DLS-387, Berthed on Space Battle Station 20, in Orbit around Anjaxx
Michael fidgeted as he waited for his captain to arrive.
Just his luck, he thought, for his first formal task onboard 387 to be acting as accused’s friend for the black sheep of his division, one Spacer Angelina Athenascu. Not that Athenascu was a bad spacer, far from it. Her record showed her to be a hardworking, experienced, and competent member of Michael’s surveillance drone team, someone to be relied on in a tough situation. But off duty was a different matter, and once again a space battle station’s long-suffering provost marshal had delivered Athenascu, left eye a brilliant swollen patch of purple and red, apparently after she’d taken exception to the way a group of marines had talked about Space Fleet in general and light scouts in particular. Unfortunately for Athenascu, her ability to take on the marines had been degraded severely by a very long session in the Fleet club, and she hadn’t been smart enough to slap on a detox patch before hurling herself off a table straight into the swinging right fist of the largest marine present.
By the time the patrol had arrived, the marines were long gone, having left Athenascu flat on her back complaining bitterly about marines who wouldn’t stand and fight.
387’s legal AI had processed all the evidence and, helped by Athenascu’s plea of guilty, had duly returned a firm proof of guilt finding. It only remained for Ribot to accept the AI’s findings-usually but not always a formality-and pass sentence. Michael’s job was to persuade Ribot, against all the evidence, that Athenascu did in fact not make a habit of taking strong exception to marines, that this was a one-time occurrence, and that he should pass only a token sentence, preferably a caution. Michael didn’t fancy his chances. With 387 about to deploy, the last thing Ribot would have wanted to spend his time on was yet another of Athenascu’s indiscretions. And it was on record that Ribot had warned her in no uncertain terms the last time around that he didn’t want to see her at his table again.
Michael’s pessimism was interrupted by the coxswain’s stentorian voice as Ribot left his cabin to stand behind the plasfiber lectern that had been set up in the passageway. “Captain’s Defaulters! Atten…shun.”
Returning Chief Petty Officer Kathy Kazumi’s snappily precise salute, Ribot made his tone sternly formal. “Thank you, Coxswain.”
“Good morning, sir. One defaulter, sir.”
“Well, that’s something, I suppose. Okay, let’s get on with it.”
“Sir. Spacer A. K. Athenascu FR4456778 charged with conduct prejudicial to good order and Fleet discipline in that she did commit common assault on the person of Marine G. J. Waddell MR8919034 in the Fleet club of Space Battle Station 20 at 02:40 Universal Time, Monday 31 August 2398 Universal Date.”
Ribot sighed deeply. Michael certainly understood why. Legal protocol prevented Ribot from knowing in advance any more than the fact that he had defaulters to deal with. Who they were, what they had been accused of, how they’d pleaded, and what the legal AI thought all would come as a surprise and, in this case, a doubly unwelcome surprise, Michael had no doubt.
“Bring in the accused.”
“Sir. Spacer Athenascu!” Kazumi’s voice would have cut steel, and Michael was glad that he wasn’t the one having to front Ribot.
“Sir.” Athenascu appeared smartly from wherever she had been lurking, coming to a halt in front of Ribot with parade-ground precision, hands tightly tucked into her sides, eyes firmly locked on Ribot’s impassive face.
As the coxswain went through the time-honored rituals of captain’s table, Michael, now standing slightly behind and to the right of the hapless Athenascu, had little to do but listen as Athenascu confirmed her plea of guilty before the case for the prosecution was presented. Petty Officer Kazumi’s experience showed as she simply and concisely summarized the evidence, and in only a matter of minutes the job was done, the legal AI formally confirming that it would be safe for Ribot to accept Athenascu’s plea.
For a while, Ribot stood there in silence. He had the option of handing the case over for further consideration, but Michael suspected that Ribot, like most captains, hated having disciplinary loose ends hanging around. Thus, it was no surprise when Ribot announced to an impassive Athenascu that the charge was proved.
