"Why is it on the entirety of the lunar surface, there's only two goddamn coffee makers?"
The refrain â common in a workplace that had banned the more exotic nootropics since the year 2098 â broke into Lucas' concentration as he hunched over his workstation and glared at the spread of numbers. He lifted his head and saw that Teller, who was the head of the cisvenusian spy-sat programs, was leaning against the wall next to one of the new transfers from Langley. The new transfer was an Asian woman from Louisiana, and Teller â born on Armstrong City and permanently barred from the Earth's surface by his thin bones and exaggerated physique â had a
thing
for Asian women and stocky, chunky Earther builds.
Lucas looked back down at his charts and tried to ignore Teller's increasingly desperate â and increasingly unprofessional â flirtation.
Nominally, LogCom was a part of the USAF. However, it was staffed primarily by people pulled from the private market. Dozens of American cooperatives had a foothold in space, ranging from the family owned automated probes that helped to catalog and survey the millions of asteroids that spread from SOL to the Kupiter belt, to the hundreds strong giants of Colby & Merryle and SpaceUs. This created an immense pool that the DOD could pull from and put to work in LogCom. The pay was great and the position â in Armstrong City â meant great things for anyone who wanted to parlay their work credit into their own cooperative.
But sometimes, Lucas would have given anything to be back in Kentucky.
A sentence my great great grandfather might have goggled at,
he thought.
Through a supreme effort of will, he managed to make the numbers begin to make some kind of coherent sense. Today, they were crunching the navs for three hundred and sixty eight supply ships in Hohmann's transfers â thirty were bound for Camp Sanders, forty two were earmarked for the Belt Fleet, and the rest were all aimed at the Outsystem Fleet. Each ship was an automated vessel â and each had been deliberately been built to be as dumb and simplistic as possible. The less sophisticated their computers, the harder they would be to do something tricky by one of the United State's enemies.
Their courses were logged and calculated in secret in LogCom â a significant chunk of Lucas' workday was spent waiting on the computer to cipher and decipher incoming data. Data which was then rendered immediately, blatantly obvious as every single other space based power registered the changes in course with their telescopes. A single thruster on one of the supply ships could be picked up by a civilian doing shipwatching near Lake Erie â the military grade spyscopes of the other powers made it trivial.
And if that didn't underline the supreme pointlessness of this gig, Lucas wasn't if anything could do the job better. While the actual math itself simply took computer time, there were a great deal of soft decisions that fell into human hands. Like fusion power, strong or general AI was always just...a few years off, which left the really gnarly problems resting in his hands. Lucas thumbed through the files until he found the specific ships that he'd been ordered to set courses for and started to chart them out on his screen. As his eyes flicked from the set of six numbers that all spaceships needed to know â their X, Y, Z coordinates and their velocities relative to their orbit point on each of those axis â to the map of the SOL system he had up, Teller finally finished getting his coffee and came back to sit across from him at the other cubical.
"Bitch," Teller muttered.
"I'd have shot you down, Teller," Lucas muttered. "There are regs against fraternization."
"For the astros, not for us," Teller said, his voice grumbly and whiny. He was suffering and wanted the entire solar system to stop and give him a pat on the shoulders. "If I was an astro-"
"If you were an astro, some Russian would be trying to shoot you full of holes," Lucas said.
"In the past fifty years, only fifteen Astros have died," Teller said. "And you know how how much pussy they get when they get to port."
"Yeah. Guild..." Lucas' tongue darted along his lips. "Guild women. Or men. Which you could afford, I've seen your pay stub, it's the same as mine."
"Astros get a twenty percent discount," Teller grumbled.
Lucas sighed.
Teller, seeing that any source of sympathy had gone from dried up to completely desiccated, started to actually crunch his figures. Lucas finished his charts for the first set of ships and programmed in the computer to check them against incoming telemetry on hostile ships. For the past century, warfare in space had been limited. In a sweeping return to the genteel days of the 18
th
and early 19
th
century, spaceships placed game of maneuver and positioning, forcing their enemy into disfavorable orbits before demanding that they, with a term that had carried on despite lacking any significance in an era without flags, strike their colors.
The only time ship guns were fired in anger was when neither vessel could force the other into a completely disfavorable position â or when one side or the other was simply too pigheaded to let the anything so mundane or pedestrian as laws of physics get in the way of their military acumen. And even then, battles usually lasted until one side or the other managed to disable the enemy ship. Considering a ship was nothing more than a tube of light alloys and skeletal frameworks built around a vast array of sophisticated, fragile equipment, sustained entirely by the energies of a small nuclear reactor â energies that needed to be vented into immense, sail-like radiators â it was easier to disable a ship than anyone had expected when the first shooting war started.
All of that went out the window with his supply ships. Which was a big part of his day job: Figuring out how to get the automated (and thus, destroyed without risk of escalation of hostilities) supply ships past enemy forces to the Outward fleet...without also making them take so long that the ships that needed their supplies would starve to death.
It was a frustrating job. It often ended up that he didn't
have
the change in velocity â the ÎV â to avoid an opportunistic missile or railgun from the Russians or the Chinese. And when he had to send the ships and hope for the best, he knew that he'd be the one getting angry letters from the DOD. Well. His boss would, and his boss would then yell at him.
Still. Lucas wouldn't trade his position, no matter how boring or irritating, with anyone in those fragile, heavily armed tubes.
Because while disabling was easy...
Killing was even easier.
And killing happened â not often enough to drive war backwards to the grim, relentless slaughter of the 20