Sixteenth Watch

by Myke Cole

  “I mean, are you so happy running TRACEN Yorktown?”

  “No. Hell, no. I mean, it’s a good job, but… it isn’t enough, Alice. Now that Tom’s gone, there’s just you and Adam. And we already talked about Adam.”

  “Then just say yes. Take the gig.”

  At those words, Oliver felt her stomach clench in spite of her near physical need to throw herself across the quarter of a million odd miles to the Moon to hold her daughter. Her throat closed and she found herself unable to answer.

  “Is it because of dad?” Alice spoke into the silence. “Because of what happened at Doloris?”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. I mean, they’re only picking me…”

  “They’re only picking you because you’re the right woman for the job, mom. You remember the old Indian proverb you told me when I fucked up in college? The one about the chasm you come across in life? What did you tell me to do?”

  “Jump.” Oliver sandwiched the phone in between her shoulder and her cheek and covered her eyes with a hand.

  “It’s not as wide as you think,” Alice finished for her.

  “God. I wish I’d never taught you that now.”

  “Come on, mom. When things started to go south with Matt, I thought… I thought I was going crazy. Do you know what I was most scared of? What I really believed would happen?”

  “I’ve got a feeling you’re going to tell me.”

  “I was afraid you’d take his side. I was afraid you’d reject me. You’d stop speaking to me. Shit like that.”

  It took Oliver a moment to realize that her daughter couldn’t see the look of horror on her face. “Oh, honey. How could you ever think that? You’re my own.”

  “I know! It’s crazy. But I really thought it. And I jumped the chasm anyway. And yeah, it’s hard now, but I’m happy that at least I didn’t stay stuck.”

  “You sure didn’t. Now you’re prospecting on a Moon on the brink of war.”

  “Uh, mom. I mean, you’re the military lady and all, and I don’t want to tell you your business, but I’m pretty sure if war breaks out here, it’s not exactly going to spare the Earth. And anyway, my tough old mom would never let anything happen to me, right?”

  “You’re goddamn right,” Oliver said with a fierce heat.

  “Look, if you’re serious, I won’t say no. I could…” Oliver could hear her daughter trying to keep her voice even, trying to be strong for her mother. “I could use you out here. I won’t lie. I thought getting away would make a difference and it has, just… not like I hoped it would. Maybe dad dying made me go a little crazy. Maybe I’m not totally over it yet.”

  “I don’t know that it’s a thing you ever get over, sweetheart.”

  “Look at it this way, mom. You take the star and come out here and run things. Do it through the next Boarding Action. If we win, great. If we don’t, great.”

  “On what planet is that great?”

  “The Moon!”

  “The Moon’s not a planet, sweetheart. It’s a…”

  “What I’m saying is, either way, after Boarding Action, win or lose, you hang it up. You retire on that sweet admiral’s pay and if you’re serious about helping me…”

  Oliver felt a strange feeling in her gut. It took her thirty seconds to realize it was hope. “Honey, you live in a closet.”

  “Nope. Just bought my own gardener last week. I can 3D-print on extra rooms by the time you’re ready to move in. The grandma suite.”

  “I’m your mother.”

  “It’ll be like a slumber party, only every night!”

  Oliver fought the grin that stretched her face. “You’re ridiculous.”

  “Look, mom,” Alice’s voice went serious. “All kidding aside. I lost dad, and I know it was my choice to go, but… I lost Matt, too. I don’t have kids. I miss you every day. I know we’d get on each other’s nerves, but it’d be worth it. Maybe this will be good for you and for your crew. Maybe, working together, you can help each other heal. Either way, it’ll get you out here, and that’s a start.”

  Oliver didn’t realize she was sobbing until the tears made the receiver slick against her mouth. “Oh God,” she managed.

  “You OK?” Alice asked.

  “Yeah… I’m all right. I just realized… I was just thinking I wanted to ask your father what to do. But he’s not here.”

  “No mom,” Alice’s voice broke on the other end of the phone, “he’s not. But I’m out here, and I’m waiting for you.”

