by Brian Smith
“Okay,” Keith replied easily. “So how does this affect us here and now?”
“Sorry,” Hutton replied sheepishly. “It helps sometimes to give a little backstory.”
“Hey, it’s interesting stuff,” Ford added, trying to take any implied sting out of the skipper’s comment. “It’s also interesting to get some of the local perspective from someone who lives and works Mars-side. The captain’s right, though,” he added diplomatically. “It doesn’t seem all that connected to the goings-on in the asteroid belt.”
“Ah, but apparently it is,” she smiled, flipping down her snoopers and inviting both officers to do the same. They did, and she brought up some graphical data that she sent them with a wave of her hand and a flick of her fingers. Light blurs appeared across the visors of the snooper sets, and Keith and Ford followed along as Hutton continued her briefing.
“The MIM recently murdered over three thousand Chinese citizens in Tongling Habitat, which made Gabriel Rogan the most wanted man in the solar system. Nobody has been able to find him yet, but the authorities have managed to track a pair of his associates. What hasn’t been made public about the Tongling massacre is that it was conducted using fully autonomous AI weapons systems—not only illegal in every nation on Earth, but a capital offense in the Chinese Federal Republic. So, in addition to trying to track and arrest ranking members of the MIM, there is also an effort on to locate any facility that might be producing forbidden AI weaponry. That’s a tall order, but the combined efforts of the CFR, the TOA, and the PEA are all bent on accomplishing it.
“Several weeks ago, two confirmed MIM members were successfully tracked to the Vesta Habitat ring, where PEA assets began monitoring them. Picking them up would have been relatively easy, but we were hoping to gain more intelligence by tracking their movements, and now that’s paid off. These two have been identified as the suppliers of the AI drones that were used in the Tongling attack. They departed Vesta on a corporate-security vessel belonging to an independent outfit long suspected of piracy and human trafficking in the belt. Now that outfit’s days are numbered, as well. Thanks to the belt patrols maintained by the navies of the Trans-Oceanic Alliance and others, we were able to covertly monitor their trajectory and compute keplers pointing directly to this rock: asteroid 5111 Omega. Since then a lot of government and law-enforcement telescopes have been pointed at it, and the bottom line is that the game is afoot. According to international treaty, the responsibility for patrolling this portion of the belt falls to the TOA. Since 5111 Omega just happens to fall along your patrol arc, Reuben James gets the call. We suspect, based on available intelligence, that there is an illegal weapons depot located here, if not a factory of some kind. Our mission is to scout 5111 Omega and take action appropriate to what we find. If possible, we secure it. If that’s not possible, we call in the remainder of your squadron or other USN or allied TOA assets. My presence here is related to our two MIM fugitives: if we find them on 5111 Omega, my job is to bring them in, alive if possible. A lot of people want to talk to them before the CFR stands them up in front of a firing squad. Handling anything else we find there will be up to you.”
Keith nodded thoughtfully, turning questioningly to Ford. The latter already had an astrogation display open in his snoopers and was feverishly crunching the numbers he knew the captain wanted.
“A slow approach conserves propellant mass and gives them less warning. Assuming they’re keeping an optical watch on surrounding space, they’ll spot us as soon as we execute turnover and start a deceleration hard-burn. The slower we are, the longer we can put that off. My preliminary calculation puts us on top of them in about six days. I’ve got a couple ideas that would really allow us to lay a surprise or two on them, but I’ll need more time to run the numbers on those.”
“Put it together and be ready to brief me at 1400. We’ll hold an all-officers meeting at 1500 and brief the wardroom on the overall assignment. Let’s hold all-hands quarters tomorrow morning on the hangar deck. We’ll introduce Marshal Hutton and our Marine detachment to the remainder of the crew and present our initial plan, along with the commander’s intent for the pending action.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Ford replied, starting to mentally sweat. That was a lot to do in a short amount of time, and there was still the squad of Marines they’d embarked who needed seeing to. Not only that, he was going to need to keep a very close eye on their propellant mass and get his astrogation team cracking on updated keplers to get them to 5111 Omega. Finally, there was still the list of myriad routine administrative details he needed to attend to daily. The XO’s job is never done, he reminded himself wearily. He prioritized his task list quickly and got to work.
