The Belt Loop _Book One

by Robert B. Jones

  “For the duration, Mister Hansen,” Haslip said sharply. “I’m taking you with me in LB-03 to the alien ship.”

  What? Was she hearing this right?

  “The captain seems to think that you can bring your considerable experience to bear on the worm, assuming that we can get into the control room or the bridge or whatever serves as the head end of that fucking thing,” Haslip rattled off.

  Max’s eyes never left Yorn’s face. This was unexpected. This was the adventure she had craved after falling victim to the slick recruiting pitch she had heard at the Navy Recruiting Station on Elber some nine years ago. But how could she ever leave the ship, leave Har?

  “You look perplexed, Mister Hansen,” Yorn said, circling the table. “Problems?”

  “No. . . I, I —”

  A grunt from Haslip, then she said, “You’re the communications expert? What’s the service coming to?”

  “Stow that talk, Gena. This is Captain Haad’s wish. Make it so,” the commander said. When she started to stutter a reply, he held up a hand. “Do you have problems with the captain’s orders, Lieutanant Commander Haslip?”

  Haslip’s shoulders slumped. “No, sir, I do not,” she said.

  “I didn’t think so. You have one hour to get your team assembled and ready to launch. Your equipment has been pre-loaded and the boat awaits your command.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Haslip said.

  Commander Yorn headed for the forward hatch and turned before he left the wardroom. “Get your gear ready, Lieutenant Hansen, and report to hangar bay two at 1645 hours in your evo suit. And, by the way,” he said wistfully, “stop by the armorer and draw a side arm.”

  And he was gone. Haslip seemed to flounder in his wake as he left the room and she just stared at the hatch with less-than-loving eyes. Then her gaze settled on Max and her penetrating eyes grew darker.

  * * *

  Lieutenant (j.g.) Jared Volta huddled close to the wall of the cargo hold on the alien ship. Singh and Gilroy had wandered away for a few minutes and left him to cower near the spot where Gunny Ryon had hit the deck. The splatter of gore painted a dark picture of destruction for several meters around the spot. Volta refused to look at it and wished he was back on the Christi playing poker with his friends. Ryon’s blood showed up as black stains on a crystal background; bits of brain and bone stood out like small nebulae in a malestrom of inky black liquid now frozen and hard. It was difficult to differentiate the splinters of shiny faceplate plastic from the fractured pieces of the solidified alien mucus.

  Volta checked the gauges on his suit sleeve and noticed that he only had two hours’ worth of air remaining. Commander Yorn had promised to bring him and the other two a refill pack when he returned with the additional help. Volta hoped that he remembered.

  Staying here on this dead ship was the last thing he had wanted to do but Silvie Tan and Lieutenant Bone had to go back to the ship. Silvie because she had medical training much superior than his own and Bone because he had some recordings the captain wanted to send to Fleet. So Yorn used Tan and Bone to help him with the body and left Gilroy here to protect those left behind. The conversations were not to Volta’s liking and when they started making light of Ryon’s death he elected to retreat to a spot just aft of the rope ladder, just meters away from the death scene.

  Jared Volta was only twenty when he had been graduated from North Umbra University on Elber Prime as a registered nurse. He was young and full of ideals and lofty visions and he desperately wanted to see the galaxy and have adventures he could share with his friends when his tour was up. That was four years ago and after a year at OCS — Officer’s Candidate School — he was assigned to the Corpus Christi as a medical corpsman.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind he still wondered why he had volunteered to come over to the worm and put his life at risk. If Ryon hadn’t pushed past him to get to that damned hatch, it could have been him splattered across this cargo deck. Or, actually, probably splayed out on one of Doctor Isaac’s stainless steel tables with his head in a containment bag.

  “Hey, Volta, get your ass over here and take a look at this,” Gilroy said over his suit mike, displaying his usual disdain for the ship’s officers. To Gilroy, all of the 210X Medical Corps officers were just so much flotsam and jetsam floating on the great river of waste in the Colonial Navy, expendables kept around to support the real Navy guys, those with combat duties. If that fucker ever got hurt and called my name, Volta thought, I’ll get a sudden case of aural displasia or something. Let him bleed out in a heartbeat.

