The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) Read Free Page B

self-destructing as they approached the disabled Truman ,
affording survival to two hundred American personnel.
    Mercy. She showed mercy to a defeated enemy ,
Neil thought, feeling a brief, melancholy sense of kinship . He found a
paper, published in a public Chinese military journal, in which Qin chided the
authors of another paper, a group of Army colonels, for caojianrenming –
“regarding life as worthless as a straw.”
    “We lead men and women, not machines,” Qin wrote. “And we
will fight women and men, not machines. We cannot regard doctrine as we would a
computer program, to be debugged until it is perfect.”
    She’s quite the contrarian to standard Chinese policy.
Will she fight like we do? Or some other way we don’t expect?
    Neil had joined Apache ’s crew eight weeks prior, following
several months at U.S. Space Command in geosynchronous orbit over Earth. There,
he had undergone formal training to be a shipboard Space Force intelligence
officer – an odd experience, given he, unlike his classmates, had served in
that capacity in his first assignment on the destroyer San Jacinto , whose
original intel officer had been badly wounded in a battle. He had also advised
a team of programmers and engineers on ways to counter China’s key
technological advantage in the war: beam cruisers that mounted huge ultraviolet
lasers able to damage a spacecraft at ten thousand kilometers, well beyond the
range at which most vessels could fight back.
    Japan and the United States were still working to match that
capability, and other efforts had focused on ways to disable the Chinese lasers
at such long ranges. The most effective weapon against lasers was a smaller,
automated laser turret, called a counterbattery, built to shoot out the fragile
optics of an attacking laser, but typical counterbatteries lacked the range to
hit the long-range Chinese weapons. His contribution consisted of helping
develop doctrine for the team’s best defense: tying a warship’s main offensive
lasers into the fast-acting counterbattery system. Although a few physical modifications
were required in each ship, the counter primarily consisted of a software
package that allowed the counterbattery computer to take over and activate the
main lasers. It was an imperfect fix: Counterbattery lasers fired only in
response to an enemy laser hit, so the shot required the defending warship to
risk serious damage. Moreover, the warship had to have its main lasers –
typically mounted on the nose of the ship – facing the beam cruiser when it
took that hit.
    Neil, who had seen the threat from the Chinese beam cruisers
firsthand, had been frustrated at the small size and limited resources provided
to the team trying to combat it, but the project was one attempt to adapt among
many. The war had taught hard lessons, paid for in ships and blood. Both sides
were refitting their ships with extra armor around their antimatter storage
rings; too many warships had died to a lucky laser shot or kinetic fragment that
had forced some antimatter to crash into regular matter, igniting a fatal
explosion.
    China, too, had correctly predicted that a widespread space
war would destroy ships far faster than they could be replaced. Most shipyards
had been above Earth, the war’s deadliest battleground, and had been destroyed during
fighting over the high orbits. Only the big neutrals, like Europe, Russia,
India and Brazil, still held theirs; for the belligerents, smaller yards around
colony planets were the only way to replace lost ships. China had also used particle
beams and marines to capture several American and Japanese ships, and the
allies were waiting to see one of their own hulls returned to action against
them.
    China’s preparations had dashed hopes that the war would be
quickly concluded after the Space Force smashed a Chinese fleet at the Battle
of Kennedy Station last June. China and her Korean allies had been forced to
abandon Earth orbit, and the main