Not a War
by Harry Turtledove
It was not a war. It was nothing like a war.
They were serious about that. Justin knew of a Space Force major who’d called it a war in an encrypted dispatch, the kind where brevity was at a premium and “war” took up far fewer characters than something like “international dispute potentially involving violence.” Didn’t help. That luckless, forthright major was now a first lieutenant, and she’d never see field grade again, not if she lived to Moses’ one hundred and twenty.
Because nobody in the inner solar system wanted to hear about war. Hearing about the dreadful thing might mean thinking about it, and nobody in the inner solar system wanted to do that, either. There’d been a medium-sized war in the 2050s, and a bigger one in the 2080s that might have been a slate wiper if an American breakthrough in jamming technology hadn’t kept a particular Central American rabbit from popping out of its hat.
Even now, forty years later, people on Earth and the Moon bases in craters near both poles and the Mars bases at the edges of the polar caps shuddered to remember what a near miss that had been. And so, just as their Victorian ancestors hadn’t cared to mention or even think about the ghastly word sex, they didn’t want to talk about war.
Of course, not talking about sex hadn’t kept the Victorians from screwing like bunnies. And, out here in the asteroid belt, where so much industry had sprung up since the turn of the twenty-second century, modern, sophisticated humans and AIs sparred with one another and sometimes killed one another. But Yahweh, Jesus, Allah, and Brahma forbid that they call it war.
Captain Justin Bregman guided the G. Harry Stine toward an asteroid that rejoiced in the name 130 Elektra. What that boiled down to was keeping an eye on the computer system doing the actual work. Nothing was likely to go wrong, which didn’t mean nothing could or would.
He asked his signals officer, “Any new transmissions from the installation there?”
“No, sir,” answered First Lieutenant Maria Canha. The installation was LATAMSEC. Like most Space Force officers, Justin had some Portuguese. Maria’s parents had fled to the States following the Barbosa e Souza countercoup in 2089. She’d grown up with the language.
A light on the screen blinked red for a moment: a radar pulse from the factory—LATAMSEC insisted it was just a factory—had touched the Hank Stine. They wouldn’t get any joy from that. Whatever radar waves the ship’s skin didn’t absorb, it deflected away from the transmitter. A bullet would have had a bigger radar signature.
Bullets . . . . . . . . . Just thinking of them made Bregman mutter to himself, as it would have with any spacer, regardless of homeland. The Hank Stine carried two old-school Ma Deuces and some lighter firearms. They, and other nations’ equivalents, did get used in the various international disputes potentially involving violence that were nothing—nothing!—like wars.
On Earth, a thick atmosphere and a deep gravity well limited what bullets could do. Mars and the Moon were less massive; Mars had only a thin atmosphere and the Moon none. Even so, bullets fired from their surfaces did eventually return to them. In space? In space, it was a different story.
Bullets that hit what they were aimed at were bad enough. They commonly punched right on through. With weight always at a premium, no one yet had built a spacecraft armored against .50-caliber slugs. Encounters between ships sometimes seemed too much like flamethrower duels at five paces.
Captain Bregman muttered some more. If someone was shooting at you on purpose, you could at least try to do something about it—get the bastard first, for instance. But bullets that missed were gifts that kept on giving. Between planets and here in the asteroid belt, it was all hard vacuum, with no objects massive enough to pull in expended rounds. They just kept going at high velocities and in unexpected directions. You weren’t likely to run into one, but you could.
Back on Earth, land mines and ordnance from wars that went back to the early days of the twentieth century still killed people every year. As best anyone could tell, the bullet that turned the Chinese supply ship Tianfei into a fireball near Vesta in 2117 had come from a skirmish between Indian and LATAMSEC scoutships more than thirty years earlier. Bad luck? Nothing else but.
Anything that can happen can happen to you, Bregman reminded himself. Reminding did not mean reassuring. There ahead lay Progreso, Elektra’s middle satellite: a chunk of ice, organics, and a little rock a couple of kilometers thick. The outermost moonlet was Ordem; the inner one, Lasca. So LATAMSEC states called them, anyhow. The International Astronomical Union didn’t recognize the names. The first two came from a national motto, while the last one meant “splinter” or “Chip.” As far as anyone knew, Elektra was the only asteroid in the belt with three satellites of its own.
