by Smith, Glenn
Interesting design, he thought. The vessel’s relatively smooth, roughly cylindrical primary hull was comprised of three major segments, like the bodies of the Tor’Kana people themselves. With an oddly semi-reflective black hull that was somehow still easily visible, even here in deep space, it looked almost like a long, slender ant, but with four needlelike jump nacelles instead of legs, spaced equidistantly around the forward segment. The aft segment was obviously dedicated to their sub-light drive engines and supporting systems, so most of the habitable parts of the ship were probably located in the center segment. Unfortunately, the main gun that he’d heard so much about had been completely blown away, as evidenced by the huge gash along the ship’s underbelly. Too bad. He’d been looking forward to seeing that.
“Wait a second,” he mumbled, confused, remembering what he’d been told during his pre-launch briefing. “Rapier, Pod One,” he called over his spacesuit’s comm-link.
“Go ahead, Pod One,” Commander Doohan’s voice came back immediately. The fact that the chief himself was on the line was just one more indication of how much he truly cared about his people. Another chief engineer might well have delegated communications to a subordinate, but not Doohan. No, Doohan would be right there with him through the whole thing, in spirit if not in body.
“I thought you told me this beast was a pearlescent-white, Commander. I’m looking at a black hull out here.”
“That’s not unexpected, Mark. I’ll explain the technology to you later.”
In other words, get to work. “Copy that, sir. Proceeding with mission.” He checked his instruments. “I’m at one hundred meters and holding. Ready to set computer to match target vessel’s pitch and yaw.”
“Affirm, Pod One,” Doohan responded. “Medical and Security teams are in position and standing by. You’re clear to proceed.”
“Copy that. Proceeding.”
He called up the rates of the vessel’s rotations, factored in the hundred meters distance, then initiated the computer controlled burn. The pod lurched to the left and downward, relative to his own orientation, and nudged forward to maintain a constant hundred meter distance around the sphere. Not unlike a vessel moving into orbit around a planet, he supposed. As he watched through the large canopy, the vessel’s bow whipped by from his two o’clock to his eight o’clock. The stern followed seconds later from his five o’clock to his eleven o’clock, but at a relatively slower rate. As seconds ran into minutes, the ship’s rotation rate seemed to grow steadily slower. Before long the stern stopped coming so close, while the bow no longer pulled so far away.
Then, finally, he found himself staring steadily at the leading edge of the bow. Except for the vessel’s counterclockwise roll, all sensation of movement had gone...as long as he ignored the thousands of stars in the background, and the occasional glimpse of the Rapier as it soared by in the distance, and the constantly shifting G-forces. Speaking of which...
He loosened his harness and found it a little difficult, though not impossible, to lean forward against those forces. But leaning forward in a work pod seat was hardly the same thing as working. How was he going to get the job done if he could barely climb out of the pod? How? He was a Lombardo—the latest in a long line of them who’d served with distinction as Solfleet engineers. That was how.
“Rapier, Pod One,” he hailed with renewed determination. Then, without bothering to wait for a response—he knew the chief was monitoring him constantly anyway—he reported, “I have matched the vessel’s pitch and yaw at a steady one hundred meters distance directly off the bow. G-forces are pretty strong, but I think I’ll be all right. Resuming approach.” How much difference would a hundred meters make? Probably not very much, considering that the vessel was over two thousand feet long. He nudged the stick forward—just a tap. Outside, the rolling Tor’Kana vessel appeared to be creeping slowly toward him on a collision course.
“Slowly, Mister Lombardo,” Doohan warned him. “I’m not wearing my catcher’s mitt.”
Lombardo grinned. “Baseball’s dead, Commander,” he reminded his superior officer. “It died a slow and painful death a long time ago.”
“Not in my home town, it didn’t, son.”
Lombardo laughed. Son. That was what he liked most about Commander Doohan. He thought of the ship’s entire Engineering staff as his own sons and daughters and treated them accordingly. Hell, he was probably old enough to have fathered every one of them.
He glanced down at his instruments. Eighty-seven meters. Eighty-six. Eighty-five. Too slow. He was anxious to get started. He nudged the stick forward again, even lighter than before. His rate of closure on the Tor’Kana vessel increased, but so minimally that he could barely perceive the difference.
“That’s fast enough, Lieutenant,” Doohan told him. “I don’t want to have to scrape you off their hull any more than I want to have to catch you.”
“Copy that, sir.”
All Lombardo could do was watch and wait while the numbers fell through the seventies, the sixties, the fifties, and so on, until they finally reached the teens. Then he quickly throttled back and adjusted until he was within twelve feet of the massive black surface.
“Rapier, Pod One. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot there for the pod’s grapplers to grapple. Are you sure the claws can bite into their hull?”
“Affirmative, Pod One,” Doohan answered. “They were constructed specifically for that purpose.”
“If you say so, sir. Deploying grapplers.”
He squeezed both triggers on his stick at the same time, as though he were firing all weapons at an enemy fighter in one last act of desperation. The twin four-clawed grapplers shot forward obediently and dug into the Tor’Kana hull, several inches deep from the looks of it, and with one last, sudden jolt that threatened to rip the claw’s arms from their housings the pod started rolling with the ship. Now, from his point of view, the only thing that appeared to be moving was the entire universe around them. He, his work pod, and the Tor’Kana vessel were motionless.
