A Call to Duty

by David Weber

  “You’re welcome,” Travis said, wondering if he dared reach over and hug her. Out in the open like this, with the shuttle prep crew floating around . . . “I just wish I could have done more.”

  “You did what I needed,” she assured him. “You’re a good friend, Travis.”

  She hesitated, and for a second Travis thought she was going to offer him a hug. But all she did was reach out and briefly squeeze his arm. “Take it easy, Long. I’ll see you around.”

  And with that, she grabbed hold of the handhold and pulled herself through the hatchway into the shuttle.

  Three minutes later, she and the shuttle were gone.

  All the way back to the gravitics duty station Travis found himself replaying that last scene through his head. Friend. Take it easy.

  No hug.

  Basically, the story of his life.

  With the whole thing still buzzing around his brain, he was a meter into the duty station before he realized that the entire division was present, crammed into the compartment literally from deck to ceiling.

  His first, self-conscious thought was that they’d assembled to honor him for his part in Esterle’s rescue. A second later, to his relief, he realized that they weren’t facing him, but were instead gathered around Craddock, who seemed to be running through a long list of assignments. Craddock glanced over as Travis came into view—“And Long will be helping Bowen,” he said. “Okay, you’ve got your jobs. Get busy.”

  Like a 3-D version of a parade-ground maneuver, the entire crowd turned in unison and surged for the hatchway. With a quick foot-grab on one of the deck handholds, Travis managed to get himself out of the way before the flow ran over him. “What’s going on?” he asked as Bowen started past.

  “We’re getting Vanguard ready to fly,” she said, grabbing his arm to bring herself to a halt. The extra momentum threatened to drag both of them off the deck, but Travis managed to maintain his foot grip. “Can you believe it? We’re actually being deployed.”

  “Where?” Travis asked, struggling to wrap his brain around this sudden new development. Vanguard had been sitting in Manticore orbit so long that it was a standing joke to refer to her as Rearguard.

  “Manticore-B,” Bowen said. There was an excitement in her voice that Travis had never heard there before. “Unicorn Belt. We’ve been transferred to Gryphon Fleet.”

  “What, all two ships of it?”

  “Don’t be snide,” Bowen admonished. “At least it’s something. Better than just something, really—we’re probably going to end up as the new flagship.”

  With some admiral or commodore coming aboard, no doubt. Briefly, Travis wondered how Captain Davison was going to react to having someone new watching over his shoulder.

  “We’ll be starting with a month of work-up exercises and maybe some gunnery practice,” Bowen continued. “Oh, and get this—we’re going to get to do a real hyperspace jump along the way.”

  Travis felt his eyes go wide. Vanguard was actually going into hyper? “That’s great.”

  “Don’t get too enthusiastic,” Bowen warned. “It’s only a little jump, you know, just from Manticore-A to Manticore-B. It’s not like we’re going to Haven or something. There’s also this thing called the wall-crossing ceremony for hyperspace first-timers that you’re not going to find very pleasant.”

  A knot started to form in Travis’s stomach. He’d heard about the crossing-the-wall thing, but no one had ever gone into any detail. “What kind of unpleasant is it?”

  “Let’s just say it’s not painful, but you’d better plan to leave your dignity at the lock,” Bowen said. “But forget that. Everyone who’s ever done hyper has been through it, we all survived, and you will, too. The point is that we get to fly, we get to see something besides Manticore—” she waved her free hand around her “—and we get to use our gravitics for something besides test runs.”

  “Sounds good,” Travis said.

  And to his mild surprise, it actually did. Any change in routine was something to look forward to; but to actually take Vanguard out into the sky was something he’d almost stopped hoping for and had certainly stopped expecting. “How soon do we leave? We’re on ready-ninety status, right?”

