In the Rouge

9 - Liam

Liam never would have imagined his first space-battle to be so boring. Of course, before today he never would have imagined actually being in a space-battle, but if he had, he was sure he would have imagined it to be more exciting. Instead, it was like watching a caterpillar attack a leaf; there was no suspense, you already knew which one was going to win, but you still had to sit there and watch the caterpillar slowly devour its prey. There weren’t even any spectacular explosions. The extent of the special effects were a few glowing red dots which would blink for a few seconds before disappearing in a completely underwhelming nothing. He was forced to imagine the explosions. Then he imagined one of those explosions being the Titan, at which point he put his imagination away with a stern rebuke.

     In the end, only a few of the pirate ships even managed to bring their primary power plants online, but none was able to get its engines fired in time to escape the doom unleashed upon them all. Liam didn’t really understand all the technical mechanics of what happened—preconditional volleys, sensor cones, relativistic ballistics, and other unfamiliar terms—but he felt he should be impressed. He figured anything that could cause Miriam to sigh and hang her head so dramatically was probably an impressive feat.

     And so, a few hours later, with the space-battle practically over before it had begun, the ISS Titan quickly approached asteroid AM-317885. Quickly, in this case, took most of an hour, and what little childhood excitement Liam still held for spacer life soon disappeared. “Are battles always this boring?” he asked of Miriam as the Titan neared the target asteroid.

     She shrugged. “Most of the time. Space combat isn’t like what you see in the holos. It’s like . . . like—Have you ever been on a range and tried to hit one of the five hundred meter targets?”

     “Huh?”

     “A rifle range. Have you ever tried to hit—”

     “I’ve never fired a gun—”

     “Weapon.”

     “What?”

     “They aren’t guns; they’re weapons,” she explained.

     “Right. Well, I’ve never fired a weapon before. I’ve never even held one.”

     She sighed. “But you understand the concept, right? You point and click, and a little ball of death flies out the end.”

     “Sure.”

     “Well, imagine you’re standing on top of an air-car that’s traveling at fifteen klicks, and your target is on top of another car that’s traveling at a different speed, and it’s five hundred klicks away from you.”

     “Klicks?”

     Miriam sighed. “This is why I never bother to explain things. Klicks: kilometers or kilometers per second; It’s one of those context things.”

     Liam thought he was starting to understand. “So it’s really hard to actually hit anything?”

     “Exactly. And with the distances involved, when you shoot at another ship, they only have to change trajectory by the barest fraction and you’ve missed. I’ve heard of one-on-one space-battles taking weeks.”

     “Then why do space-battles take place at all? It sounds to me like any ship that doesn’t want to fight, doesn’t have to. They can just run away or stay out of range or just keep moving around.”

     “Oh, that happens a lot. Most of the time, really. When a fleet is in deep space or in an unimportant system or for all kinds of other reasons. But, every fleet needs fuel and food—hydrogardens can only supply so much—and the people need a place to call home. So, almost every major space-battle takes place either in orbit of, or near an inhabited planet. Space is a lot smaller around a colony. But still, you have relativistic physics involved even there, and relativity is a mean b—”