ROMA

by R. A. Ender

  Robin looked at the silhouette closely. She always hoped to beat the computer to an identification, though, to date, that had never happened. Still, she always played that game. This time, she was completely stumped. Furthermore, from the display, she could tell that it was unlikely an intervening factor was messing up the silhouette, which meant this ship was unknown. As a courtesy, she asked the sensor technician to check for outside factors, but he confirmed that she had read the display accurately.

  “Any thoughts?” Robin asked aloud but directed at her weapons officer. Sara’s short red haired head, descended from her Britannia heritage, was barely visible as she was hunched over her station examining the silhouette. It took a moment for her to turn and answer.

  “Well, it is not very large, so unless it is a completely new advanced species, I doubt it’s a military threat. I think we can proceed without shields for now. But, I’ll have Mato charge up the emitters and bring the coolant systems up in preparation.” And with that, she turned back to her station to send the order down to engineering.

  Robin next turned her attention to Jen. As she walked back to sit in her command chair, she gave her orders. “Jen, plot a course to bring us within active sensor range in the next two hours. We still have almost 10 hours in this patrol, so no rush. Make it very casual, in case they’re watching us.”

  “No problem,” came the response from Jen, and the stars began to curve toward the left side of the display screen showing what the forward sensor hub was receiving.

  Robin sat down in the command chair and tapped her chin for a moment. Oh well, I guess a Captain’s job is never done, she thought to herself. And with that thought over, she pushed the sequence of buttons which would alert the Captain to contact the command deck immediately.

  CHAPTER 3

  Come on you stupid piece of junk! Mato thought to himself as he put all his weight into tightening the energy transmission lines insulation tube.

  He never complained about his ship with two big exceptions. When he had to prep her for battle, he always complained in his head. When he was in a battle, he always complained out loud. And very loud at that.

  I’ll never understand why the computer has to be rigged with such tight safety protocols, he thought. If the tube is a little loose it doesn’t matter! But, Mato couldn’t write computer programs and he was not going to trust any of his young crew members to do it. Instead, he did what he had done for the past fifteen years as Chief Engineer of the Churchill, improve the physical mechanics of the ship to make her the best in the fleet and suffer under the digital tyranny of Defense Force designers.

  Having tightened the insulation tube as best he could, he picked up his handcomm and opened the line back to the main engineering board.

  “Can you guys try to engage shield coil 23 again. I tightened that tube as best I can.”

  A garbled acknowledgment quickly followed and then silence. It was always difficult to have clear communication in the engine room itself. The amount of interference that the three massive graviton fusion reactors created was incredible.

  And yelling in the engine room was out of the question. The engines were not exactly whisper-quiet, and on top of that, they created a constant thrumping vibration when they ran. Additionally, the engine room was simply massive. The length of three stadiums, with more equipment, gangways, and monitoring stations than the rest of the ship combined, communicating using your voice, even shouting, was impossible.

  At the moment, it was especially bad. The instant the battle preparation alert had come from the command deck, all six engines needed to be brought up to readiness for full performance. Although they were always ready to drive the ship at maximum speed, being directly connected to the reactors, the defensive systems were another story. With hundreds of transmission lines connected to each engine to draw power from the reactors, feeding all the RPLs, Bolos cannons, and most importantly, the shield emitter coils, it was a task to activate each line. Though the computer turned them all on, even the smallest safety violation required a visual inspection, adjustment, and reactivation. This ramp up had actually been one of the best, having to visually inspect only 51 lines. That said, it was still time-consuming work.

  Mato didn’t entirely mind. It gave him a chance to walk down the engine room, climb the ladders and gangways, and get on top of and touch his engines. Few things in life made him happier. His enjoyment was interrupted though by a wiredcomm unit flashing next to the monitor station he was standing beside.

  Reaching over, he picked up the call. “Yup?” He asked, knowing it would be the main engineering board calling.

  “Sir, we tried the handcomm and couldn’t get through. The line reactivated, it is reading as 100%.” The young man on the other end of the line was to the point and didn’t seem overly concerned about having to use the wiredcomm. Despite being wired, the sound was so bad that Mato could not even identify who was calling even though he worked side by side with the crew on a daily basis.

  “Good. Which line is next?” He asked, expecting a numeric response and already checking the time to see if they had fallen behind schedule.

  “Someone else will have to handle it. Your wife is here and she says she’s taking you back to your quarters for a date. Move your ass!” Despite the bad line, some laughter came through the wiredcomm.

  Mato just shook his head. Always with the jokes about marriage! He thought to himself. And although at first, years ago, it had bothered him, he had come to realize over time the root cause.

  Unlike Mato, the vast majority of the crew was unattached. Even the minority that was, none had their significant other with them on board ship. That meant that at best it would be six months before any of them saw their loved ones. A lot of times a returning crewmember who had been excited and hopeful when they debarked and returned home, came back to duty newly single. Defense force life was very hard on relationships.

