Space Ambush

Martin P. Repetto

‘Shit, another dead multi.’ grumbled Dante from squad three into the intra-squad channel, ‘If this keeps up, I won’t have enough to pull till pity on the Christmas banner.’

The sound of his voice proved enough to snap me out of my turnip farming reverie and reminded me that I was stuck out in this void with eight other people. Instinctively, I minimized the window on my game, checked my data feeds from the detectors, and glanced at the data markers on my visor of the four riflemen positioned within my line of sight. The asteroid field was extremely dense, and true visual contact was impossible given the debris between them and me. Still, their positions had been recorded onto my suit's internal computer, so it could at least show their general positions.

I was just about to chastise him for breaking radio silence when the grizzled veteran Bastilan beat me to it. 

“Allow me to remind you, again, Dante, that the intra-squad channel is reserved for important shit, like combat or emergencies. It’s not supposed to be used for bitch-crying about worthless video games!” He was the corporal in charge of squad three, a grey-haired man with a short temper that I could always count on to be the bad guy when I didn’t want to.

“Shut up old man, it's not like you have anything better to talk about,” Dante shouted back petulantly.

“Even if that were true, the point is that I don’t bother talking about it at all!”

‘Now that's a lie!’ shouted Veridiana, the final member of the third squad. ‘You have been bothering us with talk about your audiobooks for the past 20 minutes. Do you think we enjoy hearing about the body horror and blood sacrifices that you listen to at lunch?!?’

“That’s beside the point,” muttered Bastilan, his gravelly voice filled with embarrassment, “I haven’t been telling the other squads about it.”

“Except for when we’re off ambush duty, trying to relax on the ships.” shot the deep-voiced Emilia from squad two. “At that point, we’re all at the mercy of whatever drama you decided to listen to during the wait.”

After that line, a new voice joined the conversation, “Would captain Julian like to chime in on this wonderful conversation? I'm sure he has loads of thoughts on this matter.” It was Cain, the lieutenant in charge of squad two, and my ‘ wonderfully, woeful best friend’ as he described himself.

“It sounds to me like the lot of you have the matter in hand” I replied, my voice conveying no small amount of sarcasm, “besides, I think everyone here is eager to hear the resolution to this disagreement.”

It was true that maintaining discipline regarding rules and regulations was important, but maintaining morale was doubly so. We hadn’t taken many losses so far, I could count all the deaths on one hand, but it will only take one bad stretch of engagements before this unit loses cohesion. Letting them enjoy their time now makes it easier to control them later.

Shortly after my last comment, the channel completely descended into the vocal equivalent of a bar room brawl. People were arguing, shouting, demanding attention, picking sides, switching sides, and making their sides without any overarching goal. The other two members of my squad joined in on it at some point, and after a while, the original cause of the argument had been completely forgotten.

Throughout it all, though, one person remained silent and it was with that silence that my attention was drawn. Concerned, I used my executive privileges to open up a private channel for him. 

“Damien, can you hear me? Is everything alright?”

“I’m can hear you just fine, captain,” he responded his famously confident “I'm doing alright, just didn’t feel like talking much.”

His words were exactly what I wanted to hear, but the tone was setting off red flags, so I pushed in a little further.

“Are you thinking about it?” I asked, concernedly.

He stayed silent at that, which was all I needed to hear.

It, of course, referred to the nature of our situation in space. We are surrounded by a vacuum, filled with nothing but radiation, dust, and stones. A human cannot survive in that environment, regardless of any genetic or mechanical enhancements they give themselves, so the best we can do is take some of our environment with us. Our lives depend on the small amount of air held in our suits, and though we can keep breathing that same air indefinitely via the recyclers, the realization can sometimes send a soldier into shock. Even the most fatalistic of those under my command have snapped at the thought of it sometimes, that a few inches from their face is absolute nothingness.

“Is there anything I can do to help?” I knew that sometimes people needed consoling to get through this, but sometimes they just needed time to themselves.

Again, though, he stayed silent. 

So, I cut the channel between us, as a gesture of giving him space, and returned my focus to the intra-squad channel. At this point, the common soldiers had revealed their mutinous ways and ganged up on the two other officers, working in unison to petition for better beds in the dorms. I made sure to shoot that conversation down with my first comment.

“Sink a destroyer first, then we’ll talk. You all already have beds, most of the fleet has to make do with sleep pods.” It was important to let the troops raise their morale as they saw fit, but I couldn’t stand by and let them spoil themselves. “Anyways, I have a question for all of you.”

