by M. D. Cooper
Tanis chuckled. “I know what you mean, Lieutenant. Thank the stars we’re almost dry on every supply there is. Even if it wasn’t for the three-week refit the Jones needs, it would still take a supply crew a few days to get us ready again. We’re safe this time.”
Lieutenant Jeannie faced Tanis and drew herself up to attention. “Requesting permission to depart on my shore leave, sir.”
Tanis had a strong dislike for the Terran Space Force’s insistence that ‘sir’ was a gender-neutral term, and she had managed to get her crew to call her ‘ma’am’ when away from port, but when they were docked they fell back to standard procedure.
It was probably well enough, many officers were rather picky and would tear a strip off a lower rank if they felt disrespect had been given. She wouldn’t want them to slip up on her account.
For her part, Tanis wasn’t that sort of officer. She would have been less formal in general, but with the Kirby Jones’s small, ten-human crew, she had to guard against too much familiarity. Crews who got too chummy out in the black got lax, and lax either got you in trouble with your CO, or dead out in the darkness that lay between the stations and worlds.
“Permission granted, Lieutenant. Have a good time at that hotel you booked.”
“Oh, I will, Commander,” Jeannie said she rubbed her hands. “Going to get rejuv too. Spotted a grey hair the other day.”
Tanis gave a small laugh as Jeannie left the bridge, then James took her place.
“Permission to disembark, Commander Richards,” James said as he stood at attention.
“Permission granted, Lieutenant,” Tanis replied with a nod. “Don’t get into too much trouble out there.”
“Stars…I might just sleep for a week. No partying for me—at least not ‘til I’m well rested…sir.”
“Best get to it, then,” Tanis replied.
As Jeanie was walking off the bridge, Seamus and Liam, the two E-3 specialists who served under Technical Sergeant Connie in engineering, requested permission to depart over the Link. As soon as she granted their leave, Corporal Marian and the three members of her breach team also formally requested permission to disembark.
Tanis granted it as James walked off the bridge, and she took a moment to survey it, noting that all the stations were locked down and signed out, before she turned to follow him down the main Deck 1 passageway.
She stopped in her cabin to grab her already-packed duffel, moving at a brisk pace, knowing that Connie would be waiting for her at the umbilical. She slung the duffel over her shoulder and gave the space a visual once-over before closing the door and walking to the ladder to slide down to Deck 3.
From there, it was a short twenty-meter walk to the port airlock.
Sure enough, Technical Sergeant Connie was there, duffel slung over her shoulder and already wearing her civvies.
“Permission to disembark, Commander.” Connie made the request while standing at attention.
“Granted, Technical Sergeant,” Tanis replied with a smile.
Connie groaned and shook her head. “I wish you’d stop calling me that. I didn’t bust my hump up to an E7 just to end up with the rank of ‘tech sarge’ and not ‘chief petty officer’. Fucken branch merger and reorg.”
Tanis shrugged. “I dunno, I think the merger is good. They’re hamfisted in how they’re rolling it out, but we’re in the TSF. That’s how they do everything.”
“Sure.” Connie rolled her eyes as she hefted her duffel and stepped into the umbilical that connected the Kirby Jones to Vesta’s docking ring. “You get to be ‘commander’ as an O3. Not surprised you have no issue with it.”
Tanis laughed. “I’m sorry, CPO. You’re still Chief of the Boat, at least.”
“But for how long? Can’t be chief of the boat when I’m not a chief.”
Tanis followed Connie into the umbilical, deciding her best bet was to remain silent. The rank restructure that was sweeping through the Terran Space Force had pissed off nearly everyone—except for the flag officers, who hadn’t seen any changes. Even the Marines—who were mostly unaffected—were pissed that their captains were now called commanders.
Tanis liked the idea in principle, but the slow-rollout—with some divisions seeing rank change before others—had made for such a mishmash, that half the time, everyone resorted to using pay grades rather than rank.
Enough of that, she thought. I have some R&R, a visit with my family, and two weeks with Peter ahead of me.
Connie sent the AI a mental image of herself rolling her eyes, while Tanis suppressed a laugh.
“Off to see Colonel Higgs?” Connie asked as they reached the end of the umbilical and stepped into the station’s airlock.
Tanis sent her auth codes over the Link to the non-sentient AI which managed airlock control in this region of the station. It sent her a challenge query, and she passed the correct response token. The NSAI accepted the token and the airlock began its cycle.
Tanis leaned against the wall and gave Connie a wan smile as they waited. “Yeah, just the regular debrief, though there’s a lot to go over since we were out so long. Based on a comment he left on my report, I bet he wants to talk about our encounter with those smugglers on the Norse Wind. Not sure why everyone cares so much about some junk-heap of a ship running ancient engine tech out to the Scattered Disk. I don’t know if he thinks we broke some protocol or reg, but as far as Lovell and I can tell, we did everything by the book.”
“Sounds like a blast,” Connie grinned. “The privileges of rank, eh, Commander?”
