by Jean Johnson
Jackie gestured for the others to exit ahead of her. Two were servicemen who had ridden at the same time as her the last few days; both gave her a brief smile before pulling themselves out smoothly, efficiently. A third was a female tech who eyed her Radiant Eye shoulderpatch, nodded, and released the toe loops, tugging herself forward and out the hatch with equal experience. The last two glanced at her, shrugged, and pulled themselves out carefully, but with control. Today, everyone aboard was experienced at moving in a zero-G environment—technically, if you were near the outermost edge of the spindle, there was a slight tug outward, but that was it; the station’s high orbit wasn’t close enough to Earth to feel more than the tiniest tug planetward.
Mostly, it was helpful for finding drifting objects since they’d inevitably drift to the outer wall, but not so much of a tug that a person couldn’t still be considered floating. Since no one seemed to be struggling to maneuver gracefully, Jackie let go of the handrails, pulled her feet out of the toe loops, and soared into the corridor and around the corner. It was hard not to “swim” against the air with arms and legs; in order to handle null gravity, she had to think of herself as if she were diving, and that meant having the urge to kick and stroke.
It was hard not to do it with a superhero pose with her arms, either. Every telekinetic strong enough to lift themselves and fly inevitably tried it that way, but both the Witan Order and the Psi League, the two largest training organizations, discouraged such things on anything other than the most playful of moments. The ability to lift things with mental rather than physical effort was a rare privilege, and wasn’t to be rubbed in others’ faces . . . and doing any superhero-style or masked-vigilante-type activities required a license. Most rarely bothered. Telekinetics could earn a lot more money holding down a job that paid them to exercise their minds and usually chose working in the private sector.
Of course, no one knew where psychic abilities came from, only that they started appearing in increasing strength within the last century and a half. The Greys were suspected. They were kidnapping Humans for some sort of biological hybrid experimentation, and sometimes returned them; that much, the United Planets knew about. The best xenotelepaths in the military had tried to figure out why, but the gray-skinned, black-eyed, hairless beings’ thoughts were too weird to fully grasp at a distance, and they never kidnapped psis, so doing it with the helpful boost of physical touch just hadn’t happened yet.
Jackie wasn’t so sure the Greys were involved in creating psychic Humans since they loathed and avoided her kind, but she didn’t know who or what else was involved—certainly not the government, whatever conspiracy nuts tried to claim. Science knew how to identify psychic abilities as genuine or not, thanks to the invention of KI meters that could detect the peculiar energy fields that were being used, but they couldn’t find it, let alone generate it, outside of a living sentient being.
As for programming it genetically? Despite many advances in biology, nobody could figure out what made someone like Jackie different from someone who couldn’t fly or read minds. Despite having exceptionally good gene maps in the late twenty-third century for DNA, RNA, microRNA interactions, and more, no one knew how psychic abilities worked.
Passing a clutch of workers steadying what looked like a greenish, nauseated newcomer, Jackie slowed, caught a hand loop, and pressed her palm to the scanner for the docking area for her ship while her body drifted past, orienting her the other way. Up and down made little difference up here; spindleward and rimward, port and starboard, those were the directions that mattered. For the convenience of speaking about it, down was toward the outermost torus, of course, but where she was going, it was all microgravity.
“Hoo!” someone muttered, awe coloring his tone. “She just zipped and . . . and flew!” Looking up in relation to her body, Jackie eyed the newcomer. He still looked a bit pale and green, but at least he seemed distracted from his nausea by her. “Hey, how can you do that?”
“Telekinetic, Rank 12.” Why wasn’t the airlock panel opening? Oh, right; her thumb wasn’t positioned right. She tugged herself a little closer and rolled her thumb awkwardly to get more of the print visible.
“Z’at strong?” the new crew member asked. “Uh, sir?” he added, catching sight of her silver oak leaves on her collar points and shoulder boards. “That sounds really strong.”
