The Belt Loop _Book One

by Robert B. Jones

  He went on to tell her about his forty-hour adventure in the ship’s air ducts. He hopped off the bed and used his arms and hands to describe how he had finally vanquished that worm on the bridge. His dashing tale was made even more exciting by his unabridged adolescent language. “So, when I saw that thing pointing that alien weapon at the old man, I had to do something. The rest of those guys on the bridge were just standing around like they were waiting in line for chow. Come on, Mom, you know that thing was going to take over the ship and enslave us all. Put us in chains or something while it plotted to contact the alien overlords on that new ship.”

  He made it sound like he had reached the final level in a holo-vid game.

  Max just looked at her son. He reminded her so much of Jerr and that thought made her weep again. “Well, you’re grounded young man. No more treks around the ship without an armed escort,” she told him through her tears.

  Har made a flippant gesture toward his guard. “Like, where am I gonna go? This place is crawling with people. I gotta guy that looks like he could eat plastisteel following me around. And that officer guy Yorn? He had me up in that compartment for an hour grilling me. I think that stuff is called the third degree. He skipped the first two, if you ask me.”

  Isaacs and the medtech silently eased away from the bed and let them talk. It was touching in a way to see this mini-reunion. The doctor wondered what would become of the boy.

  He continued on his rounds and nodded at the sentry as he passed.

  Chapter 44

  Her lab was borderline chaotic but Milli Gertz tried to maintain her professionalism. She had managed to grab one of the worm carcasses before Doctor Isaacs fed it to the surviving birds. She had the creature’s body on a steel table in her containment closet next to the dissected alien bird. She had so much work to do that it was staggering. Two new species to examine and tease out possible answers as to their origins.

  She didn’t totally agree with the doctor’s appraisal of the situation. The fact that the alien creatures shared common DNA and that they shared DNA with humans was interesting but, after all, practically every living thing in the galaxy shared some kind of common ancestor.

  After the Varson war many of the captured combatants were studied extensively and the Varson’s link to mankind was even more pronounced. They were bipedal, axially symmetric, oxygen-breathing humanoids. If it wasn’t for their pronounced underbites and extremely long upper torsos and limbs, they would have been easy to mistake for someone’s ugly cousin from the wrong side of the family.

  The one thing the doctor said that intrigued her was the point about that ship seeding this arm of the Milky Way. That thought had possibilities, stronger support in her mind than anything else. Only she didn’t think the original worms or birds were gathered from an ancient Earth. She felt that perhaps Earth had been seeded by whomever launched that alien ship. It was old and used woefully outdated technology but the process it used to puff out worm spores still worked even though the ship had been fundamentally decommissioned in flight. How long had that race been sending out ships? She probably would never know unless some kind of armistice was negotiated with the worms and a cultural exchange commenced some time in the future.

  But that kind of business was best done by the politicians and not the scientists. One faction was only interested in gain and trade agreements while the other was interested in shared culture and information exchange. After ten years the pols on Elber had come no closer to establishing normal relationships with the Varson Empire than they had at war’s end. They had elected to blockade the Varson zone until cooler heads prevailed in their warring governments. The only thing exchanged with them during the past ten years was an occasional laser blast when somebody strayed too far off course.

  And then there was the thing with her arm.

  Doc Isaacs had given her a clean bill of health even though her arm and hand remained transparent. Gertz had analyzed the alien venom to the limit of her machinery but the chemistry of the compound contained ingredients never before encountered by human scientists. She knew she could spend the rest of her days trying to find answers to the condition and as long as there were no lasting side-effects from her injury, she would just have to go with it. After only a day she was getting used to the glove and the strange looks she got as she moved about the ship.

  One of her techs cycled through the containment lock and started prepping for the worm dissection.

  They exchanged small talk for a couple of minutes and Milli decided to put her musings aside and get her head back into the game. With half of her people gone, detailed to the makeshift sick bay, she had more than enough to do in her exobiology lab. She set her recorder and made a few annotations before voicing on the overhead LEDs.

  Then she went back to work.

  * * *

  Captain Pax Curton watched the young lieutenant work. It had only taken her a few short minutes to interface her portable with the comm mainframe on the Pearl. She spooled up the recordings she had made from the intruder’s transmissions and explained to him how the translation table worked and showed him how to access it from his command console.

  They spent the next twenty minutes in polite conversation and Curton introduced her to his bridge crew and outlined her duties to his XO. They were about to take a nickel-and-dime tour of the boat when Mols noticed a blinking light on her machine. She pointed it out to the captain and they returned to their respective positions.

  “Incoming transmission, captain,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Put it on speaker, lieutenant.”

  “Won’t make much sense unless you’ve mastered Wormish. Hit your link to the comm alcove and let me run it through the interface.”

  He nodded and played his hands over his panel.

  “Here we go, sir. . .”

