Armored Tears Read online

  Armored Tears

  by Mark Kalina

  Copyright 2015, Mark Kalina

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. The names, places, characters and events portrayed in this book are the products of the author's imagination or else are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to any organization, group, event or location is entirely coincidental.

  Acknowledgements:

  — Much thanks to George H. Hepker, for his work in editing. He found many mistakes, typos and bits of confused phrasing.

  — Likewise, a huge "thank you" to Douglas D. Collins, for invaluable help with formatting, editing and feedback.

  Any mistakes remaining are the author's own fault and persist in spite of George's and Doug's good work. Without their help, there would be a lot more mistakes.

  — The cover art was created by Murry Lancashire, whose fine artwork can be found online at http://muzzoid.deviantart.com. Mr. Lancashire was a pleasure to do business with and created what I think is a very nice cover.

  Contents:

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter_1

  Chapter_2

  Chapter_3

  Chapter_4

  Chapter_5

  Chapter_6

  Chapter_7

  Chapter_8

  Chapter_9

  Chapter_10

  Chapter_11

  Chapter_12

  Chapter_13

  Chapter_14

  Chapter_15

  Chapter_16

  Chapter_17

  Chapter_18

  Chapter_19

  Chapter_20

  Chapter_21

  Chapter_22

  Chapter_23

  Chapter_24

  Chapter_25

  Chapter_26

  Chapter_27

  Chapter_28

  Chapter_29

  Chapter_30

  Chapter_31

  Chapter_32

  Chapter_33

  Chapter_34

  Appendix_1

  Appendix_2

  Appendix_3

  Appendix_4

  Appendix_5

  1.

  Major General Jose Salvator Bannerman of the United Earth Nations Peace Force watched from the passenger seat of his new Benz-Maybach S1000 staff car as the looming edifice of the gate building grew closer and closer. It was deceptive, the size of the thing. The gate building was a dull gray concrete dome built on a vast scale. At 200 meters tall and 400 meters across at ground level, it was one of the largest man-made structure on the surface of the Earth. True, the tallest skyscrapers reached up more than a kilometer, but they were nowhere near as massive as the gate dome.

  For almost a hundred kilometers around the dome there was nothing but the searing scrub-waste of the Mojave desert, crossed only by the battered old road and a spray of old railway lines. Gate buildings were always placed in locations like this; empty places, far from anything valuable.

  Inside the dome was a chamber, a hundred meters across, maintained in a state of almost perfect vacuum. And at the center was the spot that, sometimes, held the gate itself. People called it a Tannhauser gate; he'd once been told the name was a reference to a passing line of dialogue in a twentieth century science fiction movie, which struck him as odd enough to have a ring of truth. Formally it was called a "Morris–Thorne wormhole," but he'd never heard anyone other than a scientist or a technician call it that.

  There were nineteen working Tannhauser gates on Earth, and another fourteen in high orbit, leading, altogether, to fourteen other worlds. Three of those were within the Solar system; Mars, the Jovian moon Ganymede and Titan, a moon of Saturn. The other eleven were worlds that orbited around other suns. Most worlds got just a single gate, but important ones often had more than one, and one world —Elysium, a habitable world orbiting the star Tau Ceti, 12 light-years distant— had a half-dozen gates leading to it.

  The discovery of gate technology had, without a doubt, been the greatest breakthrough in human history, allowing mankind to explore and colonize worlds that would otherwise be utterly beyond mankind's grasp. Even at the speed of light, the nearest other world outside the Solar system would take almost five years to reach. Using the fastest possible spacecraft that humanity could actually build, the trip would take thousands of years. But though it took a long time —years— to set up a new gateway, once it was established a journey across the light-years through a Tannhauser gate took only seconds.

  The gates provided fourteen other worlds for mankind to explore and exploit... though only three of those could support human life outside of sealed, pressurized habitats. Even so, the gates had given mankind new frontiers, and a new age of discovery, far beyond anything in prior human history.

  At first glance, building gates on the surface of the Earth could seem like a bad idea. In deep space, there was no need to maintain an artificial vacuum in the gate chamber, and no danger to nearby populations from the huge energies involved in generating a gate. On the other hand, putting a gate in space meant that you needed spacecraft —rockets— to get to and from it, which, paradoxically, made space-based gates a lot more expensive to use than surface based gates.

  It had been forty-five years since the first experimental gate had been opened. Bannerman remembered hearing about it, though he'd been just a little child then, back in 2032. The actual discovery and exploration of new worlds hadn't begun till the late 2030s. He remembered watching the vids of the newly discovered worlds as a teenager in the early '40s, just a few years before he'd started his term at the Jose Maria Cordova Military Academy in Bogota. He remembered how, as a young junior officer, he'd desperately wanted to be one of those explorers.

  It had now been almost forty years since humans had set foot on worlds that orbited other suns, and Tannhauser gate travel was, if not quite routine, then at least almost routine. Millions of people had travelled through Tannhauser gates, exploring, mining, trading and founding new colonies. And the exploration wasn't done; new gates were being opened all the time.