Two minutes later, the theater of captain’s table was over, with Athenascu beating a hasty retreat from a clearly very unhappy captain. Michael’s request that Athenascu’s good professional record be taken into account had been treated with duly grave consideration by Ribot, but Michael still winced as Ribot smacked Athenascu with a 500-FedMark fine and stoppage of fourteen days of leave effective on completion of their current mission. As Michael turned away to follow Athenascu, Ribot caught his eye and waved him back.
“Sir?”
“Michael. That’s the last time I want to see Athenascu at my table. If I see her on a clear-cut case like this one again, I’ll have no choice but to recommend dishonorable discharge. While I hate to lose a good spacer, she’s had all the chances she’s going to get. Space Fleet likes aggression in its spacers but only when it’s accompanied by self-control. Make that clear to her and make sure she understands that she has no more chances. None.”
“Sir.”
As Ribot walked away, radiating extreme unhappiness with every step, Michael sighed deeply. This was not the start he’d been hoping for. Oh, well, he mused, things can only get better. In any case, he couldn’t spend any more time worrying about Athenascu. The final ops conference to review 387’s upcoming mission was due to start in less than an hour’s time, and Michael intended to be fully prepared for it.
With the ops conference over and only a hurried break for lunch, the rest of the day involved hard physical work for Michael and his surveillance drone team, which also doubled as 387’s cargo handlers.
Of course, Michael thought as he, Athenascu, and Leong wrestled a recalcitrant cargo container into position outboard of the mass driver storage bins on 3 Deck, the cargo always arrives last, and late, and nobody can ever explain why. Despite the mission having been scheduled for more than three months, the Defense Gravity Project had managed to get the massive gravitronics arrays up to SBS-20 only late that morning, leaving Michael and his team precious little time to get them secured by the XO’s deadline of 18:00 that evening and get the ship patrol-ready.
Finally the massive container, painted a light blue to show that it was vented to space and required no external services, was secured and the locking pins were rammed home and checked visually. Mother signaled a secure lock and detached the cargobots, and Leong and Athenascu maneuvered up and out of the brightly lit cargo bay to await the next container.
Michael did the same thing and then paused for a moment.
Above him was the enormous spherical gray-black bulk of SBS-20, to which 387 was securely berthed, its 400-meter diameter dwarfing 387, her stealthed hull a formless, bottomless, impenetrable black pit punctuated only by the brilliantly lit silvered inner surfaces of the open cargo hatches. Thousands of kilometers below him swam the glorious swirling blues and whites of Anjaxx itself. Beyond and above the planet hung its two moons, both silvery gray in the harsh light coming from Prime, Anjaxx’s orange-red main sequence dwarf star only 81 million kilometers away. Providing the background to it all were the billions of diamond-sharp pinpoints of light that made up the rest of the galaxy. It was a sight Michael had never gotten used to and, if his parents were any guide, never would.
“Incoming, sir.” Leong’s comm interrupted his little reverie, and Michael turned to see the next container, another big one but this time a luridly bright green to show that it was pressure-and temperature-controlled. It swam slowly into view around the sharp curve of the battle station’s outer hull, two Day-Glo orange cargobots attached one to each end, their mass driver thrusters firing brief silver-gold plumes of incandescent matter as they moved the container in a slow and carefully coordinated arc around SBS-20’s hull.
Moving away from SBS-20, Michael made sure that he and his fellow cargo handlers were clear of the container’s approach vector and would not be caught between 387 and the container as it closed; cargobots were very good, but nothing made by humans was infallible. The containers had a lot of mass and, once out of control, tended to stay that way until they either hit something or had been wrestled back under control. Even moving at less than a meter per second, the containers were lethal weapons. And the cargobots’ mass driver plumes also had to be watched. The safety sims had some gruesome holovid of spacers who hadn’t paid attention, and Michael had no intention of allowing any repeats.
As the container approached, the cargobots began to brake the container. Must be heavy, Michael thought, judging by the prolonged effort it took to bring the huge box to a dead stop 5 meters off the open cargo hatch. “Leong, take the Anjaxx side. Athenascu, the planet side. I’ll go behind.”
