COMMANDER

Without a word the doctor and I both turned and ran, her into the hospital while I headed toward the bridge. The klaxon still sounding was the warning for maneuvering to avoid a potential collision. Many of my troopers would be diving for the acceleration clams to lock themselves into the protected interiors lined with a pressurizing gelfoam and HC gas, which was good protection up to twenty Gs or so of maneuvering if everything else failed. Inertial dampers and artificial gravity systems, IDAG, had been around for a couple of centuries, now, and were incredibly reliable. Nonetheless, the Navy still had rules about redundancy of essential personnel just in case of failure of the quadruple redundant generators or controls.

For the most part, we Marines followed the Navy rules on such matters, although we did boil it down to non-operational personnel. This meant anyone who was busy on a priority project stood their post and relied on IDAG. Since most emergency or battle maneuvering now occurred at thirty Gs or higher, and since a-clams were only installed on frigate- and larger-class ships, the actual number of active personnel these rules applied to were only a small fraction of the number of personnel who would be turned to paste if the IDAG did happen to fail. It had happened, of course, although we were pretty fatalistic about it now. There are a lot of more important things to worry about.

I knew ID, or inertial damping, had to do with somehow creating a pressure field around the ship which precisely balanced the absolute pressures outside the ship with those inside. Somehow, at the quantum level, the ship was contained in what the eggheads described as a “null space,” which meant that any pressures from outside the ship—such as acceleration and deceleration in any vector—had no effect at all on whatever was inside that null space bubble.

The ID worked hand-in-glove with the AG, or artificial gravity. Again, somehow, and beyond my meager understanding of physics, gravity fields were created on the inside of the ship which gave us humans a standardized “up and down.” Without that, in a micro-gravity or null-gravity environment, most of us would be quite ill with vertigo syndrome and the HVAC system would be flooded with vomit and other nasty human emissions.

The ID and AG forces and force-fields and null fields and all that other science stuff were all minutely crafted and balanced by a computer system which took up almost as much room down the central spine of the ship as the generators for those various fields. Our computer system was vast with some number of qubit processing power I could not comprehend. It was billions of times faster than our human brains, yet carefully programmed to remain at non-sentient AI levels. Sentient AIs were very few and far between, and always extremely carefully controlled. After the Brazil Protocols, who could blame us for being careful?

The passageway hatches were still open so we were not under attack. The hatches built into the ports and passageways were meant to seal off any passageway or section which became opened to space, venting its oxygen and other volatile gases and fluids. In battle conditions the hatches could be closed manually, or automatically by the AI, depending on the circumstances. They were 190-centimeter-tall, seventy-five-centimeter-wide doorways with incredibly strong magnetic seals, and the usual redundant Navy dogging latches.

I made it to the bridge in two minutes flat and only took the skin off one shoulder and one hip passing through the hatches. Captain Lewellyn was leaned forward in his command chair, shoulders and arms tensed, neck muscles straining with his head and chin thrust forward, and intently examining the vidscreen hanging before him. His command chair normally faced the center of the bridge, where a large, translucent holo-vid field would be projected. The holo-vid could be formed spherical or cubic depending on the nature of the viewing, and was surrounded by a circular deck pathway studded with work stations. Each work station, for weapons, sensors, life-support, navigation, and more had its own smaller viewer, either holo-vid or 2D monitor as appropriate.

Captain Lewellyn was passing a continual stream of maneuvering commands to the helmsman whose hands and fingers danced intricately over his console and whose voice whispered commands into a microphone pickup floating two centimeters in front of helm’s lips.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Lt. Cmdr. Dotes, whose legs and butt I could see sticking out of an access cover under a control desk.

Dotes bent back to see who was whispering to him and replied in his own whisper, “Something’s wrong! Terribly wrong! Nothing is where is should be for this system.”

“What?”

“We’ve only got partial nav sensors back,” his whisper became muffled as he went back to work while he talked, “and what we can see doesn’t match the star chart for this system. I mean, the bodies all seem to be the correct bodies but they’re not where they should be. The bridge AI is crunching what few data points we have but it’ll take a little while.”

Dotes backed out of the access panel and closed it, then stood on the non-conductive pale-blue plastic and nanotube decking plates and booted up the desktop work console. In the bridge area the deck plates were softer, squishier than most other areas of the ship, almost like carpet. I had heard some of the working offices like the Science Department had the softer stuff, too. We didn’t have it anywhere in Marine country, which was just fine by me. The desktop flickered for a moment then glowed as the interface loaded and brightened.

