Terms of Enlistment

Chapter 18

Our ship leaves Gateway Station two days after I join the crew. By the time we clear our moorings, I’m tapped into the vitals of the Versailles enough that I don’t have to ask where we’re going, or what we’re going to be doing. The Versailles is tasked with a supply and mail run to the NAC colony on the planet Willoughby. It’s a recently terraformed planet that’s orbiting one of the stars in the Auriga constellation. Its astronomical notation is Capella Ac, but the Marine designation is “dirt speck at the ass end of the known galaxy.” Halley, who got top grades in astronomy and astrophysics back in Fleet School, asserts that this is not quite true, since the Capella system is only forty-two light years from Earth—well past the 30, which is the thirty light year zone around Earth that separates the Inner from the Outer Colonies, but well short of the settled fringe, which is sixty-one light years away. Capella Ac—Willoughby—is not the ass end of settled space, but it’s definitely located well below the neck.

It doesn’t make much of a difference to me, of course. I’m about to leave the solar system for the first time, and even though the Versailles has no windows in its hull, I have a great time sightseeing through the sensors and optical feeds of the ship. As old as the ship is, her network hardware is in great shape, and I have very little to do other than monitoring the shipboard systems and running self-checks on occasion. Traveling on a space ship is not at all like I imagined it. The lack of outside visual references combined with the artificial gravity of the ship itself makes for smooth travel, and if I didn’t know I was on a space-going vessel, it would feel no different from sitting in a classroom on Luna or Earth. The first few days of our journey, I tap into the external feeds from the hull cameras, but after we leave Gateway Station, there’s nothing to see out there other than blackness and the occasional distant star.

Halley spends her watches with briefings, simulator training, and other pilot business. I spend my watches in the NNC, ready to take complaints and fix things in case the galley dispensers fail to communicate their need for resupply to the ship’s supply clerk. That leaves seven and three-quarters of an eight-hour watch to poke around in the ship’s databanks, or see if I can get a glimpse of my girlfriend through one of the security vid feeds.

Halley seems to be flattered rather than offended when I tell her that I’ve been stalking her through the ship’s security system.

“You must be bored as hell in this office, you poor thing,” she says. “Too bad we don’t have security cameras in the officer showers on Deck Three, or I’d give you something better to look at than me walking the corridors with my ass looking all unflattering in that green flight suit.”

“Nothing wrong with the way it looks in that flight suit,” I say. We’re in the NNC, where Halley has started to seek refuge whenever she needs a quiet place to do paperwork, or talk about something other than drop ships, approach vectors, and docking procedures.

“Oh, you think so? Lieutenant Foster agrees with you, I think. He’s been a bit grabby lately.”

“Any of your officer buddies say anything about the fact that you’re poaching among the enlisted crew?”

“Fuck, yeah,” she says. “But it’s not like they have a leg to stand on. Foster and Rickman are both doing the same. Foster’s screwing some petty officer from Propulsion, and Rickman has the hots for one of the purple shirts from the flight deck.”

“Purple—what’s that, refueling?”

“Yeah, gas monkey. Red is ordnance, yellow is wrench spinners.”

“How elitist. What do you fancy pilots call the Network admins?”

“No idea what they call the other ones, but you’re ‘that lucky fucker’, according to Lieutenant Rickman.”

“Well, good to know I get to best him at one thing, at least,” I say.

Halley’s PDP vibrates on the tabletop in front of her, and she picks it up with a sigh to read the message on the screen.

“Speak of the devil. I’m being summoned to the pilot briefing room. I’ll see you tonight after your watch?”

“You bet,” I say. We can’t do dinner together because we eat in different galleys—they’d kick me out of the officer galley, and give her strange looks for eating in the enlisted mess—but I have a private cabin, a rare luxury on a warship, and we spend a lot of our free time in there.

“Later, computer jock,” she says, and gives me a quick kiss.

“Later, pilot babe,” I reply.

I watch as she walks through the hatch and into the hallway beyond. There’s definitely nothing wrong with the way her backside looks in a flight suit.

I’m on the way to the enlisted galley when I hear my job title on an overheard 1MC announcement.

“Neural Network admin, report to XO in CIC. Neural Network admin, report to XO in CIC.”

I reverse course and head to the staircase that leads down to Deck Five.