With Progreso between the Hank Stine and whatever LATAMSEC was up to on Elektra, Captain Bregman breathed a little easier. “Now we wait for Chip to move into position,” he said.
“Scooter is juiced up and ready,” Ali Riahi told him.
He nodded. “Good.” He would have been astonished and furious had the engineer said anything else. Your equipment was supposed to be ready before you needed it, and to work first time every time. It wasn’t always, of course, and didn’t always, but the Space Force came as close as humanly possible to living up to the ideal.
At its closest approach, Chip came within about 170 klicks of Progreso. You didn’t launch the scooter then, of course. You launched it well before, so it could reach that point at the same time as the asteroid’s inner moonlet.
Bregman took his place in the scooter half an hour before he was scheduled to leave. He ran through all the checks one more time. The vehicle was a souped-up version of the ones Heinlein had talked about almost two hundred years earlier. It was made of light tubing coated with radar-absorbing material. It had thrusters fore and aft, up and down, right and left. You could pilot it by eyeball and joystick if you had to, but it boasted electronics Heinlein’d never dreamt of.
It also had teeth, sharp ones. The G. Harry Stine wasn’t here on a reconnaissance mission. The ship had come to make a point. It wasn’t a war. It was nothing like a war. Things could get smashed anyhow. People could get killed. Out here in the asteroid belt, it happened more often than the comfortable folk in the inner solar system ever heard about.
A puff of gas pushed the scooter out of the ship. Captain Bregman waited till he was a hundred meters clear to start his first burn. Before long, he came out from behind Progreso and could see Elektra. Of course, that also meant Elektra could see him, but odds were nobody on the asteroid would.
Elektra wasn’t big enough for gravity to have shaped it into a sphere. It looked like a giant potato made of ice and a little rock, with gouges and craters here and there simulating places where you’d use the pointy end of a potato peeler to poke out eyes before you baked the spud.
Potatoes, though, didn’t have large solar arrays powering . . . . . . . . . whatever they were powering on Elektra’s surface. Out here, more than three AUs from the Sun, you needed a large array to draw useful amounts of energy from its light.
Elektra already had a high albedo. Icy objects commonly did. That meant no one had paid much attention to occasional flashes from the panels for a long time. Justin hadn’t the slightest idea how long the installation had been here. If any people in the States did, they were far above his need-to-know level.
He acquired Chip by eye. It looked like a free-orbiting chunk of Elektra a bit more than a klick and a half thick. Progreso and Ordem looked like bigger pieces of the asteroid. They all probably were. People thought Elektra’s satellites had been knocked off the main body in one or more cosmic collisions, but not hard enough to escape even its tiny gravitational field.
In due course, he—well, the scooter’s computer—matched velocity and vector with Chip. He kept the tiny moonlet between him and Elektra for a while, the way the Hank Stine was using Progreso. But he couldn’t stay hidden. He had to see what he was going to do. Piloting by hand, he edged out so he could survey the asteroid’s surface.
Elektra’s mean diameter was as close to two hundred kilometers as made no difference. On a planetary scale, it was tiny. But it still had a hell of a lot of surface to survey. Luckily LATAMSEC wasn’t trying to hide. There was the solar array, and there next to it sat the automated chemical works it powered.
Bregman photographed that at high magnification and gave the scooter computer the image for analysis. It took only a fraction of a second. Closest match is opioid-synthesis plant suppressed in lunar crater Wargentin in 2121, the machine told him. Three more near matches came up. All of them were drug cookers.
He sighed hard enough to fog the inside of his suit window for a moment. That was what the USSF honchos who sent the G. Harry Stine out for a close look at Elektra had suspected. There’d been too many ODs lately, both among civilians working in the asteroid belt and in the Space Force itself. The shit wasn’t coming out from the inner solar system; people seemed sure of that. Somebody was making it locally.
“And now we know who,” Bregman muttered to himself. Of course LATAMSEC governments, or people in them, had a hand in this installation, and a hand in the pockets of the sons of bitches doing the dealing. And, of course, those governments would loudly and fervently deny everything, and would sound plausible when they did.