  “What is it? The commander will be back here soon, I’m holding the ladder for them,” Volta said.

  “You want to see what one of them looks like? I mean, one of them aliens?” Gilroy taunted.

  “Follow our lights,” Singh said, “We’re not that far away from you. Just follow our lights. . .”

  Volta held fast and said nothing. He figured they were trying to bait him in a trap of some kind.

  “Jared, come on, man, come take a look!” from Gilroy.

  “If it’s all the same to you Mister Gilroy, I’m doing what I was told. And I’d appreciate it if you would address me properly, understood?” Volta said, suddenly finding a flash of steel in his spine.

  “Oh, yessir, Lieutenant Volta, sir, sorry, sir,” Gilroy mocked him.

  Gilroy had a bad reputation on the Christi as being somewhat of a hot-head and Volta knew that. But he was not going to be bullied or suckered by the rating, no matter what. “Knock it off, petty officer. You’ll find yourself on report if you don’t quit your baiting.”

  The two men were still laughing and snickering. Volta eased away from the wall and doused his suit lights. Enough was enough.

  In the distance he could see by the suit lights from Gilroy and Singh that they were having a good old time at his expense, slapping their gloved hands and dancing around on the deck. He gave them a wide berth and slowly approached them from behind.

  “Aww, come on, Volta, come see the alien. I think she wants to be your friend. The dried up one. She’s just your speed, sir.”

  Volta continued toward the lights, moving like a cat in the dark.

  Gilroy was dancing a little dance and was getting ready to slap high fives with Singh when Volta slipped his right leg between the rating’s legs and grabbed his upper body from behind with one hand and produced a shiny laser-scalpel with the other, making sure the surgical steel handle reflected in the laughing man’s faceplate.

  “You were saying, Mister Gilroy? Something about your mother being here in one of these cages? You say one more disrespectful word and I will slit your pressure suit and watch you sail away like a lost balloon. You got that, you smart-mouthed prick?” Volta sneered.

  Gilroy stood still, his banter suddenly ending in a series of grunts.

  Singh said nothing but his little dance came to a screeching halt and he teetered back and forth in the gloom behind his LED suit lights.

  Volta released his quarry and gave him a slight shove in the back. Gilroy stumbled away a few meters and slid slightly on the glassine surface beneath his feet.

  Had any one of the three of them been paying attention, doing their assigned duties, they would have seen the tiny spark of light that flashed on and off some two hundred meters away, two hundred meters toward the bow of the worm, a light just bright enough to see had they only been looking.

  That small dereliction of duty would end up costing them their lives.

  Chapter 12

  With a heavy heart Lieutenant Commander Vandi Bell looked out over the assembled throng. Bell was the chaplain aboard the Christi and his primary job was to offer spiritual enlightment and personal counseling to the men and women under his wing. Out beyond Elber Prime, the Navy usually dispensed with the multi-denominational postings: one ship, one chaplain — regardless of faith. So his training had included Christian teachings along with Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Determinism doctrines. Bell was a short balding
man in his forties and he did his best to bring a sense of calm to even the most gruesome of events. Today’s service was for Sergeant Michael Barney Ryon, recently departed.

  The recreation room deck was occupied by about three-dozen sailors and marines of all stripes and rankings, assembled in a loose formation around the large steel table beneath the basketball hoop that had been unceremoniously draped with the flag of the Third Colonial Navy Fleet at Elber Prime.

  A similar flag was draped over the stainless steel coffin on the table. Vandi Bell had just finished his soaring oratory about Ryon’s life well-spent and after a traditional moment of silence, he called upon COB Osca Penny to deliver the final eulogy.

  Penny marched to the front of the group and looked out over the throng. The captain was there along with several other line officers, a good showing considering the ship had two lifeboats in the void and another courier boat headed toward Elber. He saw cooks and culinary specialists, radarmen, electrician’s mates, machinist’s mates and others. Satisfied that the group looked respectful enough, he cleared his throat and spoke.