The CIC is busier than it was when I set foot into it for the first time. The XO is once again standing by the holotable, looking over a stack of printouts. I walk up to the table and render a salute.

“NN2 Grayson reporting as ordered, sir.”

The Lieutenant Commander looks up from his printout.

“Ah, Mister Grayson.”

He puts the stack of paper aside and waves me closer.

“At ease. Mister Grayson, how far away is this ship from the nearest communications relay at present?”

“Three and a half light minutes, sir—the orbital relay above Mars.”

“Very good,” he says. I’m pretty sure that he knew the answer to his question already, and that he just wants to check whether his new Network admin is on the ball.

“We’ll be entering the Alcubierre chute to Capella shortly,” he says. “Please make sure you check your pre-FTL procedures, and that all the databanks are fully synchronized with the main network before we go FTL.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. “I’ll get right on it.”

“Very good. Report network readiness to be directly by eighteen hundred hours, please.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

I don’t know much about our drive systems for interstellar travel. I do know they’re called Alcubierre drives, and that a ship traveling in an Alcubierre bubble can’t send or receive any messages, because it outruns even the near-lightspeed data traffic. Before an Alcubierre trip, every Navy ship synchronizes all its onboard data with the in-system network. I learned to run the process in Network school, and it’s just a matter of telling the computer to do it, but Navy regs still require the results of the sync to be double-checked twice by the Network admin on duty, and verified by the next senior department head up the command chain. I find that most of my daily duties consist of babysitting an automated process, and standing ready to get my head bitten off if I fail to catch any errors.

Back in the NNC, I open my admin deck, tap into the system, and start the automated protocol for pre-Alcubierre preparation. While the databanks synchronize with the nearest Navy communications relay to make sure we’re not going to deliver last month’s mail by accident, I go through the manual to make sure everything is going right. I suppose I should feel a little intimidated or overwhelmed by the fact that I’m running a department that should be staffed by two enlisted admins and a petty officer, but the truth is that everything is so automated that anyone with the ability to read a few checklists could run the NNC from their rack. Still, I don’t want to give the XO a reason to start disliking me, so I go by the book and hand-check every databank replication time stamp when the computer indicates that the process is finished. Then I hit the communications switch on the console next to the desk.

“CIC, Networks.”

“Networks, CIC. Go ahead,” comes the reply.

“Networks reporting ready for Alcubierre transition. All databanks synchronized and verified.”

“CIC copies Networks ready for Alcubierre transition.”

With the level of computer integration on the ship, I have no doubt that CIC was aware of the network status the moment the update finished, but this is the military, and everything has to have its proper procedure and ritual, like a kabuki theater with uniforms. There are the right gestures, phrases, and movements to be observed, and everybody plays along because that’s just the way it’s done.

I tell the admin deck to locate the RFID signature belonging to the dog tags of Ensign HALLEY D. The system finds her RF chip in the officer’s mess, and I tap into the camera feed to see her at a table with her officer pilot friends, eating sandwiches and discussing something. I take out my PDP and dash off a message to her.

>Mind sitting on the other side of that table, so I can get a better view of your ass? This camera angle is kind of crummy.

I send the message and watch the camera feed with a grin. Halley sits up slightly and removes her PDP from the leg pocket of her flight suit without interrupting the conversation with the lieutenant sitting next to her. I watch as she reads the message on her screen. Then she looks up, searches for the lens of the camera on the ceiling, and scratches her nose with her middle finger.

I smile and send another message her way.

>You’ll have to wait until my watch ends, I’m afraid.

I don’t like the transition to Alcubierre. When the ship enters the chute and turns on its Alcubierre drive, every bone and muscle in my body suddenly develops a low-level discomfort—not exactly an ache, but a disjointed feeling, as if some gentle, yet irresistible force is trying to pull every molecule in my body into all directions at once. My joints and teeth feel loose in their sockets, and my skin prickles with an unpleasant sensitivity. A few hours of discomfort are probably much easier to suffer than the boredom of spending a few years on an interstellar journey, but I can already tell that Alcubierre transitions are going to be my least favorite part of traveling on a starship.

Navy ships are at Combat Stations when they go in and out of Alcubierre chutes because their entry and exit points are fixed in space. The location of the Navy’s transit points is a secret, of course, lest the Sino-Russians simply mine our exit points to ambush our ships when they finish their Alcubierre trips, but every military has its intelligence service, so there’s always a chance of a welcome committee of SRA destroyers waiting for us as we transition back into normal space. Thirty minutes before the end of our Alcubierre run, the Versailles goes to Combat Stations once again.