At least that was what he intended to repeat to himself, over and over and over, until he finished the job.
“I have a good grab,” he reported. Then he tapped the ‘grasp’ and ‘retrieve’ controls to bring the pod itself into contact with the ship. “Closing now. I’ll be getting to work inside two minutes. Wish me luck, Commander.”
“Good luck, Lieutenant. Hold on tight.”
Chapter 30
The troop shuttle soared several miles above the vast, dark island jungle in virtual silence. Even from inside its dimly lit and slightly chilly passenger cabin, Dylan could barely hear the subdued whisper of the small vessel’s engines with their tactical noise dampeners fully engaged, and no one had spoken much more than a few words in the hours since departure, so the flight had been nearly as quiet as it had been long. But that was normal for a combat mission. There was something very humbling about the very real possibility of not living to see another sunrise that tended to plunge even the bravest of Marines into quiet reflection.
Not for the first time since he transferred to the Corps, Dylan had spent that time thinking back over his career—how it had begun almost before he realized what he was doing, how it had progressed over the roughly ten years since the that early baptism of fire in the middle of which he and his fellow recruits had found themselves on Tamour IV when they should have been going through Basic Training’s Final Phase dozens of light years away, how it had affected his marriage, and where it might take him in the future—and he’d found himself wondering what he was doing in a Ranger unit of all places. Any Ranger unit, let alone a unit in Special Ops. A combat line unit was the last place he’d ever expected to end up, and it certainly wasn’t what he’d originally enlisted for.
Lacking any firm sense of direction of his own at the time—he hadn’t exactly benefitted from a lot of adult guidance growing up—Dylan had followed one of his high school friends down the path he’d chosen and had enlisted
in Solfleet’s Delayed Entry Program for the Military Police career field during the summer after eleventh grade. They had reported for Basic Training together the following year just two weeks after graduation, Dylan having given up a surprise scholarship to the U.S. Aerospace Force Academy in favor of sticking by his friend’s side and following the only path that guaranteed he’d make it into space. As it turned out, he’d also given up the love of his life, though he’d certainly never intended to.
Ironically, the friend he enlisted with, who’d suffered from a severe superiority complex for as long as Dylan had known him, turned out to be one of the weakest recruits in their platoon, and it quickly became apparent that he wasn’t going to make it through training. He had the physical strength but not the stamina, and he became ill with some sort of condition that Dylan could never remember. Late in the third week, at Sergeant Carlson’s recommendation, the company commander ordered him discharged and he was sent home.
Dylan on the other hand, as much to his own surprise as anyone else’s back home, did very well, due in large part to Pat’s influence—Recruit Pat Thomason, whom both Dylan and his friend had befriended from the very beginning. A distantly related indirect descendant of the infamous U.S. Army General George S. Patton, Pat had easily been the most highly motivated recruit in the whole company, and that motivation had had a way of rubbing off.
After Tamour—someday Dylan would tell that story...to someone—Dylan attended and graduated from Military Police training at the top of his class, earning a Security Forces specialty code in the process. That code would forever identify him as one of the top ten percent of his class who, in addition to their regular police duties, were qualified for assignment to away team and first contact mission security units, and he felt proud to have earned it.
He took to his duties as if he’d been born to them. But rather than congratulate him for his success, that same so-called friend he’d originally enlisted with began to ridicule both the service itself and Dylan’s involvement in it at every opportunity, attempting but failing miserably to disguise his cruel comments as good-natured humor. They crossed paths from time to time over the ensuing few years, usually while visiting mutual friends, and each meeting felt more awkward than the one before.
But perhaps worst of all, the former close friend soon got into the habit of referring to himself as a military veteran, the very thought of which angered Dylan as it would anger any member or former member of the service. The man had never served a day on active duty, had spent less than a month in Basic Training, and had failed at that. He’d claimed his failure was due to the sudden onset of his illness, but Dylan had never completely believed that. More likely the illness was just an excuse he’d come up with because he couldn’t bear the thought that Dylan might actually be tougher—might be more of a man—than he was. Regardless, his claim of veteran’s status was a slap in the face to real veterans everywhere. A slap that had ended their friendship forever.
Dylan, however...
His first assignment was to the patrol cruiser U.E.F.S. Blackhawk, a vessel assigned to carry out a variety of paramilitary and interstellar law enforcement duties within the borders of Solfleet-controlled space, but that assignment didn’t last very long. He was wounded on his very first away mission and subsequently transferred to a hospital ship for care. By the time the doctors declared him fit for duty again a replacement troop had filled his position, so Command reassigned him to law enforcement duties on Mandela Station for one year. It was during that tour of duty that he met and eventually married Carolyn Mitchell.
