by Marko Kloos
From this altitude, Earth looks like a lovely place. I take in the vastness of the planet below, the swirling cloud formations that look like they’re floating on the shimmering waters, and the gentle arc of the horizon. I can see the thin, bright layer of atmosphere that separates the brilliance of the planet from the blackness of space, an almost insignificant film of air that keeps out the cold darkness beyond. For the first time since I signed my transfer papers, it occurs to me that this may be the last time I get to see my home world. If I get killed somewhere in the expanses of the explored galaxy, my first glimpse of Earth from orbit will also be my last.
I’ve seen pictures of Earth taken from space, but a mere image doesn’t come close to conveying the sheer size and majesty of the planet. I take in mountain ranges, lakes, and big swaths of ocean through the windows of the shuttle, and I realize that I’ve spent all my life confined to just a few square miles of all that vast terrain spreading out below. I’ve never climbed a mountain or crossed an ocean on Terra, and if things go well for me in the Navy, I never will.
I tell myself that there are plenty of colonies out there with mountains and oceans and clean air, and that all those familiar continents below are merely random collections of carbon, but as the shuttle speeds along its path along the curvature of the planet, I admit to myself for the first time that I’ll miss the place just a little—not the place where I grew up, the smelly urban mess that is my home city, but the concept of Earth itself, all the places that may have kept me from wanting to go into space, if only I’d had the chance to see them with my own eyes.
Chapter 17
Neural Networks school is my fourth duty station in eight months. Once again, I am getting used to a new building, a new duty schedule, and a new group of instructors and fellow students.
The school curriculum is devoid of anything that doesn’t have to do with networking. There’s no PT, no firearms instruction, no drilling, and no memorization of rank structures or military history. Instead, we spend eight hours a day learning the functions of a typical shipboard network, and how to manage and control it with our admin decks. Every week, we start a new subject, and every weekend, we have a skill test that covers the material from the week before. I haven’t spent this much time in a classroom since Public School. With the artificial gravity and the lack of windows, it’s easy to forget that we’re actually on Luna, and I occasionally have to remind myself that there’s a hard vacuum outside when I feel like going for an evening run in fresh air.
The week before graduation, I receive a mail container.
I check for the coded label on the sealed container, and see that it came from the Territorial Army’s 365th AIB—my old unit. I remember Sergeant Fallon’s promise to send me a Combat Drop Badge, and I open the seal of the container.
In the box is not just a single award case, but three. I open the first one to find a shiny new Combat Drop Badge, Basic level. In the second box is a Purple Heart, and the third box contains a Bronze Star.
Underneath the medal boxes, theres a neatly folded message form. I open it and see that it’s a hand-written note, penned in Sergeant Fallon’s precise block script.
Andrew,
here are some things of yours from the battalion. They’re legit, and by the time you read this, they will be reflected in your Navy personnel file. Every member of the squad got the same set except for Priest, who missed out on the Purple Heart because he had the misfortune to come out of it without a scratch. I sent Stratton and Paterson’s medals to their folks last week.
Wear them—you’ve earned them. The squad sends their greetings.
Best,
Briana Fallon, SFC, TA
I look at her signature twice before I notice the new rank after her name—SFC, Sergeant First Class. It looks like she received a merit promotion after Detroit.
I take the medals out of their velvet-lined cases and weigh them in my hand. The Bronze Star has a red and blue ribbon with a small, bronze-colored letter V on it, to signify an award for valor. The Purple Heart is the military award for receiving wounds in combat. It’s my reward token for a pierced lung, and three boring weeks in a military medical center.
The two medals have smaller ribbons in their cases, for wearing on the jacket or shirt of a dress uniform. I take the ribbons out of their spots, and walk over to my locker. I pin the ribbons onto the jacket of my Class A uniform, right above the top edge of the left breast pocket. The Combat Drop Badge, a little silver drop ship in frontal profile flanked by a set of curved wings, goes on top of the ribbons. When all the decorations are in place, I smooth out the front of my Class A jacket with my hand, and look at the arrangement for a few minutes, the two ribbons from Basic and Navy Indoc joined by the one for the Purple Heart, and topped with the Bronze Star ribbon and the CDB wings. The ribbons are just thin brass strips covered with a bit of colored fabric, and the badge is merely a piece of chrome-plated alloy. They hold no honor or achievement by themselves.
It feels good to have tangible, official proof that we did our jobs well on the ground in Detroit, but I would trade a whole warehouse full of ribbons and badges for an opportunity to go to the chow hall with Stratton one last time, and shoot the bull for an hour over sandwiches and coffee.
Halley completes her Combat Flight School training three days before I take my final Neural Networks exam. She sends me a message the morning after her graduation to let me know that she passed, and that she’s now wearing a brand new pair of pilot wings.
>91% score on the final flight exam, she writes. I am the fucking Mistress of the Wasp.
>Congratulations, I reply. When are you getting into the fleet?