  Oliver sat in silence for a long time after she hung up, her mind whirling. At last, she gave herself permission to take a belt of the Widow Jane. She’d been slugging directly from the bottle a bit more than she was entirely comfortable with lately, and made a mental note to knock it off. But not yet. For now, you have permission to be weak.

  She tried her son, Adam, next. It went to voicemail as she expected. If Alice had reacted to Tom’s death by reinventing her entire life, Adam had doubled down on his. He was probably in his office, or on a date with any of a string of girls he’d lined up out west.

  And what do you expect from him? she thought, Permission? He’s sure as fuck not going to invite you to come live with him.

  The thought sent a spasm of fear up her spine. She realized with a start that she hadn’t given any consideration to what her life after the guard might look like, now that Tom wasn’t there to share it with her. She turned to the family picture on the corner of her desk, spoke to his broad smile. “I always thought we’d get a yacht. Be snowbirds. Maine in the summer and down the waterway to Florida in the winter.”

  Alice’s Helium-3 stake was a far cry from that, but at least there was someone who loved her in that picture. It’s not just love. Alice is someone who needs you.

  She let her finger hover over the keypad for a full minute before she punched Elias’ number. After ten rings, she figured she’d missed her chance to wake him up, but then the receiver clicked.

  “Jane,” he sounded exhausted. That was good.

  “OK,” Oliver said, “we go year to year. I can resign at any time.”

  It took Elias’ sleep-fogged brain a moment to process what she was saying. “That’s just standard policy.”

  “How much time do I have?”

  “Jane, you just woke me out of a deep sleep. Do not ask me to do math.”

  “How much time?”

  “Fuck… Three months? Next Boarding Action is in three months.”

  Oliver sighed. “That’s… less time than I hoped.”

  “If anyone can make it work, you can, Jane.”

  “Fine, I accept. Make it happen before I change my mind.”

  “Congratulations, admiral. We’ll launch you…”

  “You’ll launch me after I’ve had basic non-cooperative docking training and zero-G ops coursework completed.”

  “Jane, we’re bringing you in to lead, and you’ve already done time in zero-G. You don’t need…”

  “If I’m going to lead, I need to understand what I’m asking my people to do, intimately. I graduate NCD/0G or I don’t go.”

  She could hear the rumble through the speaker that was Elias running his hand through his hair.

  “That’s a three-week course. Boarding Action is in three months. You’re burning a lot of time to make a show.”

  “It’s no show. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I do the job right, or I don’t do it.”

  “OK,” Elias said. “Christ I need to set up your promotion, your change-of-command. I’ll send you over a prep sheet. If you’re going to make the right entrance at SPACETACLET, we need it to make kind of a splash, you…”

  “No. I promote on the Moon. Not on Earth.”

  “Jane, we need you to show up already an admiral. Why are you breaking my balls here?”

  “Because if you were so damn smart, they’d be pinning a star on you and sending you up there. I want Alice to pin on one of the boards, and she’s on the Moon.”

  “So? We’ll fly her
to DC for your damn promotion!” Elias was surely awake now.

  “She’s prospecting H3 on Sinus Medii! You think she can spare a week away from the operation? Especially now? We do this on the Moon.”

  “Jane, the Commandant is watching this whole thing. You know that, right?”

  Oliver smiled into the receiver. “Outstanding. We’re going to give him one hell of a show. One more thing. I want the option to retire on the Moon.”

  Elias sighed. “Jane. You know that’s not regs. Everybody retires on Earth. The Moon isn’t a place for you to live as a private individual without a business purpose.”

  “It is for rich fuckers.”

  “You’re not a rich fucker. Even retired admirals don’t make that kind of money.”

  “Alice is hurting, Sean. She needs help running her mining stake. I want that option.”

  “Christ, Jane, I…”

  “Get me a waiver to retire on the Moon or the answer is no.”

  “Fine! I’ll get it done. You want anything else? A robot to massage your feet three times a day? A new Porsche?”

  “Don’t give me any ideas, Sean.”