  The first month back was always tough, with a lot of crewmembers visiting medical with emotional problems. Being married to Etu, the Chief of Medical Services on board the Churchill, Mato heard many sad tales. Tales which added to existing malaise many crewmembers experienced from time to time when they reviewed their own bleak personal lives. The morning meeting and breakfast with the senior staff often descended into laments for the better life in the next valley over. As the cruise neared its conclusion, these laments often became quite mournful.

  Etu had always cautioned Mato to hold his tongue, and just be there to listen. She always said the jokes, the kidding and sometimes the pointed criticisms were just a means for emotional release, and since they were the only married couple on board ship, it was to be expected that they would bear the brunt of those emotional outbursts.

  Mato was not always one for such joking, especially while a crisis was developing. But added stress often required a more frequent emotional release. Mato had long ago adjusted himself to roll with the punches, and usually only spoke up when the jokes continued for too long. To date, he had only thrown one crewmember in the ship jail for insubordination. That incident had almost come to blows, but being Gemberlican, his diminutive size tended to save him from being assaulted. There was little glory in beating up someone half your size.

  Defense Force was not ignorant to the stress of long cruises. That was why no ship during peace times had a cruise which exceeded a year. Most were only six months, and regardless, the crew was always guaranteed three months in dock between cruises. Most crew with families had them living on the planet to which their ship was permanently attached. That gave a lot of time together, and more importantly, a guaranteed schedule to organize their life around.

  Even so, turnover of crew due to emotional and family desires was high. It was the number one reason that people left Defense Force. And who could blame them? The thought of being away from Etu for months at a time was quite saddening for Mato. He had always been thrilled that Captain Hilbornus kept them together despite some pressure from above to
not have two senior staff members intimately involved.

  Defense Force had attempted, many decades ago, to have families travel together. As technology permitted ship space frames to accommodate ever more comfortable living quarters, a family first policy had been instituted and tested. The result was not surprising. Personal conflicts affected ship operations, and the medical staff charged with the crew's emotional wellbeing were overwhelmed. It seemed to create more negatives than the problem it was attempting to alleviate did.

  But the true reason it failed was a public relations problem. How do you convince the public that it is okay to have children in war zones? Every Defense Force ship, by its very nature, is a movable war zone. And people die in war zones. The crew may understand and accept the risk to their children to fulfill what they feel is a greater good for their family, but the Mom living on Tionaga or the Father living on Claudius, might not agree. And when the first two-year-old little girl comes off a Defense Force ship in a casket, her picture would be splashed across every annal throughout the Confederacy. The Admiralty knew it was a death sentence for the program. So, they pulled it quickly before that happened.

  Mato and Etu had never had children. He had often thought about how they would have dealt with that situation. Likely, they would have both resigned their commissions and moved planet side, somewhere where they could both gain employment using the valuable skills they acquired in the service. He would have missed his engines and his ship dearly, but his children would have come first. They would have made him very happy.

  But, the spirit of the forest had other designs for us, he thought to himself with some sadness.

  That thought snapped him back to the present and the curiosity of his wife coming to Engineering. Though it was permitted for the Chief Medical Services Officer to visit engineering, he couldn’t recall a time she had. He also realized that given the battle prep that had to be going on in medical, the odds that she was there were none.

  Stupid land walking idiots, fooling around at a time like this. Mato thought with a flash of anger.

  Grabbing the wiredcomm unit in his hand, “You fools have nothing better to do than joke during battle prep? There are always fun jobs I can find for each of you land walking idiots, just say the word!” He spat out with an even but firm tone.

  He could hear some laughing before he heard the Captain’s voice come over the unit. “Mato, I put them up to it. Can you come back to the main board as soon as possible? Sorry to bug you.”

  Even through the static, Mato could hear and picture the Captain’s half smile. He was the only voice that could have allowed Mato not to stew all the way back to the main board on the gravlift and boil over on whoever made the joke when he got back. Mato quickly acknowledged the request, climbed down the ladders and turned the gravlift back toward the main engineering board station.

  The ride was smooth as a gravlift always was, floating on the faint hum of its lift coils. As it approached its destination, Mato could make out the Captain speaking with several crewmembers that were monitoring engineering stations. They were in the middle engine room, positioned in the middle of the twenty-story high wall to the engine room. It was a small cut out of the wall, with six individual stations, each positioned to face down the long engine room. A ladder led from the middle of the small indented room, down a tunnel, to the floor of the engine room. It was the only way onto the engine room floor. Originally it had been positioned on the wall itself, but after a few injuries from falls, a tunnel concept had been created. Only a few slips resulting in minor injuries had occurred since then which was a lot better than falling eight stories to a floor.

