by Rick Partlow
"And on that note, your assignment for next class will be to compose a multimedia essay detailing a counterfactual scenario where the Sino-Russian War didn't happen and predicting the next fifty years in history from that date."
Oh shit, I thought. That sounded like a lot of work.
Wiesenthal raised her hand. "How long does it have to be, ma'am?"
Markham smiled. "As long as it has to be, Cadet. If you didn't do enough, I'll be sure to let you know."
I tried not to sigh out loud. Oh shit. What had I gotten myself into?
Chapter Seven
"Prepare for one gravity burn," I announced and heard my voice echo through the corridors of the ship through the public-address speakers, my hand hovering over the helm controls. I glanced over my shoulder back to the Captain's station and saw Mat M'voba strapped into the acceleration couch there, looking like he was born for it.
"Execute," he ordered, his voice like faraway thunder.
I touched the haptic hologram and felt the weight I'd become familiar with in my last two years on Earth pressing me down into my seat as the CFS Margaret Thatcher's fusion drive ignited. The stars on the viewscreen began to shift as we accelerated. "One gravity burn engaged," I confirmed. "Two hundred eighty minutes and twenty seconds counting down from now."
"Which, assuming complementary deceleration," Deke continued from the Navigation console beside me, "will put us in Martian orbit at 0300 hours Greenwich Mean Time."
"Very well done, Bridge Crew Alpha," Captain Eversmann declared from her observation position behind us, unstrapping and stepping over to Mat's chair at the center of the bridge. She was very tall and thin, and I thought someone had said she was from Mars, originally. She seemed to handle the one-gravity acceleration fine, though. She pressed a control on the arm of Mat's acceleration couch and waited until the response came.
"Ops," was the terse reply. "Commander Shuff." He was a laconic and bad tempered officer and I didn't know what the hell he was doing on a dedicated cadet training ship. None of the students onboard the cruise liked him when we first met him in Earth orbit; after two weeks stuck in this metal can with him, we liked him even less.
"Time for the shift change, James," the Captain told him. "Send up crew Charlie."
"Roger that, they're on the way."
I began pulling off my seat restraints, letting out a relieved breath.
"What?" Deke asked, sensing my mood. "You don't like Helm?"
I looked around at the sterile grey of the bulkheads that constricted us on the small bridge and felt a shudder run through my shoulders. "Don't much like being on this boat at all anymore," I admitted quietly, pulling the release at the base of my acceleration couch and swiveling it around enough to stand up from the station. "After a few days, it gets to be a bit...claustrophobic."
"You're not really..." Deke snuck a glance around to make sure Eversmann was involved in conversation with Mat M'voba and the rest of the student bridge crew was otherwise occupied before continuing in a whisper. "...claustrophobic, are you? I mean, they wouldn't have let you in the Academy if you were afraid of tight spaces, right?"
"Naw, not technically," I told him as we walked off the bridge together, nodding to the replacement crew as they passed us in the corridor. "Not enough to affect my performance, but I just don't prefer it." I shrugged. "I guess it didn't measure enough to exclude me, so I'll just assume the Fleet knows what it's doing."
Deke barked a laugh. "We've both been in the Academy long enough to know that isn't true!"
"Seems like longer than two years," I mused.
"That's because neither of us goes home for breaks," he pointed out.
Which was true. I didn't have a home to go to, and Deke didn't want to go home, so we both wound up volunteering for extra training while most of the others went back to visit their families. Extra training like this trip. Most of the Academy students had headed home with their families for the July break, but those among us who didn't had volunteered for a training cruise on the Thatcher.
Theoretically, it was an honor; you had to request the position and be approved, since space was limited and the first places were reserved for graduating seniors like Mat M'voba and Reggie Nakamura. Last July, after our Fourth-Class year, Deke and I had volunteered for outdoor survival training, and that had been a lot less crowded and a lot more fun, as far as I was concerned. Deke had held a different opinion.
We took the corridor to the ship's galley, having fallen into the schedule of work shift-eat-sleep-exercise-shower-work shift during the two weeks of the cruise. Holly and Daniela were there already, picking at an early dinner at one of the fold down tables in the small compartment.