“Strong enough to fly on Earth.” The light turned green, and the panel hissed open.
“Hoo,” she heard behind her. “Wish I could do that . . . uhhh, if it came without nausea . . .”
“I certainly wish you could handle zero G without threatening to puke on us all,” one of his companions quipped. Laughter followed his words, but it was good-natured teasing.
Sealing the door behind her, she floated in relative quiet to the next one. Palm prints to get in and out, each ship assigned its own dock, personnel restricted . . . Nobody wanted these new ships stolen and taken for a joyride. Or damaged. Jackie knew from her time spent studying the Space Force’s budget as a Councilor just how much each modest, shuttle-sized craft cost. But it was just the thought of the idiocy of someone taking it without knowing what they were doing that had made such precautions necessary.
Opening a hyperrift on a remote corner of Mars to test how the things would react in an atmosphere had proved to be a bad idea, and on Earth, it would be that much worse. The tiny pinpricks that swirled into ship-swallowing straws, sucking them along spatial shortcut paths, did not like being touched by matter. More than a relative handful of cosmic dust, and the tunnel would collapse, crushing whatever it caught in its maw. The resulting explosion had been a mix of fusion and fission, had kicked up a medium-sized dust storm that had altered the Martian weather patterns for a week, and had left charred carbon on the ground two kilometers below.
It had even vaporized the ceristeel plating on the remote-piloted ship. No one wanted to contemplate what would have happened to an actual pilot on board. As a Councilor who had actually served in the military, Jackie had been picked multiple times to serve on military oversight committees, hence knowing the budgets and the testing reports and more. She never would have pegged herself to be picked for actually serving on one of these OTL vessels, though.
The airlock into the shuttle was an airlock. Boring, predictable, paneled in white to show how clean it was. Beyond, the access corridor wasn’t much better. There were four entrances to the shuttle, the one she currently used near the rear on the starboard, two amidships on top and bottom, and one to port, near the bow and its cockpit. Loops of metal stuck out on all four walls, and latches hid cupboards both shallow and deep. There was a “dorsal” for top and a “ventral” for bottom in relation to how the ship would function when perched on a gravitied surface, plus starboard and port, bow and stern, but no real gravity.
The engines for powering the insystem thrusters lay in the rear, along with the reoxygenators that mechanically scrubbed carbon dioxide out of the air, using catalysts to turn it back into breathable oxygen. OTL shuttles were too small to carry enough plants for that, let alone the aquaculture necessary for scrubbing water clean, too. Most of starboard was taken up in crew quarters—spaces for sleeping bags to be clipped into place, toilet and showering cupboards, that sort of thing—and interior storage space.
Portside lay the scanners and the launch bays for sending scanner-equipped hyperrelay units into a star system to collect data and report back at intervals to the Space Force. And, of course, the front of the ship held the cockpit, with enough seating for all six to ride in acceleration-cushioned comfort. Entering the cockpit, she found Robert Graves already there.
“Hey, there, Major,” he greeted her, lifting his tanned chin a little. He had to brace his hands so that the movement didn’t put a spin on his efforts from momentum.
“Good morning, Commander,” she said, pulling herself by her arms toward her station. Comm systems, translation programs, backup scanners, even a backup gunnery position. It was all
hers to manage, though she was still at the hunt-and-peck stage with the instruction manual floating at her side while working.
Remote-controlled gun pods sat on both wings, dorsal and ventral turrets that could swivel and fire in near full hemispheres, save only that they would not fire on the ship they were attached to, of course. Those silvery wings held the water tanks that provided the fuel for the ship, with a reserve tank beneath the corridor she had floated through. There were also two missile-launching tubes, and two laser cannons, each placed bow and stern. As much as humanity wanted to believe that any aliens encountered would be friendly, pure pragmatism said that some simply would not be. That meant the military ran the space exploration program, and that meant going armed.
