The Belt Loop _Book One

by Robert B. Jones

  “Doc, how can I get out of here? I need to supervise what you’re doing over there.”

  The image on her comm stack shifted to the weary face of the ship’s surgeon. “You get that temperature down, I’ll see what I can do. Meanwhile, the captain is on my neck about this. He saw the feeds from that sleep chamber and didn’t like what he saw. As a matter of fact, he was reluctant to bring these creatures out of there. You have to admit, some hellatious fighting went on in that sleep chamber. Looks to me like the birds got the worst of it. I personally think that once we find out what happened, it’ll make our jobs a whole hell of a lot easier. There are some on the bridge that want me to poison the lot of them.”

  Gertz was crushed. The greatest find of her career was going to be flushed down the drain by a bunch of war mongers parading around in their fine uniforms and deciding the fate of an innocent species? But then the thought struck her: which species was the innocent one? The birds or the worms?

  “Okay, okay. I’m just saying, go slow. That’s all I’m suggesting,” Gertz said.

  “Duly noted,” Isaacs shot back. “How’re you coming with that bird?”

  She tried not to let her frustration color her reply. “Slow. I’m taking my sweet-ass time over here. Trying to understand these creatures, trying to use some kind of scientific method, you know?”

  A grunt from Isaacs. “I’ll come by at 1400 hours and scan you again. Maybe you’ll be ready to join us by then,” he said.

  Milli Gertz did not reply. Instead she turned the comm link off and sat in the nearest chair. She was at a loss, didn’t know what to do.

  Her injured arm started to throb. Not wanting to break containment again, she thought it best to ignore the pain and keep her suit on. But the drugs were wearing off and her arm was really starting to hurt, really deserving at least a quick look.

  She got up from the chair and walked over to the closet where the spare evo suits were stored. She went in and sealed the hatch behind her. It took two minutes for her to remove her helmet, her gloves, and the breathing gear from her back. She hit the stud at her collar to release the mag seals on the front of the suit and slowly peeled the garment from her upper body. Gingerly she eased her injured appendage out and looked at the bandage on her forearm. Using her other hand she picked at a corner of the surgical tape and yanked it off. The gauze fell away towards her wrist and she looked at the sutured wound.

  That’s when she fainted.

  Chapter 25

  After a grueling sixteen-hour shift Max Hansen left the worm on the next boat back to the Christi and looked forward to some down time. She needed food, a shower, and a few hours’ sleep. She wanted out of her evo suit in the worst way and even considered trashing her body suit underneath instead of putting it in the laundry bag. Overall she just felt dirty and used up and tired of using those little porta-potty compartments the men had set up on the bridge of that alien ship.

  She took a seat near the forward port bulkhead and watched as the boat’s pilot made the necessary preparations to shove off from the docking collar they had erected on the flank of the worm. There were about twenty other sailors on the boat and they all displayed the slumped-shouldered countenance of men and women pushed to their collective limits. The trip back to the mother ship was only a ten minute ride and Max counted on using the time to get her mind back into some semblance of normalcy.

  Her last hour on the worm had been a nightmare. That kid Mols had pretty much taken over the bridge and was running to and fro like a kid on Halloween with three empty candy bags. But she had to give the young ranking credit: she did, indeed, know what she was doing. She found out how to work most of the instrumentation on the alien bridge, found out how to get the intraship comm link going, found out how to decipher the inscriptions on most of the control panels and had at last found what was thought to be the ship’s log. Max didn’t want to hang around any longer than she had to after that. It was hilarious to watch Mols ordering her superiors around like toy soldiers but there was something about her supreme confidence that negated any blowback from the shift’s lieutenant commander. Mols’s accomplishments overshadowed her lack of respect for Navy protocol.

  But, hilarious as it was to watch, she’d had enough. She had to get back and check on Harold.

