Empty Space

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Empty Space Page 8

by Alan Black


  “And me?” York was afraid to ask, but he couldn’t stop himself.

  “You? Well frak me, even Paul didn’t want you here and I advised him to refuse your assignment. Refusing your attachment to the station wasn’t out of any favors to you, but it would’ve been a favor to you. I didn’t want you here simply because it’s bad enough around here without having one of your kind skulking around every corner.”

  Blaque laughed again and continued. “I can see what you’re thinking. Been there and thought that. Put in all the transfer requests you want. Done that, too. A transfer out of here isn’t likely and your promotion to senior grade ensign will take so long to come down the line you’ll be able to sublet my retirement cottage when I die before it gets here. There’s a long line of people ahead of you to take any transfers and promotions and none of them want to be here. Look at it this way: to a small dot on a long straight line, the whole line appears to be nothing more than the dot in front of him and the dot behind him. He can’t see how long the line is in either direction. Now, Paul is the dot in front of me and you are the dot behind me. I can’t see squat beyond you two. Believe me, there ain’t nobody behind you and this line stretches from old Earth to the gods-know-where without end in sight. Welcome home, budger. You’ve been screwed just like the rest of us greased up ex-virgins.”

  NINE

  York scrubbed the kitchen counter and wiped his hands dry. He liked living at the Wright’s Right Bed and Breakfast. The B&B was a quaint little place off the main promenade consisting of a few cozy little suites around a large communal living, dining, and kitchen area. It even had a faux porch in front of the hatch with a small holo-emitter to make it look as if a person was viewing a deep mountain valley while sipping a cold beer after work instead of a bland station corridor. His rooms were the largest he’d ever lived in. After three months on station, he considered the whole B&B his residence. He listed it on the military database for Commanders Paul or Blaque if they ever needed to find him, not that they ever would.

  Normally, he only saw Blaque at shift change and then only once a week or so as the man left his duty station early rather than waiting for York to relieve him. More than once, the man had been half-intoxicated having drunk his way through his shift, leaving detritus in his wake for York to clean up. He had yet to meet Commander Paul, his nominal supervisor. Paul’s practice was to send him a text message at the end of third shift, relieving him of duty long before the man actually showed up to work.

  There wasn’t any work to do. Everything was so automated even the emergency relay systems didn’t require supervision. Reading the manuals had only taken a month or so to get through the relevant parts. He didn’t bother with the maintenance manuals as there were so many redundant backups in place any failure would give him time to fix the broken equipment at his leisure. The maintenance log didn’t show any repair the automated system hadn’t accomplished by itself or anything requiring human intervention since the station went on line almost thirty years ago.

  He was shocked to discover Commander Paul had been station commander since the station drawdown almost a decade ago and was quickly approaching his first retirement milestone. Blaque had been on station almost as long, yet he had another twenty years before he could even take the earliest, and most modest, retirement available. Military officers considered retirement pay the joke of the navy. Most senior enlisted earned much more for their retirement than officers did. Naval officers, until York, were from the upper classes with rich family ties. They were expected to lean on family, or if family support wasn’t possible, to be smart enough to manage their money during their careers for a comfortable retirement, or at the very least, being able to lobby successfully for a second career with a civilian military contractor.

  York’s new home at the Wright’s was only a short walk from a civilian gym on the promenade. He doubted if he would ever run into Commander Blaque there. He liked the place because it had holographic personal trainers and a variable anti-gravity workout room with every piece of equipment known to man. The personal trainers, who appeared happy to be doing something again, designed a complete dietary plan for him and provided bottles of special vitamins and supplements from the gym’s storerooms. He didn’t question why the gym owners hadn’t taken the vitamins and supplements when they abandoned the gym. The obvious conclusion was it would cost more to box and ship supplies elsewhere or to throw them away than it cost to just leave them sitting on the shelves in the back. Scavengers hadn’t repurposed the vitamins as the storage area was behind locked thick hatches.

  He had found some evidence of scavengers poking into various storerooms and warehouses on the civilian side of the station. So far, none of the junk collectors had started to cut through hatch locks. The lack of serious scavenging was probably due to the minimal military presence on the station. It would be impossible for someone to dock anywhere on the station without alerting someone in the communications center, although any alert might be problematic due to spotty duty attendance by the two commanders. Still, scavengers might not know how shoddy the military presence had become.

  New Hope, York’s home planet, had gravity a few percentage points higher than human standard as set by old Earth. He liked to exercise a few percentage points higher than home, even pushing to two gravities at times. He had to admit he felt better than ever before. The Yards had fed him well-balanced meals, then again, they never provided personalized meal plans. He could feel the benefits of working hard in heavy gravity and the benefits were worth having to find and fix his own meals to match his meal plans. He did miss having real sparing partners for self-defense training, the Yards provided many volunteers to work with, especially when they were instructed not to pull any punches in full out combat training.

