by CJ Williams
The conversation over the meal was lively and interesting, on topics ranging from ship operation to speculation about whatever happened to the Acevedos. The setting evoked a rush of memories for Gus.
“I wish Carol was here,” he said. “She loves formal dinners, and I hate them. I shouldn’t have given her such a hard time about her dinner parties. She would enjoy this.” He gestured at the room in general.
Kyoko said, “Then I invite both of you over for dinner. We’ll make it absolutely fancy.”
“Me too,” Hannah added. “Or you could have us over.”
“My granddaughter would like that. Evidently, the Squid has become a fan of you two.”
“Bring her to the dinner then,” Hannah said. “How old is she?”
Gus shrugged. “I’m not sure exactly,” he admitted. “Twenty-something. Carol told me she’s married now.”
“I was going to get married,” Kyoko said wistfully. “I had a boyfriend.”
Everyone was shocked by the news, Hannah most of all. “You never said a word!”
“I didn’t think we’d make it back. After the geyser and our move aboard Alyssa, I told him in one of my messages not to wait; to find someone else. I imagine he’s married now.”
“Haven’t you called him?” Hannah wanted to know.
“I have no idea what his number was; it was in my phone. And he doesn’t have a family either. I’ll probably always wonder what happened to him.”
Esther and Hannah sighed in sympathy.
“What about you, Captain Gus?” Esther asked. “How long have you been married?”
Gus thought for a moment. “I guess this coming April will be fifty-one years.”
“He missed his golden anniversary,” Hannah teased. “He’s going to be in so much trouble.”
“Grandfather was underage when he got married,” Kyoko added. “He and Grandmother eloped to Mexico.”
That brought another round of exclamations from the two military officers and started one more round of remember-when. It was late when Gus finally reached his cabin. The first thing he did was call Carol. Much to Gus’s surprise, she had just watched the video of everyone having dinner.
“How does that happen so fast?” Gus asked. “I didn’t even know Alyssa was recording.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said primly. “The important thing is that this April will be our fifty-second anniversary.”
*.*.*.*
The next morning, Alyssa reminded Gus a stability check would soon be required. This was a task he could now delegate. He found Chief Rogers on the main deck, explaining the intricacies of rigging to several of the crew.
“Sir?” Rogers inquired when Gus arrived.
“What’s the status of the ringbolt, chief?”
“All repaired, sir. Let me show you.” They had installed a double glue bolt with a new block and tackle. “We ran a magnetic NDI on the rest and found four with microscopic cracks. We rerouted the breeches on those through new glue bolts.”
“Sounds good,” Gus said.
At least the crew would be safe from faulty breeches. Now he had to keep them safe from themselves. As a CEO, he always considered training to be one of his most important tasks. In his mind, employers who didn’t spend money on training were fools. Where safety was concerned it was even more crucial. It was time to get back into the instructor mode.
Rogers gathered up the gun crews, and Gus explained the requirement for periodical stability checks.
“But first things first,” he said, and explained his inspection checklist. “Before each shot, inspect the anchor rope, the ringbolt, and the breech lines.” Next, he showed them how to use the worm screw. After an initial demonstration, he left it to them to clean out the bore on the unfired cannons. “Once you get the cannons spotless inside and out, we can talk about actually shooting the gun.”
With the gun crews occupied, Gus took Rogers below to the magazine where he laid down strict safety procedures and bloodthirsty penalties for anyone who didn’t follow them. Rogers designated Ray Peavey and Dean Hernandez as powder monkeys. Gus had them fill several cartridge bags with gunpowder for the upcoming practice.
*.*.*.*
Alyssa announced it was time for the midday meal. Gus and Kyoko sat down with Jackson and Esther. Hannah stayed above at the wheel with Chief Warrant Officer Gamble.
“What’s for lunch?” Gus asked. It was a luxury to be waited on.
