Starfarer's Dream (Kinsella Universe Book 4)

by Gina Marie Wylie

  “What is PSO?”

  “Presidential Special Order -- As I said earlier, President van de Veere has decided on another schedule for this exam. Please, Lieutenant, none of this will help you win a single point on the exam.”

  Johnny subsided, curious but confused. The President of the Federation had a personal interest in this specific exam board? It didn’t seem possible.

  He recalled the four officers who’d arrived last and who’d left as a group. If he knew who they were, he was sure, he’d know what this was about.

  179

  Starfarer’s Dream

  Chapter 10 -- Delay In Route

  I

  “Lieutenant Shannon, you will take care of your passengers, will you not?” Captain Travers inquired of his hot pilot, a grin on his face.

  “A few bumps, a few bruises, sir. I’m a Rim Runner. In spite of a few hot approaches, I haven’t managed to ding this shuttle.” Bob paused.

  “We could wait for Willow, sir. It’s not a problem.”

  Captain Travers grinned. “I have a surprise for Lieutenant Wolf -- the identity of who is going to give her a ride on to Atlanta, and then bring her back to Maunalua. You don’t have the need to know, Lieutenant!”

  “And me?” Willow asked. “What about me?”

  “Secrets, Lieutenant! Secrets! They aren’t secrets if we talk about them! You will arrive in much finer style than the rest of your shipmates, both to Atlanta and back to Hawaii for the exam. Enjoy the surprise!”

  II

  Bob Shannon appeared in the shuttle’s cabin and Terry Morrison adapted to his role as the resident dirty-foot with alacrity. “Who’s flying this beast? Aren’t we close to Atlanta?”

  Bob shook his head. “Things are very confused just now. They launched the Fleet Ready Force a few minutes ago. I was told to defer my approach to Atlanta. Then I heard Fleet announce that they were declaring the school we dropped Willow off at as a martial law zone and sent a brigade of Marines to secure it. I called Atlanta again and requested a diversion, back to Arizona. They’ve refused and they won’t tell me what has happened.”

  Terry Morrison was emphatic. “On Guam, I was hurt, bad. Things were falling apart, but later, the chief engineer told me I’d have spent five minutes less there, if he’d done what he was supposed to, and gone to the bridge to supervise -- instead of beat futilely on the warped hatch.

  “I have no idea why they’ve done what they’ve done -- but I got to know some of the Marines on Starfarer’s Dream. They worship the ground Willow walks on. Messing with Willow Wolf, and having the Marines going to her rescue, means some ground casualties among the civilians.

  “I think we should let the Marines do their jobs, and not jiggle their elbows. If there’s trouble, it would be better if they took care of it, not us.”

  “Is that Terry Morrison speaking, or First Lieutenant Terry Morrison?” Bob asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Terry replied with a grin.

  Bethany Booth sniffed. “You are all so stupid. Willow asked me if I knew self-defense; she was getting tired of sparring with Starfarer’s Dream’s two remaining Marines. I thought I knew a little self-defense. Not compared to her. An insignificant iota. If anyone tries to mess with her, they will end up chopped liver; she just used the Marines to carry her toolbox.”

  “I’m a first degree Tae Kwan Do black belt,” Bob Shannon announced. “She read that in my public file. They were expecting to spend a lot of time between Gandalf and Tannenbaum getting the weapon and the electronics ready. She used the Marines to teach her self defense, ‘cause she helped them finish up early. You’ve all heard how early.”

  Terry Morrison sighed. “Do you know how hard it is for a ship-board engineer to get mentioned in a Fleet Tech Bulletin? Maybe once a decade. She was mentioned in three as the originator of new practices. Everyone who has ever calibrated a weapons or comm laser has been kicking themselves ever since they read them.” He paused. “She can take care of herself.”

  III

  Amanda Cross stood talking with Jeremy Cord and Annie Muong, on the steps of the Peak School. The first day of school was always a hassle, but in Arizona, August is summer, and even at seven in the morning it was already over forty degrees. Actually, it had never gotten much below forty degrees, even in the early morning hours. The temperature did not add to anyone’s good humor as they stood waiting in line for the doors to the school to open.