“Ask away, captain” responded Bastilan.

“Have I ever told you the story of this whole operation began?”

“What do you mean?” asked Dante, his ordinary petulance overshadowed by legitimate curiosity.

“I mean… have I ever told any of you the full story of how I managed to get approval for a plan that wound up with all of us sitting out here in spacesuits? It wasn’t easy, I’ll tell you.”

“No captain, I don’t think you ever did,” stated Cain.

Everyone was quiet now, just like Damien had been. But where his silence had been caused by the cold grip of fear, theirs was the result of immense interest. The stage was mine now, and none would dare interrupt my performance on it.

“Well, when I first told the Marshal's office about my plan to lay an ambush in space, he laughed at me,” I said in my most deadpan voice. 

More than one of the others on the channel snorted at that.

“It’s true! He laughed at me for a full minute as soon as the words ‘space ambush’ left my mouth. Though to be honest, I couldn’t blame him.”

“And why’s that?” asked Viridiana.

“Because the idea of infantry laying a trap for a spaceship is completely laughable, and there are three major reasons for this. Firstly, space is enormous. The scale of it is so large that no human can conceptualize it, let alone function in it. If the Marshal had stuck me in a spacesuit and had me thrown out of the airlock for my fool idea, the ship would only need to get about five nautical miles away from me before it would just blink out of my vision. In terms of space travel, that's nothing, smaller than the width of a piece of paper. With this in mind, the odds that a ship would manage to fly into the plain sight of a couple of soldiers in open space would be so infinitesimally small, it isn’t even worth considering.” 

“Next,” I continued “is the fact that for an ambush to succeed, those in hiding would need to remain hidden until the time comes that they can attack. Space is a vacuum, however, so two guys can't exactly sit around with an RPG without getting pinged by even the most basic scanning system.”

“If that did happen, the best they could hope for would be for the ship’s commander to say they’re not worth the ammo, instead of blasting them apart with ion cannons, micro-atomics, coil guns, and/or anti-fighter flak cannons.”

“Finally, there is the fact that even if a team in could find a ship, and did manage to stay hidden long enough to make it work, even the cheapest civilian ship could shrug off anything an infantryman could throw at it. In contradiction to the previous paragraph, space is not a true vacuum.”

“It is filled with debris that is just waiting for a ship to fly into it at a fraction of the speed of light, rip through the hull, and kill everyone on board. So, they armor up, heavy plating on the front, lighter stuff on the sides, and ion and EM shielding all around. It maintains hull integrity, in most cases, and has the handy benefit of making them near impervious to small arms fire.”

“And it is for those reasons that you’re plan was rejected and we’re having this conversation in a comfy cruiser lounge,” interrupted Cain. 

“Hey, are you telling this story or am I?” The retort rolled off my tongue with natural ease, and for a moment I could almost believe that we were ‘best friends.’

“Fair enough,” he apologized, “keep talking.”

“Well, there were more objections that the Marshal brought up against my plan aside from those three, as well as a few more jokes at my expense. But as I kept explaining, the reason behind my plan became clear to him.”

“The Shiva asteroid belt which we are currently in solves two of the three problems. Firstly, it is an incredibly dense asteroid belt which is hurtling around the sun at incredible speeds, fast enough to resist the pull of the massive red giant at its center and maintain an orbit.”

Within the asteroid belt, you’ll find that each one of them is constantly at risk of changing its trajectory as a result of ricocheting off one, getting pulled to the side by the gravity of a neighbor, and/or being slowed by the resistance of a stray gas cloud.”

“Due to this, it is impossible to map the navigable routes of an asteroid belt, for they are always changing. Instead, the shape that the routes will take must be predicted by supercomputers, whose results will then need to be checked, rechecked, and then securely circulated to the fleet that intends to operate within it, all in mere hours.”

It was at that last statement that Veridiana decided to chime in, “We know all this, captain. We’ve been in this belt long enough to learn how to get from point a to point b.” 

Her voice had a melodic charm to it, which I could always appreciate. It was a voice meant for singing hymnals and was at odds with her harsh manner of speech.

