by Marko Kloos
“We have food reserves for six months,” the XO says. “We can probably stretch that to nine if we cut down on the daily calorie allowance, and we’re willing to deal with the hit to morale that will cause. And there are enough field and emergency rations in storage to feed the grunts and the crew for another three months at least.”
“So, twelve months.” Colonel Rigney frowns. “That’s not a rosy prospect.”
“I don’t intend to stay in this place for a year,” Colonel Drake says. “We will find a way to scout the planet because it’s the only thing within nineteen light-years, and because it looks like it may have what we need to keep ourselves alive. But our focus will be to find the exit door out of this system. And there must be one, if the Lankies travel through here with any regularity.”
“How long are we keeping the news from the crew?” I ask.
“I’ll have to make an announcement,” the commander replies. “This isn’t something we can keep under wraps for much longer. We already have sixteen drop-ship crews who are in the know. The way the deckhands and fuel jockeys can keep secrets, the whole ship will probably know by the end of the day. We’re all in it together regardless of rank. The crew have a right to know what they’re facing.”
He sits down again and glances over his shoulder at the star map.
“This is going to be a tough job even without Lankies breathing down our necks. You all know what’s at stake here. We are tasked with looking for a needle in a haystack. Only the needle is a few millimeters long, and the haystack is a trillion cubic kilometers in size. And we need to find the damn thing before we run out of food and water. With no support, no backup, and no communications with home. I’m not a betting man, but I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t put too much on our odds. But the alternative is to roll over and give up.”
“What about the Lankies?” I ask. “If they go in and out of this place, they must have some foothold here.”
“I think we can probably rule out that planet,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. “These things are tough, but this is a dark system. No sun, no heat. No light. It’s not the best place to sustain life. We know they like it warm.”
“If they are here, we will deal with them as we come across them,” the CO says. “We have a mission, and we have a plan. The clock is ticking, so let’s get back to work. There’s never been less time to waste than now.”
“If I can make a suggestion, the STT has four Blackfly drop ships sitting in the hangar for covert missions,” I say. “We could use them for a scouting run toward that planet. Get a better picture without putting the ship at risk.”
“What can the drop ships do that the drones can’t without risking a crew?” the XO asks.
“They don’t need a data link back to the ship, for one. And they can carry a lot more hardware. We can put a full recon package on the pylons and see a lot more than a drone could.”
“That is a very long haul for a drop ship,” Colonel Drake says.
I shrug. “The Blackflies have modular cargo holds. We can set them up for a long-range mission pretty easily. Three pilots to trade off on the flight deck, three mission specialists in the back who can take turns at the recon pods. I could bring along two of my combat controller section leaders and switch off with them. They can use external tanks for extra range. And with six people on the ship, we can bring enough water and provisions for weeks.”
“Are you volunteering for the job, Major?” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. “Because that could be a one-way ticket. If you have a critical systems failure out there, we may not be able to send a rescue ship.”
“I know the recon gear on the Blackflies,” I say. “Better than anyone else in the STT. I’m the least likely to have to call back to the barn for help. If we do this mission, I want to be in charge of it.”
Colonel Drake scratches the back of his head. Then he looks over at Colonel Pace.
“Any objections to that plan, CAG?”
The head of the carrier’s space wing shakes his head. “The major is right. A Blackfly loaded up with fuel and a rotating crew has much longer legs than a drone. And we wouldn’t need to keep an uplink active. They could go out there and snoop around with passive sensors, then come back and report. Probably best to keep the EM emissions to an absolute minimum until we know what we’re facing out here.”
“And if they run into unfriendly neighbors?” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell asks.
“Then we’ll just lose a drop ship and six people instead of the whole carrier,” I say. “And you will all know which way not to go.”
Colonel Drake ponders my reply for a few moments.
“All right,” he says. “Get your team together and prep one of the Blackflies for long-range reconnaissance. I’ll give you a provisional go for the mission, but you will wait until the recon drones are back in the barn. Get ready for skids-up in eighteen hours.”
“Aye, sir,” I reply.
“Any particular reason why you’re eager to stick your head out on this one?” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell asks. “I mean, not that I don’t appreciate the commitment.”
“I’m not good at sitting on my hands and waiting for stuff to happen to me,” I say. “I want to find a way home soon. Because my wife will be livid if I get back from this deployment a few thousand years late.”
The sandwich before the briefing wasn’t nearly enough to fill the hole in my stomach, so I head down to the chow hall to get a proper breakfast. The officers’ mess is in the middle of its end-of-watch serving shift, so it’s busy with mostly junior officers coming off their duty stations and grabbing a meal before heading for their bunks. I stand in line with the lieutenants and captains and get a plate of hash and eggs along with a mug of black Fleet coffee. It can’t hold a candle to the coffee Chief Kopka serves at his restaurant, but right now it’s just what I need, and the knowledge that we may soon run out of the stuff makes it taste twice as good as it usually does as I take my first sip while still at the dispenser.