  This wasn’t the first time that her duties had left Har on his own. Once, a year ago, the Corpus Christi had been involved in some kind of Fleet exercise, some silly war game drill that had lasted two days. She was pushed to her physical limit and by the time she’d returned to Har’s hidey-hole, the boy was not there. He had been off exploring and when he finally made it back, he showed her a backpack full of belongings that really didn’t belong to him. He told her at the time he was rummaging through the waste dump, trying to find stuff to play with before the pile was turned back into its raw atoms.

  A thin smile leaked across her face as she reminisced about the dirty bedraggled little boy that hugged her around both legs when she’d tried to scold him. He was growing up so fast and even though she had him with her, Max often wondered if she was doing the right thing by him. Suddenly her head started to ache. Too much input, she told herself. Max tried to relax and since she couldn’t rub her tired eyes or her throbbing forehead, she just slumped back in the webbed seat and looked forward to the short trip back to the Christi. She had done what they asked her to do, she had brought the alien ship’s bridge back to life. Now it was time to relax.

  The lifeboat shuddered away from the worm and flew almost straight up the side of the derelict. It made a couple of course corrections to avoid the drones that were buzzing around the topside of the worm and heeled over to starboard and the Corpus Christi, a kilometer-long gray and silver ghost shimmering blue in the starlight from thousands of bloated blue giant suns in the Belt Loop.

  Max closed her eyes and slept.

  * * *

  While his mother took her catnap on the lifeboat Har Hansen struggled to breathe. He had managed to explore the twenty meter section of air duct for another way out but had found none. He was smart enough to know that the more he moved, the more he struggled, the faster the air in the duct would be exhausted. Man, why hadn’t he done something? He realized that these ducts had partitions and that, depending on the parts of the ship that had to be exposed to vacuum, he would run the risk of suffocating if he got isolated in a duct with both ends sealed.

  He didn’t have any reliable way to figure out his next move. Maybe he should have tried to put some kind of obstruction in the closing seal, maybe he could have stuck one of his bottles of water in the opening before it had fully closed. But he didn’t. He didn’t have time.

  These stupid vents were opening and closing all the time. They must have evacuated all the air from one of the hangar bays, he figured. Since they didn’t waste any air on the ship, they must have wanted to suck it into some kind of air tank and use it later. That was about as complicated as his thinking on the subject got. No matter what the big guys up top did with his air, unless he found a way out of this duct in a hurry, he would probably wind up a dead boy. Years later when this piece of shit ship went to the salvage yards they would find his desiccated body, curled up into one of those fetal positions he had read about, nothing but skin and bones wearing a back pack. But of course he wouldn’t let that stuff happen to him.

  He took out his M2-A2 UAW and looked it over for the millionth time. He liked the way the weight of the gun pulled his hand down. He looked at the stud on the side and studied the selector switch.

  Har took a sip of precious air and decided he would just blast his way out.

  Just put the contacts on the end of the gun against the side of the ductwork and pull the trigger. Make a little hole in the duct so he could get some air. But wait. He had no way of knowing what was on the other side of the duct wall. What if it was just vacuum? What if he put a hole in the duct and all of the remaining air on his side of the hole was sucked away? Would it try to suck him out too? He
had read of grown-up people sucked out into space through even the tiniest of holes. Clothes, flesh, bones, even their skulls. Crushed and sucked out of existence and there was nothing they could do to stop it. Even if he tried to put his backpack in the way, the hole would suck that thing out too.

  Maybe that stuff his mother had told him about decompression was full of bull. She was certain the only thing one would have to worry about was ruptured blood vessels, burst lungs and such, but Har had convinced himself that the effects were much worse than that based on all of his reading. She had even told him of cases where people had actually survived rapid decompression and had fully recovered.

  What to do?

  A small tear worked its way out of the corner of his left eye. He was disappointed that his high-adventure would come down to this sad ending. Either dead and forgotten in an air duct or sucked unceremoniously out into vacuum, killed before he had his chance to fight the aliens.