As luck would have it, another Security Forces position aboard the Blackhawk became available near the end of that year. Someone onboard pulled a few strings—he never did find out who—and had him reassigned to the ship. Naturally, Carolyn wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of her new husband being away for months at a time for the next four years, but to her credit she realized that military spouses had been living through long periods of separation for hundreds if not thousands of years. She also knew how much Dylan missed being out there in deep space where all the adventure was, so she reluctantly gave him her blessing. It was hard for Dylan to leave his new bride as well, but he nonetheless welcomed the chance to rejoin his old shipmates.
At the end of those four adventurous years, during which time he earned a number of commendations for his distinguished service, he was given a rear area assignment that very few Military Policemen, especially those holding the Security Forces qualifier, ever wanted or had to worry about getting stuck with. He was appointed as an Internal Affairs Investigator inside the Solfleet maximum security confinement facility on Luna. He hated the idea of working in a prison and started looking for a way out of the assignment right away, but the only slot available within his career field at that particular time was another four year deep space assignment, and having just completed one Command wasn’t likely to grant him another one right away. Besides, the previous four years away had put quite a strain on his marriage. Four more would very likely destroy it. So he was stuck. Or so he thought.
A couple of weeks into his tour in the confinement facility, one of his fellow investigators suggested he look into the Criminal Investigations Division. The C.I.D. wasn’t exactly what his training had prepared him for, but it was considered to be within the scope of his career field, and best of all it would get him out of the confinement facility for good, never to return. And since the C.I.D. was always looking for new agents to fill their ranks, he figured he had a good shot. So he applied, and a few months later he was accepted into the C.I.D. Academy.
He graduated with honors, earning the title and position of Special Agent, and received an assignment to the Europan office—one of the division’s busier offices and not a bad place for a new agent to get his feet wet. He approached his new duties with enthusiasm, but as time went on he discovered that being a C.I.D. Special Agent wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. It was instead an enormous amount of desk work and relatively very little of what he’d expected. So, as he approached the end of his year-long apprenticeship, he submitted a request to Headquarters-Personnel, asking to be released from the C.I.D. and transferred back to the uniformed Military Police.
Personnel approved his request almost immediately, but only in part. He was released from the C.I.D., but by that time he held the enlisted grade of E-6, a staff sergeant by rank if not by actual position. He was an experienced non-commissioned officer, and due to a shortage of NCOs and promotion-eligible lower enlisted personnel in the Marine Corps, Solfleet had stepped up efforts to recruit a small percentage of its top MP Security Forces NCOs for ‘voluntary’ transfer to the Corps. By changing career paths twice in as many years, a practice the fleet apparently didn’t appreciate very much, Dylan had as good as volunteered.
Voluntold, as it were.
With his release from the C.I.D. granted, he received orders to report immediately to Solfleet Headquarters for assignment to an accelerated Marine Corps Infantry training unit. He hadn’t necessarily wanted to go that route—hadn’t wanted to go that route at all, in fact—and his wife had been dead set against it, but the only other option he’d been given was to rejoin the ranks of the civilian work force, and he wanted that even less. So he went, and to his surprise he found that he liked it.
Upon completion of that training, he received an official letter from the Commandant of the Marine Corps Rangers, inviting him to try out for a coveted slot among the ranks of that elite combat regiment. Pleased with his latest accomplishments, he did so on a whim without even thinking to consult Carolyn first. He cruised through the tryout process and received a ‘qualified for acceptance training’ classification. Given the option of accepting an assignment to a regular infantry unit or going forward with Ranger training, he surprised even himself. He chose to join the Rangers.
Carolyn, of course, did not react well at all when she found out.
Ranger training lasted nearly a year and turned out to be
the toughest, most intensive training he’d ever gone through. When it was finally over the commandant took him aside and gave him verbal instructions to report directly to Solfleet Command, where he would receive supplemental assignment orders. When he complied with those instructions, he found himself facing one of the most difficult decisions of his career.
The ongoing Coalition-Veshtonn war had cost Earth and her allies dearly. But nowhere were Earth’s losses more devastating, from a percentage point of view, than in that division of the service that didn’t even officially exist. The 7th Marine Corps Ranger Battalion—a top secret branch of the Rangers, known unofficially to some as the ‘Panthers’, that fell under the direct authority of the Solfleet Intelligence Agency’s Special Operations Command. Assignment to that non-existent battalion was and always had been strictly voluntary and difficult to obtain, and he was being asked to volunteer.
He’d wondered at the time if he should even dare consider it. Carolyn had been pretty upset over his decision to transfer to the Marines and she’d been downright furious when he joined the Rangers, so he’d had serious doubts. But then he had an idea. Since 7th Battalion was a part of the Rangers, he could just tell her that he’d been assigned to that unit at random. She didn’t have to know that assignment to Special Ops was strictly voluntary.
That had been the decision-maker. Still surfing high on his roaring wave of success, he’d proudly accepted assignment to the most elite of the elite, and for the past nine months he’d served with distinction in his current capacity as a SpecOps Ranger squad sergeant on Cirra, the fourth planet of the Caldanra star system—Caldanra being the star’s indigenous name—helping to protect the Earth colonists and the virtually human Cirran natives from the terrorism of their extremist Sulaini brothers from the fifth. And, of course, doubling as a part of what would be the first line of defense should the Veshtonn ever again invade the system.