  “I am honored to have been given this opportunity to speak this evening,” he began in a booming voice. “I am honored because Gunny Ryon was my friend and shipmate. Ever since men have gone to the sea, it became apparent that many of them would never return to familiar shores and soft beds. That is the nature of what we do each time we sail.

  “Just because we are in the void sometimes we forget those traditions that have followed us here from our distant Earth: service, honor, and adventure. Those are the three things that I think fulfills a man, and those three things are what makes us proud — not only of ourselves, but of each other.

  “Carrying on this more than one-thousand-year-old tradition, we ply the murky waters of the vacuum with our intrepid mates and never look past the edges of the map, the map that proclaims, ‘Here, there be dragons’. Now we bring our dragons with us, huge fire-breathing leviathans that eat elementary particles and spit out energy. We sail ships brought to life by magnetically-bottled magic; we sail those ships upon deadly waters just as our predecessors have done.

  “But something makes us different, something makes us more willing to turn into the wind instead of running with it. That something is unwavering pride, gentlemen. Pride in one’s calling, pride in one’s duty, and pride in one’s fellow traveler. I know Gunny Ryon had all of those things. And now we show him the ultimate respect by committing his body to the deep. Would that I could go with him. Serve with him again. . . be by his side on the most compelling adventures we all could ever hope to confront. But, alas, I cannot. I have my work here, with you, my mates. When the time comes and I am prepared for my final voyage, I would hope that you orient me on the same vector and course as Gunny Ryon, so that I may follow him into eternity.

  “Thank you all and Godspeed.”

  Penny walked back into the crowd, pausing long enough to shake a couple of hands. Captain Haad whispered a few words to him and Penny nodded his head.

  Next came the piped-in music of the march songs from the Seventh Colonial Marines, the song from the Third Colonial Navy, and finally, the lone bugle wail of Taps.

  The assembly disbursed and several ratings and marines remained in the gymnasium. It would be their solemn duty to escort the body down to hangar bay three and catapult the coffin out into space, burning a hole in the Higgs Field as they did so.

  * * *

  The moaning bugle call served as a wakeup alarm for young Har Hansen. He sat up and hit his head on the top of the air duct. Not hard, but hard enough to shake him out of his deep sleep. He had dreamed of fighting space monsters and he had the most incredible weapons in the universe available at his fingertips, magic guns that could shoot around corners, strange devices that could make him disappear at will, and, of course, plenty of semi-nude space whores to cause a slight stir in his developing gonads.

  But those were only dreams and he knew he had to press on in real life. Heck, he had to pee before pressing on in anything so he crawled to a secluded spot above the corner of the recreation center and relieved himself right in the duct. He knew these airshafts were airtight and sealable but now he was hoping they were also leak proof. No better way of being discovered than a trickle of urine dripping on some rating’s head.

  Crawling away from his makeshift latrine, Har resumed his trek forward. He had no idea what time it was (next time, stupid, bring your watch) and he chastised himself for missing a lot of other essentials he had forgotten to bring with him. Toilet paper being one of them.

  Okay then, he thought, sooner or later I’m going to have to go down to the deck. He pondered his options and decided that if he waited for the right moment, he could scoot down from the overhead in an office or lab, maybe drop onto a desk or table, and look for a head nearby. Maybe even find out more scoop on the alien ship while he was at it. After all, he had command responsibilities to make the ship and the Fleet safe from the intruding monsters, sent here by a wicked overlord, some kind of demon hellbent on taking over the galaxy and eating all the humans. And having sex with our women. That kind of thing would never do, not on my watch, he said to himself.

  * * *

  Seated at his console on the bridge, Captain Haad assessed his situation. The CIC operations specialist was sending him a constant stream of data from the alien ship. Firing solutions came in from the weapons bay and all in all, he was pleased at what he saw. There was no doubt in his mind that, should the situation arise, he could destroy the worm in a matter of seconds.