“I get to be out in the black and not behind some desk,” Tanis replied, ignoring the jibe. “I’ll take the odd debrief, so long as it doesn’t make me late for the transport to Mars. It’s on an optimal launch vector; just one AU, and I’ll get to see home.”
“Good deal, ma’am…er, sir. Shit, Commander, you’re gonna get me dressed down, making me call you ‘ma’am’ when we’re out there.”
Tanis slowly shook her head, a resigned smile on her lips. “Sorry, Connie, maybe I should just suck it up. You have to be a Technical Sergeant, and I have to be a ‘sir’.”
“Better than what we call you down in engineering,” Connie replied with a smirk as the airlock finished its cycle and opened to Vesta’s main docking ring.
They walked down a short corridor, passing under a security arch, and then they were out on the ring’s main sweep. The sound and energy of the wide open space hit them like a hammer after so long on the Kirby Jones, where the loudest thing was the thrumming of the engines and James’s happy belches after a good meal.
Tanis winced. “I swear, the decibel level in this place goes up every time I come here.”
“Too much time away from people,” Connie said. “But you’ll be on Mars soon enough, hanging out on the sandy shores of the Melas Chasma, recharging your spirits. You’re gonna need it for our next run.”
“That’s for sure,” Tanis replied as she glanced toward the maglev platform off to her right. “I’ll see you in a month, Connie. As always, it has been a pleasure to serve with you.”
Connie smiled and drew up to give a crisp salute, which Tanis returned.
“And to you, Commander Richards. May your forward view always be clear and black.”
“Yours as well,” Tanis replied as Connie gave her a final smile before turning and disappearing into the crowds that swarmed the ring’s transit concourse.
Tanis turned the other direction, headed for the maglev platform and a train that would take her to the divi
sion HQ.
She brought up a map of the ring’s fifteen-hundred-kilometer circumference, and reviewed the route she would have to take to get to Colonel Higgs’ office—located within the asteroid itself, not out on the ring.
While she was often on Vesta, this was the first time she’d docked at the main transit hub, and not directly at the Refit and Repair bays—a testament to just how busy things were with Mars’s passage between Ceres and Earth.
She quickly memorized the directions, and grabbed a tether hanging from a transport drone as it flew overhead. Once her hand was in the loop, a boot-hook dropped down, and she slid her foot into it. The drone registered that she was secure, and drew the tether up, lifting Tanis a dozen meters above the docking ring’s main sweep.
Unlike other rings, the one on Vesta did not have a clear ceiling, so there was no view of the asteroid overhead. Given the curvature of the ring, she could also only see a dozen kilometers in either direction, but any vista that stretched further than the Kirby Jones’s central corridor was a welcome one.
Vesta was an installation that belonged solely to the Terran Space Force—the Sol System’s federal military. The TSF had purchased the asteroid seven hundred years ago from a consortium that had been trying, and failing, to turn it into a profitable transport hub since the end of the Sentience Wars.
The ring—sporting enough berths for a thousand cruisers and many thousands more smaller vessels—was a major resupply and refit facility for TSF ships operating on the edge of InnerSol space.
It was still dwarfed by the TSF installation on the Ceres ring, but here, the only civilians present were contractors working for the Terran Space Force, either directly, or through corporations that focused on keeping the space force fed and flying. Ceres, on the other hand, had only allocated a small segment of its planetary ring to the TSF, making it a mixed civilian and military structure.
Also makes it a lot more fun to dock at, Tanis thought.
The transport drone drew near the maglev station, and she signaled that she wished to drop off. With an easy grace, the drone lowered her tether to within a few meters of the deck.
Tanis slipped her boot out of the stirrup and dropped to the deck plate, aiming for an open spot in the crowds.
Her augmented muscles and bones took the four-meter fall with ease—the low, half-g of angular-momentum derived gravity produced by the ring’s rotation helped too.
“Those things are nuts aren’t they, Commander?” A lieutenant nearby asked.
Tanis glanced at the man and nodded. “Yeah, I’m surprised no one has died falling from one, but it’s a fun ride.”
“Oh, people fall,” the lieutenant grinned. “The drones just have these nets that they shoot down to catch them. I bet its really embarrassing to be lowered down and have to fight your way out of a net.”
Tanis had a vision of Colonel Higgs falling off a drone and getting caught in a net. She’d keep that in mind when she met with him—it would make the debrief much more bearable.
She spotted one of the express trains destined for Vesta proper, and nodded to the lieutenant before dashing off. She slipped into a car as the doors were closing and grabbed a handhold as the maglev train accelerated away from the station.
One thing about Vesta, there wasn’t a lot of safety and caution inherent in its operation. Everything here was about maximum efficiency. If that meant some people fell down when the maglevs took off, then they’d have to suck it up—and get jeered at by their peers.
Not going to happen, Tanis thought, eyeing a corporal who looked disappointed that she hadn’t landed on her ass.
As the train worked its way up to five hundred kilometers per hour, Tanis pulled herself forward to an empty seat, and collapsed into its welcoming cushions.
