by Rick Partlow
“Don’t complain. If we were on the Jambo, there’s no way we’d be able to get away with this. Too many prying eyes.”
“Are we even breaking any regulations?” I wondered. “I mean, we’re not in the same chain of command. Hell, we’re not even in the same branch of service.”
“We wouldn’t be breaking any regs in the Navy. God only knows what the rules are for the Space Force.” She rested her head against my shoulder and her laugh rumbled through my skin, conducting like an earthquake. “You know, I used to think the Space Force was a joke. Not that we didn’t need a branch devoted to space defense but the fucking name, Space Force. It sounds like something from a 1970s Japanese cartoon. And yet, here we are.”
“Having sex on a starship. God bless America.”
“Does this qualify us for the Mile-High Club?” she asked, climbing atop me, a lascivious glint in her eye. “Or would that be the Light-Year-High Club?”
“It’s gotta be some sort of record,” I ventured, breath escaping in a gasp. There really were advantages to being in my mid-twenties physically, and I suddenly regretted spending so much of that period of my life in a war zone the last time around. “A personal record at least.”
An alarm beeped insistently on my comms unit and I muttered a curse.
“Time to go brief the Delta team,” I said, letting my head fall back against the pillow.
“Now?” she said, staring at me in disbelief. “It can’t wait another five minutes?”
“I am the commanding officer of the Security Team,” I said, lifting my hands off her hips to hold them up in a helpless gesture. “I mean, theoretically, anyway.”
She sighed and rolled off of me, her face a mask of exasperation, but it faded quickly. She was career officer, so she knew all about responsibility and getting ready and at your station before your subordinates.
“You still feeling uncomfortable about being in charge of them?” she asked.
I pulled on a T-shirt and gym shorts and grabbed my shower kit.
“Yeah, a little. But that’s me, not them. Pops has been great. It’s just still hard for me to get used to Jambo not being there. He was always my go-between, not just with the Delta team but with the military. I could make believe I was still a civilian, just hanging out with Jambo and letting him insulate me from all….” I gestured at my class A uniform hanging from a corner of my locker. “…this.”
“Why is that so important?” Julie rolled off the bed with a dancer’s grace, and I had to stop what I was doing and appreciate the view. She snorted a laugh and tilted my head upward with a finger until I was meeting her eyes again. “Why are you so afraid of being back in the military?”
“Because the last time I was in, I lost my marriage, my son and my sobriety.” I pulled her into an embrace, the warmth of her bare skin an ember of fire against my skin even through my clothes. “I had nothing left to lose. Now I do, and I’m afraid history is going to repeat itself.”
“It’s not,” she declared. “Because you won’t let it. Just because you look young doesn’t mean you are. You lived through those years and you learned from them, right?” She cocked her head at me in a challenge. “Or are you saying you’re a dumbass who can’t learn from his mistakes? Because if you are, tell me now so I can bail and send you back to the taxpayers.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it. I wouldn’t have known what the hell the phrase meant if I hadn’t researched it for a book. “Back to the taxpayers” is what fighter pilots say when they wreck an aircraft.
“What?” I teased her. “You mean you’re not going to ride me in?” Which meant trying to land a damaged aircraft instead of ejecting.
She kissed me, then pushed me toward the hatch.
“I wanted to, but you went and got all duty-honor-country on me. Go get to work, jarhead.”
***
There was something different about the way the Helta crew on the Truthseeker looked at me. I wasn’t certain what it was, but I’d been around them long enough to be sure it was there. They were trying hard not to stare at me as I made my way to the armory to meet with the Delta team, meeting my eyes for just long enough to be polite—or what a human would consider polite—and then looking away quickly.
Maybe that’s all it was, the Helta learning our manners and figuring out we didn’t like to be ogled openly like we were some sort of freaks. They were learning about us at the same time we were learning about them, after all. Or maybe it was the stress of the mission, the knowledge they were about to take humans into their home system and try to justify why it was a good idea to give us weapons after what had happened with the Tevynians.
I hoped it wasn’t because they were afraid of us. Before, we’d just been backward local yokels who could barely build a spaceship to reach our own Moon. Now, we had starships and weapons better than theirs. And we did look just like the enemy. The thought troubled me. If even the crew of the Truthseeker couldn’t get over that, how the hell were we going to convince their Helta government we came with good intentions?
We had the armory to ourselves, as usual. The Helta didn’t go there during a flight. They seemed to have the attitude a peacetime military garrison did about weapons, not trusting them to their soldiers except in extreme circumstances, and I wondered how uncomfortable they had to be with us screwing around with our gear during a flight.
Pops and the others had their Svalinns out in the center of the large compartment when I arrived, running PMCS on the suits and the weapons. Yeah, they’d done it before we transferred over from the Jambo, but you didn’t take chances with things that could save your life. My own suit was standing in a portable rack off by itself, an invitation for me to do the same thing, which I would, eventually.
“On your feet!” Pops snapped when I entered the compartment, but I stopped them.
“As you were. Too much work to do for jumping and flexing.”