Which meant that what happened next would happen unofficially. The world would little note nor long remember . . . . . . . . . But, with a little luck, some LATAMSEC bigwigs would be annoyed—again, of course, unofficially.
He waited till Chip came as close to the installation as it was going to, then electronically locked the minigun above the nose thruster on the synthesis facility. When a red light told him the lock was successful, his finger stabbed the firing button.
He gave it about a fifteen-second burst, sending something over a thousand rounds of 7.62mm ammo toward the plant. And that, of course, blew his anonymity to hell and gone. Whoever was down there couldn’t very well miss the minigun’s muzzle flash. Even with powder specifically made for use in space, the weapon wasn’t subtle. And radar would be picking up the incoming rounds.
Whether anybody could do anything about that was an altogether different question. Flight time would be a skosh over three and a half minutes. LATAMSEC didn’t have long to react. All the same, Bregman pulled back behind the comforting mass of Chip.
That done, he sent a brief tight-beam message to the G. Harry Stine: “Evaluation confirmed. Target confirmed. Target attacked. Awaiting results.”
He had to hope the Hank Stine was far enough away from Progreso so the middle satellite’s bulk wouldn’t block his signal. The ship must have been, for the answer came back at one. “Roger,” Lieutenant Canha said, and then, “Be careful when you check what you did, sir.”
“Affirmative,” he answered, in lieu of something more heartfelt like, Bet your sweet ass! All transmissions got multiply recorded. They got multiply examined too. You could hope the deskbound types back on Earth would recognize the exigencies of action. You could hope, but you couldn’t take it to the bank.
He maneuvered through five minutes by the clock, so when the scooter came out from behind Chip again, it didn’t emerge in the place where it had disappeared. The position difference wouldn’t be large, but he hoped it would be large enough.
“Well!” he said as his eyeballs and enhanced video picked up the scene down on the surface of Elektra. Not to put too fine a point on it, hell had broken loose down there. A lot of the chemicals these installations used to turn basic organic sludge into drugs were, um, volatile. A lot of the reactions when those chemicals combined in unexpected ways because minigun bullets had slammed into the apparatus were, um, exothermic. Highly exothermic. Flames and clouds of he didn’t want to know what had swollen very quickly in Elektra’s low gravity.
Then he saw another flame on the surface. That was a minigun shooting back at him. The neighborhood was going bad in a hurry. Lighting off the thruster in the scooter’s nose, he pulled back behind Chip again.
Staying around seemed a lousy idea. He told the computer to work out a course back to Progreso. The first one it gave him, which was also the fastest, he rejected out of hand. It used almost all his fuel. He wanted one with a decent safety margin; he had the feeling he might need the extra for unplanned maneuvers.
No sooner had that cheery thought crossed his mind than he got another signal from Lieutenant Canha: “They’ve launched something toward Chip from Elektra. A bigger heat signature than the scooter, so it probably has more legs.”
“Roger that,” Bregman answered. Happy days, he thought. He couldn’t run away, she was telling him. If he couldn’t run, he’d have to fight. He didn’t much want to. The LATAMSEC spacecraft likely had more weapons than he did as well as more acceleration. But what you wanted to do wasn’t always what you could do. He asked, “Can you tell me where they’ll come around Chip? I’d better take the best position I can.”
“Wait one,” the signals officer said, and then, “Not yet. Chip is so little, we can’t be sure. And they can maneuver to change that point up till close to the last minute. Will inform when we have a clearer picture.”
“Roger,” Captain Bregman repeated. So he’d sit here twiddling his thumbs till just before he urgently needed to move—or till the spacecraft from Elektra opened up on him from some unexpected direction.
Time crawled by. Then Lieutenant Canha came back: “Looks like they’re heading over Chip’s north pole. ETA is about four minutes.”
“North pole. Four minutes. Wish me luck.” He used his thrusters to turn the scooter so its nose pointed in that direction. As soon as anything appeared or occulted some of the countless stars strewn across the black-velvet backdrop of deep space, he’d do what he could. Of course, so would whoever was inside the other spacecraft.
He wished it hadn’t come to this. As far as he knew, he hadn’t hurt anybody down on the asteroid. He’d just messed up the installation. LATAMSEC could have written it off as a business expense. But no. They took it personally. And they wanted payback.