"Hey Cal," Holly said with a nod. "Slick." The latter to Deke, and he sighed as he waved in return.
I was glad they'd both come on the trip, because as good a friend as Deke was, it was nice to be able to hang around with females sometimes. Not that either of us had made any romantic advances on them; I had initially been too hung up on Rachel to try, and at some point, it would have been weird. Why Deke hadn't tried, I wasn't really sure. Maybe because Daniela had slammed his ass whenever he flirted with her; she wasn't vulnerable to his version of slick. It was actually her who'd given him the nickname "Slick," which had proved stickier than he'd hoped.
"Hey," I said to the girls as we lined up at the food dispensers. "When's your shift start?"
"Not for another three hours," Daniela said. "We were thinking about skipping the workout for today and plugging into the latest ViRdrama in the lounge, since we're under acceleration."
"I don't like plugging into ViR in zero gravity," Holly confided, wrinkling her nose. "Gives me nausea."
"I'm just glad we got the chance to eat under acceleration," Deke said, grabbing a drink bulb and sitting down next to them. "I can't taste shit when there's no gravity."
"Have you guys audited the latest news?" Daniela asked, looking between Deke and me.
I shrugged. "Latest as in how late?" I asked. "I think the last time I plugged into the 'net was," I closed my eyes and thought, "sixty hours ago?" I felt brain dead after a shift at Helm...it was a duty position that required total concentration.
"It hasn't been officially confirmed yet," she said grimly, "but the word is, the Tahni took Demeter."
"Shit!" Deke blurted, accidentally spitting out a bite of a pita bread and soy sandwich that landed near his plate. "Demeter? That's a major fucking colony!"
"I'm blanking," I admitted, trying to search my memory for the name but coming up dry.
"Gliese 86," Holly supplied helpfully with a recall I envied. "Thirty-five light years from here in Eridanus. K-type main sequence star with a rock-collector gas giant in the outer system. Demeter's one of the newer colonies founded since the Transition drive opened up systems not connected by the jumpgates. Lots of agriculture to support a large oil-drilling operation owned by the chemical industry. Population of over 200,000 people."
"What did we have defending it?" I wanted to know.
"Orbital defense satellites," Daniela said. "A ground-based laser launch facility that doubled as a defensive weapon." She shook her head sadly. "We don't have the ships to keep a force in every system."
"Did they..." I hesitated, not sure if I wanted to know. "Did they kill everyone again?"
"No," Daniela said, "not that we know so far. Apparently, that was just a drastic...lesson? Maybe. A lesson about the squatters breaking the Neutral Zone." She rubbed the back of her neck tiredly. "I think maybe, if we'd done nothing about that, they would have stopped there. But that wasn't an option for a lot of reasons. Anyway," she waved a hand, "this time they tried to take everything as intact as possible, probably so they could use the resources themselves."
"This sucks," Deke said, setting down his sandwich. "There's no way we can counter-attack without risking they'll just nuke the whole colony."
"What I want to know," I said slowly, letting loose a flame that had been smol
dering inside me for months now, "is how we were so unprepared for this compared to the Tahni. I mean," I expanded as they all turned to look at me, "we already fought one war against them, and it never really ended. Why did we just sit back and assume the Truce would go on forever?"
"Because the Commonwealth is a representative government," the answer came from behind us in a voice I couldn't have mistaken for anyone else's. I twisted around and saw Mat and Reggie walking up to the food dispensers, trays in hand. "You know what the most popular thing an elected politician can do, ladies and gentlemen?" Mat asked rhetorically. "Cut everyone's taxes." Reggie chuckled at that.
"And since most of the taxes are on the corporations in the Council," Reggie interjected, "let's just say there's been a lot of under-the-table pressure to cut them."
"And what's the easiest thing to cut when you're not actively at war?" Mat asked, another purely rhetorical question, but I answered it anyway.
"The military."
"Give the man a prize," Reggie said, smiling sarcastically.
"I guess the Tahni don't have that problem," Deke assumed, "since they're like some sort of theocracy?"
"I thought they were an Empire?" I asked, confused now.