“No holos yet, but at least I’m getting the damn desktops to work,” he whispered angrily. “We’ll just have to keep doing our jobs manually and in 2D for a while longer. Hell, when we first hit this fucking system we didn’t even have maneuvering on gravitics or any but the most basic of sensors. That’s why we were still sitting out here beyond the outermost orbits. Now that we have gravitics and at least partial navs back online . . .”

He leaned a little closer to me and barely breathed out the words, “Cap’n was eager to get into the asteroid belt to gather raw materials and assumed reality would match the star charts.” Then he shrugged. “Who wouldn’t? The navcoms update the system star charts automatically for drift and spin as time passes. But, none of the orbitals are right. None of ’em! I mean, they looked close initially but we wound up in the belt, not above it.”

“So he’s maneuvering us manually, visually, through an asteroid belt?” I queried, hardly believing I had actually whispered it out loud.

I mean, the very idea of that had been anathema to any and all space travel for literally hundreds of years. Then, I actually began thinking about the asteroid belt and maneuvering a spaceship within one. As a very young man I had worked as an asteroid miner for a short time, and we had tiny two-person hoppers which we often used to maneuver around a particular asteroid or two, but never any more than that and especially in nothing larger with more power and inertial requirements.

Dotes nodded, and added, “I’ve never seen it done before. Never even heard of it outside of drunken bragging by fools. We were supposed to go up and cross over the top of the ecliptic but the belt is ragged and elliptical, not circular and flat. It is supposed to be circular and flat, only twenty kilometers thick on average. One of the extended sides of the ellipsis a hundred klicks thick was on us, around us, before we realized what was happening.”

By then I had managed to apply more than two consecutive brain cells to the issue.

“But, space is HUGE,” I argued. “There should be lots of emptiness between significant bodies way out here.”

I saw Dotes bite back an instant and angry response, sigh, then he said, “Commander, none of those objects are where we would normally have assumed them to be. They are all on new and different orbits at different velocities than expected. We may as well have popped into some new system no one has ever mapped before!”

In a moment of silence as I pulled my size fourteen combat boots from my mouth, I magnified my right eye implant in to focus more closely on the captain. Sweat dropped from his nose unnoticed and I could see a vein pulsing on his left temple. His uniform, normally immaculate and starched, was now rumpled, wrinkled, and sweat-stained, and his short, white beard and hair were matted in some places and sticking out wildly in others. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot, darting around the vidscreen rapidly to stop momentarily at a point before moving on.

His breathing was quick and shallow, fully autonomic, with every scrap of his mental focus on the screen in front of him. There were short pauses in his speaking to the helmsman as his mind processed what his eyes saw, and his voice was the loudest noise on the bridge. Dotes or someone had turned off the klaxon on the bridge and even with the hatches open I could barely hear its angry wails.

Gods Above! Even with a massive quantum computer interfaced with him, both the captain and the computer were hampered by still-marginal sensors and were virtually blind—almost literally navigating by optics alone.

I focused back to Dotes. “IDAG still 100 percent?”

“Yeah. We load-checked all redundant control systems and all generators, then cycled to the first backup to relieve any potential stress points on the primary, so it’s all good to go.”

I nodded and gave him a small shrug. “Nothing for me to do here but distract people. I’m headed back to my office.”

Either the captain could do it or he couldn’t. If he could, we would all be fine. If he could not, the end would be swift. It would certainly do neither of us any good to have me stressing silently and getting angrier every minute there on the bridge. Lewellyn had been a ship’s captain for a long time, though his attitude of superiority and entitlement had pissed me off from the day we met, the arrogant, pompous asshole. Yet, I told myself, if he got us out of this mess he would have earned every bit of the attitude he carried.

Of course, it was his fault we were in the asteroid belt to begin with but I couldn’t really fault him much there, either. While star charts are rarely, read as R-A-R-E-L-Y-!, ever wrong out to ten decimal places or so, it is still SOP aboard any Navy ship to absolutely verify every body of significance within a star system and that body’s orbital path before entering the system. Period. Without the full data set, the navcoms simply could not be trusted to chart safe lanes.