Some stars winked out. A tiny maneuver to line up the minigun, part his, partly the fire-control system’s . . . . . . . . . The souped-up Gatling spat flame.
So did the other spacecraft’s weapon. But he’d found it first, which was always the most important thing in a duel like this. Their burst went wide. His struck home. Something—probably their fuel tank—blew up in a pyrotechnic blaze of glory.
Back aboard the G. Harry Stine, the crew would be wondering whether that had been his fuel tank. “Target is neutralized,” he reported. Military lingo was bloodless, no doubt on purpose. It was just a target, not a spacecraft with at least one person aboard. He’d neutralized it; he hadn’t killed anybody. If you said it like that often enough, you started believing it. Or you might. He hadn’t yet.
“Good to hear you, sir!” Lieutenant Canha said, more warmth in her voice than he usually noticed. “When can you start your burn to come back here?”
He already had a countdown clock running in one corner of his display. “Just over an hour and a half,” he answered. “Are you still monitoring the surface of Elektra?”
“Not personally, but through sensors.” Now the lieutenant reverted to sounding as precise as she could.
“That’s pretty much what I meant. Keep me appraised if they open up on me again from down there. Chances are I’ll need evasive action.”
“Roger, wilco,” she said, which was what he wanted to hear.
They didn’t launch anything from Elektra while he waited for the asteroid’s moonlets to reach the proper positions. He wondered if they’d had only the one vehicle for moving around. He also wondered what kind of tight-beam conversations they were having with their friends, and how far away those friends might be. Were the Hank Stine’s sensors picking up those signals? He could hope so, anyway.
His gloved forefinger came down on the ignition button a split second after the scooter’s electronics did the job for him. The odds against his needing to fire up the motors himself were astronomical, but people who worked in space didn’t take chances, not if they wanted to keep working there very long.
The scooter came out from behind Chip’s protective bulk, tiny though that was. It was even smaller itself, but down on the surface of Elektra they’d been looking for a heat signature. They’d find one too. He wished the scooter were powered by beer, like the spacecraft in the classic “The Makeshift Rocket.”
As usual, what you wished for and what you had were two different critters. He hadn’t gone very far from Chip toward Progreso before Lieutenant Canha spoke urgently in his earbuds: “Muzzle flashes down below. They’re shooting at where you’ll be between two and a half and three minutes from now.”
“Between two and a half and three minutes,” he repeated. “Roger. I’ll do my best to evade. How tight is the spread?”
“Pretty loose,” she said. “They hosed it up and down when they fired. They want something to hit you.”
“I wish I could tell them how much I appreciate their generosity,” Bregman said. “Okay. Let’s see what I can manage.”
He burned his nose rocket for a few seconds, cutting his velocity. If the bullets from the surface passed in front of him because he’d slowed down, he was golden. As long as he had enough fuel to correct his trajectory again, anyhow. For now, the gauges and the computer said he did.
As he decelerated, he asked, “Is the densest part of the spread lined up with my course before I changed it?”
“Hold on,” Maria Canha said, and then, presumably after checking the displays she had in front of her, “That’s affirmative. Repeat—affirmative.”
“Understand. Okay, I’ll slide up a bit, too, do what I can to give myself less metal-jacketed company.”
Before he used the thruster under his backside, he made sure he’d have enough fuel once he’d got past the storm of man-made meteors ahead. Having confirmed that, he made the burn. He made it a bit smaller than he really wanted to, to conserve propellant in case the lovely people down on Elektra sent another present his way.
A few seconds later, Lieutenant Canha told him, “You’re entering the area most of the burst should already have passed through.”
“Most?” Bregman said plaintively. That burn should have been longer, dammit. He’d hoped everything would have been past his track before he got to the danger zone.
Before the signals officer could reply, something smacked the scooter. It wasn’t a bird strike, worse luck. No birds for three hundred million klicks, give or take a few. He hadn’t gone out in a fireball, the way the drug cookers’ spacecraft had. He frantically scanned his instruments. He wasn’t losing fuel or oxygen. He seemed to have control over all the thrusters. But he knew only too well he’d got clipped.
