The Desert of Stars (The Human Reach) by John Lumpkin Read Free Book Online Page A

the spoils.”
    “A full share? Your fleet is smaller than ours, and that of
the Japanese.”
    “You might recall we have a border with the Chinese here on
Earth,” Ramesh said. “Much of our army will have to be redeployed to deal with
the threat, leaving us vulnerable here in Punjab. As for space, you are
correct; however, unless I’ve miscounted, we do have significantly more construction
docks in Earth orbit at the moment than both you and Japan combined.”
    Donovan chuckled. “Yes, it’s no state secret that one is
indeed greater than zero.”
    The whine of a siren cut off Ramesh’s reply. Donovan looked
at him to see if the alarm was something to take seriously. Ramesh appeared
impassive, but he slowly walked under an aircraft canopy with a thick roof,
motioning with his head for Donovan to follow. A few aircraft techs began jogging
for a bunker.
    They heard a whistle. Several whistles.
    “The rebels are attacking!” Ramesh said, grinning. “They try
this every so often, but it never works. Hope springs eternal, eh?”
    In front of them, forty meters away, was a laser cannon,
mounted on a truck trailer. It looked like a searchlight. It rotated, pointing
up, and fired an invisible beam. Donovan craned his neck and saw several puffs
of smoke high overhead – some sort of rockets or mortar rounds being destroyed.
Radars tracked the trajectory of the incoming rounds and calculated their
origin at an area in the nearby mountains, and he heard a series of chuff s
as mortars on the base fired back.
    Donovan saw more bursts in the sky, some of them closer than
the prior ones. The sky grew foggy, and he knew a moment of animal terror,
wondering if the rebels were attacking the fort with chemical weapons.
    A mortar round landed off to their right, square atop a large
bomber drone, which went up in flames. Other mortars fell randomly around the base.
One landed near a squad of running security troopers; several went down,
screaming.
    Ramesh had his hands over his ears. “They’re not supposed to
be able to do that!” he shouted.
    Donovan was from the world of political intelligence and no
military analyst, but he had learned fast since the war with China started. Some
of the incoming were missiles that dispersed a plume of laser-scattering
material as soon as a laser hit them. The net effect was a cloud spreading over
the base that prevented lasers from working with any effectiveness. Such
weapons, Donovan knew, were expensive and difficult to manufacture – far out of
reach of the Punjabi guerrillas, or, for that matter, the revanchist Pashtuns
on the other side of the border.
    And now, with the defenses suppressed, regular explosive
mortar rounds were falling on the base.
    Ramesh waved and pointed toward a bunker fifty meters away. Donovan
nodded, and they ran, as another whistle crescendoed.
    USS Apache, Wolf 359
    Apache ’s directed energy officer, Lieutenant
(j.g.) Jessica Barrett, was a direct and willful woman, unafraid to make her
desires clear, sometimes in a way that inspired backbiting from other women
within earshot. She didn’t care; she viewed many of the social rules some women
enforced upon one another as silly obstacles to her satisfaction, and she often
preferred the company of men, who of course had their own set of social rules,
but they rarely enforced them on her.
    She was broad-shouldered and matched Neil in height. Her
high-cheekboned face was oval and bold, and her hair, somewhere between blond
and brown, was cropped short for freefall but still longer than many women on Apache cut theirs. Her blue eyes were bordered by nascent laugh lines.
    She had taken to Neil during his first briefing after coming
on board; he had referred obliquely to having had seen action, which was unlike
the crew of the Apache, who had spent the war in places that the Hans
had not seen fit to attack. He was unremarkable to look at; she was attracted
to what she saw as a desire in him to understand, to figure