was the inability to sprint and my best running speed was what could be charitably called a jog. Sure I could’ve continued with a desk job but it wasn’t the same. Of course, the instant it got out to the colonist training cadre about what my former profession was, the same thing had happened; the consequence of the school being in Texas and the media portrayal of the Rangers over the years.

The rest of the flight crew mostly chirped up, looking up from their tablets and threw greetings of varying enthusiasm my way. I nodded politely at them and stopped in front of the food buffet.

“Okay, everything’s looking good for our course adjustment burn tomorrow, Houston has sent some procedures they want your opinion on, Olivia.”

“I’ll give it a look, Cap, but I tell ya she’s purring like a kitten. Those dags in the back rooms just wanna tinker.”

“I realize that, but we are the first commercial nuclear drive ship so just humor them with your attention and throw a signature on it if it’s any good.”

“Aye aye, Cap.”

I began scooping into my tray, being careful with the proportions. I had always been weight conscious and while I did pick up the pounds a bit after my injury, I kept it under control these days with as much exercise as I could tolerate. The buffet today had a mix of pork and chicken dishes. As much as had been tried to improve food that had been designed to work in variable gravity and last as long as possible, it still tasted like military MRE quality, just slightly better. I didn’t begrudge it though. I had once tried to work out the logistics of feeding the maximum passenger capacity of a starship for six months and gave it up.

In comparison to the early chemburner starships, this was practically heaven in comparison as they’d had to firmly subsist on the zero gee food that had been developed for the ISS and it had been strictly rationed. Now with the Mars run only being two months and lower passenger numbers, the food was only semi-rationed and offered in abbreviated buffets for passengers.

“All right, we’ve been doing well so far and I want to keep it that way. NASA, the FAA and the Space Force are watching this flight like a hawk and the idea of nuclear starships in civilian commercial hands is still making the suits very nervous, no matter that they signed off on it. What we do and don’t do will determine whether the green light for more ships like Tranquility is given,” Martinez gave his crew a hard stare and received only determined looks in return. “Good, first shift get to work, second shift get your asses back to bed.”

The crew scampered off and headed to the transfer tube as I took a seat at the table and began my breakfast. Now I began my struggle with the damn coffee thermos. I tried to position my cup for my own mental estimation of the ship’s spin, current gravity and carefully poured as small an amount as I could. As usual I was wrong, and a small drop of coffee veered oddly in the air and splashed on the table. I repositioned my cup at that point and carefully poured, the stream of coffee spiraling weirdly down until it landed in my cup.

“You’ll get the hang of it eventually,” Martinez sympathized and sat down opposite me and poured his own coffee flawlessly. “Do you mind if I ask you a question, Phillips?” I bit into my chicken and shook my head. “Why come to Mars?”

“Surely my file has crossed your desk, Captain.”

“The files of every passenger,” he nodded, “of which there are quite a few.”

“Well, I’m going there to stay,” I affirmed. “And in terms of what I’m going to contribute, I’ll ask you this. How many Martian born children are there?”

“Barely three dozen or so.”

“Thirty-nine to be exact and the oldest is going to turn ten Earth years soon. Their parents have mostly been getting along fine with homeschooling, but it’s getting to the point where the colony can’t afford the manpower and time investment, especially since there’s a growing sentiment that it's expanding too slowly. If the parents had more time to work on colonial development efforts…” I shrugged.

Martinez groaned, “It’s not just about whether there’s enough housing in Landing.”

“Preaching to the choir, Captain. I know every extra person on Mars means greater life support capacity must exist before that person arrives on the planet, whether they be a tourist, colonist or when a new Martian is born. But trying to convey that fact to the average person on Earth with stars in their eyes is difficult.”

“So you’re going to start the first Martian school then?”

“Had to make a living after I left the Rangers, had a few grandparents that were teachers, and mentored quite a few young Rangers throughout my career too. I discovered I had a knack for it. So I got a post-grad in it after the injury. Taught about five years in my local town before this opportunity came from the company. Six months of space survival training and here I am.”

“And your former profession had no consideration?” the Captain asked with a pointed look.

“Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. What do you think?” I retorted, pointedly not answering.

Martinez sighed, rubbing his shaved scalp. “The company vetted and screened us all so thoroughly, I think we just got used to the idea of not needing it. That it’d almost be insulting for us to need a law enforcement officer.”