And then he saw the damage. One round out of however many they’d fired from Elektra had grazed the tubing that led out to and supported the nose thruster. It had cut through the antiradar coating and taken a bite—only a small one, thank God—out of the carbon-fiber-impregnated plastic under it.
He reported the damage to the G. Harry Stine, finishing, “Everything up there still seems functional. I got lucky. I’ll take it real easy unless I’ve got no choice.”
“Roger,” Lieutenant Canha answered, adding, “Glad you’re okay.”
“Now that you mention it, so am I,” he said. Somebody a couple of hundred years before—was it Churchill or Stalin?—had remarked, Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. As far as Bregman was concerned, that was BS of the purest ray serene. He’d almost forced his spacesuit to take care of something which, even after a century and a half of alleged improvements, it wasn’t particularly well designed to do.
On he went, towards a rendezvous with the Hank Stine behind Progreso. When the LATAMSEC contingent on Elektra didn’t see the scooter explode and did detect his small course-correction burns, they sent another storm of lead up at him. He was farther from the asteroid now; the bullets took longer to climb up to him. At Maria Canha’s advice, he sped up instead of slowing down, so he could get through the region where the barrage would pass before it did.
The advice must have been good—nothing clipped him this time. Then he had to decelerate again. Instead of using the nose motor and testing the damaged tubing, he spun the scooter through a hundred eighty degrees and applied the correction with the tail thruster.
Progreso swelled ahead of him, as much as a lump of dirty, rocky ice a couple of klicks across could swell. And there was the G. Harry Stine. He spotted it the same way he’d seen the spacecraft coming over Chip’s north pole: by the stars it occulted for him. He made a couple of more tiny course corrections, by eye rather than computer.
A protective hatch on the ship opened. Lights around the airlock shone invitingly. He eased the scooter in with as much care as a cat walking on eggs. The outer door closed behind him. The inner door opened. “You have air pressure,” Lieutenant Canha told him. “You can open your helmet.”
“I’ll do that,” he said. He’d been breathing his own stinks all the way to Chip and back. Now he was breathing everybody else’s again—the air scrubbers were good, but they weren’t perfect. Your nose tuned out the smells when you were in the ship all the time. When they seemed fresh again, so to speak, you noticed them . . . . . . . . . till you didn’t any more.
Everyone wanted to shake his hand and pound him on the back and tell him what a great job he’d done. “You whaled the living snot out of that drug-cooker. They won’t be able to fix it up any time soon,” Ali Riahi said. “We’ve got the video, if you want to take a look at it.”
“I’ll need to,” Bregman answered mildly. “I have to write the after-action report.” If he sounded surprised, it was only because he was. He’d been so intent on doing what he needed to do, he hadn’t worried about anything else. He pointed to the damaged tubing aft of the nose thruster. “Can you fix that?”
“I think so, sir,” the engineer said. “I’ll cut out the damaged section, then splice in some from the spares stock. The bonding adhesive is almost stronger than the tubing. I’ve got the coating too.”
“Good. Too close for comfort, if you know what I mean.” No, Justin Bregman didn’t care to think about how close he’d come to dying. Who ever did?
It was not a war. It was nothing like a war. But sometimes, when it almost bit you, you had trouble remembering that.
***
Harry Turtledove is a prolific writer of alternate history and science fiction, including The Man with the Iron Heart, The Guns of the South, and How Few Remain (Sidewise Award for Best Novel), and enough others to fill this page to combustion pressure. He was born in 1949 and raised in Los Angeles, which may explain why many of his stories involve the destruction of that city. His early interests included Byzantine history and dinosaurs, and he’s managed to work both into his writing, often at the same time.
He gained widespread recognition in the 1990s with his Worldwar series, in which aliens invade Earth during World War II, throwing the conflict into chaos. Turtledove’s attention to historical detail and penchant for puns earned him a reputation as the “master of alternate history.”
This story first appeared in 2012 as a chapter in David Brin’s novel, Existence. Set in the mid-twenty-first century, the novel deals with the impact of technological advances and contact with extraterrestrial intelligence, as well as issues related to privacy, surveillance, and the role of the individual in a connected society. It also explores the possibilities and challenges of harnessing resources in space, and of particular note, the potential consequences of unregulated space development and the importance of responsible governance in shaping the future of space exploration and utilization.