Colvers would be the main person to fire any such weapons if they were needed. A task well suited to his nature, a snide corner of her mind quipped. Adjusting the headset, she flicked a switch—and both she and Robert flinched at the feedback squeal. Thankfully, the automatics shut it off before it could do more than make them grind their teeth in pain. Unfortunately, it took her five squealing tries to figure out what had been done to make that happen, and get it undone and locked down.
“Sorry, sorry. I’m wondering, though. If I looked through the logs of who accessed this shift between now and the time I went off duty yesterday, if a certain someone would show as having accessed these systems,” Jackie muttered.
“Aw, he’s a good guy normally,” Robert told her, pausing from his efforts at adjusting something under his piloting console. “I don’t know what bug he’s got in his ears about you, but he normally gets along with most everybody. Very gung ho for the military side of things, but that shouldn’t be a problem, since you’re military, too . . .”
“Well, he should remember that I am now his superior and can slam his butt off this team if he doesn’t get that bug out of his ears,” she retorted. “Barely a few days on the job with him, and he keeps digging at me disrespectfully.”
“Maybe he’s the type that needs t’ go a few rounds with you before you’ll earn his respect?” Robert asked, grunting a little. “There . . . fuses replaced. Maybe now I can adjust the leg rests on this new seat . . .”
“This is disrespect for me, not my abilities, Robert. If I thought a couple rounds of . . . of kickboxing or judo or whatever style he knows would do it, I’d do that.”
“Maybe he’s jealous you got a tour of Earth?” Robert offered next, playing devil’s advocate.
“I’m pretty sure it started the moment he realized I was a psi,” she countered flatly. “I don’t get the prejudice against that. It’s not like I’m a psychopath or a danger to society. Psis are fellow Humans. We’re just as likely to be good, law-abiding citizens as the next guy. And it’s not like I chose to be born this way. It’s like being jealous of someone because their eyes are gray, or because they can throw a fastball better, or because they can play the cello like a virtuoso at the age of five or whatever. Everyone can do something better than someone else, and is worse at something else. I don’t understand why he’s so . . . so booted that I have psychic abilities.”
Pulling himself out from the hole where his legs went during flight, he opened his mouth, closed it with a thoughtful frown, then spoke. “I was going to say, maybe he’s jealous of your abilities, but he doesn’t seem jealous. More like just plain upset.” He thought a moment, then shrugged and twisted himself, curling his legs around and into the footwell. “Maybe someone who was a psi offended him, and he’s just taking it out on you?”
“That would make sense, but he needs to grow up, realize that I had nothing to do with it, that I shouldn’t be punished for someone else’s problems—his included—and act with mature civility instead of immature rudeness and disdain.”
The cabin hatch opened, and the blond devil himself floated inside. He smirked her way, but his blue eyes were cold, not warm. “Haven’t gotten started yet, have you?”
“Already started . . . and now I’m busy tracking down just who had access to this panel after I shut it down yesterday. Oh, look, it is you, Lieutenant,” Jackie said, shifting her eyes from her screen to his face. “Tampering with my workstation should have been beneath you, Lieutenant Colvers. It was immature and unprofessional. It is the sort of behavior that is usually abandoned in Basic Training under the discipline required by the Space Force. It is most assuredly not behavior expected and required of an officer of said Space Force, Lieutenant.
“Coupled with all the inappropriate and unprofessional ‘fat’ jokes you’ve been throwing my way, all of these actions which you have chosen to undertake are aiming you and your career toward a disciplinary hearing, Lieutenant.”
Using his rank over and over was an attempt to get him to realize just how poorly he was behaving. Officers were supposed to set good examples, not bad ones. Officers were held to a higher standard of conduct. And officers were supposed to show respect toward their superiors in rank, the exact same as enlisted and noncommissioned or warranted members of the military.