When I look around for a place to sit, I spot a familiar face at one of the tables. Lieutenant Colonel Campbell is seated by herself, with a respectful buffer of several chairs between her and the closest junior officers. As the ship’s XO, she’s the enforcer of the commanding officer, and most younger officers would avoid her even if she wasn’t naturally unapproachable already.
“Mind if I join you?” I ask.
She looks up at me and nods at the seat next to her.
“It’s not my personal mess hall,” she says and returns her attention to the food in front of her.
I sit down and take another sip of my coffee. Then I pick up my fork and take a stab at the hash, which is a little mushy this morning.
“When did you start boxing?” I ask.
“At the Fleet academy,” she says. “I was looking for cardio that wouldn’t bore the shit out of me. Some guy in my year told me I’d be good at boxing because of my reach. How about you?”
“SIMAP,” I say. “Started sparring with the grunts on deployments. Ended up liking the challenge of the competition.”
“Hmm,” she says.
We eat in silence for a little while. Just when I’ve decided to finish my food without trying to engage her in more conversation, she clears her throat.
“You did all right on Willoughby,” she says. “That was a hairy run. I can’t believe you took a civvie along for the ride. I thought for sure she’d get herself killed.”
“She did well,” I reply. “And she’s not a civvie.”
“Yeah, yeah. They’re officers, I know. But they only get their commission so they’re subject to the UCMJ and all the military regs. She’s a civvie. And taking her along was a bad call. Even if she did get eyes on that new Lanky-eating critter for the bio-division.”
“She bought herself nightmares for a while. I tried to warn her.”
“You brought them all back, so there’s that,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. “You clearly know your business. An
d you weren’t strutting around like a peacock after. So maybe I was unfairly harsh with you after that first command briefing. But I’m still not looking to make friends, Major.”
“I thought the XO wasn’t allowed friends,” I say. “Read that one in the regulations.”
“You got that right,” she says.
“We don’t have to be friends. Just don’t jump my ass unless I deserve it.”
She glances at me and takes another bit of her food.
“Are you still going to work out, or are you going to save the calories now that we are on borrowed time?”
“I’ll still hit the bag,” I say. “Gotta let off steam somehow without collecting a court-martial.”
I see the faintest hint of a smile on her face.
“You should come to the gym around 1030, then. None of the oak leaves on this ship seem to know how to hold a heavy bag or a set of punching mitts. And the junior officers are too afraid they might punch the XO by accident.”
She finishes her food with one last bite and washes it down with a swig of her coffee. Then she gets up and picks up her tray.
“I’ll see you later, Major.”
I watch with a little smile as she crosses the floor of the mess hall, ignoring the junior officers that alter their course when they spot her while trying not to be obvious about it.
We can roll over and give up, I think. Or we can keep forging on and see what happens. And maybe it turns out that we were wrong about the odds after all.
CHAPTER 24
CARRYING ON
The XO is already in the gym when I walk in. It’s the first hour after the watch change, so there are a few more people than usual on the weight and cardio machines, but the boxing area is empty except for Lieutenant Colonel Campbell. She has her long dark hair tied back in a ponytail, and once again I am struck by how much she resembles her father.
She tosses me a set of speed pads, and I catch them as they sail toward my face.
“Your father once chewed me out because he thought I was showboating,” I say as I undo the straps and squeeze my hands into the mitts. “It appears you have that in common with him.”
“Really,” she says.
“I was reporting to him when I got aboard Versailles,” I say. “He was the XO. Thought I had spruced up my smock because I was fresh out of tech school and wearing a valor award and a Purple Heart.”
“I assume they were legit because you’re still here,” she says. “He’d have people kicked out with a dishonorable discharge for wearing unearned awards.”
“They were legit,” I confirm. “I was a lateral transfer from the Territorial Army. But for a second or two, I was still scared shitless.”
I finish wrapping the straps around my wrists and hold up the punching surfaces for Lieutenant Colonel Campbell to try out. She’s tall and strong, but now she shows that she also has the speed to go with the strength and the reach. She hits the pads with a fast combination of strikes, then another, pulling her hands back into a perfect guard position in between combos. I vary the position of the pads and the sequence of the presentation—high, low, sideways, one hand, both hands. She shifts her combinations smoothly, with good footwork and no wasted movements. For a while, we are circling each other, and the only sounds from our corner of the gym are the XO’s hard breathing and the slaps of her gloves on the striking surfaces of the pads. Some of the junior officers on the machines nearby have slowed or paused their own sets to watch the ship’s second-in-command lay waste to some punching pads. Finally, she wears herself out for a little while, and she gestures for me to pull off the pads and switch it up.
I peel the pads off my hands and wait while she catches her breath. Then she tosses me the light gloves and takes the speed pads in exchange.
“Don’t hold back,” she says when she has slipped the mitts onto her hands and secured the straps.