“Stand by for transition,” the all-hands announcement comes from the CIC. “Transition in ten…nine…eight…seven…”

We transition back into normal space a mere twenty light minutes from Capella A, and forty-two light years away from Terra. There’s no welcoming committee of SRA warships waiting to blow us out of space. I feel the moment the Alcubierre drive shuts down bcause the low-level discomfort I’ve been feeling for the last twelve hours is suddenly gone. The screen of the admin deck in front of me shows that the ship’s neural network has already started its battery of post-transition integrity checks. I divert a tiny bit of system time to show me the feed from the ship’s optical arrays on the outside of the hull, but there’s not much to see out there. Capella A looks a lot like our own sun, a tiny, washed-out yellow orb in the distance, and I can’t make out any other celestial bodies at all. The Capella A system doesn’t look very different from our home system—vast stretches of nothing, punctuated by the glimmer of distant stars.

Out of curiosity, I check the navigational plot. The exit point of the Alcubierre chute into Capella A is much closer to our destination than the chute’s entry point from Earth. We are just fifteen light minutes from Capella Ac—Willoughby—and we will be in orbit in just a few hours. The ship’s long-range sensor grid shows a whole lot of nothing between us and Willoughby. It looks like we’re the only starship around, NAC or otherwise.

“All hands, secure from Combat Stations. The watch schedule will now resume,” the XO announces overhead. “Welcome to the Capella system.”

We start our orbital approach to Willoughby right at the end of my watch. I’m tired and hungry, but I decide to stay in the NNC for a few more minutes to witness our approach to the first extrasolar planet I’ve ever seen.

I’m looking at the feed from the dorsal array when the hatch buzzer sounds. I walk over to the hatch and peek through the viewport to see Halley’s face.

“Hey, you,” she says as I unlock the hatch for her. “Mind if I duck in for a few minutes? I want to fill out this flight log without Lieutenant Rickman chewing my ear off.”

“Sure thing,” I say, and wave her in. She steps through the hatch and lets herself drop onto one of the chairs in front of the admin console.

“Isn’t your watch over?” she asks. “It’s 2230.”

“Yeah, I’m off. I just wanted to hang around to watch us go into orbit. Here, check it out.”

I point to the screen of my admin deck. She leans forward to look at it, and puts her flight log aside.

“Wow. That’s Willoughby? I didn’t realize we were already this close.”

“We’ll be in orbit soon. Aren’t you supposed to play taxi with those drop ships of yours?”

“Yeah, but not until 0600 tomorrow morning. I guess they’re not set up for nighttime deliveries down there.”

We look at the globe of azure and brown that’s slowly shifting around underneath the ship. It looks a lot like Earth, but there’s also something profoundly different about Willoughby. I’ve seen the familiar picture of Terra from orbit often enough that looking at a planet with completely different continent shapes feels a bit disorienting.

“Look at that,” Halley says. “Continents, and oceans, and everything. Looks a lot like Earth, doesn’t it? Do you think they have wildlife down there?”

“I have no idea,” I reply. “I don’t know how that terraforming thing works. Did they get to bring livestock from Earth when they set up the colony?”

“Maybe in a tube, as genetic samples or embryos. I doubt they would have wasted the cargo space on that colony ship for a herd of live cattle. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to transport a whole cow forty-two light years across the galaxy?”

The ship lurches to the side so hard that I lose my footing and stumble against one of the databank racks. Halley lets out a surprised shout.

“What the fuck was that?” I ask when I regain my balance.

The overhead lights flicker, and switch to the red-orange combat lighting scheme. The overhead starts to announce Combat Stations, but whoever’s doing the announcement in CIC only makes it halfway through “Combat…” before the audio cuts out with a squelch. Then there’s the sound of explosive decompression coming from the deck below us. The ship lurches again, much more violently than before, and the sudden jolt throws me into another rack of equipment. The side of my head collides with the unyielding edge of a data storage cabinet, and then I’m prone on the rubberized deck and rapidly slipping into unconsciousness. I hear Halley screaming, and I register the thumping of the emergency locks on the NNC hatch, and then my brain turns off the lights.