  “OK, Jane. I’ll get it all done.”

  Oliver had one more call to make before she packed her things. Ho was awake, despite the late hour. “What are you doing up?”

  Her XO laughed into the receiver. “Hui-Yin had a nightmare.”

  Oliver nearly accepted the answer, but something bit at the back of her mind. “Wen, I have known your kids since they were born. You have never once said they had a nightmare.”

  Ho laughed again. “First time for everything, and… I guess you could say I had a premonition.”

  “Did you bug my phone or something?”

  “You’re doing this, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah. I just got off the phone with Elias.”

  “Shit. I have to be honest, ma’am, I wasn’t sure you would. I guess I need to prep for your change-of-command.”

  “Make sure you prep your whites while you’re at it, because you’re changing commands with me.”

  Ho was silent for a moment. “You want me to move my family to the Moon?”

  Oliver’s laugh sounded harsh in her own ears. “You’re goddamn right I do. You wanted me to do this, so now we’re doing it.”

  For once, Ho didn’t laugh. She could almost hear the wheels of his mind churning.

  “Look, Wen,” she said, serious now, “I can surely do this without you, but man, I have to be honest. I… I really don’t want to.”

  The silence stretched, and Oliver could have sworn her heart stopped beating for fear she would miss his reply.

  “Yeah,” he finally said.

  “Yeah, what?”

  “Yeah, OK. I’ll uproot my whole family and move them to Mons Pico.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I can surely have a career without you too, and I really don’t want to either.”

  “Ting-Wei…”

  “Has been through six PCS moves already. She’ll be fine.”

  “16th Watch is a bit different, though.”

  She could hear Ho’s shrug. “She’ll live, and the kids will flip. And it’s super-promotable, right?”

  “Operational hardship tour. XO at a critical command. You’ll make captain for sure.”

  “I will or I won’t, but the…”

  “No, Wen. You will. Because I’ll make damn sure you will.”

  She broke the connection and stared at her own reflection in the glasslike surface of her desk. It lengthened her features, smoothing the wrinkles, sapping the gray from her hair. She looked like the commander she needed to be, even though she knew a real mirror would be less kind.

  Her mind tried to turn the decision over, pick it apart. She quashed it. She had made her choice. If anything, it brings me closer to Tom. The Moon was where he’d died, and they’d jettisoned his casket on a straight trajectory to the sun. But that was all nonsense. The Moon was no closer to Tom than Earth or Saturn or Alpha Centauri. Her husband was gone. He had ceased to be the moment the PLAN kinetic round had struck his boat.

  But she couldn’t shake the feeling that closer was somehow better, and after a few minutes of wrestling with it, she stopped trying. She’d have enough on her plate in the days to come.

  CHAPTER 3

  Service members in all five branches commonly refer to any tour of duty in space, whether assigned to a space station or to the Moon, as “the 16th Watch.” The term comes from the sixteen sunrises and sunsets witnessed by inhabitants of the original International Space Station. You don’t see that many from the Moon, but the term stuck, and is uttered with reverence or dread, depending on whether you see space as a new frontier, or a wilderness.

  “THE FINAL FRONTIER? THE MILITARY STRUGGLES TO ADAPT TO THE DEMANDS OF OPERATING IN SPACE.” GQ MAGAZINE

  The space elevator’s lift schedule was watertight for a month, so the Coast Guard shelled out the outrageous fee for a heavy lift rocket. It was Oliver’s second time on propellant lift.

  Well, the third time, if she was being fully honest, but escaping the Moon’s non-atmosphere and weak gravity had made the ride back to Earth after the Lacus Doloris incident trivial. It felt about as bumpy as your typical airplane ride.

  Breaking free from Earth was another matter, and she was sharply reminded of the stomach flattening, bone-rattling pressure of the acceleration as the hundreds of thousands of gallons of propellant forced her up, ripping her from the planet’s grip. The whole structure trembled and her back ached from the mule-kick of the initial acceleration, but once the boosters separated and they eased into the final burn stage, she began to relax. Acceleration-gravity beat spin-gravity, she remembered. It was more comfortable to feel the pressure evenly rolling you back than wrenching you over to one side.