The maglev climbed the track as it rose to the main sweep’s overhead, streaking above the crowds for several kilometers before passing through an opening on the top of the ring. The train passed into a long, rapid-cycle airlock before passing onto the surface of the ring, where it continued to accelerate in the vacuum of space.
Tanis suspected that whoever designed the maglev system on Vesta was a thrill-junkie. The cars had emergency electrostatic shields that could hold in atmosphere, but other than that, all that protected the passengers from cold, hard vacuum was a single door, which was a little unnerving.
But in a good way, Tanis thought with a laugh.
The other thing that she loved about Vesta’s express maglevs was their transparent overheads. Looking up, Tanis soaked in the view of Vesta hanging overhead, noting the many structures dotting its surface. Also visible was the rapidly approaching intersection of the docking ring and one end of the oblong asteroid.
At only five-hundred and fifty kilometers long, Vesta was not a particularly large heavenly body—though it was the largest ‘asteroid’ in InnerSol—but when it was racing toward you at several thousand kilometers per hour, the effect was unnerving to say the least.
Normally, when an artificial ring was wrapped around a planet or asteroid, the host object always appeared to hang overhead. But with the docking ring passing through Vesta at either end, the visual effect—as one approached the connection point—was of the asteroid falling toward the ring, and by extension, the passenger.
Tanis took a deep breath as the maglev passed into the tunnel that bored through the asteroid, the bulkheads shaking as the rapid compression from the airlock slammed atmosphere into the vacuum around the train before it passed through the far end of the sealed section, shoving the passengers forward as it decelerated into the station.
Once the train came to a stop, Tanis found that she was shaking ever so slightly. Few things—outside of combat—were more intense than an express maglev ride on Vesta.
She rose from her seat, noting that the corporal who had eyed her earlier was a few shades paler. She was glad for her internal mods that kept her from feeling dizzy or nauseous, and strode off the train with nary a wobble.
On a platform one level down, Tanis caught an intra-asteroid maglev that took her one stop laterally through the Vesta, before disgorging her on a wide platform, from which a dozen passageways branched off to disparate regimental and divisional offices.
She threaded the crowds and walked down the long corridor toward Colonel Higgs’ office. Over the past seven hundred years of TSF ownership, Vesta had taken on very little personality. The only decorations in the passageway were a variety of recruitment holos, one of which Tanis recognized from when she’d enlisted a decade earlier.
A decade! Tanis realized that her ten-year anniversary in the TSF had passed only a few weeks ago. Perhaps that is a part of what the colonel wishes to discuss.
A decade was a pivotal time in an officer’s career. If the space force was happy with a person’s service, they would begin to put you on track for bigger things. If they aren’t…well, then you’d better hope you like what you’re doing at that point.
Melanie replied.
The AI’s equivalent of a throaty chuckle bubbled into Tanis’s mind.
Tanis sent her thanks to the AI with a mental smile, drew herself up before the colonel’s door, and gave a single, sharp knock.
“Come,” the colonel’s bass voice rumbled through the thick plas.
She opened the door and approached the colonel’s desk, where she stood at attention.
“Commander Tanis Richards, present for tour debrief,” she announced herself.
“At ease, Commander,” Colonel Higgs grunted, and Tanis relaxed, standing with her wrists crossed at the small of her back.
Higgs hadn’t lo
oked up at her yet, still fixated on something displayed on the holo panels that covered his desk. She kept her eyes forward; it wasn’t proper to peer at someone else’s displays, even if they didn’t key them for their eyes only.
Even so, it was hard not to stare at Colonel Higgs, his muscled bulk shifting with an easy grace in his chair. The man was an Earther, and a big one at that. His dark skin told of an equatorial heritage, and his two hundred and sixty centimeter height made his head center in her field of view—even when she was standing and he was sitting.
After a minute, he grunted and swiped a hand across his desk, clearing away all the holoprojections. Only then did he lift his grey-eyed gaze to her face.
“Have a seat, Commander.”
Tanis wordlessly sat and waited for the colonel to begin. He didn’t do so immediately. First his eyes swept over her, taking in the state of her uniform, and glancing at the duffle she had set beside the door when she entered.
She knew her uniform was immaculate, it always was. She prided herself in a crisp and proper appearance—she had also heard the tongue-lashing that Higgs gave anyone who entered his office with so much as a scuff on their boot.
“I see that you plan to visit Mars on your leave,” Colonel Higgs began without preamble.
“Yes, sir,” Tanis replied.
“You’ll have to cancel that,” Higgs said without any emotion. “Your shore leave has been restricted to Vesta.”
“Sir?” Tanis asked, schooling both her voice and expression, tapping into her last dregs of self-control.
She had just spent nearly a year on the Kirby Jones with the nine other human members of her crew, in conditions that allowed for virtually no personal space or time. Combined with the rapid turnaround during the Jones’s last refit on Vesta, it had been well over a year since she’d had more than a couple of days to herself.
If she kept this up, Peter was going to move on—if he hadn’t already.
“I have a lot to do, and you need to get to your appointment promptly, so I won’t waste any time going over the mission reports you’ve filed. They are all satisfactory, of course.”