In answer, CS Brown appeared with a heavily laden tray. “Hamburgers today, sir. Tomorrow there’s pizza, then tacos, chicken nuggets, fish burgers on Friday, baked potatoes, and then chili mac on Sunday.” It was an obviously well-rehearsed litany. He set the tray on the table and left.
“It’s not fancy, but it does the trick,” Esther said. “His dinners are pretty good.”
“I’m not complaining,” Kyoko said. “At least someone else is cooking. For me, this is a treat.”
Jackson and Esther laughed at Kyoko’s exclamations of delight. “Breakfast is my favorite,” Jackson said. “The biscuits are always warm and fluffy. Esther covers hers with butter and a speck of government-issue strawberry jam, but I like mine with gravy.”
*.*.*.*
After lunch, Esther and Kyoko returned to the navigation room. Gus and Jackson went up to the poop deck to evaluate the status of repairs and ship’s operations. By now Chief Rogers had broken open the paint cans. Some of the crew prepared the metal surfaces while others came behind, applying fresh paint to gunwales, trim, and molding. One man hung suspended under the bowsprit by safety straps, furiously scrubbing old paint off the figurehead’s mounting, giving Alyssa herself a badly needed facelift.
“As I am sure you are aware,” Jackson said, “the navy has a passion for painting ships and the chief shares it more than any man I know. He’ll leave the decks and masts as they are, but he brought a hundred gallons for everything else. If there’s anything you don’t want painted, you better speak now.”
*.*.*.*
The following morning, the chief reported that the guns were clean and four teams were ready for firing practice. Gus was impressed when he inspected the cannons. They could not have been in better shape when they first came out of the foundry.
After he trained the initial cadre on the cannons, the plan was to cycle the rest of the crew through the gun deck so all aboard would have the opportunity to shoot one of the big guns. Sergeant Hawkins, the same Hawkins who had been on the initial boarding party, served as the gun deck officer.
In each crew, there was one man to load, another to swab and ram the barrel, one to prick the powder bag through the vent, and a gun boss to insert the primer and yank the lanyard. Peavey and Hernandez stood by as powder monkeys to deliver cartridges and cannonballs to the crews as required.
“All right,” Gus said as the men gathered around. “This is not rocket science; just remember that safety is the biggest priority.” He methodically rammed a powder bag, a cannonball, and some wadding down the bore. At his direction, two of the crew hauled on the breeches until the carriage was firmly against the bulwark. After piercing the powder bag, he inserted the primer and called out a safety warning for feet and toes. He then fired the cannon to the cheers of everyone on the gun deck. “Over to you, Chief. Try to keep everyone alive.”
“Aye, sir.”
“And let’s shoot the guns one at a time. I’d rather not fire a complete broadside all at once.”
“You heard the Captain,” Rogers said to Hawkins.
“Aye aye,” Hawkins replied. He looked down the gun deck, and in a deep voice called out the instructions. “First gun crew to your positions!”
The active crew took their places around the gun while the other men stood well clear behind their own cannons.
“Open the gun port!” The cover was jerked up and tied open.
“Load your weapon!” The assigned loader took a bag from Peavey and shoved it into the barrel. His partner then rammed it down firmly. The cannon
ball and wadding followed in sequence, rammed home fiercely. Gus winced each time; he had never pushed the load in quite so hard.
“Run out the gun!” The rammer and loader tugged on the breech lines until the carriage was tight against the bulwark. The vent man and gun boss used handspikes to lever the back of the carriage until the line of fire was perpendicular to the ship. From Hawkins’s first command, the entire process took less than two minutes.
Gus sighed. Over the last several months the same process took him about half an hour.
“Is the line ready?” Hawkins yelled.
The four team-chiefs gave thumbs-up.
“The line is ready. Charge the shot.”
The vent man shoved his brass pick down the vent to pierce the cartridge and shouted, “Home!”
The gun captain pushed one of the primers into the vent and stepped to the side of the cannon’s carriage. Hawkins checked they were clear of the recoil and yelled, “FIRE!”