  . . .no warning. This attack was a deliberate act of aggression and will be dealt with accordingly. Attention attention attention. The ?placename? strongly advise you to not provoke further attack. Now ?we = us? aware your capabilities and must ?adjourn = retreat? to ?placename? to report these actions. Soon the ?racename? return with many ?vessel? and retrieve property you take from ?we = us?. Will return with no warning. This attack was a deliberate act of aggression and will be. . .

  The message repeated in a continuous loop.

  “Well, there you have it. They’ll be back with many vessels. That kind of implied threat merits no reply. What do you make of the proper nouns, lieutenant? How would you translate them? Their world, their race?”

  Mols looked at Captain Curton. “I don’t know, sir. Maybe the computer can come up with a romanization if I asked it to.” She turned back to the console and slapped at the keys on her portable. In less than a minute a single word flashed on her screen. “Oh,” she said.

  “What’d you come up with?”

  She stood and looked at Pax Curton. “The machine calls them the ‘Kreet’ based on what it could make of their chittering. This is subject to further upgrading should they decide to transmit any more hate mail.”

  “The Kreet. Sounds ominous enough.”

  “It’s still working on a possible translation of the placenames. Damn. I wish I had more of the alien recordings from that derelict.”

  Curton grunted. “From what Uriel told me, you were pretty lucky to get what you got. He said you barely made it off that ship alive.”

  “But, I made it,” she said dismissively, not wanting to get into any detail about her exploits and possibly stepping on Captain Haad’s wishes. “Now, how about that tour, captain?”

  “Sir, that worm is powering up drive engines,” his XO said.

  “Very good, Commander Fain. Have an armed shuttle track it as far as she can. If it takes them a while to make jump speed like it does us, maybe we can get some azimuth data and find out where she hails from.”

  The XO acknowledged and called his quartermaster to discuss the disposition of the shuttlecraft.

  “
Now, Lieutenant Mols, where were we?”

  Chapter 45

  “Sir, dispatch from the Pearl on your screen.”

  Davi Yorn looked at his comm stack. The worm was powering up engines. Well, it didn’t take them long to make repairs. Or just maybe this was a ruse of some kind. He then read the latest message from the worm.

  “Mister Corman, make that dispatch available to the captain, send it on down to his quarters. Mister Gant, steady on the helm and be prepared for evasive action. No telling what direction that worm will try to take once her engines come on-line. If she so much as wiggles her nose in our direction I want to be notified. Mister Mitchell, alert the weapons bay and have them ready. I’m not going to issue any alerts or battle orders, but we need them to be ready in a heartbeat.”

  His bridge responded appropriately. Acknowledgements worked through the comm links and the ship was ready. Yorn rubbed the worn leather and looked at the scratched steel of the armrests on the command chair. Even though he had strongly resisted being given a ship of his own, he was sure he could do the job. The chair felt comfortable to him and as he surveyed the bridge, a new feeling started to brew in the percolator of his mind. I could get used to this, he thought.

  And he had been a senior officer long enough to know that with the title of ‘captain’ came the enormous responsibility of actually commanding men and ships. The Christi had sailed with 218 souls on board. Correction: 219 souls counting the boy. She would be making port with only 168. Fifty good men and women lost to the vagaries of the Belt Loop. Men burned, lost in space, men torn apart by vicious worms, women killed by exploding pressure plates. The duty was hazardous and the pay wasn’t grand but the adventure was certainly worth the price of admission.

  More than likely the ship would be repaired enough to make the fold to Elber in a matter of weeks. She had been battered and bruised but she had prevailed. After three years the ship was his home and the thought of returning to port with less than a full crew was something every commanding officer hoped would never happen. How do you explain the losses to those who have been anxiously awaiting the return of their loved ones? He imagined the anguish some of the families back on Elber must have felt when they learned the Christi would be returning early, with casualties that needed more treatment than the ship could give them. And what of the families that would not even get a chance to bury their deceased? What would they think of the little ceremonial white crosses placed on a hilltop overlooking the Scorpius? If he was a captain, could he look those family members in the eye and convey to them the proper respect for their sons or daughters, fathers or husbands?

  Could he muster enough nerve to tell the family of Eddie Rich that their beloved sailor committed an act of unbridled barbarism that resulted in him losing not only his own life, but the lives of countless others? He squirmed in the chair and watched as the worm began slowly orienting its nose away from the task force ships. He was certain that the worm captain must have been thinking similar thoughts.

  He read the dispatch again. They were called the Kreet. They’d promised a return engagement.

  Yorn looked around the bridge once again and made up his mind.

  The time had come for him to lead.

  He wanted his own ship.

  * * *

  Max was up early. She wanted to relax and get ready in plenty of time for her hearing with the captain. She had stayed up pretty late with Har. After Isaacs had released her from sick bay she took the boy straight to her cramped quarters. The guard had followed them. They spent several glorious hours talking and planning and playing games. Har was totally unconcerned with his fate and not the least bit worried about the “old man” and his stuffy charges. The captain was lucky Har had saved his life and he had been quick to point out that fact to his mother and her Commander Yorn.