Leong and Athenascu, two bright strobe-marked orange shapes against the black nothingness of 387, spun on the spot, stopped dead for a second, and then accelerated into position, turning at the last second to drop into place, perfectly set. Show-offs, Michael thought enviously as he maneuvered himself much more carefully and, he would have been the first to admit, clumsily into position. It would be a long time before he was as good as the worst spacer on 387’s surveillance drone team, but then, they had had hundreds, in some cases thousands, of hours of practice. Michael commed the cargobots, confirmed that they had the correct cargo slot, checked that the team was clear, and then authorized the final approach. As always, despite the impressive finesse with which the cargobots handled the container, the last couple of centimeters required the combined efforts of all three of them to get the damn thing into position so that the locking pins could slide home.
Finally, the container was where it needed to be. Mother signaled a secure lock and detached the cargobots as Leong and Athenascu connected the thick armored power and ventilation umbilicals. Two minutes later, Mother was happy that this was one container that would survive the trip, and Michael and the team turned to await the next; this one, according to Mother, would be the last to go into the starboard 3 Deck cargo space.
It had been a long hard day by the time the last container had been pinned home and after an exhaustive gear check to make sure nothing had been left behind-captains got pretty upset if they had to stop acceleration to recover lost equipment rattling around loose in the cargo bays-and Michael could dismiss the team. He and Petty Officer Strezlecki did a last fly-past along the containers.
“Looks fine to me,” Michael said as he checked out the last of the containers on the port side.
“Me, too, sir,” Strezlecki confirmed. “All personnel clear and accounted for. All equipment accounted for. Button her up?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
Michael and Strezlecki pushed back as Mother turned off the cargo bay lights and one by one closed the massively thick armored access doors until all that was left was an absolute and total nothing. Michael knew 387 was there because logic told him it had not moved and he could see her shape as a black cutout against the gray-black hull of SBS-20. But all of a sudden, the sense of form, solidity, and mass, of firm reality that the open cargo doors had provided, was gone. All Michael could see was void, a pit into which he felt for one awful moment he was going to tumble.
Strezlecki also felt it. “That’s something, isn’t it? Never get used to it even after all these years.” Her voice brought Michael back to his senses.
“Christ, thanks for that cheerful thought. I’d rather hoped I would get used to it.”
“Never, sir, trust me,” Strezlecki said confidently as they turned to make a final inspection of the hull to confirm that every cargo hatch had sealed as flush as Mother said it had, guided only by the ship schematics brought up on their neuronics. Finally, the job was done and they made their way back to the personnel access lock, the ship passing below them unseeable and unseen.
“Any thing else we-I-need to think about?” Michael didn’t think there was, but it didn’t hurt to ask.
“No, sir, that’s it for today. I’m headed for the shower and then to the Fleet senior spacers club-got a birthday bash to attend.” Strezlecki’s voice made it clear that with a patrol scheduled to last almost two months less than twenty-four hours away, she intended to get in a final round of serious partying before they dropped.
“I wish I had half your luck. Quiet evening for me and then a decent night’s sleep would be good.” In the frantic scramble to get everything done in time, Michael had managed only about three hours of sleep since he had stepped-sorry, stumbled and fell-aboard 387.
According to Michael’s neuronics, they were only two meters from their destination, and in confirmation Mother opened the outer hatch of the forward personnel access lock. The brilliant white light from inside the ship seemed to come from nowhere.
“Age before beauty,” Michael commed, pointing for Petty Officer Strezlecki to go first.
“Remember the rest of that aphorism, sir, and don’t tempt me into saying something that should stay belowdecks,” Strezlecki retorted as, without fuss or wasted effort, she pushed her boots into the air lock clear of the rungs of the ladder that dropped into the brightly lit space three meters below them. The ship’s gravity tugged at her feet and drew her in, gloves braking the fall to drop her neatly to the deck.
Michael laughed. “I didn’t want you to see what a screwup I’m going to make of this,” he said as he struggled to emulate Strezlecki’s effortless move into the air lock without a great degree of success. First he wasn’t dropping fast enough and then he was falling too fast, his boots thumping onto the deck, the weight of his suit almost forcing him to his knees. But finally he stood there as Strezlecki commed the close command to Mother and they waited as the outer hatch closed and the air lock pressure equalized. At last the flashing red light gave way to a steady green, and the inner door opened onto the drone hangar deck.