Of course, this is assuming you actually have navcoms. Ours were down due to subspace capability being damaged. Dotes had originally ranted the system was FUBAR but we all knew he was just ranting. All Fleet vessels from corvettes up had fab wards and drones, and could manufacture any part or system the ship might need. Therefore, technically, nothing on the ship could be “fucked up beyond all repair” so long as at least one fabricator was functional.

However, no subspace signals to carry the EM sensor sweeps instantly in real time meant what few sensors we had remaining were limited to the speed of light. To scan an object ten light minutes away meant we would not get a response for twenty minutes; ten out, and ten back. An enemy ship ten light minutes away could conceivably launch a missile spread at us and we would not know it for up to twenty minutes. At least six minutes too late.

Conversely, subspace signals were instantaneous regardless of distance. A comm signal or an EM sensor signal carried on subspace could function identically with zero time lag regardless of twenty kilometers or twenty light years. The only mitigating factor here was our ability to focus.

No subspace also meant we could not contact any of the rest of the Fleet, or Earth HQ, or the Earth government. We could not report in, we could not warn them, we could not request any help or backup. We were alone here in the Hylea system, and we wouldn’t even know if someone back on Earth was trying to contact us or not. All emergency retreat jump points were pre-programmed at ultra-secrecy. Yet, someone knew. Someone should be looking for us, trying to contact us.

This system was not far off the beaten path, those trade lanes from one system of opportunity to the next, so the star charts would have been updated within a couple of years even in a worst-case scenario. To have the charts be so dramatically wrong meant something catastrophic had happened here. Something like a massive gravitic force transecting the ecliptic plane somehow and radically shifting asteroid/planetoid orbits which had remained relatively unchanged for millions of years. How could something like that happen in only a couple of years, and with no general warning? Answer . . . it couldn’t.

The Hylea system, according to the AI, was identified as a potential colony site for humanity. The second planet circling the star was dead center in the Habitable Zone, and had near-Earth everything . . . orbital period, gravity, tilt, rotation, moon, seasons, weather, tides, oceans, volcanoes, all of it. It was a perfect candidate, although our records indicated it had not yet been colonized. Which, in turn, was why it had been selected as an emergency jump point. Conceivably, we could jump to such a system and have a planet full of resources to utilize, fresh air and water, and no population of any kind to have to worry about.

When I got to the office and my new quarters connected by a short hallway and two hatches, I took off my uniform and swabbed the abrasions on my shoulder and hip with antiseptic cleanser. No sense in making the nanos work any harder than necessary. They’d already stopped the bleeding and began to mitigate the bruising. I dressed in PT shorts and tee and went back into the office and commed Gene to the HQ, then stepped out into the main hold to wait for him. It would be good to let the troopers see me dressed down. It would give them permission to dress down also. It was just too damned hot for uniforms, and I wasn’t about to let anyone change to battledress.

The only time we wore the hi-tech Ballistic Battledress, which we shortened to BBD, with its nanotube and other technologies, was in battle deployment, period. The rest of the time we put on our standard synthetic-fiber work fatigues. Both sets of uniforms had light-transductance for power generation to operate the numerous sensors and sleeve-readouts, which read and displayed our bodily vitals and emitted a transponder locator signal, but the BBDs had much stronger goodies, and many more of them.

BBDs were comprised of two sets, underwear and outerwear. The underwear fit body-tight like a second-skin glove of ultra-soft material. Its synthetic fabric makeup generated power from our body heat and movement rather than light, and the power energized temperature control which automatically warmed or cooled us as necessary, and was good for any external temperature from -50°C to 60°C. Beyond those boundaries, whether hot or cold, any exposed skin would receive nearly instant damage. The layer also acted as a backup to the outer layer in terms of ballistic defense and could absorb nearly 1,400 Kilopascals, or Kp, of impact energy with zero pain or damage to the wearer, as well as deflecting sharp penetrating or cutting impacts . . . for example, enemy edged weapons or shrapnel from exploding bad things.

The outer layer was also form-fitting but quite a lot looser. This layer utilized any light and any movement as power generation. The two layers worked in perfect synthesis and passed micro-current between them wherever they touched, to convey vital statistics to the forearm display of the outer layer. The outer layer could withstand nearly 14,000 Kp before rupture or damage to the trooper. The fabric was amazing stuff, which remained soft, supple, and comfortable until the precise moment of impact, whereupon the fabric stiffened instantaneously under the pressure to act as a thin but incredibly tough layer of armor.

