Solfleet above and beyon.., p.57
Solfleet: Above and Beyond, page 57
“Are you awake?”
She sniggered, though she didn’t know why, and then answered, “Uh huh.” A little less scratchy that time.
“I thought I’d take some time this morning and tell you where we’re going and why, if you’re awake enough to listen this time.”
She heard Max resume her workout as she rolled onto her back and opened her eyes again—crunch, grunt-hiss, crunch, grunt-hiss. She and her father both glanced over at her to find her down on her hands and feet, knocking out pushups, her head up and her back perfectly straight, grunting and hissing through her gritted bright white teeth again with every push, looking as though she could go on like that for an hour or more. She was also still in her underwear, which didn’t seem to be bothering her father at all. So, he was all right with a grown woman whom he’d only just met letting him see her in her underwear, but not with his own daughter doing the same? How was that fair?
Though, to his credit, he had finally lightened up some recently, compared to the prude that he used to be.
He turned his eyes back to her. “What time is it?” she asked him through her moans as she stretched.
“About seven-fifteen,” he replied without checking his watch, which she was surprised to see that he was wearing. He usually didn’t put it on until after he got dressed, and she felt pretty sure that the gray sweatpants and white tee-shirt that he was wearing now wasn’t what he intended to wear around the ship for the rest of the day. “You’ve been asleep for almost ten hours.”
“I needed it,” she told him.
“Yeah, you did,” he agreed. “You were pretty tired last night.”
“Yeah.”
“So, are you awake enough now, or do you need some time?”
She’d worn her old loose-fitting faded pink tee-shirt to bed and hadn’t taken it off because she’d fallen asleep quickly and had slept soundly through the night. It covered her as well as any tee-shirt made to be worn outside would have, so her father couldn’t possibly complain about it, even if she hadn’t worn a bra under it, so she went ahead and sat up and let the blankets fall away. Then she propped her pillow up against the headboard, scooted back—she was wearing panties, too, so again, he couldn’t complain—and then leaned back against it. “Yeah,” she replied, “I’m awake enough. Tell me everything.”
“We’re on our way to a planet called Cirra in the Caldanra star system,” he began.
“Somewhere I’ve never been, nice,” she remarked. Then she asked, “So how long will it take us to get there?”
“Aboard this speedy little vessel, about a week, give or take a few hours, once we jump...” He glanced at his watch. “...which should be any time now.”
“A week?” she asked, not at all pleased by the prospect of spending an entire week closed up in this little tin can. “Dad, I’m really glad we got this chance to go somewhere, but what am I supposed to do on this ship for a whole week?”
“There’s a stack of readers in the galley,” Max tossed out.
Heather and her father both looked over at her to find her standing with her hands on her hips, apparently finished, or perhaps just taking a breather. “How’s the selection?” Heather asked her.
“Surprisingly good,” the woman assured her. “Books, both fact and fiction, a variety of magazines, comic books...pretty much anything you could want. There are some games and movies on some of them, too.”
“Okay, thanks.” Heather looked back to her father. “So, have you ever been to this planet called Cirra? What’s it like?”
“Yeah, I’ve been there two or three times,” he replied. “It’s a lot like Earth, actually, except that it has two small moons instead of one large one. It’s about the same size as Earth, so the gravity feels the same. The sun is slightly more orange than ours, but that’s barely even noticeable most of the time, and the sky is blue with only a slightly greener tint to it. The only real differences are that the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, the days are twenty-seven hours long, and most of the plant life is generally blue rather than green.”
The plants were blue? “Really?” she asked him. “It’s all blue?”
“Most of it is,” he told her. “From where we’ll be on Solfleet’s Grainger Army-Aerospace Base south of Tarko City, you’ll be able to see a huge, dense forest of hundred meter-tall everblue trees off to the north and west that lead up to a virtual wall of snowcapped mountains off in the distance. Those trees smell just like pine trees back on Earth, but with a strong minty smell mixed in.”