  “Yeah, right,” Bowen said scornfully. The rest of the crowd had finished their mass exit, and she gave a quick shove off his arm to send her floating across the compartment toward the tool rack. “Even the Admiralty knows there’s no chance we can prep that fast. No, they’ve given the captain seventy-two hours.” She snagged a tool belt and tossed it over her shoulder toward him. “And if we don’t have the Number One Sample Counter taken apart, cleaned, and rebuilt within the first five of those hours Craddock will have our hides. Let’s get to it.”

  It was much later, in the stillness of that last minute before falling asleep, that Travis wondered if the deployment could have been deliberately engineered in hopes of distracting Vanguard’s crew from the gravitics array fiasco.

  But he chased the thought away. Surely First Lord Cazenestro and System Command wouldn’t go to such a ridiculous extreme as that.

  Surely they wouldn’t.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Rafe Hanford had been an asteroid miner for over half his life. He’d started as a crewman on one of the big mining ships, and had eventually reached the point where he was able to talk a group of investors into letting him captain a small ship of his own.

  On balance, he’d done a good job of repaying their trust as well as their bank accounts. Over the years he’d become something of a specialist in working off the beaten path, poking around the emptier sectors of Manticore-B’s Unicorn Belt in search of ore concentrations too small for the big boys to bother with but large enough for a small-ship operation like his to turn into a modest profit.

  Overall, he liked both the work and his jauntily maverick approach to it. It was quiet out here in the sparselies, his sensors and his instincts were good enough to find enough ore to keep himself and his small crew in business, and he didn’t have to answer to anyone except his investors.

  There were times, though, when all that solitude had its drawbacks.

  Times like now.

  “Well, it’s not the impeller ring,” Katerina Shankweiler said, frowning at the engineering status board. “That’s the good news. The bad news is that the burble’s probably coming from the fusion plant. Probably some glitch in the containment bottle.”

  Hanford gazed at the board, tugging absently at his lower lip. Of all things that could go wrong on a ship, the fusion plant was the worst. Everything else could be fixed or cobbled together or run at half-limp speed if necessary. And indeed most everything else aboard had gone through one or more of those kluges over the years.

  But the fusion plant was different. If that went, everything except emergency power and the survival suits went with it. “Can we make it back to civilization?” he asked.

  “Depends on what you mean by civilization,” Shankweiler said. “If you mean Unicorn One, not a chance. If you mean one of Tilliotson’s mining factory groups, maybe. We’d probably do better to blast out a mayday and see if there’s another independent nearby.”

  Hanford scowled. Like everything else plying the spacelanes, belter ships were required to supplement their com lasers with omnidirectional radios for precisely this kind of situation, and it was one piece of ship’s equipment that he made sure was always in good working order.

  But a mayday broadcast wasn’t something you did on a whim. The administrators on Unicorn One and their Star Kingdom overseers down on Gryphon took a dim view of stirring up the rest of the belters unless such stirring was genuinely and urgently called for. “What about that new patrol ship?” he asked. “That—what the hell is it, anyway, a sloop or something? It’s supposed to be stooging around these three sectors, right?”

  “Yes—HMS Phobos,” Shankweiler confirmed, kicking herself off the monitor console and floating over to the navigation board. “Let’s see if we can pick up he
r beacon.”

  She puttered at the board a moment. Hanford studied the position plot, trying to come up with a workable Plan A, a contingency Plan B, and a last-ditch Plan C. Hopefully, this time he wouldn’t also need a Plan D. There’d been occasions when he had.

  “There she is,” Shankweiler said. “Pretty far . . . and of course, she’s also moving away from us. Damn.” She looked over her shoulder at Hanford. “So what’s Plan A?”

  “We head for Unicorn One,” Hanford told her. “Low acceleration, just kind of ease our way along.”

  “I already told you we’ll never make the station.”

  “Maybe not, but that’ll at least get us closer to the main travel lanes,” he said. “More chance that way of getting in range of someone who can reach us if we need help. We’ll keep an eye on the burble, and if it amps another twenty percent we’ll shut it down and go on emergency power.”

