by Allen Ivers
Locklear spun about, tossing himself back toward Leo, “My boys will shuttle down when we hit periapsis. We’ll call for you when we know it’s safe.”
“The colony radio tower’s out,” Leo stated the obvious, curious to see what rebuttal Locklear had to that.
“Garner has a man-pack.” Locklear’s lip curled back in disgust. “And you can fix the damn radio. Stay up here, and get geared for heavy lifting. We’ll call when it’s secure.”
Locklear seemed to be returning proportional disgust to Leo’s, despite it being largely perceived disgust in the first place.
“Gateway would prefer we not get chatty about it, lest somebody back home decide to let loose about Manifest being, y’know… destroyed.” Leo heard himself get smarmy and almost bit himself halfway through the sentence.
When did he become this guy? The smartass back talking at a cop? That wasn’t a behavior that produced a good end.
Locklear pushed off the wall, spinning himself in place like a top. If there were gravity, he’d be pacing. This was what he had to settle for in the confined space, “Leo, I swear to God, somebody on Luna with a half decent telescope is goin’ to see what we’re seein’. You can’t keep this thing quiet.”
Sure enough, the whole transport was buzzing by the next morning, like a faint vibration echoing through the hull. It was as though the bulkheads themselves gave up the ghost. The air even tasted different. Sweat. Stress.
Of course, the boys back at Gateway station could have hoped that there wouldn’t be a leak, but in the era of space travel, dependence on hope and unicorns invites catastrophe.
Realistically, they had to know people would find out, talk, or just plain look up at the bright shiny future of the human race to find out something had gone wrong. The pale blue dot was likely buzzing with theories and conspiracies, creative and otherwise, about the fate of the hundred colonists on the surface.
Locklear used to reap an abundance of amusement from such debate, before relegating it to the dustbin where it belongs. But as it turns out, he couldn’t so easily escape the questions shipside.
Locklear’s boys had their questions, and some even asked them, but most knew enough to shut up. Their meals and their training had gotten a lot quieter since the news broke. The kind of hush that causes the guilty to simply up and confess, a lead brick about the shoulders, the metronome of dripping water somewhere out of sight. It was liable to unscrew even the most hardened of minds.
It was going to break their spirit before they even got to Manifest.
The treadmill was good for stress like that. Strapped in with a six point harness, a spider’s web made of aircraft cable, Locklear was able to run wind sprints without fear of losing balance in the weak gravity. There were other mobility exercises and stretches that helped build and maintain, but cardiovascular health was challenging to conserve in zero-G.
Especially for people who would have to be at something resembling healthy on arrival.
The ship’s doctor – Doctor Olivia Gamble -- kept a close eye on everyone’s health, looking for abnormalities that the months long trip could cause. She told him there were usually two cases of something awful each trip. Cost of doing business.
Locklear had his heart set on not being one of the two statistics to suffer cardiac arrest in deep space.
Gamble was an expert in her field in the best way possible. She used precisely the language a patient needed to hear, if not what they would like to. She had seen too many patients in too short a time to ease them along with compassion. She had told Locklear that he had lost bone density in his shins, and was growing a gut despite the best diet – “Get your shit together.”
Locklear had a good long laugh, while the few other patients in the bay had stared slack jawed. She reminded him of his old DI, and it just all felt that much more like home.
Although not everyone was to be cut of that particular cloth.
Taking her advice to heart, he scheduled his third exercise regimen into his days. The conveyor belt whined underneath his feet, threatening to break down on him. He monitored his breathing in time with his footsteps, as each fall tended to mute the screaming of gears and plastic.
In on one, out on three, keeping a pace.
He tried not to look at the timer, although he was supposed to be keeping a rigid schedule. If he looked down at the clock, his legs felt the burn faster. If he could just stare straight ahead, like he had blinders on, he could run till his legs fell off.