“It sounds beautiful,” she remarked. “I’m looking forward to seeing it.”
“I thought you might enjoy it.”
“So now that I know where we’re going, tell me why.”
Her father drew a breath, presumably to answer, but then hesitated. Then he pointed out, “Some of what I’m about to tell you is still classified when presented in full context. You can’t ever repeat any of it to anyone who’s not assigned to this mission. That includes our flight crew. They only know where we’re going, not why. Understand?”
“Yeah,” she assured him, nodding her head. “I understand.”
“All right. A little less than a year ago, a Marine platoon found evidence that indicated one of our officers who’d been listed as M-I-A more than twenty years ago might still be alive, held prisoner by the Veshtonn. That officer’s daughter was a crewman in the fleet and worked for me at the time. She found out about it and went AWOL to try to hire some mercenaries to go into Veshtonn space to try to rescue him. Liz found her on Cirra, but...but someone abducted her before Liz could arrest her and bring her back to Earth. Lieutenant Commander Johnson recently found out that she’s still being held on Cirra by the same people who abducted her. These marines are going to go in and get her out.”
“I thought the Military Police did that kind of work. Looking for troops who go AWOL, I mean.”
“They do,” he confirmed.
“Then why was Liz out there looking for her?”
“She wasn’t, actually. She’d gone to Cirra to try to recruit a Marine squad sergeant I met once at the shipyards orbiting Mars, back in sixty-eight after...” He fell silent and looked away.
“After what?” Heather prompted. “Dad? Back in sixty-eight after what?”
She gave him a moment, but her question had obviously fallen on deaf ears. What was wrong with him all of the sudden? He looked...confused. He looked like he had suddenly forgotten something, or was worried about something. “Dad?” she repeated, concerned. Then, when he finally did look at her, she calmly asked him, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he answered evenly, finally. Then he cleared his throat and added, “Yeah, I’m fine. I just... My mind wandered for a moment. I’m okay. I just rolled out of bed a few minutes ago. I just need some coffee to help wake me up.”
“Let’s get some breakfast,” she suggested.
“Good idea.”
He stood up and gazed at Max again as he took a step back to give Heather room to climb out of bed. Apparently having rested long enough, she presumed, the woman was lying down on the deck on her back again, knocking out another set of crunches, once more grunting and hissing like an angry cat.
Crunch, grunt-hiss, crunch, grunt-hiss, crunch, grunt-hiss.
“I really like that you still care enough about your crewman to try to rescue her after all this time,” she told him as she pulled on a pair of shorts, “but won’t this mission be kind of dangerous?”
A moment passed in silence while her father continued watching Max—they really did need to find him a woman. Then he told her, his eyes still glued to the woman, who was, unfortunately, far too young for him, “Cirra’s a friendly world in the Caldanra star system, which we control nearly in its entirety.” Since her father wasn’t looking at her at the moment, she went ahead and peeled off her tee-shirt. She didn’t care if he saw her naked or not, of course, but he’d made it very clear that he wasn’t at all comfortable with the idea. She tossed it aside, onto her bunk, then grabbed up the same bra that she’d worn yesterday—it was handy, hanging right there over the bedpost where she’d left it last night, and she was planning on taking a shower later anyway. “Their neighbors, the Sulaini, control the immediate area around their own planet, but they’re strictly on the defensive now.” She put on the bra, then reached up to the shelf on which she had stacked her clothes. “Now that we’ve pushed the Veshtonn out of the system, they don’t pose a serious threat anymore. Besides, you and I won’t be participating in the mission. We’ll be perfectly safe back on the base with Rod, directing and monitoring the marines while they carry out the mission. I wouldn’t have brought you if I thought it might put you in danger.”