  “I don’t think the batteries will last nearly as long as you think they will,” Shankweiler warned.

  “As long as they last long enough for you to fix the bottle, that’s all we need,” Hanford said. “It will be easier with the system shut down, right?”

  “You mean nearly impossible instead of totally impossible?” she suggested dryly. “I guess when you put it that way—”

  “You can do it,” Hanford assured her, floating over to the helm and strapping himself in. “Let’s get this floating parts store turned around, and I’ll get us on an arc for Unicorn One.”

  “You want me to tell the others?” Shankweiler asked.

  For a moment, Hanford was tempted. He’d never liked delivering bad news, and the possibility that the twenty-five of them might be facing a horrific death was about as bad as news ever got. And Shankweiler had the kind of smile that always made things look and sound better.

  But no. Rafe’s Scavenger was his ship, not hers. If there was doom to be proclaimed, it was his job to proclaim it. “I’ll tell them,” he said. “You get your tail back over to the plant and see if you can figure out what the problem is.”

  “Will do,” Shankweiler said. “Good luck.”

  “That’s my line,” Hanford corrected. “You’re the one who’ll be working on the fusion plant.”

  “Yeah, but you’re the one who’ll be telling Gratz he may soon be down to bottled air and cold hash.”

  Hanford grimaced. She had a point. “There’s that,” he conceded. “You just fix the damn plant. For both our sakes.”

  As with many other life experiences, Travis reflected, getting HMS Vanguard out of orbit and into real space sounded much more exciting than it actually was.

  The preliminaries were certainly frantic enough. Along with getting the replacement gravitic vane into place—which, thankfully, went off without a hitch this time—there were three shuttleloads of new equipment that had to be installed elsewhere on the ship, plus four shuttleloads of fresh food that needed to be brought aboard and stowed now that such supplies would no longer be a quick jaunt away. Captain Davison’s seventy-two hours were a mad scramble from one end of the ship to the other, with the official duty roster more fiction than reality. On two separate occasions Travis dragged himself into the mess for a break long after he was supposed to go off duty, only to find a sizeable percentage of other bleary-eyed spacers already there, sipping coffee in an attempt to revive flagging brain cells.

  The actual departure from orbit, once it actually happened, was a definite anticlimax. The announcement came over the all-ship speaker system, and Vanguard was on her way.

  It probably looked better on the bridge, Travis thought as he floated behind Senior Chief Gravitics Specialist Inzinga in the Combat Information Center. The bridge had their big visual displays, after all, whereas CIC’s more modest monitors mainly showed false-color images or the more subtle constructs from the radar and lidar sensors.

  It was the gravitic readout that most interested him, though, and he gazed in fascination at the flickering lines and curves on Inzinga’s monitors, curves that formed the gravitational profile of the Manticore-A system. Back at Casey-Rosewood, after he’d been summarily switched to gravitics training, he’d tried to get into the Specialist track. But he’d been a late arrival, and the Navy had needed more techs than system operators, so that was where he’d been put.

  But there were ways to get them to change their minds about such things. Ever since coming aboard Vanguard Travis had made a point of spending at least two hours a day studying the manuals and prep work for the Gravitics Specialist rating. Another three to six months, he estimated, and he’d be ready to request a proficiency test. If he passed, and if the RMN could find a slot for him, he might be able to graduate from digging into the guts of the gravitics system to facing this set of monitors and keeping the bridge informed of large masses or moving ships.

  Not only was it a quieter, more peaceful job, but system operators never had to explain to a CPO why something hadn’t gotten fixed because they’d run out of spare parts. That aspect alone would make the upgrade worthwhile.

  Still, the bridge was where all the most interesting jobs were. That was where the monitors were, and where the captain, XO, tactics officer, and astrogator all hung out. Travis had visited the bridge exactly once, right when he’d come aboard, but the memory still lingered. That was where he wanted to be someday.

  But the bridge was a long way up the ladder, especially for a noncom, and that ladder was a hard climb. It required hard work, competence, and dedication.

