by Jim Rudnick
Not at all like his thousands of feet of space in the captain’s quarters back on the Atlas, but it was still serviceable, clean, and ably stewarded. He smiled and the crinkle of his skin at the corner of his blue eyes crinkled even more. Gray hair at his temples made him realize that life was just getting interesting at forty. Life as a single navy captain, he meant, and he forced out any thoughts of Helena at the same time.
He tossed his meager belongings into the overnight satchel and threw the strap over his shoulder. He left quarters and went down the hallway to the escalator down to grade level. Outside, he asked a sergeant, who was just entering, how he could get over to the landing fields. The sergeant pointed at a metro bus just loading a few feet away.
He looked at Juno as the bus went along and thought milk run as the bus stopped often to pick up and drop off riders. Towers were few here in the naval areas, but in the close distance, the downtown major city of Juno lay well across the horizon. As the capital city of the RIM Confederacy, with more than forty realms, it was a hub of one kind or another. Each of those realms had embassies, and each had its own groupings of inhabitants. Diversity was surely a Juno thing, he thought, as he noted that three Ttseens got on the bus and sat together across one of the seats. Ahead of them was a Leudi. Behind them on the other side of the bus sat two couples of Skoggians, their purple-colored skin almost glowing in the morning sunshine on Juno.
After another dozen stops, the driver looked up into his rearview mirror and said, “Captain, all out next stop for the Juno landing base, Sir—hard to starboard is the way to go,” and he smiled as the bus came to a stop.
Jumping off the last step and waving his thanks to the driver, Tanner looked to his right and saw a Jeep waiting there with a corporal at the wheel.
“Sir—need a lift over to the port?” the corporal asked, and Tanner nodded.
As the Jeep took off, Tanner watched as the enormous fenced gates ahead grew closer and then parted. The Jeep must have initiated some kind of AI response, and they pulled up at the now erect barrier. A marine came out, looked at the corporal, and then checked Tanner’s orders, which he’d handed to the man, and smiled.
“Sir, your paperwork is in order—Corporal, drop the captain over at the Columbia on pad twenty-four STAT!” He saluted as he pressed the button to raise the barrier. Moments later, Tanner stood at the foot of the landing escalator that went up into the academy frigate. He was met by a bored sergeant and two academy student officers.
“Sir, your papers ple—” the one student said and stopped as Tanner thrust same into the young man’s hands.
He leafed through them, nodded, then made some kind of an entry on the tablet he carried, and handed Tanner back his orders.
“Sir, you’re checked in—all the way to Eons, Sir. Please report to the bridge after you have taken over your quarters on Deck Twenty-Nine, Sir. Bridge is up on Deck Thirty, Sir, if you’re unaware of how a frigate is laid out. Sir,” he said.
The sergeant stifled a guffaw. “Cadet Lieutenant, this is Captain Scott—who probably knows more about frigates than you do the back of your hand. Welcome, Sir,” the sergeant said and snapped a salute, which was quickly copied by the two academy student officers.
Tanner nodded, smiled, and said, “Not a problem, Sergeant. Will quarter up first and then see my way to the bridge.” He saluted back to the threesome.
Quarters he found were fine—someone had billeted him in a single, and he noted his bags from the Atlas stood in a row off to one side. Normal bunk, separate head, view-screen, console, and AI leads. Same as always, and he left his quarters to take the stairs up one flight to the bridge deck.
With more than one hundred and thirty crew members and about thirty officers, the Columbia was a normal frigate—except it was a split between navy men as supervisors and academy students in training. For all positions, Tanner knew the students in their fourth and final academy year worked out in the various navies across the RIM Confederacy. Each had a series of postings through all the major sections like the bridge, engineering, science, and ordnance, and each required that they hit a threshold of skill and experience the academy valued. If someone failed to live up to those expectations, they had to repeat that section—but the repeats were limited to one. If you failed twice to get past the section thresholds, you washed out of the academy.
Not, Tanner thought, that the washouts lost completely, as he knew of a few who had found positions with smaller Confederacy member navies in some kind of positions—but not the kind of navy men or women he’d want looking out for his back either.
He stopped at the bridge door, and as it opened, he stepped out onto the bridge deck floor.
Ahead of him lay the normal frigate bridge, but it was slightly modified as most of the consoles had two seats laid out beside each other—one for the student and one for the supervisor. “Made sense,” he said to himself, “in that the console and data were available to both for their input and feedback.”
He took the few steps over to the captain’s chair and snapped off a salute.
“Sir, Captain Scott reporting in and that I’m squared away, Sir,” he said, and as the frigate captain turned to him, Tanner smiled.
Captain Darnell smiled back, returned the salute, and then got up to hug him.
“Tanner, so good to see you again,” Darnell said, and he yanked a chair over beside him and pushed Tanner down into same.
They had been shipmates back on the RN Kerry before the pirates had attacked. Both had been very much involved in the attack on the Kerry, and Lieutenant Darnell had moved up the chain of command nicely.
“Captain,” Tanner said, “you’re a captain now and the Columbia is yours—nicely done, Tim” he said and smiled.
