by Ron Collins
Another round of laughter and a few raised glasses came.
Malloy turned to Torrance.
“Given all that, sir, we thought you might appreciate a little something to remember the event by.” He proffered the package.
Torrance took it amid a smattering of applause.
“I don’t know what to say,” he mumbled.
Heat rose to his cheeks. He had gotten used to people congratulating him in the hallways and commenting to him in the mess. But those were simple things. Having the crew he worked so closely with do something like this made the world seem claustrophobically small, but also made him remarkably lighthearted.
“Open it up, LC,” Ensign Whalen said.
Torrance tore the paper, found a box inside, and lifted the lid.
It was a square slab of the composite EMI shielding they had used to wrap the launch chambers—engraved with the image of a wormhole pod in flight. In the distance was a blazing sun, Alpha Centauri A. The words UGIS Everguard, Changing the Universe were engraved along the top of the slab. The ship’s date and time of the launch were on the bottom.
He looked up to see the smiling faces of the entire team staring at him with anticipation.
“This is the coolest damned thing I’ve ever seen,” he said.
“We’ve got all our names on the back, sir.”
He turned it over.
“Then I’ll have to display it on this side,” he quipped, holding it up so everyone could view their names.
The crew laughed, and everything felt right.
This presentation meant as much to them as it did to him. The idea took him by surprise. This was a night for laughter, he thought. As much as he hated parties, it was a night to breathe.
“Thank you all very much,” he said. “Seriously. I don’t want to get all mushy because we still have, uh, a few years of time left together. But you guys were a great team. Are a great team. I think we should give ourselves a cheer.”
“LC’s right,” Malloy said, raising his glass. “On three. One, two, three.”
They all cheered. Then again, and again.
Finally they each shook Torrance’s hand and drifted back to their own tables.
“Hey, LC?” Malloy said. “Do you know Lieutenant Harthing?”
Malloy moved his hands in such a way as to present a woman who had come to stand beside him. Torrance recognized her.
The lieutenant was radiant in her formal blues with a silver sash cinched at the waist. She was thin, maybe to the point of awkwardness. His age, he thought. From her bearing, he suspected she spent a good deal of time in the ship’s gymnasium. A pair of blue barrettes pulled her hair back in a graceful sweep around the back of her head. Silvered earrings glittered from her lobes. Her makeup was a spare application of coloring to her lips and something to augment her eyes. The effect was dazzling, though.
He recalled her name on the roster of officers in the Forward Nav office, but that was as far as it went.
Torrance blushed. Harthing seemed equally stymied.
“Only by reputation,” Torrance finally said, taking her gloved hand. “Which is, of course, quite good.”
“This is Lieutenant Commander Black,” Malloy said to her. “He’s a real steady guy. I thought the two of you might hit it off.”
The three stood there for an awkward moment.
“Hello,” Torrance said, suddenly finding himself annoyed at Malloy, both for putting him in a situation he wasn’t prepared for and for the tone in his voice when he called Torrance a “steady guy.”
“You can just call me Torrance,” he said.
“Marisa,” Harthing said. “Nice to meet you. Congratulations on your launch.”
“Thank you. You’re navigation, right?”
“Yes, I’m surprised you knew.”
Malloy chimed in. “When he’s not writing wormhole code, LC is the service engineer. He knows everything about everyone.”
They laughed, but Torrance grimaced.
“Not everything,” he said.
He couldn’t help a glance across the room where Security Officer Casey was speaking with Sunchaser’s First Officer. The idea of an overseer made him nervous enough as it was, and it didn’t help matters that Casey caught his eye, smiled, and raised his wineglass in an “I’ve got plans for you” kind of way that Torrance found himself imagining as a threat.
“I see another glass of champagne with my name on it,” Malloy said. “I’ll leave you two kids to chat.”
So they chatted.
“Karl said you’ve been in the service for a long time.”
Torrance nodded. “It’s how I went to school, actually.”
“I guess you could say the same for me, too. But I’ve always dreamed of being in space, too. This was the safest way to do that.”
A server bot streamed past with a tray of champagne.
“Drink?” Torrance asked.
She smiled, and he grabbed two from the tray. The wine was sweet.
“Tell me about the launch,” she said. “I bet it was the coolest thing ever.”
“To be honest, I’m just happy it’s over.”
She gave half a laugh. “I bet.”
She had a catch in her voice that he liked, and grace to her movements that he found mesmerizing. She used her hands when she talked, which made a conversation with her like watching a ballet. She was military through and through. Her father and mother were stationed on Venus Command, working security detail for the science station there. They had traveled all her life, so this stint on Everguard was the longest she had ever been in one environment. She valued structure, maybe even more than he did. She understood the discipline of a system that worked on checks and guards.
Torrance liked her eyes and the way she asked questions that led to interesting ideas.