Most important, though, besides the armor capacity, the temperature control, the monitoring of vital statistics of the trooper, and the quasi-camouflage aspect where the fabric absorbed ambient light from 360 degrees and automatically reflected back the base spectrum color schemas, was the computer capability built into the flexible sleeve displays. This capability gave the displays touch control like a desktop surface, as well as direct comms with the shipboard Combat AI and any other trooper within a fifteen klick radius.

We were so used to the hi-tech gear now we almost took it for granted. I could easily remember when this stuff was just sci-fi, though, dreams over which we drooled. When I did stop to think about it, to compare what we had now to what we had many years ago when I joined up, I had to admit, this shit was just fucking awesome!

Gene appeared in less than sixty seconds, running across the main hold. I opened the door and we stepped into the office.

“Next time I comm, LT, comm me back asap if you’re going to be longer than thirty seconds to get to where I am.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Gene replied without apology.

Good. I didn’t want apologies, I wanted to set my own feel for command.

“Find someone to turn off the klaxon down here. We don’t need it,” I said next.

“No issue?” he queried, knowing I would have been in touch with the bridge.

“Nothing we can have any effect on, so I want the troopers to focus on their tasks without having the alarm divert any of their attention. Feel free to change into PT dress before you head back, and give a nod to Harlan, too. I assume he is in the AV hold?”

“Aye, sir. The last I heard he had another one running. The last one he thinks can be ready by planetfall, provided we get the parts we need from the fabs in time.”

“Mmmm . . . which means he’s cannibalizing . . .”

Gene grinned. I leaned over and palmed the comm for Harlan.

“Lt. Jenkins,” I said when he answered, “I assume you are cannibalizing the AVs in worst condition for parts to fix the ones in better condition. I assume this because it is what I would be doing. I also assume you are keeping a careful inventory of removed parts so we can add them to our fab order when we get the chance.”

“I assigned a new sergeant, and she assigned a new corporal, sir. The list will be part of my written report in the morning.”

I chuckled before I hit the switch and said, “Good work, LT. Carry on.” There was a loud clang and cursing in the background as the link closed.

“How’s morale, Gene? Seems decent as I pass through, but you know how we always seemed to know when the commander was near.”

I invited him to free speech with my use of his name rather than his title.

“Nothing you wouldn’t expect, JD. Most of the troopers are down but making the best of it despite the bitching. The PTS programs are working well for the most part. There are a few hotheads here and there but we have managed to keep them separated on different shifts or tasks.”

“Give me a list of hothead names within the hour.”

Gene’s face expressed his surprise. “What are you going to do?”

“A hotheaded trooper is a hurting trooper. I intend to give them a target for their anger and a place to dump it before it explodes.”

“Wait a minute,” he began in a chastising tone, “you can’t . . .”

“I can do any fucking thing I want, Marine!” I interrupted Lt. Timmons loudly, suddenly, angrily. I continued, moving to eye him from a distance of twenty-five centimeters. “Get this straight! I expect two things from my officers . . . obey my orders without question, and provide me solutions based on expertise and experience. When I feel the need to be challenged by questions or alternatives I will ask for them. Are we clear?”

“Sir!” Timmons replied after he snapped straighter. “Yes, sir. A list, one hour.”

Good. No apology. A Marine never apologizes, they just take responsibility and make it right. Personal friendships are good, and necessary, but they cannot ever intrude on the chain of command, and every officer from corporal up is taught this law from Day One. Sometimes reminders are necessary.

As well, I needed to enforce a new attitude with my new Lt. Gene and I had both been in the Corps for a number of years, and we both had seen the politics and bureaucracy at work. Where we differed in our attitudes about the “P” word and the “B” word was our willingness to work within the existing format. He was willing to do that, and had the patience for it. I was not.

When I admitted it to myself, I hated politics. I hated bargaining, negotiating, having to be willing to give up something to get something else. I hated the idea of owing favors, or being expected to give favors. I mean, trading duty shifts was one thing, but currying the favor of a superior officer just to win points toward a promotion was something else entirely. Far too often, troopers died when some REMF who gained a rank politically was placed in charge of a battle sequence and didn’t have either the experience or talent required.

I also hated it when a department head hoarded and protected the power inherent with their position, and used it as a club or a barrier or a bargaining chip like some little kinglet or fiefdom. That led to bureaucracies dealing with bureaucracies rather than soldiers dealing with soldiers. In turn, that led to soldiers dying when they could not get the right gear, or the properly functioning gear, just because some asshole wanted a bit more personal power.