  Breathing was getting more difficult. He hefted the gun in both hands now. Didn’t he read in one of his space books about people faced with two undesirable fates being able to op for a third? He pressed the end of the gun to the side of his neck and thought about what it would feel like, wondered if he would even feel anything. Would he smell his burning flesh? Would he hear the angry sound of crackling electricity? Would it kill him right away or would he have to linger in some kind of suspended animation until his heart finally got the message that his brain was dead? And what about the part where he got a glimpse of his whole life flashing before his eyes? How would there be time for all of that stuff?

  Killing himself made no sense. It was much more complex that getting sucked out to space through a little hole and far less preferable to him than simply suffocating.

  He was undecided. He didn’t know what to do.

  So he just put the gun down and stretched his tired frame into a prone position and closed his eyes. Just like his mom, he slept.

  Fortunately for Har, events out of his control would intervene on his behalf. Things unfolding in another part of the ship — very important events — would make the difficult decisions for him.

  * * *

  The time had come and Eddie Rich was ready. He had recalibrated one of the drones without drawing attention to his deceit. The whole ship was a beehive of activity and his little trip up to the flight deck had gone practically unnoticed. It hadn’t taken much time at all to switch out one of the navigation modules used for one of the MK-34c drone ships.

  Now all he had to do was use the little transmitter he had stored in the weapons locker and transmit the proper codes to the soon-to-be-hijacked drone. It was his simple plan that was sure to have a spectacular effect on the Christi and all of its moribund officers.

  Once he used the drone to “attack” the ship, he would be hailed as the hero of the worm war by launching his baby in retaliation. His baby, his weapon of worm destruction, his revenge on the powers-that-be that had so uncaringly ignored him and his talents. More than likely he would die in his plot. He was prepared for that eventuality. He didn’t care.

  Going down fighting was more important to him than living as a shell of a man. He had given the Navy so much and now it was time for them to give him something in return.

  What did he want?

  Their attention.

  * * *

  Captain Uri Haad slept fitfully. His ragged dreams were full of death and destruction and most of the images in them had started out with his family members then morphed into officers he’d served with and they promptly changed to dying aliens with fierce claws and gigantic mouths filled with serrated teeth.

  After three hours spent wrinkling the sheets on his bunk he finally gave up and refreshed himself with a quickie shower and shave. Then, feeling better, he donned a clean uniform.

  Haad looked at the chronometer on his comm stack. It showed ship’s time as 1544 hours. A yeoman from the officer’s mess hailed him and wondered if he would be gracing the mess hall for dinner. He respectfully declined and asked for a light meal to be sent up to his cabin. After listening to his options the captain settled on a green salad and fresh-baked bread. He would top off the meal with a glass of wine. Spirits were rare on a starship and beer and wine were offered to the crew infrequently. Studies by the Navy’s behavioral scientists had shown that booze, broads and ballistic weapons were not a comfortable fit. Still, to help bolster morale and prevent petty disagreements aboard ship, he would authorize limited beer consumption for the ratings whenever possible. He tended to govern his own alcohol use by another set of rules. He was the captain, a position earned with blood and guts and he could drink what- and when-ever he damned well pleased.

  No matter. He checked the feed from the worm on his stack and first looked at the alien derelict ship hanging in the void like a long limp finger. Next he caught the feed from sick bay. Then the bridge of the worm. Then the exobiology lab. Then the —

  The last time he had looked in on Milli Gertz she had been waltzing around that alien carcass as if she was participating in some kind of mating ritual. Now the room was empty. Odd, with her being restricted to the containment lab. He punched the comm stack for sick bay.

  “Doctor Isaacs, Captain Haad. Pick up.”

  “Captain Haad, Ensign Tan here. Doc is right in the middle of something. Can I relay a message?”

  Haad was not used to being put off by his senior crew. “Tell him that I need to talk to him soonest, ensign.”