A rush of warmth went to my cheeks at the gesture, though. Delta did not hop to attention for just every swinging dick with shiny metal on his collar. They reserved that for their own officers, or ones they respected.
“What’s the good word, sir?” Pops asked me. “You find us a real mission instead of this honor guard bullshit?”
“Hey, don’t knock it,” I said. “You’re more than an honor guard, you’re the representatives of the United States military to the Helta.”
“Doncha mean the ‘United Stars’ military, boss?” Dog asked, snickering.
I raised an eyebrow at the leather-faced, broad-shouldered soldier. When he grinned, a keloid scar pulled at the side of his mouth and I wondered why he hadn’t had that taken care of now that we had the technology to remove it simply and quickly. Maybe it was a badge of honor for him, or a reminder of a mistake he didn’t want to forget.
He wasn’t likely to let me forget using the name of my science fiction series as the alias for the made up government I’d given the Tevynians back in the Fairhome system when we’d stolen the Jambo out from under their noses. It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, and I’d had to make up something to keep the Tevynians from blaming the attack on the Helta and carry out reprisals against the colonists of Fairhome.
“I tell you what, Dog, if you can convince the European Union and the Chinese to go along, we’ll change the name when we get back.”
Laughter filtered through the team. There were ten of them in all, since we’d got the replacement for Jambo. Well, not that, since he couldn’t be replaced, but since the new guy had rotated in to take his spot on the team. He didn’t have a nickname yet. Everyone else was “Dog” or “Pops” or “Ginger,” but this guy was still just “Baker.” You earned a nickname and it had to be given to you by the rest of the team.
“What sort of an honor guard are we going to be, boss?” Pops asked me, polishing one of the elbow joints of his armor with a wire brush. “We brought the Svalinns…are we gonna wear them or dress up in monkey suits like you?” He motioned with the brush at
my class A dress uniform.
“Full armor,” I told him. “M900 rifles, too, and if they don’t like it, to hell with them. You’re here to show our strength in a controlled manner designed to impress the Helta without scaring the shit out of them. I wish I could wear mine, but I’ve been tasked to answer questions and be the human face of our armed forces.”
“With these guys, a human face might not be the best thing.”
“That’s why I have to be extra charming.”
“Rules of engagement?” Ginger asked. He’d recently grown a flame-red beard to match the curly head of hair that had given him his nickname, on the theory that the fuzzy-faced Helta would appreciate it.
“What do you think?” I answered his question with a question. “No one is to show any sort of hostility and no one is to even touch a weapon unless fired upon or ordered otherwise.”
I leaned against the shoulder of my Svalinn, the heavy metal suit of powered armor unyielding beneath my weight as I regarded them. I half expected them to be tuning me out, rolling their eyes at the Marine officer who was tagging along, pretending he was in charge of a group of stone killers, the most professional of professionals in the US military. To my surprise, they all seemed to be giving me their complete attention, leaving the cleaning and repair work aside, eyes fixed on me. Which was flattering and also very intimidating, in that I had to try to sound like I knew what I was talking about.
Might as well just tell them what I was really thinking.
“Guys, if we can’t get the Helta on our side, it’s over. We don’t stand a chance against the Tevynians on our own. The Jambo by herself is not going to be enough.”
“We got those hyperdrives,” Dog pointed out, motioning with the screwdriver in his hand.
“We do,” I agreed, “and it’s going to take us months to build the ships around them, and that’s with the Helta helping out every step of the way. Without the Helta, we don’t have a source for any more of the things, either. Just coming up with the exotic materials they use for the production of the drive core takes particle accelerators the size of an asteroid, then more particle accelerators to produce the antimatter they have to use to power those accelerators. We couldn’t even build the smaller kind to make the antimatter, not yet anyway. And just getting the exotic materials wouldn’t do us a damned bit of good, because turning that into hyperdrives takes gravimetic field generators we don’t have and can’t build.”
I shrugged.
“This is it. We either get the Helta to bring us into their Alliance or we will not win this war. We have to make this work.”
“What if it doesn’t?” Pops asked me. “Do we have a backup plan?”
“If they do,” I said, “they haven’t seen fit to share the details with me.” I closed my eyes and tried to think. “I suppose,” I ventured, “that we could do what the Tevynians did and start trying to hijack ships. From the Tevynians, I hope, not the Helta. But that’s the counsel of desperation and I’d rather that be our last resort than our only one.”
Most of them were nodding agreement and I almost sighed in relief. Good, I hadn’t sounded like a complete idiot.
“Standard drill,” I finished up. “Don’t speak unless spoken to and don’t take the chance of pissing anyone off.”
“Us?” Pops raised an eyebrow, face splitting in a grin. “Piss anyone off? Perish the thought.”
Chapter Nine
“So,” I asked, “what’s the name of this system sound like in your language, Joon-Pah?”
His reply was a series of grunts and hoots that resembled a howler monkey having wild sex with an internal combustion engine and even Strawbridge raised an eyebrow at the cacophony despite what seemed to be a concerted effort on her part to be as pleasant and cordial as possible.
“And I bet that means ‘home,’ doesn’t it?”
Joon-Pah’s expression indicated surprise.