Yeah, he had to admit. He was stressing too. Strange to suddenly realize it. Can’t hide it, that’d be silly. Any attempt to ignore this feeling would soon be followed by delusional denial.
Wear anxiety like a shield, and it’s just another part of the team now. These kids were depending on him to lead them through whatever catastrophe awaited them planetside. They signed up to handle drunks, not fight off a rebellion.
He was the most qualified person on board for the task at hand. That’s all there was to it.
The heartbeat of his feet on the plastic tread.
“Are you trying to make your heart explode?” A crotchety pack-a-day voice groaned right next to him.
Locklear turned toward the voice, while refusing to slow down. The ash blonde curls of Amelia Dane bounced in the low gravity, still refusing to settle after she planted her feet. But that cutting stare, belonging to someone truly soulless, is what really commanded attention.
He liked that about her. She inspired discomfort.
“Gamble kicked my ass yesterday, and I’m looking to outrun her,” Locklear quipped, although he slowed his pace a bit.
She wasn’t wrong. His heart was jackhammering. Can’t run without oxygen. He forgot to breathe. Stupid mistake.
Amelia stood icy still, just giving the slightest tilt of her head, but she might as well have been a judging statue.
Her eyes slid over to the heart monitor on the console, condemning the staccato pattern with dubious eyes, “You know what we do to racehorses when they’re done?”
“Point taken.”
Amelia shifted her weight to her other leg. He wondered if she actually knew how to stand up straight. God, Locklear was being picky today.
Amelia was easily the most disciplined and ardent member of his team. She came from metropolitan SWAT, handling tactical situations with grace and efficiency, and she had little tolerance for the lack of those qualities in others.
Competency was the rule with the Viking. No need to be so prickly with her.
He was pretty sure she’d be the one whipping everyone else into shape before Locklear could even make a move. He’d be the bureaucrat compared to her.
“So is this going to be a police job, or a Police Action?” She remarked, with more of that unforgiving cold biting into his burning chest.
Locklear palmed a button on the treadmill, stopping the rotations and that ear-biting whine. He settled for a moment, taking one solid breath to get his wind back, “You looking for a full briefing right now?”
Amelia shrugged, “Was going through my equipment. Need to know what I’m packing.”
Locklear smiled, wiping the sweat from his forehead like one clean sheet of water and grime, “First round, recon and support. We pack essentials.”
“Ammo and armor?”
Locklear shook his head, “If you want to carry it. There’s only like a hundred and six people down there.”
Amelia cracked a smile, one pale lip curling up the right side of her soft jaw, “So I guess you’re just bringing a night stick?”
Locklear toweled off his face. “Very funny.”
“You should say something to the kids,” she blurted. “They’re bouncing off the walls.”
“Say what?” Locklear chirped at her with a matching crisp frost, “You think I left the inspirational speech in my other pants?”
She wasn’t up here to scold him from ruling from a pedestal. She had advised him not two months before to stop being a member of the frate
rnity.
The commander was not one of the troops; a new condition for Locklear. They had to have the freedom to bitch and moan without fear of consequence and leaders cannot truly be one of the boys.
No, she was up here with a pretext to check on his cracking exterior, and make sure there even was a commander by business time. She was here to bust his balls in order to see if there actually was a pain response, some sign of life.
She shook her head, and he could swear her hair didn’t move with it, just hanging in space. “Or you could kick their asses a little.”
“Goddammit, what did I bring you for?” He jabbed back with a smirk.
She finally smiled back, satisfied that he was in working order, “I’m just sayin’…” She paused, adding weight before continuing, “Should I be packing riot gear or confetti?”
“Pack what you pack, but you have to carry it.”
The standard go-kit weighed a mere 18 pounds, not counting the uniform and boots. This included light armor (11.2 pounds), body cameras (4 ounces), personal radios (1.6 pounds) and flashlights (8 ounces). The nine man team would then have freedom to customize their particular kit for both role and preference.