  He also knew that it would be a tense day-and-a-half of waiting for his answer from the admirals on Elber Prime. But, for now, he was content to sit and read the information streaming its way across his console from the ship’s various sub-units. He hit a few keys and pulled up the ship’s log and made a few annotations as he was required to do. So far he had been on duty for more than sixteen hours since that jarring alert that brought him out of his deep sleep at 0630 hours. He decided to stay on the bridge until the reports started to come in from the freshly augmented S&R team. His curiosity about the worm supplied him with enough adrenalin to make it through a couple of more hours.

  To be on the safe side, he arranged for bridge relief to commence at 2330, and, if nothing else happened to warrant his direct attention, he would retire to his stateroom for a well-deserved rest and a cold shower. His uniform tunic was getting ripe, too, he thought.

  Haad looked at his astrogation panel. The Christi was sixteen parsecs from base, roughly fifty-two inbound light-years away. Elber was 800 light-years from Earth and a line from Earth through Elber would eventually pass through Mintaka and pierce the dark heart of the Flame Nebula, some 700 light-years further out. Only twenty vessels had ventured out to Alnilam and the Fringes beyond. Two of those never returned to port. There were 1,432 planets in his patrol zone, three-quarters of those outbound of his position; his area of concern was populated with 396 star systems for an average density of about seven stars per grid square, with each square being ten parsecs per side. Of those 396 stars, only thirteen percent of them were single-star systems. Most of the suns in this region of space were bloated blue giants, some being many hundred or even thousand times larger than Earth’s feeble sun; many were binary systems, dense white dwarfs orbiting massive red and blue behemoths, sharing coronal gasses and corkscrewing trillions of metric tons of light gasses into space. These systems were off-limits, these were the hellish areas that only the scientists could appreciate, laboratories of fission and fusion so powerful that no ship dared approach, as no shield or field generation was able to withstand the high energy radiation that cooked everything in its wake.

  But he knew that there were enough safe zones available to him. He knew that eventually every ship had a safe haven in the storm of galactic events. Right now, he plotted a few plausable escape routes in his mind, and made mental notes as to what he would do should he have to get out of Dodge in a hurry and find safe harborag
e.

  Haad was just reaching for his coffee cup when he heard his name being called, snapping him out of his reverie.

  “Captain Haad, Commander Yorn.

  “What do you have for me, commander,” he answered dryly.

  “Green team in place. We got all of the gear assembled and functioning in the hold. I sealed up the access tunnel we used for infil, sir, and we’ll have atmosphere shortly. Got the lights on from the portable generators and now we are going to work our way forward. You can get the stream on your tac-two,” Yorn said.

  “Understood, commander.”

  “Uhh, captain, we’re still looking, but there’s no sign of the rankings we left here at the bottom of the rope ladder. Maybe they wandered off somewhere, did a little exploring on their own, but, right now, there’s no sign of them.”

  Haad stood up. “Who’re we talking about, Davi?”

  “That would be a Lieutenant Volta, a Lieutenant Singh, and a Petty Officer Gilroy, sir.”

  “Duly noted,” Haad said. He paced a few feet in front of his command console and looked at the blister. “Keep a tight grip on your men, commander. We don’t need any more accidents in that worm, you copy?”

  “Aye, captain, affirm that. I sent a squad of the new arrivals out to search for them. As you can see from the feeds, this place is huge, sir. Lots of places for them to hide. Or be hidden, if I might add.”

  Shit, this whole op was getting complicated, Haad thought. He had a bad feeling about this. “Keep me posted, Commander Yorn. Bridge out,” he said.

  The captain retreated to his chair and resumed his look at nearby safe havens. He wondered if he would need them.

  * * *

  Max followed Commander Haslip into the darkness. They were almost a hundred meters away from the flurry of activity behind them. This little vanguard knot of men and women were scouting in advance of the main thrust, trying to look for missing men, trying to find a way into the bow of the alien ship. Max had her suit comm unit set volume-low and she voiced it over to Haslip’s command freq.