Fleet Orbital Heavy Repair Station Terranova-2, in Orbit around Terranova Planet
Happy for once not to have to stand on a leg that still ached when he put his full weight on it, Michael hung back and watched the painfully slow process of moving 387 out of the orbital repair station’s maintenance dock and into the cavernous hold of the huge ultraheavy planetary lander.
387, tiny against the orbital heavy repair station’s vast bulk, was being maneuvered with infinite care to line up with the lander’s gaping cargo hold. An army of orange-suited spacers shepherding a swarm of heavy-duty cargobots, anticollision lights flashing like demented orange fireflies, fussed around the scarred and torn hull, which had been cleaned of the tons of foamsteel and bracing that had been used to get the ship safely home. All classified equipment had been stripped out, and fusion plants shut down and decommissioned.
A moment of sadness struck Michael.
387 once had been a living thing and, through Mother, almost a friend, or at least a comrade in arms. He’d miss her quirky, deadpan sense of humor. But now 387 was just another dead warship hulk, and Mother had gone on to other things. She was the latest in a long line of warship AIs safely downloaded into Attila the Hun, the massive AI that powered the Fleet’s StratSim Facility at the Fleet College. Michael knew that some warship captains liked to reminisce with their old AIs, but he didn’t think he’d ever be one of them. For him, 387 was something that had happened in the past, and there it should stay.
As the bows of 387 nosed slowly into the lander’s hold, Michael could look directly down into the hole that marked the point where Weapons Power Charlie’s plasma containment bottle had blown out most of the starboard bow. The hole was huge, a mass of twisted titanium frames and shredded ceramsteel. The edges, torn, twisted, jagged, and razor-sharp, had been masked off with Day-Glo plasfiber for the trip. Down through the hole, its sides etched out of the darkness by 387’s internal lighting, Michael could trace the path of the platinum/iridium slug inside its deadly shroud of plasma as it had cut its way down through the ship, taking the lives of so many of the crew on the way.
Farther aft on the port side, the entry point for the slug that nearly had taken Michael’s life was framed untidily by yet more orange plasfiber. Less dramatic, the pear-shaped puncture was surprisingly small. The slug’s awesome kinetic energy, with little armor to slow it, had been focused as it hit on a single small part of 387’s hull.
And then, farther back, there was another hole. The slug’s exit from the hull aft had been much more dramatic, its plasma shroud by that stage blooming into a lethal blast wave that had opened up the ship’s ceramsteel armor like a tin can. The hole was much bigger, now rimmed with yet more orange plasfiber to mark the place where the slug had finally cleared the ship, taking with it 387’s pinchcomms antenna, leaving only the stump of its hydraulic ram to show that it ever had existed.
Michael smiled as he tried to picture the surprise of some poor spacer crew centuries down the track as they tried to work out just what the hell a pinchcomms antenna was doing floating in interstellar space.
As Michael watched, performing his final duty as ex-captain of 387 and with orders posting him to Fleet freshly received, something made him look up. Across the massive hangar, a substantial orange figure emerged from a small personnel air lock and with considerable verve shot across the gap that separated them before coming to an impeccably judged halt only centimeters from Michael. The spacer barely had to move to touch helmets.
Michael only knew one very large spacer that good.
“Junior Lieutenant Helfort, sir. Leading Spacer Bienefelt reporting for duty, sir.”
“Benny, you are a fucking rogue,” Michael said with a broad grin. “Last time I checked, they said two more days.”
“I know, sir. I am a fucking rogue, and they didn’t want to let me go. But I can be very persuasive when I have to. I had to see 387 one last time before she went dirtside.”
Michael laughed.
He’d always believed that Bienefelt would make it, and even though it had taken months in regen, the news that she would be fine had set the seal on his own slow recovery.