GENERAL NALANI KEAH
“All right Dr. Krieger,” General Keah said, “impress me.”
Aboard the Manta cruiser heading out to the rings of Saturn, the weapons scientist fidgeted before dredging up a wave of self-confidence. “Very well, General, I will. I promise I’ll make up for last time.”
Jocko Krieger glanced away, looking guilty; General Keah didn’t press the conversation. After the debacle at the sun-bomb fabrication plant had cost dozens of lives and a vital production facility—not to mention a stockpile of one of the only weapons that had so far proved effective against the Shana Rei—Keah had railed against the mistakes, the ineptitude, the cockiness. But then she had stopped. Dr. Krieger knew damn well that he had screwed up, and no amount of knuckle-rapping from her would make him learn his lesson any better.
Tragedy was an unwanted, but often effective, teacher.
When Nalani Keah was a young pilot in training with the Earth Defense Forces, flying combat training missions with a souped-up Remora, she had been cocky too—reckless, invincible. She viewed safety margins as nothing more than suggestions. In the first days of the Elemental War, when the hydrogues had just begun to attack Earth colonies and Roamer skymines, she was a daredevil pilot and damn good, too, just like all the pilots in her squadron. They played tag through dense asteroid clusters, and it was all thrilling fun … until one of her fellow pilots discovered he wasn’t quite as immortal as he thought he was. He grazed an irregularly shaped asteroid, and the spectacular explosion was over in a nanosecond. The rest of the squadron circled back, stunned and horrified, combing the glowing wreckage while praying that their comrade had managed to eject. But of course he hadn’t.
Tragedy had taught Keah her lesson then. It dispelled some of her cockiness and made her an even more competent pilot. Half-measures simply wouldn’t do.…
Now as the CDF test ship arrived at Saturn, the General hoped Krieger had learned his own lesson, achieved the same balance.
“These are dangerous times, Dr. Krieger,” she said. “Overconfidence and cutting corners can lead to disasters—I don’t need to remind you of that. But an overabundance of caution can also cost lives, if we don’t produce weapons that can kick the shit out of those shadows and their damned bugbots.”
The scientist gave her an uneasy smile. “Given the yield calculations on the modified designs, General, we don’t have to worry about an overabundance of caution. I just hope people aren’t too upset if we create a noticeable gap in Saturn’s rings today.”
General Keah raised her eyebrows as the Manta dropped down to the plane of the rings. “You’re kidding, right?”
Krieger just shrugged.
She had been skeptical when he wanted to test his enhanced sun bombs again. He had come to her, metaphorical hat in hand—along with a new prototype and a request for a full-fledged demonstration. “I know I caused the problem before, General. I made an error in my calculations. It won’t happen again. This time I’ve run checks and double checks.”
Keah had frowned at him. “You have a tough hill to climb to make up for that setback.”
Jocko Krieger crossed his arms over his chest. “Will ten times the destructive yield make up for it?”
The General considered. “Yeah.”
Now, upon reaching the spectacular rings of Saturn, the Manta dispatched a sequence of probes at the maximum safe distance from the test zone. Below them, the rings looked like a golden highway of rock and ice fragments.
In her career, Keah had seen numerous gas giants across the Spiral Arm, but Saturn always struck her as a calm place, devoid of the huge hurricanes and multicolored bands that were so characteristic of Jovian-class giants. During the Elemental War, the hydrogues had emerged from their hidden empires inside those gas giants, but they had not appeared in many years. Keah certainly hoped this new sun bomb test didn’t rile them up.
“Just be sure you don’t miss, Dr. Krieger.”
Previously, he’d been a blustering tyrant among his lab assistants, shouting and driving them like slave workers. But after the accident, he had grown much meeker, exercising caution and actually listening to other opinions. “If your people shoot straight, General, we won’t miss. And if I did my part right, the sun bomb won’t fizzle.”
Keah cracked her knuckles. “Let’s see for ourselves.”
Catching the light of the distant sun, Saturn’s rings flowed around the planet in an unending river of rocks, ice, and dust—placid and sparkling. Keah turned to the weapons officer. “Everything’s ready?”
“Just waiting for you to give the command, General.”
She had been cooling her heels in the Earth system, monitoring activity around the Confederation, staying in touch with Adar Zan’nh during preparations for the mission to explore the Onthos home system. But there was no reason to waste time.
“We haven’t got all day,” Keah said. “The shadows could show up any minute. If this works, Dr. Krieger and his crew have to get busy fabricating a hell of a lot of these things.” She gave a quick nod. “Time to brighten somebody’s morning. Bombs away.”
The crackling, pinwheeling sphere of plasma leaped out like a supernova cannonball and burrowed across empty space into the wide swath of Saturn’s rings. There was no actual target, but the General imagined all the tumbling rocks to be a thousand bugbot ships.
The prototype rolled forward, pulsing, brightening. When it reached the center of the rings, it flickered. Then an outpouring of light expanded in an incandescent hurricane so intense that the Manta’s safety systems shut down the main screen before in-place filters resolved the images again. Keah could see ever-expanding ripples from the new sun bomb mowing a widening path through Saturn’s thin ring. The blast swept the rocks and ice away, clearing a hole in the plane of the rings—a hole that kept growing, and growing, and growing until the glare finally dissipated.
Krieger stared with his mouth open. The bridge crew whistled and cheered. General Keah said, “Holy crap with a turbocharger! That was just one sun bomb?”
“Just one,” Krieger said. “And we can make more. A lot more.”
“Doctor, that does indeed make up for the setback.” She stared at the still-dissipating light. “I’d like to put in my order for a few thousand of those. The Confederation Defense Forces—hell, even the Ildiran Solar Navy—need as many new sun bombs as you can manufacture.”
Krieger looked relieved and pleased to be back in the CDF’s good graces. “We’ll get on it right away, General, but with sufficient safety precautions. No more accidents.”
“Good call. And in the meantime…” she said with an optimistic lilt in her voice, “we’ve still got all those original sun bombs to use up before they get stale.”