  There were, of course, limits. Setting up a gate was a chancy process and the initial connection propagated at the speed of light. So a gate from Earth to, say, Alpha Centauri would take almost four-and-a-half years from initial activation to actual opening. And since gates had to be opened into vacuum, initial contact gates were always orbital, and hence useless for anything but small scientific missions. To make real exploration and colonization possible one had to, at great cost, build a gate station on the surface of a new world, and then wait however many years till a new gate was propagated to it. But once a gate was established, it could be reopened instantly.

  Perhaps a more profound problem was making sure the other end of a gate opened somewhere that was worth going. There were at least a few gates initiated every year, now, and had been for decades; hundreds of attempts. But only fourteen had succeeded so far... and only three of those were actual successes, in terms of finding new worlds for mankind to live on. Even the best long range astronomical surveys could only guess at the nature and precise location of an extra-solar planet; sometimes gate attempts missed. Other times they reached their targets, but found useless worlds, no better and no more useful than the airless rocks that were available much closer to home, in Earth's Solar system. Just three livable worlds, so far... so that even the least of them was a prize beyond price.

  General Bannerman pulled himself away from his musings and put his mind to the task at hand. The huge gate building was getting closer. The face of the great dome was all but featureless, so that as he drove towards it, it was possible to imagine that it was a fraction of the size, and much closer. The handful of multi-wheeled trucks parked in the kilometer-wide paved staging area
near the dome could have passed for scale models or children's toys.

  A spray of rail lines converged on the huge structure, crossing a vast, concrete apron that stretched several kilometers in all directions out from the dome. All but one of the lines were derelict; rusted or even missing sections of rail. The lone intact line was empty now as well; today wasn't one of the scheduled gate openings.

  When the gate was open, the single line would be fairly busy. Pressurized train cars would be lined up with goods and passengers, ready to be fed into the Tannhauser gate, or else rows of cars would be coming out, full of people and goods from Arcadia, a planet that orbited Luhman-16A, a very small dwarf star almost seven light years distant from Earth.

  Arcadia, first reached in 2039, was the third —and so far the last— habitable world discovered and explored via the Tannhauser gates. The discovery of Arcadia had been a surprise; no one had expected that tiny, relatively cool, dwarf stars like Luhman-16A could harbor habitable worlds. And yet, Arcadia was there. Orbiting very close to its very small, relatively cold star, Arcadia's mass was close to that of Earth, as was its atmospheric pressure, and crucially, its atmospheric composition. As with Elysium —orbiting Tau Ceti— and Xanadu, which orbited Epsilon Indi, humans could breathe the air of Arcadia without life support equipment.

  On the other hand, that was just about the limit of Arcadia's hospitality. Arcadia was a water-world, with only a small, equatorial landmass. Its seas teamed with oxygen-producing microbial life. The water was mildly toxic to Earth life, though not beyond being filtered and purified. But, as if to mock the promise of its vast blue seas, the only landmass on Arcadia —two irregular peninsulas linked by a narrow, rocky isthmus, with a combined surface area roughly on par with that of Japan— was a lifeless desert; searing, rugged and utterly barren.

  When the Arcadian Tannhauser gate was closed, as it was now, the entire facility would normally be all but deserted. Which was just as well, mused the general; a security leak this early in the operation would be a disaster.

  The area around the gate structure was not deserted now, though. There were a half-dozen articulated, 12-wheeled trucks on the vast concrete apron; vehicles from the 1099th field engineering battalion, painted glossy black with a single white "lightning bolt" stripe running down their sides; the colors of the UEN Peace Force. Several dozen Peace Force troops in black-and-gray "digital-pattern" camouflage uniforms stood around, looking at the towering bulk of the gate building dome looming over them. The general was old enough to remember when the paint scheme had been all white, and the troops had worn the uniforms of contributing nation-states with pale blue helmets; a long time ago. A few of the troopers were looking in a desultory way at a disused rail lines that tracked across the cracked face of the concrete, but other than that, there was no sign of any work or activity.

  "Sir," said a man with a lieutenant-colonels' rank badges, offering a crisp salute as the general got out of his staff car. The colonel seemed to ignore the driver, Major Hafez, who got out a moment after. The general was a tall man, blocky of build and square featured, with olive-toned skin and silver at the sides of his raven-dark hair. His adjutant-driver of was much the same skin tone, but a dozen years younger, thin and shorter than average. Major Hafez wasn't an impressive-looking man; his face had a receding chin and an oversized hawk-beak nose, but as far as Bannerman was concerned, that was just a matter of effective camouflage; Hafez was a man of rare qualities; both utterly loyal and very competent... not least with the little Beretta officer's service pistol he wore at his side.

  "Report, Colonel," the general said, perfunctorily returning the lieutenant-colonel's salute. The lieutenant-colonel was pale-skinned and blond-haired; North American or North European, the general thought with mild distaste, though Bannerman's own family name came from North European roots; a distant ancestor in the early 19th century had been a Scottish mercenary in the service of Simón Bolívar. Not that it mattered; a politically unreliable man would never have risen so high in Peace Force service, so this colonel's political connections and bona fides must have been good enough to overcome his ethnic disadvantages.