“It does. How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
The system was impressive, though I wasn’t certain how much of what I was seeing in the Truthseeker’s main viewscreen was real and how much was a computer simulation of the data that the ship’s sensors were taking in. The primary star was a bit brighter and hotter than the Sun, but a close cousin for all that, and it boasted eight planets that I could see in the sensor scans, though only three were visible in the image on the main viewer. I’d reviewed the data on the flight from Forestglen and I knew the innermost world was as burnt and blackened and useless as Mercury, though the Helta had used its gravity to anchor a huge solar collector plant to power the particle accelerators to produce antimatter. I’d asked Joon-Pah why they didn’t use the antimatter to power their ships and got an earful of physics I didn’t really understand, but the upshot was, it took so much effort and energy to produce so little of it that the only practical use was to power the gravimetic exotic matter factories to make hyperdrives.
The outer two were ice giants, a lot like Uranus and Neptune but with fewer moons and none of them apparently that useful. The industrial core of the system was the massive gas giant at the gravitational center of things, a touch larger than Jupiter, just a hair too small to be considered a brown dwarf. It was surrounded by dozens of moons, five of them large enough to be considered planets in their own right, though none was close enough to the primary to truly be called inhabitable and the mining colonies there required powerful radiation shields to protect the Helta who worked in them from the periodic surges of ionizing energy coming off the gas giant. Atmosphere mines were automated and pulled enough deuterium and tritium from the gasses of the upper reaches of the planet to fuel every ship in their fleet.
Beyond the gas giant, whose name I couldn’t recall either in English or Helta, there was an asteroid belt, larger than our own and a bit denser as well, though it had been thinned out by mining over the last couple of centuries. And then there was the real surprise, something I hadn’t expected when we’d set out, still hitting me hard enough I asked him about it again as we approached.
“This system really has three habitable worlds?” I shook my head. “That’s pretty incredible, isn’t it? How likely do you think it is that the Elders had something to do with that?”
“Our researchers are fairly certain that all three worlds were terraformed no later than ten to fifteen thousand years ago,” he told me. His face shifted into what I recognized as the equivalent of a smile. “I often wonder if our scientific progress would have come as quickly if we hadn’t been left such obvious evidence that our world was engineered by a superior race.”
“And it doesn’t bother you at all?” I asked, a frown tugging the corner of my mouth down.
“No, why should it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted, “but I’ll be honest, it kind of bothers me.”
They were stunning blue and green jewels of life, whether God or the Elders or random chance had set them in their places. The farthest out was also the smallest, a bit larger than Mars, with massive ice caps sheathing its poles in swathes of white, the blue of its inland seas spotty, most of its water tied up in the ice. A line of green hugged the equator, daring to creep northward or southward in places but rarely more than a few degrees.
The closest in of the living worlds was a sea of green and blue with no white in evidence, even on the tallest of its mountaintops. Brown stained her southern continents with endless tracks of desert, and I wondered if it grew so hot and dry in those arid interiors that a man—or, rather, a Helta—could die in a few hours from the baking heat. The green of the northern jungles seemed so deep and impenetrable it was difficult to imagine a city being carved out of the tangle there.
But the real Goldilocks world was the third planet out, an echo of our own Earth, teetering on the narrow edge of an orbit neither uncomfortably cold nor unbearably hot. Ice caps crowned the poles, but the oceans were vast and the stretches of green covered entire continents. I thought of a Mesozoic Earth and wondered if this was w
hat it had looked like.
“Captain Joon-Pah,” the Helta communications officer said, turning at his station, “we have the Prime Facilitator’s office on the line for you.”
The words were translated automatically by my comm unit, but the title still seemed strange to me, like I knew what both words meant but together, they were still meaningless.
“What’s this Prime Facilitator anyway? Like our President?”
Strawbridge answered the question, which wasn’t a surprise as I expected her to have studied up on the Helta government.
“Think of it as more of a prime minister,” she explained, “like the UK or Israel. The representative of the ruling faction, except not quite as easy to vote out. I’m simplifying things, of course,” she added, her smile condescending enough to let me know she was simplifying them for my benefit. “The Helta have a representative government, but not exactly a democratic one. Representatives, or Facilitators, are selected by a computer program out of qualified candidates.”
I arched an eyebrow.
“Well, I guess that’s probably superior to the way anyone on Earth does it,” I said, not sure if I meant it or I was just jabbing back at her. “Though I don’t know who I’d trust to set the parameters of that computer program, you know?”
“Put him on,” Joon-Pah ordered the communications officer. “Tight focus on me until I indicate otherwise,” he added.
The Helta who appeared on the main screen looked like any of the rest of them, as far as I could tell. Maybe he was a bit more jowly than Joon-Pah, his ears a bit larger and sticking out farther from his head, but there wasn’t much difference between one were-koala and another from a human’s point of view, particularly when they didn’t age.
“Joon-Pah,” the male said, and my translation program gave the simulated voice a warmth, like old friends speaking for the first time in years. “I had not expected to see you again after I received the news of the fall of Fairhome. I grieved with my mates and children before you sent us your message. I am very gratified to see you whole once more.”