And, since I was now the commander, I had the joules to do something about it, at least within my own command. I was determined to wipe the two demons of beauracracy and politics from my clan. My troopers would live or die on training and competence, both mine and theirs.

Two hours later I faced a group of twelve troopers from the hothead list lined up in the main hold. At Gene’s order for gathering they had left their weapons on their bunks other than issue fighting knives which were always carried, and stood in a ragged line. Some were acting indolent and aloof, others were scowling as if daring the others in the group to say something, anything. By bringing this group together, their combined tension became palpable, something tasting coppery and sharp and smelling just as bad. None of them even attempted to go to Attention when I appeared. They just stood there waiting to see what I would do, to see what they might challenge or rebel against. Yeah, they were surly, angry, hurting.

Other than the PTS psyche programs, I had nothing to offer them but my examples and PT. At the very least, I could PT them so hard they would be too exhausted to pull any shenanigans or blow off steam in some unpredictable or dangerous manner.

I eyed them for twenty seconds in silence, then ordered, “PT Sequence 1. One hundred pushups, one hundred crunches, one hundred squats. Begin!”

I hit the deck and began the pushups without watching to see if my orders would be obeyed. All around the hold, noise had been echoing with clanging and banging, with curses, with conversation. All of the noises one would expect from a major repair and refit effort. About halfway through the pushups, I noticed the noise had greatly diminished in volume. I knew they were sneaking peeks at us. The troopers working there were getting a good look at their new clan commander, and probably shocked into silence by seeing him lead the PT. To say it was a rare occurrence was an understatement of epic proportions. Maybe so, but, this was my clan now and I would run it my way until someone in higher position ordered me to stop or relieved me of command.

I worked them through three reps without stop, then ordered, “Follow me!”

By my reckoning we did close to 10K at a fast run around the large hold before we stopped back at the center space. I was breathing moderately hard and sweating profusely. Two of the troopers were breathing very raggedly, and one of those had stopped to vomit after 8K. I waved my arm in a circular motion and the troopers spaced themselves in a circle about twenty-five meters in diameter. From the center of the circle, I motioned to the trooper who had vomited. She moved forward to join me in the center.

She was shorter than me by twenty centimeters or so, with a nearly shaved head, not bad looking at all except for the puke on her shirt.

“Hand to hand, full contact, three falls,” I commanded, and struck a fighting stance.

She lasted about a minute, and I didn’t spare the newtons or the joules. I motioned to two troopers to drag her off to one side and check her vitals, then went through a rundown on the moves we had used against each other, the attacks, the blocks and strikes, what was effective and why it was effective, or not. It was important to teach by both example and explanation.

I motioned to the other trooper who had struggled in the run. He entered the center and immediately struck a guard stance. He lasted maybe a minute and a half. Neither of them had landed a solid blow.

“Awright,” I growled at the ten left in the circle. “Either I am much better than I expect of myself, or you maggots are laying off. Which one of you hardcases thinks they can actually manage to hit me?”

There was a moment of hesitation.

“C’mon!” I roared at them. “Are you life-takin’, heart-breakin’ troopers or just a gang of pussies?”

The female I had put down first was now back on her feet.

“No one calls me a pussy,” she snarled and stepped forward.

She lasted three minutes this time, and banged me hard a couple of times. Over the next eight volunteers I was smacked hard several times. The first man I had put down tried his luck again and managed to land an elbow to the side of my head which split my scalp and blood was running freely until the nanos staunched it. There was actually quite a bit of blood on the deck by the time I was taking on the last trooper of the group.

I slipped in a puddle and went down hard on my back. The trooper facing me leaped to take advantage of my fall. The breath knocked out of me and my head pounding in pain like an anvil being beaten, I managed to get my left leg up in time and my knee caught her on the sternum between her breasts as she was coming down at me. Then we were both down, rolling and gagging for breath. I waved my arm at the group and signaled “gather up” with my fingers, then rolled onto my hands and knees and, somehow, made it to my feet.

I wasn’t worried about our collective bumps and bruises as the nanos would take care of those. Besides, it was good to be reminded of pain. If you could feel pain it meant you were still inside. What I was worried about was their attitude.

“Let’s talk,” I said to them as I caught my breath. “Free speech.”