  "Sir," the colonel said, in an voice that perhaps held a hint of a modern British accent, "infrastructure is, as you can see, mostly intact. Of course, there's been some degradation since the... ah, unscheduled shutdown, seven years ago. The single line that's been maintained is at full capacity, of course. But the other lines are... ah, not yet ready for operation. But I'd say that we could get the rail systems up and running fairly quickly. No more than a couple of years... ah, assuming that we have real cooperation from the labor unions involved in the project, of course."

  Years, thought the general. The man wanted years to repair a dozen rail lines laid on flat desert ground; the old norteamericanos had built most of an entire transcontinental rail system in less time than that. Still, the estimate wasn't a surprise. Long, stretched-out projects meant larger budgets and more pay and benefits, not to mention more political clout from handing out the largess of those swollen budgets, which was something the labor unions were very keen on. But with this project, years simply wasn't an option.

  "You have three months, Colonel," the general said. "Ninety-two days to be precise. And labor cooperation won't be an issue," he added, to the man's shocked expression. "This will be a Peace Force project exclusively. No civilian labor involvement."

  The colonel's face was still frozen in slack amazement.

  "But the unions..."

  The general allowed himself a slight smile. "The Permanent Oversight Council of the United Earth Nations has given this project a green light. Even the unions should know better than to interfere with that, Colonel."

  "Sir, I, ah, I understand... but this is the FSNA... the, ah, the unions here enjoy a great deal of support. Even with pressure from the Permanent Oversight Council... I'm not sure how quickly..."

  "The politics of the situation are not your concern, Colonel," Bannerman said in a mild tone.

  "Yessir," the colonel said quickly, and then paused again. "Sir, my... that is to say, ah, my people don't have the skill sets to rebuild the rail system, sir."

  "Your battalion is a military logistics unit, is it not, Colonel?" the general said, with a certain wry amusement in his voice.

  "Yes, sir."

  "But you lack the skills to repair and make ready a railway system that was designed to carry military supplies... among other thing?"

  "Ah, sir, we... well, the unit has never been trained for that sort of work. I... I believe my predecessor may have been tasked with the relevant training, but since I took command, the training schedule has never covered..."

  "Never mind, Colonel," the General said. "This project has been designated a class three security matter. You have authorization to invoke the Emergency Conscription Acts and draft the required labor from the local union representatives. Drafted personnel will be retained in service for the full two year term and given the full pay and benefits of Peace Force service, of course."

  The colonel said nothing, tried to school his expression, failed, letting a look of shocked amazement cross his face, then tried to school his features again.

  "I imagine this is all a bit confusing, Colonel," General Bannerman said, "but I expect you'll be able to adapt and carry out your mission. In fact, my aide's subordinates should be arriving shortly to help clarify the situation... for you as well as for some other people."

  General Bannerman glanced over to where Major Hafez stood, looking down, watching his military-grade wrist phone.

  "Yes, General," Hafez said. "I expect them shortly. They've been waiting for our arrival just a few kilometers up the road. I believe I see their vehicle now."

  "Good," Bannerman said.

  A white UEN van was driving onto the concrete apron, and the three officers waited till it pulled up. Behind it was a second, identical van. The doors of the first van opened and two men in plain civilian clothes exited, followed by f
our Peace Force soldiers in light combat armor, with their compact Beretta AR-250 combat rifles held at the ready and their black-shaded helmet visors down, concealing their faces to the chin.

  Between the soldiers stood another man in civilian dress. He was a rotund, balding man, older, shorter and softer looking than the Peace Force soldiers or the plain-clothes UEN agents, though his suit was of a much finer and more fashionable cut. His features showed outraged shock and no small measure of fear.

  "Mr. Fitzmorton," General Bannerman said, looking at the civilian.

  "Who the fuck are you? Do you have any idea who I am?" the civilian said, his tone growing more belligerent as he spoke. "You think you can send some UEN soldier-boys to come into my office and man-handle me like this? I'm the fucking Regional Secretary-Treasurer of the fucking International Laborers' Union of fucking North America! Who the fuck do you think..."

  "Please be silent, Mr. Fitzmorton," Major Hafez said, "or I will have you shot and send my men to collect your subordinate."

  "You fu..." Fitzmorton's voice fell silent as he met Hafez's eyes.

  "Now, then, Mr. Fitzmorton," Bannerman said. "My name is General Bannerman, and you are in a position to help the vital interests of the UEN and the welfare of all of humanity. We, that is, the UEN, are going to need skilled workers, Mr. Fitzmorton. We need several hundred patriotic transportation infrastructure workers to enlist in the Peace Force. And you are going to provide them for us. Obviously, we all understand that your cooperation isn't in doubt. Is it, Mr. Fitzmorton?"

  "You can't..."

  Hafez's pistol was in his hand, leveled casually at Fitzmorton's face.

  "I don't care who you are," Fitzmorton said. "This isn't some third-world piss-hole where the UEN is the only law. You can't do this. I know people. I..."

  "Is this man's subordinate a viable option, Major?" Bannerman asked, as the civilian's tirade grew more intense.