  “Stand by, one,” she said. Haad used that opportunity to activate all the feeds from sick bay, segmenting them onto his large display on the bulkhead to the side of his small desk. He saw the row of alien pods stretched out in a line on the containment-field side of the bay and plenty of suited techs running back and forth doing things he could only guess about. One of the suited figures was approached by Silvie Tan and they had a suit-to-suit conversation. Finally the other suit shuffled over to the comm stack near the containment hatch.

  “Captain, Isaacs here,”

  “Where is Lieutenant Commander Gertz?” he asked.

  “The last time I saw her, sir, she was still in the exo lab. Inside the containment locker. . .” Isaacs let his voice trail off as if he were trying to remember something to add to his last statement. “Why do you ask?” he said.

  “Pull up the exo feed, Anson. The locker is empty except for our dead friend.”

  He watched as the doctor hit a stud on his comm stack. “Well, I’ll be damned,” Isaacs muttered. “I’m on the way.”

  Haad thought for a second and said, “What’re you guys doing with those aliens retrieved from that ship?”

  Isaacs paused and looked back at the comm stack. “Just routine assessments, for now.”

  “Carry on. Give me a squawk from the exo shop,” Haad ordered.

  Isaacs acknowledged and hurried off to the containment hatches.

  Haad resumed his monitoring of the ship.

  Chapter 26

  Davi Yorn was not pleased. He had found several knots of uniformed personnel gathered around comm stacks in almost every part of the ship. The crew mess, the crew lounge, the weapons bay, hangar bay, stores, electronics, navigation, you name it. He realized that this was a first-time event for a lot of the younger ratings on the Christi but he’d expected better supervision from his chiefs and he let them know about it in harsh terms. He figured that he had broken up seven or eight gab-fests below decks and he had to remind his chiefs and officers to make sure the teams were not neglecting their assigned duties. He directed his NCOs to segregate the on-duty sailors from the looky-loos and directed most of the gawkers to the lounges to see the show instead of clogging up passageways and equipment bunkers to engage in unprofessional talk and rumor-spreading.

  His inspection of the ship brought him into the weapons bay. All seemed normal. He saw a rating weaving in and out of the gun emplacements on the portside of the ship.

  “Mister Rich, how’s your battery’s readiness?” he sai
d as he approached the chief.

  The CPO took a few uneasy steps in Yorn’s direction. “As ready as we’ll ever be, Number One.”

  Yorn looked at his reader. “How’s that number ten gun, Chief Rich? The one you were having a problem with earlier?”

  Rich fidgeted and looked away from the XO. “It’ll be on-line within the hour, sir.”

  “Good. Show it to me,” Yorn said in an off-hand manner. Something about the way the chief was acting sent warning signals to Yorn’s brain. Was the chief hiding something? Was there a problem here that he should know about?

  “Ahh, sir, I —”

  “What is it? What’s going on back there?”

  Eddie Rich felt trapped. There was no way that he could let Yorn get any further into the battery. If he saw the last gun still covered with the tarp he would demand to look beneath. That was not an option.

  “Just a little problem with the targeting circuit, sir. I assure you that it will be taken care of soonest.”

  “Might I remind you that you said the same thing four hours ago. What’s the problem, chief?”

  Damn. There was only one thing for the chief to do. “Let’s go back, I’ll show you,” he said, ushering Yorn to go ahead of him.

  Yorn walked past the fidgeting chief and headed for the last emplacement in the row. He noticed the gun was still under wraps. He made some notes into his reader. What he didn’t notice was Rich unholstering his heavy M2-A2. Yorn was about to turn his head back to the chief to ask him a question when the lights went out and he crumpled to the deck.

  * * *

  COB Osca Penny knocked once on the door to the captain’s ready room.

  “Come.”

  Haad and Penny exchanged a few pleasantries and discussed the upcoming funeral for the three men that had recently been killed on the worm. Penny decided to decline another invitation to speak at the services, deferring to another officer that had known the three a little more intimately than he had. After five minutes of routine quotidian talk, Chief Penny got around to what had really brought him to the captain.