She presents the pads, and I launch into my own workout. I can tell that she does her best to replicate the combos I made her do—high and low, straights and uppercuts, hooks and crosses, alternating sides. To a bystander, it doesn’t look as ferocious or impressive as a heavy bag workout, but it’s just as tiring. Three minutes in the ring is an eternity, but three minutes of full effort on the mitts feels even longer than a proper fight. By now, we are definitely the center of attention in the gym, even if the junior officers in the room aren’t staring outright.
“Good,” Campbell says when I finally pull back to catch my breath. “Take a breather. Heavy bag next?”
Overhead, the 1MC signal sounds, and all movement in the gym pauses.
“All hands, this is the commander. Listen up, everyone.
“Twelve hours ago, we entered Alcubierre while engaged with a Lanky seed ship. The Alcubierre field we entered was not our own, as some of you may already suspect. I have held off on sharing the complete details with you until now to allow our recon drones to do a full survey of our surroundings.
“The hard truth is this: We are in uncharted space. The Lanky’s Alcubierre bubble transported us a distance of nine hundred light-years. We are presently in the constellation of Corvus, far away from Earth or any human colony. We engaged and destroyed the seed ship that got us here, so we are no longer in immediate danger. But now we are facing the prospect of having to find a way out of this place.
“We have made this journey without the rest of the battle group, so we have no backup, no resupply, and no support. But this ship is built for long missions in unfriendly space, so we are equipped for exactly this sort of task. Furthermore, we have located a nearby planet, so there may be a watering hole around here somewhere.
“That is the situation. It is challenging, but it is not hopeless. I expect everyone to do their duty to the utmost of their abilities. We depend on each other more than ever now. Work hard and be kind to each other, and do not lose heart. We are about to do things that no ship in the Fleet has ever done before. We’re going to see things no human eye has ever seen before. And then we are going to go home and tell the rest of the world about it.
“Carry on. Commander out.”
The XO and I look at each other.
“Cat’s out of the bag,” she says. “He had something in there about us being the high-water mark of humanity if we don’t get back home. I’m glad he took that one out in the end. It was a little too depressing.”
“‘High-water mark of humanity’ sounds so much better than We’ll all be dead in a year if this doesn’t work out.”
“I don’t know,” Lieutenant Colonel Campbell says. “Personally, I find the second one a lot more motivating.”
She pulls the pads off her hands and chucks them to the side.
“Well, you heard the man. Carry on. Unless you want to pack it in already.”
I step behind the heavy bag and brace myself against the bottom.
“After you, Colonel,” I say.
She walks over to the edge of the mat and picks up her bag gloves. Then she comes over to the heavy bag and gives me a curt smile.
“Sophie,” she says. “But only in here. Remember, rank doesn’t count when you have gloves on.”
I return the smile, surprised at the amount of pleasure I feel at her extension of this personal courtesy.
“All right, then,” I say. “After you, Sophie.”
There are no day and night cycles on a spaceship, but we still think of the day in relation to the clock even in the absence of light and dark skies because we’re used to it. For some reason, I always think of the flight deck as a nighttime environment even though it’s the most brightly lit place in the entire ship. Maybe it’s because the huge open space reminds me of the plazas between the PRC high-rises, flooded with artificial light in the evening hours when people come out for entertainment and socializing. Whenever I am on one of the nighttime watches, I like to step out on the flight deck before I go up to the CIC just to soak in the atmosphere a little and pretend I’m in a bustling city again.
To
night, the flight deck is quieter than usual. A few ammunition handlers and refueling guys are using the vast expanse for running laps between rows of parked attack craft. There’s maintenance going on as always, and on the far end of the deck, the armed Ready Five drop ships are waiting silently below their docking clamps, standing by to be called upon even in the absence of a planet within five hundred million kilometers. Rumor has it that the next generation of carriers will include some sort of atmospheric exclusion field that can let drop ships and Shrikes pass through while keeping air in, and then we’ll be able to have carriers with decks that are open to space and don’t need drop hatches anymore. I am looking forward to that development mainly because then every flight deck will have a perpetual view of space.
Halfway down the deck, near the area where we set up our obstacle course, I see a familiar face in the middle of a group of deckhands. It’s the technician I met shortly after I got on board. The group is standing around a piece of equipment on the deck, and as I get closer, I see that it’s one of the deployment drones for the new optical Arachne system sensors, the ones the tech called “Wonderballs.”
“Technician Fisher,” I say when I join the group. “At ease,” I add as some of the deckhands start their supplication ritual when they see my rank insignia.
“Major Grayson,” Callista Fisher says. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I’ve been okay,” I say. “All things considered. How about you?”
“I’m not wild about the fact that my six-month commitment seems to have turned into a possible nine-hundred-year commitment,” she says. “Other than that, things are pretty okay here, too. All things considered.”
I point at the deployment drone that’s sitting on a maintenance rack. The access hatch on one side is open all along the drone, exposing a payload bay that stretches for most of the length of the device. Much of the bay is empty except for two nooks that have translucent containers in them. A third container of the same kind is sitting on the floor next to the drone. Inside I can see a pile of metal tabs.
