WE ALL LOSE IF THEY TAKE MIZUBA
by
Tom Purdom
 

 “They’re coming out.”

There were twelve control ships in their little battle fleet.  Seven of the people strapped in the ships said the same thing at the same time.

Their leader was the most obvious exception.  Elio could feel the edge in Nadida’s voice when she popped on the net, seconds after the outburst ended, but she sounded steady and businesslike.  Nadida had been granted the august title of commodore.  Disciplined, properly trained military offices maintained a tight control over their feelings.  Nadida focused on the realities of lethal live ammunition combat in exactly the same way she had limited her input to orders and information during their training simulations.

Anyone who looked at their personality charts could have predicted Elio would join the chorus of bleaters and Nadida wouldn’t.  Elio had finished in the bottom fifth of the acceptable range when they had completed their “personality alignment” processing.  Nadida had ended up near the top.

 “I’m advising the city we’re being forced to execute Option Two,” Nadida said.  “Please activate Option Two.”

The feed from Elio’s display system filled the space between his eyes and the blank wall that formed the front of his cockpit.  A yellow dot winked on every time a verani combat ship went active.

The verani combat ships had been attached to a transport that supplied them with their basic long-term life support while they spent forty-three days creeping through nine million kilometers of the asteroid belt.  Option One had been a direct attack on the transport—an all out, concentrated drive that would hit the transport before it could launch a counterattack.  Missile strikes would overwhelm the transport’s damage control system—rah, rah, victory!—and put it on a path that would send it drifting harmlessly through empty space.  Elio had even nurtured a small hope they could land on the transport and liberate the verani crammed into its combat ships.  Now they would have to take on the verani ships and hope they could wear them down and open a route to the transport.

Intelligence had estimated the transport would carry eighty-seven combat ships.  It had already ejected twenty-two.  The running total on Elio’s display was tabulating a new ejection two or three times a minute.

“Remember your priorities,” Nadida said.  “We all lose if they take the city.  Them and us.”

Seven green dots maintained a circular formation six hundred kilometers in front of Elio’s ship—the seven autonomous combat machines that formed the squad under his command.  The combat machines and the verani combat ships would approach their estimated effective range in about three hours.  In the meantime, the two forces would sally toward each other with all the fury of two groups of dust particles drifting across an empty gymnasium.

“I think I would benefit from a little rest,” Elio said.

“Would two hours be enough?” Nadida said.

“That’s about what I had in mind.”

“Granted.”

The machine strapped beside him was supposed to be an anthro but it was about as unhuman as an anthropomorphic robot could be.  It had been reduced to the bare essentials—a cylinder with four limbs, topped by a small turret outfitted with sensors.  The brain housed inside the cylinder was a compact specialized unit that stored a full library of medical procedures.

“Put me out for two hours,” Elio said.

The anthro stuck one of its fingers in an outlet above its turret.  Elio turned his wrist and the anthro rested the finger on his bluest vein.

Give me liberty or give me death....It’s better to die free than live as a slave....

The personality alignment program had exposed Elio to a hundred and thirty-three quotes like that.  In some cases he knew the language, in some cases it had to be translated.

He liked the second quote best. The first quote had climaxed a speech a politician delivered in a legislature. The second expressed the feelings of a man named Frederick Douglass who had actually been a slave and escaped.

Most of the quotes had been voiced by people who assumed death was an inevitable, inescapable reality.  None of the authors had visualized a world in which a man could live for two hundred and thirty-six years and still have hundreds—maybe thousands—of years ahead of him.  To every man upon this earth, death cometh soon or late, a poet named Macaulay had written, and how can man die better, than facing fearful odds for the ashes of his fathers and the temples of his gods.  But what if you didn’t live on Earth?  What if you lived in the asteroid belt?  And death didn’t have to come at all?

Didn’t that favor a different cost-benefit analysis?  Wouldn’t it make sense to bide your time and hope you would eventually regain your freedom?  He hadn’t survived for two hundred and thirty-six years because he liked to take unnecessary physical risks.