She’d picked out a clean tee-shirt and was pulling it on over her head—she probably should have waited until after she showered, but, oh well—when one of the flight crew officers announced over the intercom, “Flight deck to passengers. We are on approach to Trident Jumpstation at this time. Be prepared for a slight surge in the next few minutes.”
“Hey, I have an idea,” her father said while she stepped into her flip-flops, finally looking at her again. “You want to go up to the flight deck and see what it looks like to slip into jumpspace before we go eat?”
“Yeah, sure!” she replied, genuinely excited. But then she reined it back a little bit and asked him, “Are we allowed in there?”
He smiled at her. “I am a retired admiral, remember?”
She smiled back at him, and then followed him out.
They walked up the corridor and around the tactical display table between the bathroom and the equipment locker, inside which the environmental suits and various other emergency supplies were stored, she had learned. Then they stopped just outside of the flight deck door. Her father pressed the buzzer, and a moment later one of the crewwomen responded over the intercom.
“Yes? Who is it?”
“Admiral Hansen,” her father replied, his voice thick with that old authority that she’d heard so often throughout her life, yet hadn’t been hearing very much at all lately. “I’m here with my daughter. I’d like to bring her in so she can see what slipping into jumpspace looks like.”
A moment passed, and Heather wondered if maybe they weren’t going to be allowed in after all. Then the doors slid open and her father guided her in onto the flight deck ahead of him.
Four consoles formed a horseshoe from left to right around the front of the deck—one to port, two side-by-side facing forward, and one to starboard. She had no idea which station was what, but only the right side station facing forward was occupied at the moment, by one of the crewwomen—a thirty-something-year-old dark-skinned major decked out in full black and blue flight suit and gear who was apparently far too busy to turn around and say, ‘hello,’ as her hands were dancing over her console as though she were some kind of concert pianist or something. A fifth chair stood centered behind the forward consoles, a few feet back, its purpose apparently nothing more than to provide an observer with somewhere to sit, as there weren’t any controls within reach of it. Her father nudged her forward and guided her into that chair, then stood behind her, his hands on her shoulders.
“I don’t mean to ignore you two,” the major said without looking back at them, “but I’m a little busy at the moment.”
“That’s quite all right, Major,” her father told the woman. “Go ahead and do what you need to do. We’ll be fine.”
The doors opened again and the other three members of the flight crew filed into the cockpit behind them and took their places, each one greeting ‘the admiral’ in turn as they walked by him.
But Heather’s eyes were glued forward. A small speck of glistening silver-gray not much larger than one of the stars hanging in space beyond it appeared ahead. Heather pointed at it and asked, “Is that the jumpstation?”
“That’s it all right,” one of the other officers replied from his place at station number two. He was a tan-skinned, gray-haired, thick-bearded lieutenant colonel roughly her father’s age. “Trident Jumpstation.”
Heather had learned about Trident Jumpstation in school. It was the oldest jumpstation in the solar system still operating and had been designed and built to serve the smaller military vessels that were in service at the time. Now relegated almost exclusively to meet the needs of even smaller commercial and privately owned jump-capable vessels, and manned, at least for the foreseeable future, by non-Solfleet personnel—according to her teacher, the fleet had had to spread its personnel pretty thin after the last Veshtonn invasion—the station still maintained its orbit along the path that it shared with Neptune on the opposite side of the sun, where the relatively lesser but still immense gravitational forces that it generated couldn’t do any harm.
The ring and its supporting station divided into their separate structures in the center of the canopy as they drew closer, growing visibly larger by the second. The ring was their obvious target, or so she assumed, as it floated directly ahead in the center of the canopy. Besides, they couldn’t very well slip into jumpspace by flying through the station, could they? of course not. A massive, twelve-segment, double-rimmed halo of reinforced metallic silver-gray plastisteel and titanium, an almost imperceptible sheet of unbroken, translucent crystal as smooth as glass coated its entire inner circumference, and as they drew even closer, that crystal suddenly appeared to ripple like the surface of a lake in the wind and then began to glow with a dim blue-green sheen. Heather drew a quick breath.
