among ranks that had evolved out of the long history of Earth’s various military services, a Navy lieutenant outranked a Marine lieutenant. Gray was actually the equivalent of a Marine captain, one grade above a Marine lieutenant. Richards should have been calling him sir.
On the other hand, Gray had never cared much for the stuffy, pseudo-aristocratic demeanor of the fraternity of naval officers—one of the oldest of the old-boy networks. It was that fraternity—and sorority—that had closed ranks against the poor kid from the Manhattan Ruins and made his life hell for the past three years. Officers and gentlemen was the phrase they used, but it included conceited clots like Lieutenant Howie Spaas and arrogant hypocrites like Lieutenant Jen Collins. So far as Gray was concerned, they could all go to hell, with their “sirs” and “ma’ams” and formal military etiquette and protocol.
Ostend’s informality, Gray decided, made him uncomfortable because it was so out of place, so unexpected. It certainly was better than the usual formality.
As unexpected as General Gorman’s holographic visit a few moments before.
“Any word on the battle yet?” he asked the other officer.
“Confused,” Ostend replied. “I’ve been hearing reports come down the line from CIC, but who’s winning is anybody’s guess. Want my best guess?”
“Sure.”
“We’re kicking their alien ass. The bombardment stopped about the time the carrier battlegroup arrived, and it hasn’t picked up again. That either means we have the bastards on the run, or …”
“Or?”
“Or the Tushies are mopping up what’s left, and don’t really care about us down here at the bottom of our gravity well anymore.”
“Cute, Lieutenant,” Richards said. “Real morale-building.”
“Hey! Any time! Catch you guys later.” Ostend left.
“So … can I go yet?” Gray asked the corpsman. “I kind of want to find out what’s happening with my unit, you know?”
“Mmm … not just yet, sir. We have you scheduled for a psych set.”
“Psych.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m not crazy, damn it.”
“No, but you’ve been through severe emotional trauma. Dr. Wilkinson wants to put you through a stress series … and he wants to link you in with Old Liss.”
“Old Liss? What the hell is an ‘Old Liss’?”
“Psy-Cee BA. Psychiatric computer, for battlefield application. We call her Liss for Lisa, the first of her kind.”
“A computer? I don’t want …”
“I’m afraid what you want, Lieutenant, isn’t a very high priority right now. Don’t worry, though. It won’t hurt a bit.”
But Gray had had run-ins with psych computers before.
And he was not at all eager to do it again.
Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra
SAR 161 Lifelines
Battlespace Eta Boötis IV
0104 hours, TFT
Although the news hadn’t yet reached all of the Marines and naval personnel on the surface of the planet, the Battle of Eta Boötis IV was, in fact, over.
Or, to be precise, the active part of the battle was over. The Turusch fleet, what was left of it, was under high acceleration, already close to light speed and still grav-boosting into the Void. The Confederation carrier group had entered planetary orbit, with fighter patrols orbiting in shells farther and farther out, ready in case the enemy tried to pull a reverse and launch a surprise counterstrike. There was also the possibility that not all of the Turusch warships had in fact left. A lurker or two might remain, powered down and apparently dead, waiting for an opportunity to draw easy blood.
But with the probable withdrawal of the Turusch fleet, the battlespace cleanup had begun.
SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra boosted at a modest two thousand gravities, her forward singularity capturing the light of the system’s white dwarf just ahead and twisting it into billowing sheets and streamers of radiance. The ship was a four-thousand-ton converted tug, an ugly beetle shape with outsized grapplers trailing astern, like the legs and antennae of some highly improbable insect.
Search and Rescue operations had been an important part of the military procedure, all the way back to the pre-spaceflight days of the twentieth century. In the days of wet-Navy aircraft catapulting from the decks of seagoing carriers, the destruction of a fighter meant either a dead aviator or one lost in an immensity of ocean or rugged terrain.
In space, though, the problem became a lot more complex. Countless things could go wrong with a gravfighter, through equipment failure or through enemy action, but the usual outcome saw the fighter with power off and drive singularities down, tumbling helplessly through space with the same vector it had been on when its systems shut down. If the pilot survived whatever had caused the situation failure in the first place, he or she was in for a long and uncomfortable ride … and an ultimately fatal one if somebody couldn’t come get them.
SAR Recovery Craft Blue-Sierra was an old in-orbit work-boat, originally a UTW-90 Brandt-class space-dock tug used for maneuvering large pieces of hull into position. Converted with the addition of singularity projectors fore and aft, it now had the acceleration necessary for locating a tumbling fighter, grappling with it, and bringing it back to the carrier or a repair/service vessel or facility. At the helm was Lieutenant Commander Jessica LeMay.
And she was worried.
“PriFly,” she called, addressing America’s Primary Flight Control, “this is SAR Blue-Sierra. I have a target at twelve hundred kay-em … closing … but I can’t get a visual. I’m losing signal in the dwarf.”
The dwarf was Eta Boötis B, the brighter star’s white-dwarf companion. A star with the mass of Sol, collapsed into a sphere the size of the Earth, a white dwarf this young—less than two billion years old—was still hot, with a surface temperature exceeding 20,000 degrees Celsius. A dim, faint point of light compared with the orange glare of the sub-giant Eta Boötis A, the dwarf gleamed with a harsh, arc-brilliant glare, still no bigger than a bright star, just ahead.
The white dwarf orbited Eta Boötis A at a distance of 1.4 astronomical units, with a period of about one and a third years. Eta Boötis IV was more than twice that distance out; the dwarf companion never came closer to Haris than one and a half AU. Apparently that wasn’t close enough to seriously disturb its orbit.
But LeMay had spotted a disabled gravfighter tumbling clear of battlespace at high velocity, moving along a vector that would take it quite close to Eta Boötis B, close enough that the dwarf’s gravitational pull would snag it within the next hour and pull it down. Radiation from the dwarf, however, was interfering with her optics, making the approach difficult.
At radar wavelengths, she still had a sharp return. Focusing on radar, she locked onto the target and followed. Slowly, LeMay’s tug closed with the disabled fighter, using the utility