  The uniform generator in his ‘official’ quarters on the military side automatically adjusted his uniform size, taking in a pinch at the waist and letting it out in the shoulders and arms. He thought about just dressing in the variety of civvie clothing he could order from the automated clothing production units scattered throughout both sides of the station, but it had taken him too long to become an officer. He wouldn’t throw his commission away that easily. Maybe after ten years, he’d go native, but not yet.

  He could see why Blaque was almost reverent about automation. Without it, he’d be running around half-naked as most of the shops on the promenade were stripped bare of everything not welded down including hangers, hooks, and hairspray. Most of the shops, like the gym were locked and sealed, requiring his military password and biometric overrides to open.

  York felt positively deviant tweaking the hologramic programming to get his favorite trainers, Gretchen and Aphrodite, to appear topless. He figured that if he could get it to work, he would move some of the emitters into his suite at the bread and breakfast. He didn’t want to touch and couldn’t have even if he wanted to. He did want to watch them as he was only passing familiar with nude women and admittedly, was more than a little curious.

  The girls had some amazingly flexible personally interactive programming, however the software wasn’t quite flexible enough. He wondered if he could combine their software programming with the adult theater near the main hatch between the military and civilian sides of the station. It would be a way to provide the appearance of human contact. He also didn’t really need the overtly sexual actions of the holo-women in the adult theater. They were vulgar and obscene, so much so it made him nervous and twitchy. On the other hand, they did have a different set of personally interactive skills missing in Gretchen and Aphrodite, especially in the areas of vocabulary and conversational responses.

  He glanced at his dataport. He still had a few hours before reporting for duty. His options to kill time were relatively short. He wanted to read, as he was in the middle of a thriller about a spy who’d been trapped by his own underdeveloped sense of sexual mores. His enemy was just about to start interrogating/torturing him making it a hard place to stop, but he�
��d quit reading because he spent most of his working shift reading fiction and didn’t want to finish this book too quickly. He didn’t want to read for fun during his off duty hours.

  He’d found a list of additional duties he could volunteer for. It included every duty ever assigned on Em.T-Sp8s. They were still available because there wasn’t an officer officially assigned. The list was long, including everything from laundry officer to gunnery and weapons munitions officer. Most duties listed the rank of the last officer holding the duty. Few duties seemed fit for a junior grade ensign, as captains and commanders had filled them. Few duties weren’t already running on automatics, yet all he had to do was plug his name in as volunteering for secondary duties and he would get paid for the extra work, even if there wasn’t any work to be done due to the automatics.

  There was the caveat that if something went wrong with the automatics, the officer in charge was held responsible. That gave him enough pause to think each position through rather than just sign up for everything and take the pay. It might be more trouble than any extra pay was worth, certainly if the duty required officer sign-offs on every report submitted to higher command, even if the reports were automatically generated. He wondered if automated readers read automated reports.

  He did like the idea of becoming the station’s morale officer. How could he get in trouble being the officer in charge of civilian complaints when there weren’t any civilians? He didn’t have any place to spend extra pay, yet he wondered how much extra pay he could sign up for before someone came to check up on him.

  He decided he would go for a run since he hadn’t showered after working out this morning. He would be back in time to shower and change into work utilities before third shift. He liked running on the station. Running wasn’t like being on a planet. Here he could set his dataport to guide him from deck to deck, exploring the station as he went, looking at this, marking that for later study, racing up and down ladders instead of using lifts and elevators. His runs didn’t follow any discernible pattern. He set his dataport to be as random as possible ensuring he eventually went everywhere, backtracking and duplicating as little as possible. He set a goal to someday tread on every corridor on the station and look in every cabin, storeroom, and warehouse. Most of those he’d already seen were empty spaces without even a trace of dust, having been undisturbed for years. Reading activity logs assured him that most of the station hatches hadn’t been opened in years. Em.T-Sp8s was truly empty space.

  He was running along the lowest freight decks in the military section. He was feeling good about the run. His feet were whisking quietly and lightly along the decks. Working out in heavy gravity made running in standard gravity much more pleasant. There was little enough to see, following the path designated by his dataport. He would run along a wide corridor, issue orders for a warehouse or loading lock to unlock and open the interior hatches, then run through and trace a quick circle around the space. He’d order the area closed, locked and sealed behind him as he went. He was amazed at how similar each space was, yet how absolutely different they were from each other, like the comparison to the obvious similarities of women’s breasts. Yes, they were the same, yet different and each worth a good look.

  He opened a hatch at the run, whisked into the space and skidded to a stop, his shoes squeaking on the deck. He came face-to-face with a master chief petty officer. The expected empty space was filled with enlisted men and women in various stages of activity and inactivity.

  The man shouted from behind an incredibly well-grown mustache, “Where the hell … who the … ?” He flashed the QR code on York’s workout uniform and shouted, “Officer on deck. Room attention!”

  TEN

  Before he realized he’d spoken, York shouted, “As you were!” He gave a silent thanks to the Yards for the hours of rote practice. Speaking to the master chief, he said, “I’m Ensign Junior Grade York Sixteen, third shift station commander. You are?”

  “You sure took a few years off my life showing up like that, Ensign York.” The man smiled. “Master Chief Jim Fugget.”