  Or there was that other ladder, the one no one officially talked about. The one that simply required having friends and patrons in high places.

  It absolutely didn’t involve having enemies in those same positions.

  He felt his stomach knot up. Even now, three years later, he still found himself wondering if he should have handled that cheating accusation differently. The whole idea had been absurd, but he’d been so stunned by the charge that he’d found it impossible to do anything except stammer protestations. The deal Lieutenant Cyrus had offered, to quietly transfer from impellers to gravitics, had sounded a whole lot better than standing before a review board, and in his mind-numbed state he’d grabbed it.

  Would standing for review have been better? Cyrus had warned that if the board convicted him he would be out on his ear, whereas a small note listing the suspicion of cheating would probably never be noticed by anyone, especially since the suspicion was unproved. So far, that seemed to be the case. Certainly neither Craddock nor the bosun had even hinted that they were aware of it.

  But the men and women who selected personnel for bridge and CIC assignments were likely to be more thorough in their reading. Would they see it as a minor glitch, or would it doom his chances of advancement?

  He didn’t know. In fact, given the back-room nature of all such discussions, he would probably never know.

  “Having fun?” Craddock’s voice came from the side.

  Travis jerked, his reflexive twitch bouncing his knee off the back of Inzinga’s seat and starting him drifting away. “Yes, Chief, I am,” he said, grabbing the seat’s upper handhold and bringing himself to a stop. “I’ve been studying the operator’s manual—”

  “Yes, I know,” Craddock said, glancing around as he floated into the compartment. “I presume you know this is a restricted area?”

  “It’s all right, Chief,” Inzinga said. “I said he could watch.”

  “Yeah,” Craddock said. “And I said he was supposed to hit his rack. Or did you somehow miss that order?”

  “I’m sorry, Chief—I didn’t realize it was an order,” Travis apologized. “But I wasn’t all that tired, and I wanted to see what the gravitics looked like with Vanguard in flight.”

  “That’s nice,” Craddock growled. “And now that you know it was an order?”

  Travis felt his cheeks warm. “Yes, Chief,” he said. “Permission to go back to the machine shop first and get my multitool?”

  “Fine,” Craddock said. “But I do
n’t want to catch you turning a single bolt with it. The rest of the work can wait until next shift. Now get moving.” He peered at Inzinga’s displays for a moment, as if wondering what Travis found so fascinating, then shoved himself off the other’s chair and disappeared through the hatchway.

  “You heard the chief,” Inzinga said. “Get some sleep. Something’s bound to fall apart and need fixing tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Senior Chief.” Travis gave the gravitics displays a final look of his own and pushed off toward the hatchway.

  Someday, he promised himself. Someday.

  The machine shop was, as expected, deserted. Travis collected his multitool from the tack strip where he’d left it and made his way back across the compartment.

  He was nearly to the hatchway when a young female lieutenant suddenly loomed in the opening in front of him. “Finally,” she said. “You a gravitics tech?”

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Travis said, flailing a bit. “Spacer First Class Travis Long.”

  “About time one of you showed,” she growled. “I was starting to think you guys were running bureaucrat hours. Grab a tool kit and come with me.”

  Travis felt his mouth go suddenly dry. “Ah . . .”

  “Is there a problem, Spacer Long?”

  “Ah . . . I’m off—I’ve been ordered to report to my quarters, Ma’am,” Travis changed course just in time. Somehow, he sensed that the words off duty wouldn’t be smart to say right now.

  Apparently, the word quarters wasn’t much of an improvement. The lieutenant’s expression didn’t change, but suddenly Travis could almost see frost forming in the air between them. “Ordered by your chief?” she asked, her tone deceptively calm.

  “Yes, Ma’am,” Travis said. “Chief Gravitics Tech—”

  “You see these?” the woman asked, inclining her head toward her insignia. “These say my orders supersede his orders. Now get your tool kit.”