"It's complicated," Mat allowed, sitting down at a table next to us. Reggie took the seat across from him. "You four haven't had the Tahni xenohistory course yet, have you?"
"Scheduled for it next semester," Deke said.
"They're run by an Imperial family," Mat explained, "but the Emperor is selected from that family by the priesthood. And the Emperor is supposedly the physical avatar of a spiritual sort of god-type being also called the Emperor."
"Jeez, that is complicated," Deke commented.
"But it's kept them politically united for almost a thousand years," Daniela reminded him.
"That and executing all heretics," Holly commented drily.
"Have you guys heard where you're heading when the cruise is over?" I asked Mat and Reggie.
"Intelligence," Reggie announced, raising a drink bulb in salute. I raised mine in return and took a sip of fruit juice. "I head to branch training on Inferno in a month, after I visit my parents."
"What about you, Mat?" I asked him.
"Branch training on Inferno," Mat replied easily, taking a bite of his sandwich and pausing to swallow it. "And then I report to the CFS Jutland as Assistant Operations Officer."
His mouth quirked into as much of a smile as I'd ever seen from Mat M'voba, and we all gave a subdued cheer and raised our drink bulbs to him. The Jutland was one of the newest battle cruisers fresh off the Fleet shipyards in Martian orbit. They were a new class of ship, the largest the Commonwealth had ever built.
"Congratulations!" Daniela said. "I know that was your dream assignment!"
"Are you going home before you report for training?" Holly asked him. I knew she was missing her family, but she'd really wanted this cruise.
"No," he said, not offering an explanation. Mat never talked about his family, and I'd been curious as to why, so a few months ago I'd tried to research his background on the 'net but found nothing on him whatsoever...which was nearly impossible for anyone born on Earth. Even Deke was on the 'net, if only as a footnote in an article on his parents, who were fairly big deals in the medical community. I didn't press him on it, though; I didn't like to talk about my family either.
"I hear they're working on another battle cruiser right now at the shipyards," Daniela said, breaking the sudden awkwardness. "Maybe we'll get a chance to see it when we hit Mars orbit."
"The Midway," Mat confirmed with a nod. "She's almost complete."
Mat and Daniela exchanged a look that must have meant something, but not to me. Then Holly shot Deke a glance and shrugged.
"Well, we're gonna be there in four hours," I said, covering a yawn with my hand. "So, I'm for some sleep." I stood up, carrying my tray to the disposal and dumping my leavings to be recycled. "I'll see you guys later."
I headed towards the crew quarters, feeling, as I often did, that the others at the table understood more about what was going on beneath the surface of the conversation than I did. Earthers were strange.
***
I woke from a troubled dream of Rachel to an alarm klaxon screaming in my ear and I leaped out of bed...and kept going, bouncing off the padded surface of the overhead. The engines had stopped accelerating and we were back in zero-g.
"What the fuck is going on?" Deke demanded from somewhere below me and I blinked as the lights flashed on automatically.
He was in the bunk below me and must have come to the room sometime after I'd fallen asleep. I was about to ask him how I would know what was going on when he didn't, but I was spared that inanity when the public-address system blared through the ship, painfully filling the little room with the voice of Captain Eversmann.
"This is not a drill!" Her voice cut through the hull like a laser. "The Martian shipyards are under attack by enemy forces! All regular ship personnel to battle stations! All cadets into your vacuum gear and..."
Whatever directions she'd been about to give were cut off by a sound like fabric tearing and a concussion that rang through the ship like a bell and sent both of us flying across the small chamber to slam against the deck with enough force to knock the breath out of me. The klaxons changed in tone to one I'd only heard once, in the classroom preparation for this cruise.
I caught Deke's eyes and saw that they were as wide and shocked as mine. It was a vacuum warning. We'd been hit. Without a word, we both scrambled for the locker set in the bulkhead beside the hatch to our room, pulling out the vacuum gear we'd been issued before we boarded the Thatcher. We stripped down to our skinsuits, then pulled on the necessities first, like we'd been trained: thin gloves that sealed at the wrists, sock-like booties that sealed at the ankles, then the clear, plastic bubbles that fastened to the collars of our skinsuits and the backpack air supply for them, connected with thin tubing to the helmets. Deke had to remind me with a gesture to slip the ear piece for my 'link into place before sliding the helmet over my head.