The average officer didn’t need excessive specialization, but these were excessive circumstances even before the crisis arose.
The basic tactical vest was a stiffened polymer mesh to allow for balance between protection, flexibility, and cargo capacity. It would blunt a knife edge, but direct hits from projectiles or blades would pierce.
Each team member had customized their platform to their preference, but most stuck inside the 10 pound limit. Amelia and Garner had pushed past that with their added electrical and explosive gear. Amelia in particular liked to plan for every eventuality, and generally relished an opportunity to test that preparedness.
Locklear’s IFAK (Individual First Aid Kit): 11 ounces. Included a saline pack, IV tubing strong enough to double as a tourniquet, liquid skin, and antiseptic. Everything up to a gunshot could be stabilized on site.
The single biggest battlefield threat was blood loss, and the shock that followed. The ability to pump fluids into a casualty was often the thin red line between surviving and not.
He went out of the way to receive annual training in the latest field medicine and had only used those skills twice before. He had cleaned up a bar fight that had gone horribly wrong when a broken bottle found itself lodged in a drunk’s leg. Locklear’s kit may very well have saved the man and the leg.
Garner’s VHF Man-pack radio: 11 pounds. Granted him the ability to communicate with the Murci and coordinate ground work. Bulky, but satellite communication still had to obey physics. And Locklear wasn’t going to leave the house without a way to call the bus.
B-Field rations (Beef Teriyaki): 20 ounces. Locklear would trade Garner for his Chili with Beans; nobody wanted Garner eating that. Hopefully Manifest’s kitchen was still stocked, else they were going to have to keep Garner suited up to maintain his… emissions.
Amelia slotted on her vest a few specialty M84 stun grenades: old faithful, 8 ounces each. They’d been in use since the 1970s, and nobody had managed to find a more reliable (or at least less lethal) method of taking a room.
Not Locklear’s favorite tool. One went off on his vest two years back. Third degree burns on his chest and forearm. Manufacturing fault.
Against Locklear’s conventional thinking, big Jericho was packing a cutting torch. Oxyacetylene tank: a whopping 22 pounds. With the structural damage down there, it might prove useful, but that was a lot to carry. And if Locklear didn’t want to carry 8 ounces of phosphorous for fear of the hazards, Locklear couldn’t imagine how Jericho could stomach carrying twin canisters of liquid fire. But he wasn’t going to argue with a man sculpted out of a block of solid slate.
No, instead Locklear carried his signature ‘pocket’ shield -- collapsing acrylic panels hinging around a steel band on his forearm. They’d been issued as riot control in Germany during his stint and he’d grown fond of the gadget. A mere 5 pounds, but carrying it around all day wears out the shoulder.
It had saved his life when a driver pulled a pistol on him. He could swear, despite brand new panels, he could still feel the cracks.
The standard issue sidearm, a brand-new Sig Sauer P255 frame, was relatively light at just under 3 pounds with a double stacked magazine, firing copper-jacketed .40 caliber pre-fragmented rounds. The composite material allowed the pistol to be stronger and lighter, with a muzzle brake to help control the added recoil from the reduced weight, and an ejection port that aimed casings down and away from the shooter and allies.
The bullets were factory-made for soft tissue, and while extremely lethal, Inventory selected them more to preserve structural integrity during space travel – a breach of a single wall could kill dozens. A bullet that refuses to penetrate through steel was an ideal choice.
Doesn’t mean that any single discharge might take a wall with it, but Locklear took every available chance to stack the deck his way, further customizing his rounds with lighter powder loads. He would sacrifice the muzzle velocity for lower risks of catastrophic accident.
Each man carried an additional three magazines, one in a quick release for snap reloads in high stress situations. They hadn’t trained with it since they left Luna Gateway -- firearm accidents in space generally result in the prescribed catastrophes that Locklear was afraid of -- but he trusted muscle memory to remember how to do it. The whole team had qualified above and beyond, and even if they had lost a step, it was likely more than enough.