“There’s almost five hundred and fifty Martian colonists, and another hundred tourists at the moment. Tranquility will bring that up by another eighty. Any infraction of Martian law has been minor things and easily handled by yourselves with oversight from judicial authorities from Earth. The problem is now that with the push to accept another full wave of colonists, that we’ll inevitably have something more serious happen. It’s something I pray won’t happen, but human nature is human nature, and merely moving planets doesn’t change that.”

“So the company told you to be the first Martian ‘Ranger’?”

“At the moment, it’s completely unofficial, but the paperwork is there and both the governor and CEO are ready to make it official. Think of it as an ace in the hole, Captain.”

“So you’re gonna be the first official teacher and principal of Mars’s first school, but actually a trapdoor undercover cop,” Martinez shook his head in amazement as he heard himself say it aloud.

“Say what you want, Captain. I think it’s a damn miracle that there hasn’t been a serious crime on Mars yet. It validates all the testing and screening the company does, but it’s inevitable that something is gonna fall through the cracks eventually.”

“It’s crazy to think about it though. Mars is a hostile enough place already. We fight daily to survive on it and those who decide to live and eventually die there become family. The idea that one of us would ever one day… “

Martinez didn’t want to say it, the struggle was clear on his face. As if giving voice to the word would maybe make it actually happen. I tried to keep my own thoughts from thinking about such a day. How the colony would react, how the people on Earth would react… No, best leave that for the future.

“Well, I’ll leave you to your breakfast in peace,” Martinez stood and idly waved at me.

I nodded at him as I was taking a sip of my coffee. Soon enough he had disappeared up the transfer tube leaving me alone to my thoughts. I started to fiddle with my watch and enabled my personal augmented reality. A flat screen appeared in the air in front of me and with gestures I navigated to an internet browser and loaded my usual bunch of sites. The Internet or its newer more accurate name, Solnet, since it was now encompassed by Mars, Luna and Earth, was not an instantaneous thing anymore. It really depended on where the site was hosted, but on Tranquility, given its position from Earth, it took about fifty seconds or so for the data to reach the ship. That would go up all the way to four minutes when we reached Mars orbit, which was rather mild considering that communication lag between Earth and Mars could reach twenty one minutes at certain times of the year.

My social media, hobby and entertainment sites finally began loading but my attention was diverted by another early bird passenger coming up the transfer tube.

“Morning Mrs Jackson,” I nodded.

The woman in her early thirties huffed in annoyance as she walked to the buffet. “Morning Jason, and it’s Sara. That Mrs business…”

“Sleep well?”

She shook her head, “I don’t know if it’s the background noise or the spinning, so I had to take a couple of sleeping pills. Definitely didn’t get to the REM phase.”

I winced in sympathy. There were a lot of sources of sound on a starship that reverberated throughout the interior, the loudest being the air pumps and conditioners of the various life support systems. Then there was the problem of centrifugal gravity that affected people to various degrees. The sensitive inner ear that regulated balance had a fluid channel that could detect that spin, and while all the other senses were telling the brain that everything was normal, that little inner ear channel sent contradictory signals. A vast majority of people could get used to it, but it was inevitable that there would be exceptions to that. The only thing she could hope for was that as the gravity and spin was reduced that her inner ear would calm down.

There was no reliable way as yet to tell who had this reduced spin tolerance. As it couldn’t be evaluated properly in a grav well and there were no space stations in Earth orbit that utilized spin as yet.

She sat down across from me with two cups of coffee and not much in the way of breakfast.

“Not really the meal of champions there,” I pointed out.

“If I eat too much I’m afraid I’m gonna just chuck it all up at some point,” she shook her head in bleary dismay. “It’s not like I couldn’t stand to lose a few kilos either.”

“That’s the worst way to lose weight,” I waved a fork at her admonishingly. “If you feel too bad, just call it a sick day.”

“Wish I could,” Sara grumbled, taking a deep gulp from her mug of coffee. “The colony isn’t going to build itself and as I’m the new lead structural engineer for the company on Mars…”

“The keyword there darlin’ is lead,” I pointed out. “How many people now report to you? Delegate that shit.”

“If only, I have yet to select a deputy and I can only really do that on Mars, virtual conferencing only gets you so far, especially with the time delay.”