  All three students stopped talking at once, their eyes going to a half dozen contrails tracing across the southern sky heading northeast, silver glints at the tip of each contrail. The ships leaving the trails were already very high, fanning out as they went.

  “Big ones,” Jeremy whispered in quiet awe.

  As if in agreement, the ground rumbled from sonic booms. There was a faint high-pitched sound, the sound of engines running wide open.

  “Looks like the ready squadron from the Gulf of California,” another boy said, from a meter away. Everyone standing on the steps was staring at the apparitions in the sky. Conversation had stopped as everyone watched the white streaks race across the blue dome of the heavens.

  “They’d be sounding an alarm, if it wasn’t an exercise,” someone eventually said, a little nervously.

  “My cousin lives in Hawaii,” Annie’s voice was a throaty rasp. “She says they launched five times in the first month. There was never an alarm.”

  Amanda closed her eyes and squeezed her eyelids shut. Indeed, what would be the point? How do you run or hide from a thousand megaton bomb? From a thousand of those bombs? And even if you weren’t vaporized instantly, you weren’t going to live long afterwards, no matter what! Better to get it over with! Quickly! All a warning would do would be to make people worry unnecessarily.

  The voices that had been present a few moments before were stilled; there wasn’t much movement as the students stared upwards.

  It was so hard to get used to! You could look around and the world still looked the same. Even now, three months into the war, sometimes you had to look hard to see any of the changes.

  The Earth had seen changes, thousands and thousands of changes. In three months, nearly one in ten thousand of young men and women in the age range eighteen to twenty-four were now wearing some sort of uniform, instead of one in a hundred thousand. And off Earth -- there the changes were so scary, that most people simply didn’t understand or comprehend, particularly those home here on Earth.

  When the war had started, six billion people lived on Earth; ninety-one billion lived off planet. Now, three months later, six billion still lived on Earth, but there were only 50 billion left off planet. Nearly half of the human race had been exterminated like humans exterminated termites.

  The official estimates were now that the war could last from thirty to fifty years; that within two or three years, tops, one half of every last man and woman of the human race, from 18 to 65, would be involved directly in the war effort. The Fleet was going from three million active duty personnel, with eight million in the Reserves or on the Retired List, to perhaps a half billion.

  Amanda had heard her father say that if the war lasted as long as they said it would, the number in the Fleet could easily reach two or three billion. And that she’d better choose a career quickly or one would be chosen for her. Too many people were dead -- the survivors didn’t have time for people who couldn’t make up their minds.

  Amanda’s attention turned back to the small group she was with, waiting for the doors to open. They were one of dozens of similar groups patiently waiting in line. The Peak was one of the finest technical university prep schools in America, perhaps in the whole world. Getting accepted had taken major league pull in times gone past and now that the war had started it was almost impossible to get in. The only thing that mattered in the least was performance.

  Students who graduated from the Peak went on to Caltech, or to MIT or Ecole Polytechnique in France. The Free University or Humboldt University in Germany, Moscow Un
iversity or Beijing or Tokyo, above all, nearly a fifth won entrance directly to Fleet Academy at Maunalua in Hawaii. That was something Amanda had dreamed of since she was a little girl, six years old, watching her father’s starship return to Earth.

  Rumor had it that the Peak was going to announce that seniors would be eligible to take a special test this year, and if they passed, they would be selected for the Fleet Academy and go directly there. Amanda hoped it was true, hoped with her heart of hearts, dreaming... Even if her dreams had never considered the possibility that she would be engulfed in the biggest war in all human history.

  Someone came up the steps, walking briskly. A girl their age, a tall young woman, taller even, than Amanda. Amanda played on what passed for the Peak’s varsity basketball and volleyball teams. There wasn’t much time for athletics at Peak, but they did try to give the students some exercise.