She didn’t want a disciplinary hearing invoked because there were too many visions of Colvers being involved in the missions ahead, most of them listed among the “friendly alien encounter” ones the precogs had seen. It wasn’t exactly superstition, wanting to avoid negating those friendly encounters by not having the right personnel on hand. She knew that the registered precogs were seeing real glimpses of possible futures. Jackie was just glad she wasn’t a precog; that kind of power seemed like a nebulous, annoying headache to hold instead of something concrete and reliable like telekinesis.
Eyeing the quiet, almost sullen man, she continued. “If you can set aside whatever problem you only think you have with me—a problem I suspect is actually the fault of someone else, so please stop applying it to me—if you can do that, then you can and will make an exemplary member of this team. Your skills and abilities as pilot, gunner, and so forth are not being questioned, Lieutenant Colvers, but your professionalism is. That professionalism needs to exist outside of working hours as well as within them. Once we go into space, there are no nonworking hours. So get out of the habit of sniping at me even when you’re off duty, and stay that way. You can hold your opinion, but you need to hold your tongue. It is unprofessional, and the Space Force both expects and demands better conduct from you. Have I made this clear, Lieutenant?”
“Sir. Yes, sir,” he replied, his tone clipped, his gaze dark and displeased, but at least his words seemed to be obedient.
She had carefully phrased things so that the Space Force was the party with all the expectations of his better behavior. Let’s hope a little smear of diplomacy on top helps the message taste better. Of course, he knew he was being verbally disciplined by a higher-ranked officer. The use of sir was not an insult, either; it was exactly what he should be saying to her.
When the various military forces had been combined into one organization, the Space Force had decided to consider sir gender-neutral and thus appropriate for addressing all officers. The Space Force did not care about one’s gender, whether it was the one a person was born with, or the one they identified with, save only for what actual physiological requirements needed to be met for certain activities. Modern military life contained too many force multipliers via its hardware, its equipment, vehicles, and so forth, to make differences between the genders important. Stamina, hand-eye coordination, and general fitness were requirements, but not gender. However, the Space Force did care about discipline within its ranks.
The Peace Force units spread around the United Planets had already instituted a tradition of caning as punishment for major crimes committed by its members—bribery, treason, theft, rape, all the good things. The Space Force, she knew, was wavering on whether or not to apply that high of a corporal punishment to infractions against its own highest rules and regulations; in fact, she had served on some of the Council committees discussing that very topic.
Nothing Brad Colvers had done so far would have me
rited a caning, but if he didn’t clean up his act and resume treating her with the respect she was due, he could do something wrong, and at the wrong moment in time. A potential First Contact situation had no room for such problems, particularly any tangible displays of disrespect or derision.
Movement at the back of the cockpit distracted Jackie from her thoughts and her efforts to ensure every last scrap of her controls were back to their original settings. Ayinda was the next to pull herself into the cockpit, with Lars at her heels. Literally, for she almost kicked him with a stray swing of one leg. He caught her boot and grinned.
“Should I call you Achilles, for having caught you by your heel? Toss you aside like a fisherman who caught a boot instead of a bass? Or sing that classic song ‘Boot to the Head’?” the Finn asked, displaying his odd sense of humor with a grin.
The astronavigator chuckled and hauled herself into her seat behind Brad, a position she had flown in several times before with the lieutenant and the commander both. “None of the above, Lars. None of the above, today.”
“Then there is hope for tomorrow.” Lars took his place behind her at the rearmost starboard station, activating his various screens and scanner consoles. His seat was parallel to Jackie’s at the back of the cabin.
Robert’s pilot seat was to the left of Brad’s, with the doctor’s station behind the chief pilot, and in front of the communication station. Maria didn’t really have much to do other than monitor the crew’s health and the ship’s general life-support conditions, but it had been deemed easier to upgrade the rearmost port seat in the extended cockpit with translation matrices and broad-spectrum broadcast equipment than try to fit it all into the middle seat, portside. A seat that was currently still empty.