  At least, York thought the master chief was smiling. His smile was hard to see behind the huge mustache and the glare coming off his polished baldhead. His dark skin practically glowed in the station’s artificial light. “I didn’t realize we had anyone else on station, Master Chief … um … Fuckit?”

  “Fugget, sir,” the master chief laughed. “Two gees in the middle.” He waved a hand at the other enlisted, most of whom hadn’t bothered going back to their duties and were standing watching the exchange. “Most of these boneheads pronounce it with the ‘ck’ in the middle, but it’s okay with me, just so long as—” He raised his voice so it carried across the space “—just so long as they’re working.” He flexed his massive arm muscles as if the threat of a physical altercation might follow if his words weren’t obeyed.

  The hint was enough. Suddenly everyone was busy, although there were plenty of laughs and joking as if they knew the master chief’s threats were toothless. York wasn’t sure he’d consider the man toothless. He was as tall as York, yet much wider. His muscles seemed to twitch even when he was standing still. He wore his uniform sleeves rolled up tight, almost to shoulder height, covering his shoulder patches.

  Most of the enlisted were unloading gear through a shuttle hatch. A few of them were dragging what looked like fiberglass and clear plastic torpedoes to a stack in the corner. Each one was barely big enough for two men to squeeze inside with the outsides covered in various paint schemes reminiscent of any graffiti wall in the budger section of town. No one seemed concerned if they were banged around or scratched, so he assumed they weren’t dangerous.

  “Master Chief, I’m sorry. I don’t recognize your unit designation.”

  “Sorry, sir.” Fugget rolled a sleeve down far enough for York to flash a dataport query to the man’s QR patch. “We’re the 44th Naval Reserve from Saorsa City on Liberty.”

  “You’re on liberty?” His imagination could dredge up more exciting places to spend liberty or leave than Em.T-Sp8s.

  Fugget pointed at the deck, though obviously his finger meant farther below the station. “Liberty? The planet below?”

  York was embarrassed. He’d completely forgotten the name of the nearby planet. He had plenty of leave saved up to take a quick visit to the planet, but he felt as if he was still settling in and was more than a little uncomfortable asking for leave when he had only been on duty three months. It didn’t matter if he’d accumulated almost five and a half months leave. In fact, he’d never requested leave before. It still felt wrong to request the time.

  He nodded, “Yes. Liberty, the planet. Thank you, Master Chief. I didn’t realize your Naval Reserve used the station.”

  “Well, sir, we only get up here a couple of times a year. You know how it is with the Reserves. Most of us have real jobs and can’t get away for these trips as often as we’d like.” He pointed at the men and women working around them. “A lot of these goobers would be up here every weekend if we could afford the freight charges. They’ll take any opportunity they can to get up here so they can ride back down on their skyriders.”

  “Skyriders?”

  Fugget waved a hand at the fiberglass torpedoes stacked in the corner. “Skyriders are those little deathtraps there. It’s a crazy sport. One or two of those idiots pop the top open, run across a launch bay, jump in at the last minute, and slam their hatch shut just before hitting vacuum. They travel ballistic down through Liberty’s atmosphere until they get low enough to pop open their wings and glide them the rest of the way down. They score points for speed, aerobatics and accuracy. Do you see the skinny petty officer with the green and pink hair? She was junior world champion a few years back when she was only thirteen. She and her little brother landed one so close to the target that you couldn’t squeeze a human hair between the skyrider and the target. She’s only gotten better since then. I swear the only reason she’s in the Naval Reserve is to catch free
shuttle rides up out of atmosphere.”

  “They jump from here?”

  “No. This is way too far. They need to be much closer to the gravity well. They’ll jump from the shuttle on the way back. Why do you ask, sir? Do you want to go for a ride?”

  York looked at Fugget as if the man had lost his sanity. “No, Master Chief. I was just asking because it amazes me at the myriad of ways humans think up to kill themselves.”

  Fugget shrugged, “It happens in a lot of ways, sir. We lost a spaceman first class last year when he tripped getting off a bus and hit his head on a rock. I can understand accidents, but it really chaps my cheeks to lose good people to theft.”

  “You mean when they get arrested as thieves?” He wondered about the Reserve’s recruiting techniques if they were enlisting criminals.

  “No, sir. I mean when they’re stolen right off the planet by slavers and kidnappers.”

  York remembered the Gambion was supposed to be in this part of space for slaver interdiction. It must be a bigger problem than he imagined if slavers took people from their homes. “I was told the ship that brought me here about three standard months ago came to put a stop to slavery.”

  Fugget said. “I’m sure that’s what they tell the media. It’s been going on for years and they rightly don’t seem to give a rat’s patootie, sir. I imagine they’re only involved because some slaver made a mistake and kidnapped the wrong rich man’s kid. They most likely sold the kid back for ransom, however it may have pissed off someone enough to rattle a few sabers.”

  “The slavers take children?”

  “You don’t follow this, do you, sir?”

  York shook his head. “I have a good grasp of economic slavery, but not human trafficking. I know it goes on, I just haven’t had any personal experience with it.”

 

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