She asked Torrance if he danced, and though he didn’t really, he also didn’t want to disappoint her. Somehow he managed to not break her toes.
Remarkably, the party was over before he knew it, and he was both shocked and a little dismayed when the lights to the assembly hall went up.
“Can I walk you home?” he asked.
She smiled and they left the deck together.
Torrance and Marisa strode along the hallway, her hand resting lightly inside the crook of his elbow. It was three in the morning. The deck was quiet.
“This is my stop,” she said, pointing toward the door. It was a standard-issue four-bay quarters. She hesitated, then slipped her hand from his elbow. “I would invite you in, but I don’t want to wake anyone up.”
“That’s all right.”
A few strands of her hair had slipped from the barrettes, and her sash was rumpled from the dance. He could see she was as tired as he was. But otherwise Marisa was still as stunning as she had been earlier.
“Yes?” she said, obviously sensing he wanted to say something.
“I was just thinking that maybe you would like to do something else together sometime.” The words came out before he could stop them, which is probably why they worked well enough.
Her smile brightened. “That would be great.”
Torrance smiled, too.
He bent and kissed her. Marisa kissed him back.
Then she smiled and pressed her palm to the door’s scanner. It slid open and she stepped into her room.
“Call me,” she said over her shoulder.
The door shut behind her, and Torrance leaned against the corridor bulkhead.
It had been a very long time since he had felt so good.
CHAPTER 11
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: May 19, 2204
Ship Local Time: 1200
A blast from the snare drum echoed through the loading bay.
Torrance stood at the end of a long line of officers, his back straight and his arms loosely at his sides. The chamber was cavernous relative to most of the ship, big enough that the drumming reverberated against the stark metal walls, larg
e enough that it was cold despite the gathering of warm bodies all together. It smelled lightly of metal and dust despite the cleaning bots that ran through the place earlier. He logged an entry to his register of things to do: check janitorial for maintenance status. The ventilation system was running hard enough that Torrance also noted to accelerate its next maintenance cycle.
Admiral Hatch entered the hallway with his full entourage.
His uniform was pristine and sharply creased, his shoulders square, his jodhpurs flared, and the corners of his collar achingly stiff. He carried a staff under one arm—a meter-long shaft of dark mahogany polished in warm brown tones with bronze casings capping both ends.
The band brought the music up as he made his way into the main bay and began to parade down the line of Everguard’s officers.
Romanov stood at attention near the shuttle.
The admiral made his way slowly down the line, shaking hands with his staff and leaning in to speak directly into their ears.
Torrance couldn’t help but feel the moment.
He swallowed hard, and was surprised when his mind flashed on a memory of his dad standing in front of his bathroom mirror one day when Torrance was just a kid.
Torrance clutched a datapad with his model of the Delta rocket. He had pulled plans from archive data and painstakingly put them into the computer. It had taken days to figure out what parts were missing, and another three weeks of late nights to find models that would recreate the full system. When he was done, he had put it all into a virtual engine and launched it. The thing blew up, of course. Fifteen times. But the sixteenth shot was the one.
He made it into orbit—at least that’s what the math said.
“That’s mighty fine,” his dad said, rubbing his day-old stubble and pushing his white work shirt into his trousers. He looked into the mirror and adjusted his tie. He hadn’t even looked at the display. “I’m glad it worked.”
“I’m going to make spaceships someday,” Torrance said.
His dad got a loopy grin on his face.
“I think your mom would rather you stay home.”
“I’m serious, Dad. I’m going to make something big.”
His dad turned from the mirror and drank down the last of his morning coffee.
“I’m late for work,” he said.
Then he looked at Torrance and saw what was almost certainly a frown of disappointment on his face.
“Sure, Torrance. It’s great that you want to make something like that. But don’t be too worried if that doesn’t happen, all right. The world is tough, you know? Sometimes it’s best not to dream too big.”
Torrance snapped out of the memory, tasting bitterness against the back of his throat.
Kip Levitt was in the audience, too.
Levitt’s dark skin was smooth and made the crisp white formals seem even whiter.
His dad had been right in some ways.
Sometimes life was just one sucker punch after another.
But the people in this room had been part of something that might someday be argued was the single most important event in human history. Right this minute, Admiral Hatch was going home to make the purpose of the Everguard mission a reality. And Torrance had been part of it.
A bit part, maybe, but a part.
He had done something important.
Hadn’t he?
And yet …
He glanced again at Kip Levitt.
Then at Captain Romanov.
Then at Government Security Officer Casey.
The juxtaposition of his emotions was a strange mix as the admiral drew forward to salute Casey, then made his way down the row of his staff officers.
The music drew to its close as Hatch finished his last handshake and came to stand before Captain Romanov.
A whirlwind of conflict crashed inside Torrance’s brain, and for an instant, he thought he was actually going to cry. Damned silly of him, he supposed.
“Are you prepared to receive command, sir?” the admiral barked.