If there was one unfortunate thing that advances in IT infrastructure had accomplished in the past two decades, beginning in the early 2010s, it was that you could truly have your ‘office’ with you now. Then the pandemic of the early 2020s brought the concept of ‘home office’ and near virtual workplaces into being. Add in neural interface technology, augmented reality and no longer do you have the excuse of traveling preventing you from attending a meeting or working to your full capacity. The only way you got off working was if you actually switched off your personal area network, with the understanding that you were just delaying the inevitable.

I had gotten to know Sara during training and especially because she would eventually be the one who was going to be working on building the school I was going to set up. It had been interesting bouncing my ideas for it off her and what could and couldn’t work due to the unique Martian conditions and the building materials Mars had to offer.

My attention was drawn to my virtual screen when a notification alarm sounded from my newsfeed. Simple courtesy would have me ignore it but the headline that was visible out of the corner of my eye slammed into my brain, leaving me unable to process anything else.

What the fuck?

“Something wrong?” Sara asked, seeing the expression on my face.

“Maybe,” was all I said and reached to the screen, grabbed the headline, which turned into a ghostly representation of a website link in my hand and threw it at her.

Her PAN absorbed it, going through the standard virus interrogations before being allowed through her personal firewall. Her watch flashed and chimed in a specific manner.

“What’s this?” she put her coffee down before enabling her own AR with a few touches on the watch screen. My mind was now fully invested in what I was seeing as the news video unfolded.

Official sources and the US Space Force have confirmed that a significant space launch has occurred from mainland China. At approximately just after midnight EST, an ultra heavy launch vehicle delivered a new design of Chinese spacecraft to a low-earth orbit. It later boosted itself to a higher orbit and observations are clear that the spacecraft has a nuclear thermal propulsion engine. This is the first such engine the Chinese National Space Agency has successfully demonstrated and represents a clear strengthening of the Chinese ability to explore and access the inner solar system.

Thus far the Chinese government has given no official statements, beyond the announcement of the successful launch on local state-run media. There is also no indication on just what specific mission the new spacecraft will be used for beyond being an experimental testbed for their NTR engines. Independent observations from various parts of the aerospace community indicate a worrying possibility that the spacecraft might be armed. A number of large bay doors are visible around the perimeter of the cylinder and along its length, beyond what would be necessary for airlocks and cargo operations.

Thus far there has been no comment from the Space Force on the issue beyond giving a reporting name for the Chinese craft as a ‘Ussuri Class’, a designation which will be submitted to NATO for possible adoption.

I swiped at the virtual screen and dismissed it from view, switching off my AR.

“They might as well say that it’s armed by giving it a reporting name like that,” I scoffed and shook my head.

“Jason, the Space Force has armed spacecraft as well, it was inevitable that the Chinese would follow suit in our little Cold War.”

“Oh sure, but they’re not built from the ground up as warships,” I countered. The world as a whole and most people who wanted to move into the final frontier didn’t want to bring the ails of Earth into the heavens. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 was still in force and was the cornerstone of space law. It had been amended four times since then, as new realities came forth, but it didn’t outright prohibit the militarization of a spacecraft, merely that no state may use nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction in space. US Space Force starships were just like their civilian versions in general structure, but had the latest classified tech running in them and could arm themselves by carrying missile busses which would deploy like parasite craft from the USSF starship. Other than that they were primarily used as very classified cargo haulers that could be anywhere on Earth within just over an hour.

“It’s rather ironic, we built those militarized starships for fear that the Chinese would do what they’re doing now,” she stared grumpily into her breakfast and resumed eating. “Not considering that us doing so would motivate the Chinese to level the playing field, so in a way, we’re responsible for this.”

“It’s a valid observation of cause and effect, but by that same token we can’t let that fear rule us and our decisions,” I retorted. “We can’t afford to let them gain any upperhand in space. It’s the ultimate high ground and it doesn’t matter who is the top dog in the Chinese system at the moment, he’ll still be an ‘emperor’ in all but name and the instant they have any sort of ace in the hole, they’ll hang it like a sword of damocles over our heads and start demanding things or taking things or else… If there’s nukes on that new ship of theirs for example…”

“If they violate the OST then…” she trailed off, looking troubled.

“You’re beginning to see the problem, at the end of the day the Treaty only has the strength the rest of the world gives it. We’re already on Cold War footing with the Chinese, there’s little more we can do to punish them for a treaty violation beyond making that war go hot, which we don’t want and I hope to God they don’t either and I hope a madman never takes the seat of the President of China.”

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