Tim Darnell smiled back, and yet Tanner could tell the smile was not really all there.
“Tanner—yes, thanks. And I know that you might be thinking why be a captain on an academy training frigate—and the answer is quite simple. The attack on the Kerry somehow made me realize that the life of a swashbuckling navy man was not for me—not as much as moving over to the academy side of things. I trained for a full year as a commander on an academy cruiser and then got this posting on the Columbia as full captain. And its pretty easy duty—Juno to Eons and back to Juno. And more importantly, least to my way of thinking, I am helping train the next class of navy men and women at the same time. Works for me, Tanner,” he said and smiled that smile once more.
Tanner had a fleeting thought that such duty would never put the man in harm’s way, but he stifled that thought and rightfully so. One can’t measure one man’s courage from another man’s standards.
He clasped Tim on the arm, smiled, and said, “So, how’s this bridge crew, Captain?”
Some of the supervisors around him chuckled.
Tim went through the introductions, and after about a half dozen, Tanner begged off, finding it difficult to remember who was who and what console they were running.
Tanner noted the friendly attitude between supervisors and trainees. Light and easy, he thought, which in a training environment was a good thing. Of course, there were meant to be times to test the students too, in the heat of battle as it were, but that would be a lesson for another day.
As he settled into life on the Columbia, he was glad to see, from his own point of view, the overall teaching and supervising were being very well done.
“Nothing like an academy grad,” he said to himself and smiled.
#####
In the flyer, Tanner was a bit lost at first. Normally, the pilot held a stick or some kind of piloting device that allowed the user to direct the craft—but on these Eons flyers, the pilot used what might be called a trackball. Placed in the same spot as the stick would have been, between the pilot’s legs, it was mounted to the dashboard and the solid arm was immovable. The center held a movable ball which the pilot used to direct the craft for the normal roll control. Side-to-side ball movements controlled yaw, or the dir
ection the flyer actually took over the ground. And pitch or up-and-down controls were handled by simply changing the throttles located at the side of that ball.
He smiled after noticing same and said, “Interesting controls—have they not heard of a stick here on Eons?”
The sergeant smiled. “Sir, not on Eons—everything is the same but different somehow,” he said.
He gently moved the ball and throttles at the same time, and the two-man flyer moved up and to the left. Leaving the Dessau landing fields, Tanner had requested a quick flight over to the new academy towers and the sergeant off the Columbia had been quick to comply.
The flyer was now almost three thousand feet above the landing port. The sergeant swung her to port, and the flyer accelerated quickly to full speed.
“She does like half a Mach,” he offered.
The flyer quickly began to cover ground as the city behind them fell away and the foothills and canyons off the mountains in the distance became more visible. As the flyer hit some turbulence, the sergeant modified his speed down a notch, slowly spun the craft to its left, and picked up a river below them. It twined its way deeper and deeper into the growing canyon that angled back and forth, as it went toward the now closer mountains. In less than ten minutes, the four academy towers sprung up in the near distance.
Each was a true tower—some architect had made sure of that—and Tanner thought about form over function for a moment and then shrugged. Different streets for different feets was the universal answer to all.
Each tower was about four hundred feet tall, or about forty stories, he reckoned. Each tower appeared to have ground level landing ports as well as the same about midway up their expanse. Each was capped with simple arrays that he thought would handle networks, communications, and Ansible functions. He thought the apparent lack of windows of any kind was odd, and he said so to the sergeant.
“Sir, yes … that’s what it looks like—but inside you’d see that there are windows all the same—just that they’re hidden from outside. Each holds like thirty-some odd floors, and each is wholly self-contained we were told. Each has its own power plant, networks, communication, and such, and at this point, they should have been issued occupancy permits. Course, guess that’s why you’re here, right, Sir?” he said, putting the question right out front.
“Don’t know what I can do to help on that front,” Tanner said, and he meant it.
The towers were all beautiful, clinging to the sides of the canyon, two on one side and two on the other side. The outer skins of the towers were dull grayish metals that glowed in the late afternoon dusky sunlight. Each was also, he noted dryly, tended by robo-welders that sparked with their tasks. One had a side-mounted set of scaffolding still erected so that meant work too, he figured. One farther away had some kind of flyers tending to the top arrays, which made Tanner give up looking for issues. There’d be plenty.
“Swing her around all four, slowly if possible,” he said to the sergeant, and he complied.
Not much more could be seen, but down at ground levels, Tanner saw massive lineups of trucks and stacks of containers that were slowly being forklifted onto conveyor belts that entered the towers themselves.
“Still being worked on, for sure,” he said to himself and nodded to the sergeant.
“Okay, thanks for the flyby, Sergeant. Now, please, back to Dessau and the landing field—I will need to see Rear Admiral Higgins, I expect.” He leaned back as the sergeant pushed down on the throttles and the flyer leaped away from the towers.
Ahead the city of Dessau slowly grew, and while it held less than half a million inhabitants under the big blue sun, it was the capital city. That big blue sun was brighter than most, so the climate here was hot and dry. For almost three generations, the ground had been able to support less and less vegetation, and crops had long since died. No matter what kind of fertilizers had been developed, the land could not grow enough food to support the people of Eons.