  Oliver and Ho had hitched their ride on a payload delivery mission, redeploying the Coast Guard Cutter Corvus into lunar orbit after a complete refit at the Pascagoula shipyards, leaving Ho’s family to follow later. The final stage of the trip was announced with a loud bang, as the heavy lift rocket fell away entirely, and the Corvus continued under her own thrust. The trip to the Moon would take three days, but they were bound for the Coast Guard’s Orbital Training Center at the Lagrange point just a couple of hundred nautical miles off the Moon’s surface. It would shorten the trip by a little, but not much.

  She spent the intervening days with Ho, mostly playing cards and swapping sea stories. In her younger days, she’d have been afire with planning, setting up her command structure, building budgetary castles in the air. But she had been in the guard long enough now to know that commands were built on the people in them. Until she met them, her plans were dust. And besides, Elias had been clear – the Commandant expected her to run SPACETACLET after this year’s Boarding Action was won. Until then, she was to let the acting CO handle affairs quietly, and focus one hundred percent of her time and attention on prepping the SAR-1 team to win.

  She relished the break from responsibility, and was even a little disappointed when her small boat coxswain, a young Boatswain’s Mate First Class with a thick southern accent and a nametape that read LEE, knocked on her stateroom door and told her it was time to suit up. Ho was, not surprisingly, already in the cutter’s launch bay and into his hardshell by the time she arrived. “You’re going to make us late ma’am,” her XO quipped, handing his helmet off to one of the crewman to help him seal in.

  But Oliver ignored him, looking at the hunched domes of the boat’s furled solar sails. “This… is not a longhorn.”

  Lee looked surprised. “No, ma’am. Longhorns started phasing out the year after…” He paused awkwardly.

  “It’s OK,” she said, “Lacus Doloris sure as hell isn’t a secret to me. Just don’t call me ‘Widow Jane’ to my face, and we’ll get along fine.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. Well, they started bringing the Rhino Class in. Right after the dustup.
Stronger belly thrusters and a longer nose.”

  “For an extra hard point, am I right?” Oliver asked.

  “You’d have to ask Northrop-Grumman, ma’am.”

  Ho was looking at the small boat’s bow now. “Huh. You could put two autocannons on there.”

  “More guns,” Oliver shook her head, as one of the crew helped her suit up, “exactly what we need.”

  Lee gave an embarrassed smile and stepped through the hatch, motioning her to follow.

  The interior was different from the longhorn. They’d left the metal unpainted, and the wider space made her feel oddly agoraphobic, too far to reach the handholds she’d been used to in the past. The weapons and gear lockers seemed too far away, the windows too big, as if, once they launched, space might reach in and snatch her away. But there was enough of the familiar in the new model to make her eyes sting and her throat close. She realized with a start that this was the first time she’d been in a small boat since Lacus Doloris. Since Tom.

  Ho kept his eyes resolutely forward, but Oliver had sailed with him long enough to know he was thinking the same thing. Lee was busy strapping himself into the helmsman’s chair, which seemed a mile away. Oliver wrestled with the terror, grief and uselessness. No. I am not going into my new life like this.

  She worked her way to his side, tapped him on the shoulder. “You conn. I’ll run the helm.”

  His eyes went wide behind his visor. “Ma’am?”

  “What, you think I can’t figure it out? I qualified on the longhorn.” The two joysticks certainly looked the same, even if the plotter and the radar were in different spots.

  “I doubt your cert is current,” the coxswain said.

  Oliver shrugged. “I’ve logged thousands of hours on Defiance Class gunboats back home. How different can it be?”

  “Those are Earth boats, on water. This is space. It’s pretty different, ma’am,” Lee looked like he wished the bulkhead would swallow him.

  “Well, good thing I’ll have a qualified coxs’un standing right next to me.” Oliver gave him her most winning smile, and belted herself into the helmsman’s chair, gave the thumbs up to the crane-operator through the window.