>Tomorrow. We got our assignments last night. I’ll be on the Versailles.
I check my PDP for information on the NACS Versailles, and it looks like she’s a fleet frigate from an older class. She was commissioned almost thirty years ago, which means that she’s just a few years away from the scrapyard.
>I didn’t even know they had Marines on those little frigates.
>Just one platoon. One drop ship, and one in reserve. I’ll be one of four pilots on that tub.
>Well, good for you. Any leave before you ship out?
>I had five days, but they cancelled my leave for some reason. They’re letting me take it after the next deployment instead. Hey—maybe you’ll get some leave by then, too!
>That would be nice, I reply, even though I have no idea what I would do with a week or two off.
>We could go to some military resort somewhere, and do nothing but eat and screw for a week or two, what do you think?
Halley’s reply makes it look as if she had read my mind, and I chuckle at the screen.
>That sounds tolerable, I send back. Pencil me in.
Our final exam is a grueling eight-hour marathon session of computer tests and practical problems. We have to use our admin decks to serve requests from fictitious ship officers, and fix a series of ever more complex simulated Network problems. The final test is the solving of a total environmental control failure in fifteen minutes, before the crew suffocates. Most of us figure out the source of the problem—sabotage by virus—but a few of the trainees don’t find the solution in time and fail the exam, to be recycled into the next training flight.
At the end of the day, there’s the obligatory graduation ceremony, and I’m glad to see that it doesn’t involve parading in front of a flag officer in dress uniform. Instead, our section commander pins Neural Network Admin badges on our shirts, shakes our hands, and orders us down into the chow hall for a graduation party.
We all gather in the building’s galley, mingle with instructors, and drink crappy alcohol-free beer. Everybody is anxious to learn their assignment, and our instructors don’t keep us in suspense for long. One of the petty officers brings in a large plastic tub, and as we crowd around it, we can see a bunch of little white cylinders at the bottom.
“Each of those has the name of a ship on it,” our com
manding officer explains. “We will call roll, and each of you will step up and pull a name out of the bowl. We do it this way so everybody gets the same chance to get on one of those luxury cruise ships you all want to serve on.”
The ships in need of new Network personnel range in size from small escort corvettes to giant assault carriers, and everything in between: frigates, destroyers, supply ships, space control cruisers, and deep-space reconnaissance ships. When it’s my turn to draw a ship, I mask my nervousness by quickly reaching into the tub, and popping the cap off the cylinder before giving myself time to think about the process. I shake out the slip of paper, and read the name of my new ship out loud to the assembled crowd.
“NACS Polaris.”
There are whistles and hoots all over the room as soon as I say the name of the ship.
“Damn, Grayson,” the petty officer in charge of the tub says with a grin. “Pulled the jackpot ticket.”
I raise an eyebrow and reach for my PDP, but the trainee standing to my right supplies the information eagerly.
“She’s a brand new assault carrier. Newest and biggest ship in the Navy, one of the new Navigator class. That’s the most advanced ship in the Fleet, Grayson.”
I tuck the slip of paper into my shirt pocket and take another swig of my drink as the next trainee is called to the lottery bowl to draw his assignment.
We’re almost at the end of the lotto when one of the students pulls a ticket out of her cylinder and announces her new assignment to the rest of us, and I feel a jolt of surprised shock when I hear the name of her ship.
“NACS Versailles.”
There’s general groaning as our classmates consult their PDPs and find out that the Versailles is a tired little frigate from a now obsolete class that has long been superseded by more capable designs.
“That’s a rust bucket,” someone chuckles, but I don’t feel like laughing. Instead, I walk up to her as she steps away from the table, a dejected look on her face.
“Trade with me,” I tell her, and she looks at me in wide-eyed surprise.
“Are you joking?” she says. “Didn’t you pull the Polaris?”
I pull the slip of paper out of my pocket and hold it up for her to see.
“I did. What do you say? I’ll trade you my assignment for yours.”
“Are you serious? Why would you trade that ship for a frigate?”
“I have a friend on the Versailles,” I reply.
“Oh.” She looks at the nearest instructor, her expression a mix of incredulity and sudden excitement. “Can we just do that, trade off assignments?”
“I don’t see why not. They’re not finalizing our orders until tomorrow, anyway. Ask one of the petty officers.”
She walks over to one of our instructors and exchanges a few quiet words with him. When she comes back to where I’m standing, I can tell the instructor’s response by the excitement in her face.
“He says it’s no problem, as long as we both agree.”
“Well, I agree. How about you?”
“Are you kidding? Hell, yeah, I agree.”
I hold out my hand, and she gives me her paper slip. I hand her my own, the ticket to the most advanced warship in the Navy. She takes the slip gingerly, as if she suspects a last-minute hoax on my part. Then she walks off, looking over her shoulder with an expression that clearly implies I must have lost my marbles.