After I got the helmet on and the air supply connected, I felt a little of the urgency leave me and I was more methodical in pulling out the rest of the gear. You could live in a vacuum with what we had on, but you'd start building up heat if any debris blocked the mesh, and while the suits were rip resistant, they weren't protection against much at all. So, the cooling jacket went over the skinsuit, and the armor plating went on top of that, including an armored helmet that fit over the bubble, leaving a slit a few centimeters wide in the front for us to see through.
It seemed like it took forever, but finally we both had the last piece of armor plating strapped on and we found ourselves floating in the middle of the room, staring at the sealed hatch and wondering for just a moment what the hell we were supposed to do now. Then the hatch slid aside and I saw a large, imposing figure in vacuum armor standing there, fixed to the deck by the sticky plates on the soles of his boots.
"The bridge took a direct hit from a rail gun." The voice coming over my 'link via the short-range line-of-sight connection was unmistakably Mat M'voba's, as were the dark eyes staring out from the slit of a visor. "The Captain and Bridge Crew Charlie are all gone, and I think some others were sucked out before the section got sealed off. We need to get to the Auxiliary Bridge now."
Deke was closer to the deck than I was; he touched his boot to the surface to let the nanomolecular fibers on the sticky plate connect him to it, then pulled me down so I could do the same. We followed Mat down the corridor, each step feeling oddly like my feet were sinking in mud as I had to make a physical effort to tear the gecko-like adhesive away from the floor. It was a bit draining and I started to sweat inside my skin suit despite the efforts of the cooling system in my second layer.
I checked the gauge on my wrist and saw that I was still breathing ship's air through the backpack's intake filters. We'd been hulled but the emergency seals had kept this part of th
e ship air-tight. I wasn't about to take my helmet off though: if I needed that air supply, I'd need it fast.
Others joined us as we walked down the corridor, more students emerging from their quarters but I couldn't tell who they were. My 'link would have been able to read the signals from theirs, but we were walking too fast for me to take the time to check it.
"Holly?" I called hopefully. If she wasn't nearby, she wouldn't hear it; the ship's 'net was down so the 'links would only work line of sight. "Daniela?"
"We're here," I heard Holly answer and felt a surge of relief. I looked around and she waved from behind us, following a few meters back.
"This is M'voba," Mat announced on the general line-of-sight address. "We have Nakamura, Mitchell, Conner, Morai and Vallejo. Who else is here?"
"This is West," I heard that familiar accent from the cadet I'd learned was from the Southwestern part of North America, from a place called Texas. His name was Roger, I'd discovered during my first year, but everyone had started calling him "Cowboy" for some reason I didn't quite understand.
"Savage here," I heard Keller Savage's laconic, flat-toned reply. I didn't talk to the second-year cadet much, but he was tall and mean looking and seemed like a very focused individual, always paying keen attention in class.
"Hammer." That terse reply came from Brian Hammer, who was a year ahead of me. He was from somewhere in Europe, I think I'd heard Germany, and was the only Earther I'd met who was nearly as broad-bodied as me, though a bit taller. I didn't know him well; but when I had talked to him at times, he always seemed cheerfully bloodthirsty, eager to get commissioned into the Fleet Marine Corps so he could get busy killing Tahni face-to-face.
"Dominguez here," a female voice was the last to answer. I searched my memory for the cadets on the ship's roster and thought I remembered an unremarkable looking, quiet third-year student with that name, but I couldn't be sure.
By the time she'd sounded off, we'd reached the lift station hub at the center of the crew quarters level, but we weren't taking the lift cars; we didn't know how badly the ship was hit and no one wanted to get trapped inside one when the power went off. Instead, Mat led us into the central access tunnel, which ran through the center of the ship to every crewed level. It was, I thought, uncomfortably narrow for more than one person to travel abreast even when we weren't wearing vacuum gear, but it was thoughtfully padded and had evenly-spaced handholds to propel yourself along.