***
“There it is, XO. See it?” ENS Tanner asked, two days later. “A torch plume, no doubt. It wasn’t there on yesterday’s celestial shot, so whoever it is executed turnover and began a breaking burn in the last twenty-four hours. We’ve been watching it long enough for parallax, and the magnitude shows it relatively close. Looks like we’ve got a bogey inbound to our target.”
The two officers were on the bridge, huddled around the astrogation station. Tanner was the astrogation division officer and responsible for maintaining the ship’s astronomical and optical gear—her division was part of the operations department, but in this capacity she was also the XO’s direct assistant. Right now, Reuben James was running “dark”—she had put on a temporary burst of acceleration two days before, altering course and accelerating for several hours at 2-g before throttling down. She was coasting on a free-fall trajectory toward 5111 Omega at present, operating under EMCON-A: strict emissions control. The ship wasn’t broadcasting transponder signals, using her long-range transmitters, or emitting radar or lidar. Even the normal networks electronically linking her with the flagship and other vessels in the squadron were shut down.
At present they were observing the asteroid and nearby traffic using the ship’s array of finely wrought optical telescopes. These were the same scopes the ship used for celestial navigation and observations; they worked equally well as a passive torchship-tracking sensor, given the star-bright light given off by fusion plumes. The imagery they were looking at now was displayed on the flatscreen at the astrogation station, but both officers were using their snoopers to look at a higher-definition image with variable-strength light filters. If they wanted to, they could filter out the visible light entirely and look at other spectrums in virtual—every fusion drive in existence put out a unique signature. Properly cataloged, these could be used to classify individual torchships.
“I do see it. Good work, ensign!” Ford nodded. “Start a new track.”
“Aye, aye, sir. Combat, optics. New track: designate Omega-2, keplers to follow,” she stated crisply.
Seated at the astrogation station, the quartermaster of the watch let the computer chew on the trajectory data, then captured it and sent it to the combat-direction center (CDC) one deck below them.
“Good catch, Tanner,” Captain Keith sent from the CDC.
Ford saw Tanner fight to hold back a grin, but it didn’t stop her from blushing slightly at the praise. “Begin working on a classification,” he told her. “I want an ID on the bogey—soonest.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” she replied.” A few minutes later, the shrill of the bosun’s pipe echoed throughout the ship over the 1MC, piping the crew to lunch.
Ford looked over at Tanner, who would be relieving the next watch shortly. “Go eat,” he told her. “I’ll mind the store.”
“Both of you go eat, and I’ll mind the store—sir,” the quartermaster of the watch said. QM2 Reed looked up from his station, giving them both a stern, patronizing look. Of the three of them hunched around the astrogation station, he was the one currently on watch and therefore unable to leave the bridge.
“We’re still four days away. With all due respect, XO, didn’t I hear you grousing earlier about how you skipped breakfast?” He purposely didn’t mention tha
t the XO hadn’t slept more than catnaps in the past two days either—there were no secrets on a ship this size.
“Hmm. Did I say that out loud?” Ford grunted rhetorically, reaching under his snooper visor to rub absently at his burning eyes. He had to admit it was true—he was famished. As for a petty officer’s voicing his suggestion in such a way to the ship’s exec, it highlighted the closer relationship between officers and enlisted personnel in the late-twenty-first-century navy.
One of the most significant changes stemming from the Defense Reorganization Act of 2047 was that all prospective officers were required to complete at least four years of enlisted service. That was a major departure from past practice, but this generation hadn’t known any different. In the spacefaring services, everyone needed to start on the ground floor anyway: it was necessary to train recruits to properly use standard equipment and operate in hostile extraterrestrial environments. Drawing officers from the ranks just made sense—it gave the service the ability to internally evaluate personnel based on merit, weeding out most of the prima donnas. By 2047 there was far less resistance to the idea than there would have been in decades past; the dividing lines between officers and enlisted personnel had blurred over time, and even before midcentury it was common for enlisted ratings to hold higher academic or technical credentials than the officers appointed over them.