Ten minutes later, with suit turn-around completed, Michael stood there, his gray one-piece innersuit rumpled and sweat-stained. “That’s it,” he said to an equally disheveled Petty Officer Strezlecki. “Enjoy the party and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sir.”
As Michael turned to go below, the XO commed him. “Finished?” she asked.
“I have, sir, yes.”
“Okay. My cabin, now.”
“Sir.” Shit. That didn’t sound good. What now? Michael thought as he dived for the ladder down to 3 Deck.
Seconds later, Michael was at the XO’s cabin. Seeing him at the door, she waved him into the one and only chair in the cramped compartment where Lieutenant Jacqui Armitage both lived and worked. For a couple of seconds, the young woman just stared at him from brown eyes set wide in a ruddy, almost windburned face overshadowed by a shock of barely controlled brown hair, her face a set of flat planes that made it look as if she had been chiseled out of stone. Her mouth had a firm set to it that all of a sudden told Michael that he wasn’t there to be told what a good boy he was.
“Pretty good job you and your team did, Michael. You certainly look like you’ve been working hard.”
“Thank you, sir. We have. Though I need a lot more practice before I’m as good as they are.”
“That’s what I knew you would think, Michael, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Young officers are always over-impressed by space gymnastics.” Armitage paused for a second. And here it comes, Michael thought, at a loss to know what he had missed. “I had Mother analyze the whole operation end to end, and she agrees with me. While acceptable, your oversight of the safety aspects of the operation was close to being compromised on three occasions. Have a look.”
Armitage popped Mother’s analysis up on Michael’s neuronics. “See? Here you got so close in to the container that you missed Leong drifting off-station. A few more meters and he could have been in trouble. Now, he’s a good spacer and caught himself in time. But you should have seen it first just in case he didn’t. People with their heads down very often don’t. And here, Leong again. And here, Athenascu. Too close to that mass driver efflux for comfort. So Michael, the moral of the story is this: You are paid to command, so stand back and command. You are not paid to be just another cargo handler. And nothing will lose you respect faster than a damaged team member. So learn the lesson and do better next time, okay?”
“Sir.” There wasn’t much Michael could say. Armitage was right.
“Okay. That’s all. See you at supper tonight.”
Tired but reasonably content even after the moderately severe singeing he had received from the XO, Michael sat quietly in the wardroom on 3 Deck.
Supper over, the wardroom was filled with the give-and-take of team members who knew one another well. Sitting at the mess table, Armitage and Michael’s boss, Maria Hosani, were in the middle of a spirited debate on the relative merits of planetary life compared with life on orbital habitats. Michael suspected it was a debate months in the making and with many more to run. Sprawled in the two armchairs at the far end of the compartment in front of an impressive holovid of a large fireplace set into a stone wall, complete with a cheerfully blazing wood fire, were the navigator, Leon Holdorf, and John Kapoor, the proud commander of 387’s lander, Jessie’s Hope. Why Jessie’s Hope? Michael had had to ask. Because, Kapoor had explained patiently, probably for the hundredth time, the rest of the crew wouldn’t allow his first choice, Mom’s Hope, so he’d had to settle for her first name, “Jessie.” Yes, and the “Hope” bit, Michael had prompted. That he’d come home safely, Kapoor had said with a faint air of embarrassment and a shrug of the shoulders. Michael had laughed. He’d liked Kapoor from the moment they had met, and as the only other junior lieutenant onboard apart from Michael, he was a natural ally. Though not for long. Kapoor was about to pick up his second stripe.
Sitting next to them on one of the benches that ran down the length of the mess and as officer of the day the only person in uniform was 387’s chief engineer, Cosmo Reilly. With the aid of a firmly pointed forefinger, Reilly was at that moment making the point very emphatically that warfare branch officers paid too little attention to engineers when it came to the conduct of Space Fleet business. Michael had to smile as he watched Reilly’s impassioned diatribe. Long, long ago, Space Fleet had decided in its infinite wisdom that too much engineering was a bad thing for the officers responsible for fighting on the Federation’s ships and had split engineering and warfare officers into two specialized streams. The merits of that decision still were hotly argued, a never-ending debate and one that Michael was sure went on in every mess in the Fleet most nights of the week.