Amelia would carry the big guns, the Franchi SPAS 21, a gas-assisted semi-automatic combat shotgun specialized for short-range, high intensity situations: 9 pounds, plus an additional 5 pounds of shells for a total of 14. The first five in the tube were bean bags for nonlethal riot control. The tactical approach to peace.
God, he hoped it was peace down there.
Chapter 4
Murcielago
Leo struggled with the clamp on the shuttle’s fuel line, his bulky spacesuit making it difficult to wrap the handles, despite said handles being built to spec around those god-awful gloves. Stress compounded an already clumsy task. It was never simple, so the mantra was always take it slow.
Leo hated going slower than he knew he could. If only somebody had decided to make the suits less bulky, redundant, or one-size, they might actually be more useful in zero-gravity. But cheaper was the number one rule of the day.
And so every suit was for every occasion, and that made every occasion a grueling task.
While contained in the docking collar, a worker always wore an environment suit in the event of sudden decompression due to work-related hazard -- fuck up, better be wearing a pocket atmosphere or die.
It was entirely a redundancy for safety, annoying but well-intentioned. Leo had experienced one such decompression before and – of course – it happened the one time he bucked that regulation. A small rupture, just an imperfect seal on the docking collar, had found his air trickling out into space. The additionally redundant alarms indicated the oxygen drop and Leo was able to retreat and re-seat the collar, but he’d worn the suit every time since.
It was a reasonably effective reminder of why rules are rules.
Leo adjusted his grip for the nine thousandth time, tugging on the lever. It was being strangely possessive today, refusing to slide free. They designed the system with hydraulic controls like the bulkhead doors, but after one computer glitch on his first flight, he never trusted the system again. Anything a computer does can be done better by a wrench.
That may be just a saying and not strictly true, but it made him feel better to know for certain, in a tactile way, that something took place. He always wanted to go lay his hands on the object in question, and visually confirm the difference. That, and his wrench didn’t run on batteries.
By comparison, the T9-VDC (Vertical Drop Cargo) shuttle was a state-of-the-art piece of aerodynamic majesty with close
to two thousand computer processors, four efficient liquid fuel engines, and its own atmosphere recycler, all built by the lowest bidder – still the most expensive pick-up truck ever made.
That meant it was hardly user-friendly and broke. Often. But it’s sleek edges were unmatched in re-entry, and its relatively large glide ratio made it easier in the thin Martian atmosphere for both landing and take-offs, minimizing the titanic amount of fuel that had to be spent for the Single-Stage vehicle to return to the Murcielago. A simple refueling from the hydrogen station at Manifest, and it could return to low-orbit in a frighteningly brief two hours of ground time.
It had very few control surfaces, making abrupt changes to trajectory near impossible, but it’s not like the Murci was going anywhere strange. Time your take-off correctly, and it was like throwing a dart.
All that had to be done was make minute changes on approach with the RCS thrusters – as though the dart could instruct the board to edge a bit to the left. In no version of this scenario does the dart have to take a hard left at Albuquerque.
The clamp snapped free with the kind of crunch you’d associate with cracking a chicken bone. Leo knew this was disturbing but normal. A phrase he found himself thinking far too often in this job. With the last hard line to the shuttle cut, it was ready for departure.
His skin tingled with anticipation, pulling pricks rolling up his arms. It never escaped him that the ‘flight’ down to Mars or Earth or Luna Gateway more closely would be described as a mildly controlled free fall fast enough to melt a steel girder in seconds. He didn’t have a fear of heights or falling; he was afraid of the slowing down part, because that’s when everything bad happens.
Green light overhead meant the hatch had opened behind him.
Locklear and his men, sans space suits, floated up past Leo and toward the docking collar with their gear in duffel bags – their suits, he presumed. They either didn’t know that the suits were smart to have on already, or they just didn’t care.