  But now, as zero hour approached, she was gently easing the patch of gauze from her eye. She had a dozen even stitches from her temple to just above the mid-point of her brow. The skin was bruised and dark and she knew no amount of make-up would cover the black eye underneath. Fuck it, she thought. Most of the officers had prominent scars and many of them looked at them as a signature of service in the Colonial Navy. Scars were equivalent to the dirty uniform you wanted to wear home from the big game.

  While she fussed with her uniform Har was fiddling around with her comm stack. She had locked the transmit capabilities and allowed him to listen to the radio transmissions. Maybe he would find something interesting enough in the ship-to-ship traffic to keep him occupied for the rest of the morning. Har seemed to be enjoying whatever it was that he was listening to wearing her adult-sized headset. Every now and then, she heard his chuckle. Once he even clapped his hands.

  “Hey Mom, what’s a World Series?”

  She stopped and looked at the boy. “What did you say?”

  “Hey, it’s right here on the radio. Some guy named Dave Stewart has just won the MVP award in the World Series.”

  Max went to the comm stack and pushed the stud for the speaker.

  “. . . and there you have it folks, Dave Stewart of the Oakland A’s has just been named the 1989 World Series Most Valuable Player,” a tinny, far-away voice said through sandpaper static. She muted the broadcast and went back to her dressing. So, the faded broadcast from Earth circa fall of 1989 had made it to the Loop. Her dead reckoning figured the Christi was some 800 light-years away at that moment, which translated into 245 parsecs. Funny that Har would settle on an old ball game to keep himself occupied. Baseball wasn’t really played on Elber because of the lower-than-standard gravity. A batted ball would wind up in orbit, she figured.

  She tried to explain the game to her son even though her knowledge was strictly based on the history books she’d read. The rules of play and the nuances of the game were lost on her. But Har seemed satisfied enough with her ramblings and soon she saw that he was hitting the seek button again.

  Later she would look up Dave Stewart just to be on the right side of her knowledge. She found out that the Oakland Athletics had swept the San Francisco Giants in four games, with the last game being played on October 28th, the latest World Series game ever up to that date. The Dave Stewart in the broadcast won two out of the four victories.

  But that knowledge was weeks in her future and now she had more pressing matters. She glanced at the chronograph on her comm stack. “Time for me to go, Harold. You be good down here and if you need anything, just ask the guard.”

  She had made it up in her mind that she would be back.

  Chapter 46

  The captain was sitting in one of the heavy steel chairs with a sheaf of papers in his hand when she walked in and properly reported as ordered. Commander Yorn was sitting at the far end with his hands folded on the edge of the long table. The captain let her stand at attention for what seemed like an eternity before finally saying that she could be seated. Geez, was he going to play a hard-ass right up until the end?

  “Good morning, lieutenant. Since we all know why we’re here, we can dispense with the usual formalities if you’ll agree,” Haad said. He finally looked up from the papers he was holding and stacked them neatly in a pile and put them off to the side. His portable reader had been beneath.

  “Yes, sir, that’s fine.”

  Haad turned on his reader and identified himself by name and rank. “This hearing is convened in the matter of Lieutenant Maxine Hansen, CN866519, Communications Officer on board the Colonial Navy Ship Corpus Christi out of Elber, official designation CCV-552. Present as a witness is Commander David Yorn, CN224779, Executive Officer and material witness as to the events described in the complaint.”

  Oh, shit. This was beginning to take a serious turn, beginning to go way past what she originally imagined the hearing would be. Should she have sought out legal counsel, as was her right?

  “Excuse me, captain. Should I get someone from legal over here from the Pearl Harbor to assist me?”

  Haad looked at her and shook h
is head. “You can if you desire, Lieutenant Hansen, but I suggest you wait until you hear the specifications against you.”

  Max sat back in her chair and stared at a spot just over Haad’s right shoulder.

  “For acts in violation of Section 815, Article 15, specifically, aiding and abetting a runaway colonial citizen, and violation of Section 898, Article 98, noncompliance with procedural rules. Do you understand these charges and specifications, lieutenant?”

  Max let her chin drop. Maybe this wasn’t going to be too bad. There were a lot more violations he could have charged her with, like conspiracy, contempt toward officials, insubordinate conduct, failure to obey, misconduct, misappropriation of military property, the list was staggering. Her research had shown her that. If he was just limiting her transgressions to two lousy articles maybe she would get a pass. “Yes, sir, I understand.”

  “Are you prepared and willing to accept administrative punishment for these violations of the UCCMJ?”

  Davi Yorn cleared his throat. Max gave him a sideways glance and noticed his slight nod.

  “Yes, captain, I am.”

  “Under the provisions of Article 15 of the code I am exercising non-judicial punishment in the form of loss of pay, restrictions of privileges, and assignment of extra duties while you remain aboard my ship.”

  Oh, great. The captain is punishing me by not punishing me. Loss of pay will hurt but will not kill; restrictions might be tough considering I still have Har to take care of until they send him back; what kind of extra duties did the skipper have in mind? She worked the toughest shift on the boat and was called upon frequently to fill in for other less-qualified comm techs.

  “Sir, can I speak, off the record?”