The gun captain yanked on the lanyard, and the cannon detonated, sending an iron ball out into the cosmos.
*.*.*.*
Gus watched one additional round and then returned alone to the waist. Hannah and Esther were deep in conversation at the wheel on the quarterdeck. Now and then Alyssa spoke to the deck crews, who trimmed the sails as instructed.
Seaman Brown clanked equipment around in the galley while Hawkins’s voice sounded from below. Three men were aloft, tending sails and making repairs to the rigging where the Hanzo missile had left its mark. Others were polishing everything within reach.
Another shot fired and the cannonball disintegrated into a streak of light at the edge of the warp bubble. Smoke drifted up over the starboard rails. Firing the gun every day should keep any stability issues at bay.
Gus felt a bit of nostalgia. All around him, chores were being accomplished by men and women enjoying what they were doing. Old memories came back from when he used to make rounds at the shipyards where his company built mammoth space-going vessels.
Then as now, there was an order to the work with clear objectives. It was a good feeling and quite different from the past two years when he never had a spare moment; when he always had more to do than he could possibly manage. What a difference the last couple of weeks had made.
He went up onto the forecastle deck and looked at the stars ahead. So many times, he thought they would never make it home, and now it was just around the corner. “How much further, Alyssa?”
“We will reach Armstrong Station in twenty-six days, including three brief stops for stability,” the ship responded. “Lieutenant Jackson has already requested a docking station for our arrival.”
An hour later the cannons fell silent. Every crew member had had the opportunity to participate at least once in a gun crew. Rogers assigned several men to clean the gun deck, and the ship began to prepare for the coming night.
Hammocks appeared, and the gun deck became more like a barracks than a place of war. Thirty men and women were jammed in among the guns. It didn’t seem possible that thousands of years ago the crew had numbered fifty men sharing the same space.
A movie projector appeared, sparking debate over what would be shown. Hammocks were shifted, and eventually the forward deck became a self-contained theater complete with popcorn from CS Brown. Closer to the tiller someone produced a speaker cube, and contemporary rock filled the stern.
*.*.*.*
Hannah tried again to sip her diet cola but didn’t like the taste. “I used to live on these things,” she grumbled.
“Not like you remember?” Esther asked.
“Nothing is like I remember.”
“Something must be the same,” Esther prompted. “What’ve you seen that’s same as before.”
Hannah looked around the ship. Two of the sailors were laughing and one of them spit over the rail. “The boys. I guess men act like kids their entire life.”
“Ain’t that the truth? What about Grandfather Gus though? I wouldn’t exactly call him a boy. Whew.”
Hannah smiled at her friend’s exclamation. Esther didn’t hide that she considered Gus an exciting man.
“You and I have different perspectives,” Hannah said. “My mom told me he’s a sex symbol on Earth, which is really hard for me to believe. I guess you haven’t seen him like I have. He’s gotten pretty angry with me a few times, so I can vouch that he has a temper. And sometimes he’s just so clueless I want to wring his neck.”
“Overall?” Esther asked.
“Overall, he’s a pretty good grandfather. And he misses his wife so much that sometimes Kyoko and I get all teary-eyed. I hope I find someone like that.”
“Don’t we all? Do you have someone waiting?”
Hannah laughed, ignoring Ether’s question. They watched Gus meandering around the deck, inspecting, observing, sometimes directing the sailors to accomplish a task. He walked and spoke with a quiet assurance that the men responded to. Gus looked in their direction and threw them a quick, distracted smile. Then Chief Rogers called, and he turned away.
Hannah missed the early days in space when they weren’t so busy and had time to rest. The last month of watch-on-watch had not been fun. Mostly it was a blurry memory of worry about Kyoko.
In a way, it was hard to imagine the trip being over. The idea of going back to the same life she’d had before wasn’t appealing. Too much had happened in the last couple of years. She wanted more out of life. It was time to rethink.