  The girl had short, tightly-curled, pitch-black hair, so black it was almost blue; her skin was dark too, but olive, like someone from the Mediterranean region. A face, that was, to put it kindly, homely. And while she wasn’t overweight, she was certainly pushing the upper edge of the envelope of nominal. The girl was wearing a plain black tunic; it took Amanda a second to realize that she was seeing a for-real, Fleet weapons-black shipsuit.

  Who would wear a shipsuit here on Earth? It was considered socially gauche to wear them on Earth. A lot of people resented the “high and mighty airs” of spacers -- Rim Runners, they called themselves, harking back to when the solar system’s asteroid belt had been the Rim of Space. What was someone dressed like this young woman doing at Peak?

  The visitor looked around, curious, then walked through the crowd of waiting students and knocked on one of the closed doors. Someone a meter away from the spacer woman laughed in derision. “They won’t open that door if Jesus Christ appeared himself. Fat chance.”

  She had to be a Rim Runner, Amanda thought.

  The girl nodded absently and rapped the glass again, when no one responded the first time. One of the adults inside moved close and shook his head and waved her away. It was Potter, Amanda observed. The spacer wasn’t going to get any help there, Amanda thought wryly. The Rim Runner reached into a folio she was carrying and took out a piece of paper and waved it. Potter shook his head again.

  “I have orders,” Amanda heard the young woman say; her voice had an accent, one that Amanda couldn’t place. But, in the four hundred and twenty years of mankind’s permanent presence in space quite a few accents had developed. “It is important,” the girl said, trying to talk through the glass.

  Potter shook his head, signing he couldn’t hear. The Rim Runner put the paper to the glass, slapped the flat of her other hand hard on the glass next to it. “Orders!” she barked.

  “Can it space girl!” someone said from the largest group near the door. The really rich kids. Amanda grimaced. If you thought spacers were arrogant, you had to go no further than the nearest wealthy scion to see true arrogance.

  “They won’t let me in, and they aren’t going to let you in.” He was the young man everyone called Dick Head, rather than Bickford, which was his “proper” name.

  Potter started to turn away, but the spacer rapped the glass again and waved the paper. Potter glanced back, and then continued to walk away. The girl banged on the glass louder and Potter said something to someone inside. A security guard came close to the door, motioning the spacer to go away.

  Amanda was curious. She’d heard a lot from her father about Rim Runners, even more from her Uncle Tag, who’d been a Fleet officer too, before he had been hurt and retired. Thinking of her uncle took Amanda a place she didn’t want to go. He’d retired! He didn’t have to go back! Yet, when the war had started, her uncle had been one of the first to go. He had been sent to a planet called New Cairo, to handle operations for the defenders.

  The first thing Amanda did each morning, when she woke up, was that she prayed for her uncle’s safety. And the last thing before she closed her eyes at night.

  The pain of Amanda’s thoughts distracted her for a moment. This wasn’t, she thought, belatedly, something a Rim Runner would do. Not without it being the gospel truth.

  The spacer looked around. “I am to be evaluated.” Her accent was doubly strange, the last word was pronounced as syllables, with the second stressed more than was common. “It is important! I have appointment, later.” Her words were oddly clipped and curt. Like someone who’d lived their entire life in space, and didn’t have time for nonessentials. Amanda had heard accents like the woman’s on HDD often enough.

  “Space Girl,” Dick Head said, “no one died and made you President of the Federation! Wait your turn like everyone else! And while you’re at it,” he gestured with a thumb down the steps, “wait at the back of the line.”

  “I must make appointment,” the spacer said, frustrated, ignoring Dick Head. “How can I talk to them?” She looked at the building in frustration. “Can I use the phone?” Her words were clearer when she was angry, Amanda thought.

  “They won’t answer,” Amanda interjected, trying to calm the other. The young woman wasn’t hysterical, but she was certainly extraordinarily frustrated.

  Amanda continued, trying to explain. “The first day of school, they run tests for everyone. First come, first served. You pass, you get in, even if you’re new. If you’re continuing, you fail and get dumped. And when the slots are full... they’re full. They don’t let anyone in early. So sorry.”