“Oh yes, you know it, everybody in every ship in the fleet knows it, the Imperial Marshal certainly knew it. But nobody I’ve talked to up till now has ever thought about it, nor how it changes warfare. The massive cruisers that hurl superweapons at one another throughout light-seconds can’t enter the be, they’re just too fat to fit into the corridors, and not even their armor can withstand the megatons of force the asteroids can bring to bear. Instead, the work must be left to the smaller frigates, space-skiffs, and fighter craft that can navigate the narrow passageways that do open up.”

“Because of these two facts of belt warfare, as I explained to the Marshal, the viability of infantry squads becomes a realistic prospect. The constant efforts of the supercomputers predicting how the meteors move also allow us to predict when and where the enemy ships will be within certain areas, as they would be bottlenecked down from the full expanse of space on three dimensions into thirty or so odd corridors. The asteroid field itself also gives us places to hide in.”

“Once we get the predictions, we can prep a location and then wait for ships to pass through. The ships we ambush will, of course, be on the lookout for attacks. The corridor is cramped and will set any captain’s nerves on edge. But ultimately, they will have to watch the entire passageway as they travel through it, while we will only need to watch one small part of it.”

This time it was Bastilan who interrupted. “So, that’s the two of the three main issues out of the way, the challenge of predicting where ships are and avoiding detection. Would it be fair of me to guess that these giant guns we all have solved the third?” 

“Oi. No skipping ahead in the story. You let me tell it at my own pace… but yes. The railguns we have did solve the issue of piercing their armor.”

“Thus, I introduced the FPA Dynamics, Mark V, Electromagnetic-Accelerator Rifle, or as it is more commonly referred to, a railgun. A state-of-the-art piece of equipment that was designed for the use of special ops teams to punch holes in the shield generators of fortresses.”

“The original prototype was built by no less than twenty talented engineers and cost 20 million imperial marks to design, enough to restock a battlecruiser's entire missile salvo. There was no better tool for the job it was made for and would have seen great success had it not been for the few “minor” drawbacks it had. Namely that it was so heavy you would need an entire special ops team to carry it to where it needed to go, rarely did enough damage to cripple an enemy fortress, and gave off such a massive EM-burst after firing that the soldiers who used it would prove better off just lighting themselves on fire while shouting “Shoot me, I’m here!” at the top of their lungs. Finally, the shield generators were often hidden away underground, so even if the soldiers could shoot it, they often lacked the information to know where to shoot.”

“The weapon was eventually retired from military service, despite the investment into its development, but it would find loyal buyers on the black market. Assassins could use it to great effect, as the lives and patterns of politicians were planned to the minute, allowing the assassins to easily predict where to shoot and there was no way to guard against a weapon that could shoot through an entire city skyline, after all.”

“The manufacture of them was banned, but the military could still use the ones it had...” my voice trailed off.

“Which explains why we have them today,” finished Cain. 

“Exactly, lieutenant. We had nine railguns in all, so I devised a plan to divide them among three squads of six. Three people would be able to lie hidden, waiting to use them, while the other three would be waiting in the wings to rest up for their shifts. Split them between three skiffs and add a fourth support team who could spend their time all prepping locations for an ambush.”

“I’ve got one question, though,” voiced Damien into the com. It was all I could do at that point to keep a grin off my face. Nothing rouses men from fear better than a good tale of history. 

“Ask away, Damien.”

“Why should we be doing any of this? Why do we have to be out here all by ourselves when we could just stick with the fleet and be safe with them?”

Just like that, the grin left my face. I hadn’t roused him from his fear, he just turned the fear into bitter motivation. The only way to help him now, I knew, was brutal honesty.

“Because it isn’t safe with the fleet, not for us in our small little skiffs. If we were with them, we’d eventually get ordered into a battle between frigates, destroyers, and maybe even cruisers. The weapons on those things would devastate us, and they would be free to attack as they see fit.”

“When you boil it down, what I did was convince the Marshal to let a bunch of grunts play special ops away from the thick of the fighting. We get to be out here, alone, because we choose to be here. The fights we get into are also ones that we choose for ourselves. So long as we can hold onto this luxury, this one gift I managed to claw away from the Marshal, we might all have a chance to live to the end of this godawful war.”

I was frustrated, I was angry. I was entirely prepared to rip into Damien with my next set of words, but an alert from one of our detection buoys further up the corridor stalled them in my throat.

It only took two blink clicks to enforce combat mode onto the squad, simultaneously turning off their entertainment programs, minimizing the energy footprint of our suits, and starting the warm-up process for all of our railguns. The others might be confused for a moment, but I was confident in their ability to focus on the task at hand.