Kapoor just couldn’t resist. “I remember one time on the old Zube-”
“Don’t you mean the Zuben-el-Genubi?” Reilly interrupted indignantly. “You bloody warfare types can’t even get the names of your ships right.”
The rest of the officers broke out laughing. Michael just smiled. Clearly, teasing Reilly by shortening ship names was one of those long-running gags that made small ship life bearable. Michael reckoned that Reilly played up to the rest of them by putting on the personality of a cantankerous old space dog.
“Enough of this,” Reilly said, waving the debate to a halt as he climbed to his feet. “Time for a walk-around. Can’t let the masses think management isn’t paying attention.” Michael was beginning to suspect that Cosmo Reilly was only half joking; of all the officers onboard, he was the most old-fashioned and almost always had an authoritarian tone to his voice. Be interesting to see what the troops think of him, Michael mused as Reilly left the mess.
Kapoor’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Michael, you’re far too quiet. Get your fat ass over here and tell us what you think so far. But before you do, refill these glasses.”
As instructed, Michael refilled the two port glasses at the little bar before sitting next to the fireplace, which, if it had been real, would have fried the lot of them long before.
Soon he was deeply involved in a debate about the merits or otherwise of the Honorable Valerie Burkhardt, the Fed Worlds’ current moderator, whether she and the New Liberals had any chance of being reelected to the government in the forthcoming elections, and whether Space Fleet would be better off with a new federal minister of defense given the view commonly held in the Fleet that the present incumbent was a party hack promoted not because she had any talent for the job but because she had a hold over Valerie Burkhardt. Soon the debate sucked in Armitage and Hosani, and by the time Reilly returned from his rounds, the wardroom was well into an appraisal of how the Space Fleet had had to put up with an endless succession of ambitious but not necessarily capable ministers and so on and so on.
Probably, Michael thought as he sat back to let the debate rage around him, if you did a survey, four or five topics would account for 80 percent of all conversation in officers’ messes across the Fleet, and this was surely one of them.
Finally, he’d had enough. “If you’ll excuse me, people, I am going to make this an early night. Big day tomorrow.” He rose to his feet.
“Can’t persuade you to step ashore to sample the delights of the Fleet O club? I think everyone else is up for it.” Hosani’s suggestion was tempting in the extreme, but Michael shook his head.
“Not this time, sir.”
“Okay. Get your beauty sleep. God knows you need it.”
“Night all, see you in the morning.” With that, Michael turned and left. He really must vidmail his parents and reply to Anna’s last comm before they left.
As the wardroom door hissed shut behind Michael, the group was quiet for a moment.
“What do you think of our latest recruit, Jacqui?” Holdorf looked at the XO, his face quizzical.
“Too soon to say. But he looks like he’ll be okay. He did well enough today for his first time out, and he took the obligatory dressing down without complaint. Remember McPherson’s first cargo op?” Armitage laughed as she recalled the three-ring circus that Michael’s predecessor had managed to create. “And he turned out okay.”
“What do you think, Maria?” Armitage asked.
“Like you said, not too bad for the first day. And he’s certainly not hard on the eyes. Pity he’s in the chain of command,” Hosani said, aiming a playful wink at Armitage, who winced. An improper relationship in the chain of command? Now, that was the best definition of an XO’s nightmare Armitage could think of.
Kapoor came to his feet. “Look, you lot! Enough. Time is getting on, and the O club calls. Are we on or not?” His insistent voice made everyone grin.
“I can’t see any reason to hurry, can you? Time for a few more drinks?” Holdorf teased, “Unless of course there is a certain someone that John feels the need to get close to.”
“Bastard. You know there is. So can we go?” Kapoor said, standing up. “Because if not, I’m off. Night, Cosmo. Keep her safe.”