It had not always been so; records going back ten centuries showed that once this had been a fertile continent with many farms and cities and commerce too. Towns had sprung up and prospered centuries ago, and the whole region was known to be an agricultural success.
But as every Issian knew, the change in their blue sun with its varying radiation meant that droughts had come and the soil had dried up for almost three centuries now, as did the economy, and the farmers left and fled to the cities and towns.
The giant blue star that Eons revolved around was young. It was still trying to find a balance, the scientists said, and the radiation would be dynamic for a while and then eventually decrease, the climate would settle, and agriculture could begin again. To support themselves, the people of Eons had done what anyone else would have done; they found ways to trade what they could for food and commerce.
In the meantime, Eons had done well with being the home of the RIM Confederacy Naval Academy, and it was amply repaid for that. This brand new academy, partially paid for by the Barony as they folded up their own academy on Neres and all was in the process of being moved to Eons, was also going to help Eons survive too.
#####
Tanner thought about the phrase déjà vu one more time and then shrugged. He’d been here before only on a different planet and years ago. It felt so much like he was re-living the past that he wondered what might happen if he got up and just left the offices and went for a Scotch. Wait. Scotch was a part of that past, no longer a part of his present, and he smiled.
Here in the administrative wing of the Eons landing port, it seemed the admiral had obviously used his rank to get an office.
And at the desk ahead of him, working on something that was obviously frustrating as hell, sat Administrative Assistant Lieutenant Kelsey CoSharan, the rear admiral’s number two, and he looked upset, which for a Faraway alien was an easy tell.
Faraway aliens looked like few other races with a tail that protruded more than four feet behind them and rested often on the ground. They could leap almost thirty feet, and their race looked almost kangaroo-like with the huge legs and muscled calves; however, the tail was the best way to read a Faraway.
A stiff, unbending tail meant the alien was not going to engage, not going to work with their peers. Yet a soft tail that would simply drop to the floor and lie still with little twitches meant that the owner was going to be approachable and work with you, it was said. And a tail that curled up, toward the alien’s head, meant it was pissed.
Just like now.
Tanner smiled at the alien and continued to smile, as the assistant looked up every few minutes.
He’d sat here now for over a half hour and he wondered—
The box on the assistant’s desk chimed three times, and the lieutenant looked up once more to Tanner.
“You may go right in, Captain. And welcome to Eons,” he added with a wry voice. At least that’s what Tanner read into it, and that curled tail still meant something else, he was sure.
He entered the inner office and found Rear Admiral Ethan Higgins, sitting at his desk, with two side tables pushed up close that were all covered with stacks and stacks of folders, files, and tablets some of which were chiming and unanswered too.
The admiral stood and came around his desk the other way to offer his hand, which Tanner took, and they shook quickly.
“Heard that you’ve overcome your previous … um … previous shortcomings. Good for you and the RIM Navy,” he said as he sat in his chair.
“Captain, truly welcome. We need you—I’ve asked the admiral for help for over six months, and you’re a welcome sight. Sit, please—Kelsey, get in here!” he barked.
Even though Tanner had closed the door behind him, it opened a moment later and the admiral’s assistant came in—a stack of folders loaded with files in one hand and three tablets in the other. Without any direction from the admiral, he dropped the items into Tanner’s lap and left the room a few seconds later.
“Not a lot of time we have—nor
for that matter does the academy have to get finished, get our occupancy permits, and then take on students in the upcoming semester. We have four months is all. We, you’ll note I said we, as I now count you in on the team. A team of two—well, three if you count Kelsey. You might have thought that the academy itself would be on the team—but it’s them that we’re fighting with daily, it seems. Course, that’s why you’re here—I do hope you enjoy their deans who want accent walls in their offices to hold not Randi waterfalls but a photo of their own world. Or chairmen who want their desks to be elevated so that they can look down on all who enter their offices, but somehow they want that to be hidden. Which is why I work outta here—oh, you’ll see what I mean when you visit your own office over in Tower Four. But don’t get too sidetracked by the various professors who hate blue boards in their lecture theaters and want them to be green or black … whatever, Captain,” he said like an outpouring of his latest frustrations had boiled over.
Tanner nodded. “Sir, are we using any kind of rules of engagement to well, sort of to triage these requests and such? How important is it that a classroom blackboard be green as opposed to blue?” he asked.
The admiral nodded. “Not bloody important at all, but we can’t say that to the academy staff. They must feel that their input is appreciated, I’ve been told by everyone from Admiral McQueen to the Confederacy Council to the Master Adept. Yet we still gotta get it all done in four more months. You’ll be hard pressed I know to nod to a professor about his concerns, while mentally saying no chance to yourself. It’s a lesson in, well, in diplomacy. Have you any experience in that, Captain?” he asked.
Tanner nodded. “As a matter of fact, recently, yes, Sir, I do. But I also know that it’s applied as needed, Sir. I take it that these,” he said as he pointed to his lap, “are the most pressing ones?” he asked.