After that came the worst part of it all, the waiting. No one ever speaks during that period between getting the first alert and engaging the enemy. We are as quiet as the dead, and like the thought of the dead, the fear of It also crawls into our minds. Our breathing becomes hard, our vision narrows, and our hearts start to pound in our ears. Many of the others will be rationalizing the ways they will avoid hard in the coming fight, I know, some of them will be praying to their gods, while the last few, like Damien, and I, will simply wait in tense silence.

We wait, and we wait, in the oh so loud… silence.

The ship screams around a bend in the corridor, a frigate class ship as big as life and only going at a fraction of its top speed, but still enough to only give us a few moments to fire on it. The wireframe of the ship is highlighted on my visor, allowing me to see it through the asteroids that litter my field of view. I am the sights of my railgun at its starboard engine nacelle, knowing the targeting information is being quietly shuttled to the eight others with me, before pulling the trigger.

A pillar of light fires out of the muzzle of the railgun, and even though it is bolted to the asteroid that I, myself, am tied to, it still batters the shoulder I have it braced against with its recoil. I see the beam punch through the asteroids between me and the engine I aimed for, reducing them to stone chips and dust particles without losing an ounce of momentum. In the distance, I see eight more beams lancing through the vacuum to strike the target true, destroying the blazing thruster in an actinic flash of nuclear fire.

In just a moment, the massive ship that had been sailing through the small corridor as stately as a shark found itself overbalanced on one side and careened into the asteroids that lined the canal it had sought to sail through. Explosions raked the port side as metric tons of stone slammed against the side of it. The ship had been dealt grievous wounds, but it was a colossal thing and would fight on regardless.

Even now, I could just about make out turrets of the flank of the ship turning to fire in the direction of the em bursts our railguns had given off. They were Gatling turrets meant to shoot down strafing fighters, weapons that had no chance to punch through any asteroids between us and them. But they were firing now, and our guns still had to cycle through a twenty-second reload. 

Twenty seconds might as well have been twenty years while under fire, and I could feel the fear of a lucky shot urging me to work faster. But it was impossible to do so, for my weapon dictated its rate of fire, not I.

The time passed, I fired again, this time aiming for the bridge section. The bridge was nestled within the interior of the ship, there were no obvious signs to aim for, but the frigate had been built to a template, so I could make an educated guess. I fired, hitting the center of the ship and punching clear through to the other side. Several shots from the others also struck home, but I could hardly spare the time to count the after trails from the shots. There were no obvious signs of the ship being wounded by the shot, no gouts of flame erupting from the puncture hole, but I knew that, like a bison being pelted with bullets, it was only a matter of time before something critical would be. It had to be.

I looked down at my railgun for a moment, before seeing the effects of a bright flashlight up the void around me. I think for a split second that perhaps one of the others had struck a critical system and caused the frigate to self-destruct, but it only took one glance to dissuade me from that idea. The ship had fired one of its main weapons and had reduced much of the asteroid field in front of me to molten slag or stone vapor for its efforts.

The backwash from the asteroids being evaporated had not been kind to the ship, and the entire starboard side glowed like a sword fresh from the forge. The weapon mounts were undaunted, though, as they continued to adjust their aim, now aiming straight for me. A signal marker popped up on my visor, the weapon had reloaded. I aimed the sights of it as massive rounds fired from the Gatling guns zipped past my suits face plate and impacted the asteroid I had been strapped to, a safety feature to keep myself from floating off that now felt like the ropes keeping me in front of a firing squad.

One final time, I pulled the trigger, and one final time, the blindingly bright after-effect of the railgun round exiting the barrel lit up the space in front of me. This time, it hit something important, an ammo dump or fuel tank perhaps, for the ship erupted into a supernova-like explosion that blinded me to the damage it caused. After a while, the vision returned to me and for a moment, I wished it hadn’t. The ship had nearly been cut in half, the prow of hit only being connected to the aft section by a thin piece of armor plating that had been twisted like the peel of a fruit by the wrenching motion.

All of this, the initial attack, the ensuing battle, and the finishing explosion had happened in silence. The life of the ship and the seamen within it had been extinguished in absolute quietude. It chilled the soul to think about, and yet, at that moment, I did not care, for I was alive. I had survived another battle, and I knew in that shameful moment that nothing else would matter to me as much as that one fact. I would not care quite so much about anyone else who had perished, because I had not done so.

I was still alive, and I felt all the closer to leaving this war alive.