  “Not here to take dirty-foot test,” the woman in weapons-black spoke bitterly, “just certificate evaluation.” That same odd pronunciation of the last word. “Just verify records. Say okay, sign off. Two minutes. Three, if slow reader.”

  Dick Head and some friends suddenly grabbed the Rim Runner, two to an arm, and started frog-marching her back down the steps. Amanda saw the consternation from the other, then something else.

  Pain! Deep, deep pain!

  The spacer writhed and squirmed, trying frantically to break their grip.

  “Let go!” the woman demanded, her voice much higher. “Let go of me!”

  Amanda was stunned at the expression on the woman’s face. It looked like she was undergoing excruciating torture. The woman had worked one arm free and she used it to pluck Dick Head off, and Dick Head, being the moron that he was, slipped and sat down hard on his butt.

  Amanda wasn’t the only one who laughed. The woman shook off the last of them, and then stood alone on the steps, frozen in pain, tears streaking down her face. She’s crying, Amanda thought. The tears are because she’s hurt. And probably hurt bad! How?

  Bickford was back up, swinging a balled fist and yelling at the Rim Runner. “You want something to cry about, Space Girl?” His fist slammed into her middle. The young woman stood frozen, looking at Dick Head with disbelief. “I’ll give you something else to cry about, bitch!” He swung his arm back, cocked to swing again.

  “No! Stop!”

  The woman wasn’t frightened, Amanda thought, she was just telling Dick Head not to do it. The boy’s fist started to move forward. Abruptly the woman’s arm snapped up, her wrist driving Bickford’s fist off line; a millisecond later her elbow slammed up against Dick Head’s jaw. There was a sickening crunch and Bickford went down like he’d been hit with a baseball bat.

  The woman took a visible grip on herself, turned and went back up the steps, slammed her hand flat against the window, coming, Amanda believed, very close to breaking the plate glass. Inside, several people turned to look. The woman slammed the paper against the glass one more and made an imperious gesture at the door.

  Those inside turned away, but not so the students outside. Amanda saw one of Bickford’s friends come up behind the spacer and slam her hard against the glass. Amanda screamed, “No, no, no!” But another of Dick Head’s friends was there, kicking and punching the woman as she started to slump, stunned.

  It was like an explosion. The pent up emotions of three months of fear, anxiety
and the sheer enormity of events around them crystallized into an insane paroxysm of violence, directed at the girl from off-world; as if it was her fault, as if she had something, anything, to do with it.

  Amanda tried to pull one of the guys away from the woman, who was now struggling to stand back up, her face bloody. The student shrugged Amanda off and when Amanda tried again, he slammed Amanda down on the pavement.

  Lying on the concrete of the steps, Amanda’s head was spinning; someone else kicked her, accidentally, she thought, but it didn’t help her spinning world, it seemed to speed it up. That was when she saw something crazy; it was like the girl, only instead of seeing double, she was seeing four! How bizarre!

  Then Amanda realized that there were four men coming up the steps and these weren’t dressed in plain shipsuits; they were wearing Fleet dress uniforms. “Stop! Halt!” one of them was calling. “Back off! Back off!”

  One of the rich kids laughed and threw a punch at the leader of the four. The man simply tracked the fist and when it got close, reached out and pulled, throwing the student off balance, sending him rolling down the steps. More of the other male students came towards them and she heard the one of the men, the one in back, say loud enough for everyone to hear, “No weapons!”

  The crowd shifted a bit and Amanda’s eyes lit on the speaker’s sleeve. Dear God! Three broad stripes, one wavy! Three stars! Three!

  One of the three men in front punched at a male student in front of him, who had tried to grapple with him, but two more students grabbed the man’s arm and someone else stepped close and slugged the man hard; two more piled on, pulling the man down. Someone stepped over the pile of bodies, swinging a backpack at the fourth man, the one in back. One of the Fleet uniforms jumped in the way, and took the blow and staggered.

  Amanda saw the one left in the lead look back, slam blows into two attackers almost as fast as you could blink, then reach for the pistol on his belt.