17 – Reattack
“No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned…a man in a jail has more room, better food and commonly better company.”
(Samuel Johnson, “James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson”)
After three uneventful weeks, the thrill of firing the cannon wore off. Chief Rogers asked if the men could get trained on the muskets. Gus left it to Rogers to oversee that operation. For a couple of days, their sharp popping noise occurred during scheduled training sessions.
But then someone had the brilliant idea of sailing paper airplanes from the main yard while everyone else blazed away at the flimsy targets as they dipped and swirled around the mast. Gus came unglued at the sight of barrels pointed every which way, but before he could get off the quarterdeck, Rogers had intervened in a towering rage. The muskets got locked back in the gun cabinets down in the hold.
“Sorry about that, Captain,” Rogers apologized afterward.
“Make sure no one touches the swords,” Gus said.
“Aye, Captain. Already taken care of.”
*.*.*.*
Two days later, Gus took a turn at the helm. Esther was explaining solar system arrival procedures to Hannah.
“You can’t just come scorching into Earth orbit without clearance,” Esther said. “Not anymore. Try it, and you’ll get shot full of holes. Once we discovered the Acevedos ruins, people got all freaked out about aliens.”
“So what do we do?” Hannah asked.
“We slow to something less than lightspeed prior to reaching the Kuiper belt. The navy—”
“What’s the Kuiper belt?”
“Well, you can think of it as an extra asteroid belt, a very thin one, beyond the edge of the solar system. The navy has a dozen starbases on dwarf planets all around our system’s circumference. We have to clear through one of the stations to get clearance in. Those assignments really suck, by the way. I served a year on Haumea Station and thought I’d go crazy.”
Jackson heard the comment as he came out of the navigation room. “You picked the wrong spot to serve a remote tour,” he said. “I did my remote on Eris, and it was a hopping place. About five universities have a presence there.”
“Where are we headed?” Hannah asked.
“Eris,” Esther said. “Once they verify our identity, they clear us into the solar system. Then we talk to System Control, who hands us off to Earth Approach, and finally to Armstrong Station.
It’ll take about three days just to reach Earth’s orbit. But that’s not what I’m really worried about.”
“Pirates?” Hannah asked, her eyes all wide?
Jackson laughed. “No. Not pirates. Esther is talking about college students…and worse.”
Hannah looked relieved. She smiled and said, “What’s worse than college students?”
Esther shook her head. “Media and thrill seekers. I suspect we’ll have a noisy escort once we get closer. And it’s your fault!” she said, pointing at Gus. “You just had to go and become a superstar. It’s not like we don’t already have enough celebrities on this boat.”
“You talking about me?” Jackson asked.
“Get out of here!” Esther laughed, slugging her husband gently. “We’re navigating.”
A couple of hours later, Alyssa reduced the star drive to minimum power and slowed to sub-light. At that speed, the distortion of normal space around them was barely noticeable, and the star sail was stowed in favor of the round gravity disks.
After lunch, Gus went up to the navigation room to monitor their arrival. Alyssa’s new transponder broadcast their identification. To prevent misunderstandings, Captain Copeland had arranged a special ID code designating the galleon as an experimental spacecraft. It would keep them out of trouble when they appeared on the military’s radar.
The initial call came through quickly. “Sailing Vessel Alyssa, this is Eris Station, squawk ident.” The man’s voice had an amused tone. “And may I say, that’s a ship designation I never thought I would use out here?”
Esther answered, “Eris, this is SV Alyssa. You better get used to it. I’m going to order one of these things when they come on the market.”
“SV Alyssa, Eris, you can add my name to that list. You are cleared to enter the solar system and proceed direct to the Point Gleam initial approach fix. Maintain sub-light speed and be advised there is more traffic than normal between your position and Neptune. You folks have generated a lot of interest. All spacecraft have been advised to give you a wide berth. My regards to Grandpa Gus.”