While the modern role of officers and ratings mirrored those of the past, the perceived class barriers between the two, rooted in antiquated aristocracies, had been swept away in modern society. The service academies were revamped after ’47, returning them, by and large, to their institutional roots. The Naval Academy was no longer a four-year program that conferred undergraduate degrees (Level-Three academic credentials by modern standards), but rather a one-year professional course designed to take qualified enlisted sailors with existing Level-Three educations and transform them into commissioned officers. The old label of a “mustang” officer was obsolete post-’47—all officers were mustangs now, with closer ties to the crew than in past eras.
Ford clapped QM2 Reed on the shoulder. “You sure?”
“The watch relieves in about half an hour, and the chief is coming on—he’ll be up here early if he’s running true to form. I’ll call you or Ensign Tanner if I need to, but we’ll have that classification nailed down well before watch turnover,” Reed assured him. “I’ve got it.”
“Very well,” Ford replied. He and Tanner made their way down to the wardroom. The ship was in free fall, so they floated most of the way there using handholds to propel themselves along. They reoriented to the deck and switched on their magboots just prior to entering the wardroom proper.
The midday meal was the most formal of the meals served aboard ship in the modern navy, as necessitated by the standard four-section-watch bill with its protected sleep periods at either end of the ship’s “working day.” There was also an informal tradition in the modern navy for random officers and chiefs to eat either breakfast or dinner on the mess decks with the crew—it was good for team building and morale and served as a reminder that even those wearing gold trim on their jumpsuits had started out in silver.
A frigate’s wardroom numbered only around sixteen commissioned officers and warrants. Aboard Reuben James, the supply officer was the only commissioned staff officer not in the line of command—the ship’s “medical officer” was an enlisted chief corpsman. Between people working during meals and the watch requirements for the bridge, CDC, and engineering, lunch in the wardroom was usually attended by fewer than a dozen people.
The wardroom’s synth steward was just finishing laying out place settings when Ford entered. The steward was somewhat lifelike in certain ways, while classically robotic in others. It was governed by a mil-standard task-and-behavior package that permitted moderate emulation of human speech and mannerisms, pursuant to what was allowed by regulations. There were other, nonhumanoid robots aboard that performed various functions that reduced human manning requirements, as well. However, there was still a multitude of tasks that humans performed as well as or better than mechanical assistants, especially given the restrictions on autonomous military AI systems.
“Good morning, exec,” the steward said amiably. “Cup of joe, sir?”
“Thanks—I’ll get it,” Ford replied, moving to unclip his coffee bulb from the bulkhead. He charged it with a dose of rich navy brew—black as space and hotter than a fusion plume. Although numerous forms of pharmaceutical stimulants, sedatives, pain blockers, and performance enhancers were available through external suit injectors or internal nanopumps embedded in people’s endocrine systems, coffee remained one of the traditional life-sustaining elixirs of the U.S. Navy—not everything had changed post-’47.
“’Mornin’ XO,” was the airy, relatively cheerful salutation from LTJG Gordon, the ship’s operations officer. Without waiting for a reply, Gordon turned slightly toward the steward. “Hey there, Stew. Coffee for me please, and what’s for lunch?”
“Cup o’ joe coming right up, sir,” the steward replied in a warm baritone. The voice could almost be mistaken for human if you had your back turned, but there was just some subtle lack of inflection that always jumped out at Ford when a synth spoke. Some people claimed they couldn’t tell the difference by voice alone, but he was pretty good at spotting a synth even when he wasn’t looking straight at it. “Zero-g menu today, Ops-O. Sandwich wraps, dry crudités, and mini lumpia. World-famous Reuben James oatmeal-cookie bites for dessert.”
“Heh. Navy chow is good chow!” remarked ENS Ferrell with a wryly sarcastic smile.