The stars that she’d seen through the ring suddenly faded, almost as though someone had simply switched them off, and then a pulsating point of blue-green energy sparked to life in the center of the depthless black emptiness that they left behind. That point of light expanded outward in all directions very quickly, until it reached the ring’s inner circumference and formed what looked a lot like a pool of shimmering seawater.
“Course plotted,” one of the officers announced—the same older man who had spoken earlier—the lieutenant colonel.
They were going to fly right through that!
“Energizing jump nacelles,” the officer sitting at station-one reported. He appeared to be the youngest of the four and was just a lieutenant.
The ring seemed to grow faster and faster until the entire structure finally passed beyond the canopy’s borders, leaving only the swirling vortex still in view, its blue-green shimmer darkening to a deep purple and then to violet as its energy field interacted with that that the vessel’s twin jump nacelles were generating. Then, with a final shift from deep violet to black as their vessel passed through the ring and slipped into jumpspace, the stars suddenly reappeared, only to fall toward the center of the canopy where they gathered into a hazy, gently pulsating circular band of color like some sort of dark rainbow—deep purple-violet around its inner rim, shifting through shades of purple to blue, to aqua-blue around its outer rim. Every few seconds, one or two or a few of them escaped the band and raced past the shuttle, shifting from aqua-blue to green as they sailed by, but the size of the band ahead remained constant.
“Jump velocity achieved,” the major reported, reading from a display on her console. “The field shows stable and we’re secure in jumpspace.”
“Sensors and scanners showing all clear ahead,” the last officer added from her place at station-four—the other woman on the crew—another lieutenant. “I see no potential obstacles.”
“That was pretty,” Heather told her father as she stood up. “Thanks, Dad.”
“You’re welcome, sweetheart,” he replied. Then he guided her around and past him, toward the door. He thanked the crew, then asked her, “Ready to eat?”
“Yeah,” she replied, “but I think I want to take a shower first.”
They left the flight deck.
CHAPTER 44
One Week Later: Earth Standard Date: Sunday, 12 June 2191
So far, their voyage hadn’t been nearly as boring as she had worried that it might be, Heather reflected as she straightened her panties and tee-shirt and then sat down on the deck, facing Max but offset, her legs out straight, beside Max’s, feet together. Following Max’s lead, she reached forward and grabbed hold of her ankles, then pulled and leaned forward as far as she could without bending her knees to stretch out her hamstring muscles—Max was practically lying flat, torso on top of her legs, but she couldn’t go that low. At least, not yet. Almost, but not quite. As it had turned out, the readers really were loaded with a lot of good books and magazines, games, and movies, just as Max had said they were. Aside from a few magazine articles about beauty, dating, and sex, she hadn’t read very much—she’d never been much of a read-for-pleasure type, though the articles about sex had seemed promising in the pleasure department—but she’d enjoyed watching a few of the movies and had tried her hand at some of the games, as well. Those games hadn’t been as intricately plotted...or as loud...as the ones that she used to play so much back home on Mandela Station—Mandela was no longer her home, she reminded herself—but they’d still been entertaining. Even the two that hadn’t actually had any story to them had been fun.
Max sat up, raised her left knee, brought her left foot up beside and against her left hip, sole up, and then put her knee back down onto the deck and lay back, all the way to the deck, to stretch her quad muscle. Heather did the same, but she had to hold onto her foot to keep it from sliding away, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t quite force her knee to stay down when her shoulder blades hit the deck. Her quad felt like it was going to explode.
Whenever she hadn’t been busy reading or watching a vid or playing one of those games, Max had been right there to do whatever she could to help keep her from getting bored. She’d told her stories about some of her previous missions as a marine, had thrown a little bit of life advice at her every once in a while, and had, as of this morning, convinced her to join in on her morning workouts—a decision that she thought she might be starting to regret.