“Aye, sir.”
Hatch proffered the staff, and Romanov took it.
“Sir,” the admiral said boldly. “I give Everguard to your safekeeping. Sail well, Captain Romanov, she is a fine ship.”
“I accept your command, Admiral. I hope only to serve as competently as you have.”
Applause filled the bay, and the band played again.
Romanov gave a formal salute, which the admiral returned.
Hatch leaned in to whisper something private to the captain, and Romanov grinned with teeth as white as his uniform. He nodded and patted the admiral on the forearm. A moment later the admiral strode into his waiting shuttle. Then the door closed, and the order to evacuate the vacuum chamber was given.
With that, Everguard closed its doors to visitors for the final time.
Starsling
.
CHAPTER 12
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: May 21, 2204
Ship Local Time: 1255
Romanov’s voice was firm over the communications system.
“We are go for star sling. Roll ninety dark-side.”
This is it, Torrance thought.
They were going to drive the collider system as hard as she could go and dive toward Alpha Centauri A. This would catch the star’s gravitational well and, with the right application of power, would slingshot Everguard away as if the ship was a comet from Centauri’s own version of the Oort cloud. The maneuver would bring them much closer to the star than before and expose the shielded bottom of the craft to its severe energies.
They had made the same maneuver on their way here—a slingshot around Sol that increased their velocity and sped them along a proper course, but that first loop had been made around a star that was slightly smaller than Alpha Centauri A. The same maneuver here meant a steeper rise in temperature and higher stresses on an older ship.
It also meant this was the most dangerous moment of the entire mission.
Everguard’s underside was shaped to shed heat, and its cooling system was a simple steady-state device reliable enough that Torrance wasn’t concerned about its survival, but the collider struts and the ring were another story.
The standard EVA visual inspections had been completed and passed prior to the wormhole pod launch, as had all the proper routine maintenance activities. But the struts were older now. They would be under heavy load, and since shielding for these areas could not be efficiently formed, the situation called for an active monitoring system capable of sensing minute thermal changes and providing immediate streams of supercoolant. One blooming hot spot and Everguard would disintegrate.
It was his team’s job to monitor and report, and if anything went wrong it would be his team’s job to fix it before the worst hit.
Numbers flashed on the monitors in his office.
The time was spot-on: 1300 hours.
They had been accelerating toward the star since morning. Assuming everything held together, they would be heading for home in just over three hours.
Torrance strolled around the engineering pit outside his office, trying to remain casual as Everguard rolled to expose its heat shields to the star.
There wasn’t much he could do at this point beyond be there with his crew as they worked, which they did with professional calm that said they knew how much could go wrong.
The ship’s artificial gravity system made adjustments so Everguard’s maneuver felt somewhat motionless, but Ensign Hallie Whalen had built a simple monitor of the process on the corner of her desktop—placing a steel bearing on a translucent purple air pillow. As the ship neared perigee, Everguard’s angular momentum would increase the effective gravity inside the ship. The stronger field would pull the steel ball further into the pillow. A betting pool sprang up wherein each crew member guessed what the max deflection would wind up being.
Torrance decided he liked Whalen early in the trip. She was one of those people who had a silent intellige
nce about them, someone who could do just about anything she set her mind to but she wasn’t obnoxious about it. She was someone who just went about doing her job.
“How’s the bearing, Hallie?” Torrance asked.
Whalen glanced at the air pillow. “Down a hundredth, LC.”
“Anyone have twenty-two hundredths?”
“No, sir.”
Torrance grinned. “Put me down for a ten spot.”
“You got it, LC.”
Torrance patted her on her shoulder and continued his stroll, trying not to think about the stresses that were building up in the collider struts, trying to ignore the g forces he knew the ship was being exposed to, and the heat that would vaporize them if the heat channels somehow failed.
He thought about Marisa.
Being navigation command, she would be busy right now, but he imagined her fingers running over her station, occasionally brushing hair out of her eyes as she, too, worked with the calm efficiency of someone who knew their job.
What would become of the two of them?
It felt strange to care.
He shook his head and glanced around the room, then to Whalen’s purple pillow.
It was down three-hundredths.
Nineteen more and he was a winner.
Four hours later Everguard had traversed Alpha Centauri A and was heading home.
“That’s it,” Torrance said to his team. “Stand down the mission.”
There was no big celebration this time. Despite the fact that completion of star sling was easily as noteworthy as launching the pods, the crew had only smug smiles and relieved sighs to pass to each other.
They’d made it.
“It’s all vacuum from here,” Malloy quipped.
The team laughed.
“Well, Mr. Malloy. Looks like you can afford to be jovial,” Whalen said.
Everyone paused.
She brought her gaze up from the bearing and pillow.
“You’ve got eighteen-hundredths, right?”
Malloy grinned. “I guess the first round is on me,” he said.