Gordon’s eyebrows went up humorously, and he glanced sideways at CW3 Cheryl Ayers, their cyber/intel officer. “Well, I don’t know about that,” Gordon joked. It was his patented response to almost anything said to him—sort of funny the first few times, and then it quickly grew tiresome. He generally didn’t say it around the captain or when spoken to by the exec, but everyone else was fair game. Since he was third in command, nobody tried breaking him of the habit—they just mocked him behind his back.
Unlike Gordon, Ayers was one of those people everyone respected and even deferred to, to a certain degree, up to and including the captain. Ayers was a career cyber-warfare specialist with no interest in kinetic warfare, fusion reactors, or torchship driving. She was a twenty-five-year veteran who’d come up through the ranks, being promoted all the way to senior chief and quietly achieving Level-Five academic credentials in her specialty along the way. When it was obvious that she was never going to apply for a commission, the navy (in its infinite wisdom) finally offered her a meritorious promotion to chief warrant officer.
Regarding their intrepid Ops-O Gordon, she’d seen more than her share of quirky personalities over the years. She smiled, sipped her coffee, and casually ignored him.
Everyone else who was going to show up for lunch trickled in while the steward went about laying out the meal in covered magnetic trays. When the captain took his seat, everyone else strapped into theirs without further ado and dug in. Different commanders fostered different command climates, but as a rule Captain Keith liked to keep meals relatively social and lighthearted. If he had ship’s business he needed to address, he would do so, but he tended to keep shop talk at a minimum.
“Where’s Marshal Hutton?” Ford asked, addressing nobody in particular.
Tanner was responsible for seeing to Hutton’s needs and keeping her out of trouble, which included keeping tabs on Hutton’s general whereabouts. According to Tanner, the marshal wasn’t having any issues with shipboard life and was pleasantly low-maintenance. “She’s having lunch with the crew down on the mess decks,” Tanner replied, covering her wry grin with a sip of coffee.
It hadn’t gone unnoticed that XO Ford had shown an interest in their guest ever since Hutton came aboard. His trying so hard to play it cool and disguise his preoccupation from his shipmates just made it more obvious—much to their quiet amusement.
Like many youn
g Americans at the end of the twenty-first century, Ford had felt the pull of space early. The solar system radiated an adventurous boom-town aura and romance about it, as a place where people had to be capable enough to survive and smart enough to compete, and there were fortunes to be won and lost. For young people of modest means raised on Earth, the most affordable way to get offplanet, into space, and properly trained to survive it was to enlist.
Ford’s plan was almost as old as the navy itself: to use enlistment as a stepping stone to a better life. His original intention was to become qualified as a torchship officer and then sell that expertise to the private sector, but somewhere along the way he’d found that navy life agreed with him. It showed in his performance of duty, which was why he was on the fast track to an early command—not many lieutenants got the nod for these senior positions on smaller ships. His current job as executive officer was prestigious enough, although traditionally thankless. He was responsible for the ship’s day-to-day administration and materiel readiness, leaving the captain free to focus on the bigger picture. Usually, the XO was expected to play “bad cop” to the captain’s “good cop,” making him less than popular, if not sometimes hated. Ford could play the role of a taciturn hard-nosed bastard if the situation called for it, but it wasn’t really his style. Aboard a small ship like Reuben James with a tight-knit crew, he rarely had to.
For his part, Ford had enjoyed working for Skipper Keith thus far. He spent a lot of time observing the captain’s style and manner; Keith was another rising star, with a keen eye for detail and a mind like a steel trap even without a data network available—trying to stay ahead of the captain’s expectations really kept Ford on his toes. Keith was a little older and more seasoned than most of his contemporaries; he’d served a full decade as an enlisted rating before applying for a commission. Although he was only an O-4, he’d already logged more than two decades of service. The skipper’s manner was usually pleasant enough, although Keith did possess that uniquely navy-grown talent enabling him to rake a subordinate over the coals with a casually sarcastic word or look. His long enlisted service greatly endeared him to the crew—they loved him.