The next morning sees me packing up my things and stuffing them into a duffel bag again. The staff office has our final orders ready, and we all file in one by one to pick up our official printouts. We’re all dressed in our Class A uniforms, because that’s the required smock for reporting to a new unit, and I notice a few of my fellow trainees glancing furtively at the small collection of ribbons above my left breast pocket.
All of us have assignments on Navy ships, so we board shuttles to Gateway Station.
The Versailles is docked in a far corner of the Gateway fleet yard. I have to traverse what seems like miles of increasingly narrow and dirty corridors before I finally reach the docking collar that says NACS Versailles FF-472 on the sign above it. There are two Marines guarding the airlock, both wearing the Marine Corps version of ICU battle dress, and carrying sidearms in thigh holsters.
“I’m new to the ship,” I say, and hand my orders form to one of the Marines. “Where can I find the XO?”
The Marine looks at my order printout and looks at my breast pocket.
“Uh, try the CIC. You the new Network guy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Go through the lock, follow the gangway to the central fore-and-aft corridor, and turn right. You’ll get to an elevator bank. Ride down to Deck Five. CIC will be straight ahead as you step out of the elevator.”
“Thank you, sir.”
I take my order form back, pick up the duffel bag I had rested on my foot, and render a sharp salute in textbook TA fashion. The Marine corporal salutes back, and I step past him into the airlock to set foot onto my new ship for the first time.
The Versailles is showing her age. She has a patina of wear almost everywhere. The flooring in the gangways is smoothed out from decades of constant foot traffic, and the markings on the bulkheads and walls look like they have been refreshed and painted over many times. The interior of this ship is a little more cramped and a lot more worn than the fleet destroyer simulator back at Great Lakes. As old as the ship is, however, every deck and gangway is neat and clean. The floors are worn, but there are no supply crates and broken equipment piles in the corridors like at Gateway.
I take the elevator down to Level Five. CIC, the Combat Information Center, is hard to miss. It’s a big, circular room that takes up a big chunk of the deck. The hatches and windows are armored, and I can see the tell-tale synthetic gasket of an autonomous environmental system on the edges of the open entry hatch. This is the battle station for the ship’s captain and the senior staff officers, one of the best-protected parts of the ship.
I hand my order form to the Marine guarding the CIC hatch. He studies it briefly and waves me on.
“Leave your gear out here,” he says, and nods at my duffel bag. “The Skipper hates it when people drag their kit into CIC just to report in.”
“No problem.” I take the duffel bag off my shoulder and slide it up against the wall, away from the hatch.
There are enlisted crewmen sitting at consoles all along the periphery of the room. The center of the CIC is a sunken floor space with a large holo table in the middle. There are three officers standing in a small group on one side of the holo table, holding a discussion in low voices. One of them looks up when I step into the center of the CIC. He’s a tall man with the sharp and angular features of an infantry grunt just out of some hard training regimen. He’s wearing the gold leaves of a Lieutenant Commander on the collars of his khaki shirt, which makes him the highest-ranking officer of the small bunch. I walk up to him and render a snappy salute across the holo table.
“NN2 Andrew Grayson, reporting for duty, sir.”
The Lieutenant Commander returns the salute with an expression that’s not quite a frown. His name tag says CAMPBELL T, and he’s wearing no decorations on his shirt other than the Space Warfare Badge in gold.
“Mister Grayson,” he says when I finish my salute and lower my hand. “You supposed to be our new Network guy?”
“Yes, sir. Just finished Network School yesterday.”
Lieutenant Commander Campbell shares a poignant look with the lieutenant standing next to him. “Well, Mister Grayson. Welcome aboard, I suppose. I’m your new Executive Officer. Would you walk with me for a second?”
“Of course, sir.”
I follow the Lieutenant Commander out into the corridor. When we are far enough to be out of earshot of the CIC, he stops and turns to face me.
“Every deployment cycle, I get a few crew members who decide to spruce up their smocks a little to impress the boys or girls at the rec facility on Gateway. Now, before we start off on
the wrong foot here, would you mind telling me what you’re doing, coming fresh out of A-school with a valor award, a drop badge, and a freakin’ Purple Heart? And if you don’t have a good explanation, I’m willing to give you exactly five seconds to pull those things off your jacket before the Command Master Chief sees them and has the Master-at-Arms toss you into the brig for wearing unearned awards.”
I feel my face flush with embarrassment, and a moment later, I chide myself for feeling shame at the XO’s accusation.
“That’s a negative, sir. Those are legit. I’m an interservice transfer, from the Territorial Army. Have the Chief check my personnel file.”
Lieutenant Commander Campbell looks at me with a raised eyebrow.
“No shit?”
He pulls his issue PDP out of his pocket, and starts tapping on the screen.
“No need to ask the Chief. I can pull up your file right here and now.”
I wait as he digs through a few layers of menus on his screen. He studies the screen for a few moments, and lets out a low chuckle.
“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit.”
He turns off his PDP and stows it. Then he extends his hand to me.