  The room could be sealed off from the engine room itself by shielding, a transparent door or a heavy duty complete seal door. Usually, there was only a railing between the main board and the open air of the engine room. But that was a preference of the crew. Like their chief, they liked to be as close to the engines as possible.

  To get in or out of the main board station was a single door in the back wall which was always sealed unless someone was entering or exiting. A window in the door allowed those on the main board to see down the hallway, but someone approaching could not see engineering until they opened the door. A security feature which Mato had not once used, and hoped never to need.

  The hallway was just large enough for two crewmembers to slide by each other if both were turned sideways. The preference was simply for a one-way transit at a time. Again, a security feature. It was hard to invade and establish control of an engine room if the soldier needs to enter single file. Plus, at least fifty engineering staff is on duty in each engine room, along with a fully stocked armory.

  The hallway had a second purpose as well. The entire hallway could be sealed, from one end to the other, with a solid piston located inside the ship itself. If the piston was activated, it was pushed into the hallway, and once in place, it secured itself using a self-generated magnetic field that held it firmly in place. The system was powerful enough to survive an internal and external graviton fusion detonation and not be moved. The protection this offered to the populated parts of the ship from any kind of engine room disaster was important. It was standard training to review a small handful of examples from other ships where the system had saved many lives.

  All three engine rooms were designed in exactly the same way, each a mirror image of the other. That said, Mato favored the middle engine room as his main station. It was simply a practical decision, the middle room faced reactor one and engine one and two, which were used for primary navigation in space. The other two reactors and four engines, though always running, were never fully powered unless traveling through Hyper or Olympus space or during battle. So, the chief engineer preferred to stay where he was most needed.

  As the gravlift approached its destination, Mato stepped off which immediately stopped the gravlift’s forward momentum. He walked inside the tunnel and climbed up the ladder with practiced ease. The tunnel up was clear, as it usually was during an engineering shift. Only time congestion happened was during a shift change, and that was usually orderly, new crew down, old crew up. The only time it got mixed up was the first day of a new crew, someone always became the engine room joke for a week for messing up and getting stuck in the tunnel heading the wrong way.

  As Mato climbed up onto the main deck, the Captain offered his hand to help him up. It was a common gesture and always taken as a sign of comradeship, but no engineer ever accepted. It was simply a tradition.

  “How are we looking?” Captain Hilbornus asked as Mato stood up. The Captain, as always, appeared to be all business, except for his half smile which always betrayed his true thoughts when he spoke with his senior staff. We’ve been together fifteen years, Mato thought. There is no serious formality left between us.

  But, the business question still needed an answer. Mato approached one of the stations, punched a few monitors to get the answer.

  “We only have three lines to get online. One shield coil is being replaced, along with three cooling units. The rotating pulse lasers are one hundred percent but one of the Bolos cannons is offline. It will not be ready. If you’ll recall, that is the cannon below the medical imagery section. We still haven’t resolved the issue with the cannon interfering with the medical equipment so I’m leaving it offline. The ammunition has been spread among the remaining cannons, so it shouldn’t be a problem.” Mato took a moment to pause and read his station again.

  “Estimate is everything will be online in ten minutes. Oh, sorry, the scintillate guns are one hundred percent as well.” Mato finished.

  The Captain nodded approval. He looked around briefly, “Can you leave engineering for a bit?” He asked.

  Mato hesitated for a second, but he knew his crew could handle any problem, so he motioned for the Captain to head into the hallway first, and they proceeded to walk out of the engine room in single file, the Captain first.

  Once Mato had closed the door to the hallway, the C
aptain immediately began talking.

  “Mato, we have an unidentified ship sitting in space with almost no emissions. Robin hasn’t confirmed that the ship is powered, but they are certain it isn’t a recovery. The problem is the silhouette hasn’t been matched yet. It’s been over a half hour.”

  Mato was listening and understood the implication immediately. It didn’t usually take the computer even a minute to identify a previously encountered ship, let alone thirty. And since the ship was powered, it meant a potential first contact. That was exciting but incredibly dangerous. No way of knowing for sure how powerful that ship could be.

  The Captain continued, “I was hoping you would be willing to take the engineering station on the command deck for this one. I would like you really close to help evaluate this ship when we do an active scan.”

  Mato was complimented. The request was a testament to the Captain’s faith in his abilities. Mato could have served the same role in main engineering, but it was a treat to be at the center of the action on the command deck. It was also very important to the Captain otherwise he would not have come to engineering to personally ask.

  With some pride evident, Mato said, “Of course, Richard, I would be happy to serve on the command deck.”

  Richard looked back and half smiled, before turning around and opening the hallway door into the rest of the ship. He waited for Mato to emerge before closing the door behind them both.

  “Has the computer returned a partial match at least?” Mato asked.