James Wittenbach - Worlds Apart 01

by Meridian

“Pegasus Flight Control to Aves Prudence. Slow to docking speed. Come about 32 degrees and adjust positive 620 meters vertical.”

  “Prudence acknowledges,” he turned to his commander. “I have visual on Pegasus,” Driver announced.

  Keeler turned to the forward monitor. At the edge of their field of view, a tiny pale star was becoming larger, eventually resolving into a magnificent double diamond of light, and crystal, and gold. As the full shape and details of the ship became clear, Keeler could make out transport and cargo shuttles flitting around her like a swarm of lightflies while a small squadron of construction pods applied the finishing touches to the hull.

  They came at her head on, nose-to-nose. The forepart of Pegasus was like the prows of two ocean-going vessels, sandwiched one atop the other and fronted with a huge shield in which was inlaid a design of wings and stars. Just as Prudence reached the bowsprit, she lifted up to flash over the four-and-a-half kilometers long dorsal plane of the ship; a mosquito buzzing past a swan.

  Driver banked his ship, and showed Keeler what he would soon be commanding. First came the domes and heavy hatches that covered the main body of weaponry; the missile hatcheries that made Pegasus as deadly as she was beautiful. Then came a long expanse of metal and crystal that connected the forward to the aft like the shapely neck of a swan. The hull widened where the habitation levels began, protected from space by millistrati ultracrystal stronger than diamond. Within, Keeler could see flashes of gardens and architecture, as well as transport pods moving on the intraship tubeways.

  They reached the rear of the ship, and Driver guided his Aves between the command towers. Nearly a thousand meters high, they narrowed as they rose, adorned with sculptures of humans reaching toward the stars. They curved upward, bending toward each other as though to whisper secrets. Almost despite himself, Keeler was impressed. Humanity was returning to the stars in style.

  Flight Lt. Driver cut his speed again as the Aves flashed over the ship’s backside. In the space beyond, Keeler could pick out the distant space docks where two other ships of Project Odyssey, Republic and Sapphire, were being constructed The Aves arced around behind Pegasus and began its approach to the landing bays, whose hatches lined her stern.

  “Prudence announces final approach to Landing Bay 23-Alpha. Confirm beacon and lock.”

  “Pegasus flight control to Aves Prudence, you are cleared for docking.” Keeler leaned over him. “I’d like to see the bottom of the ship.”

  “The Underside?” Keeler figured him to be the kind who hated it when plans were changed at the last minute. Most pilots were.

  “Za, think of it as an inspection. I would never buy a house without looking at the basement.” The pilot obliged. “Pegasus Flight Control, Prudence requests clearance for another go-around.

  Transmitting vector.”

  There was a pause, then “Is everything all right, Prudence? ”

  “Affirmative, Flight Control. All systems optimal.”

  “You are cleared, Prudence. Transmitting new approach vector.” The Aves executed a sweet pirouette in space, dipped, and came in just between the twin, teardrop-shaped lobes of the two great under-hulls. The underside was not brightly lit, but did glow faintly from the energy within. Keeler could see the skin of the hull here was not smooth, but a kind of bas-relief. Between the two primary under-hulls nestled a smaller, shallow one. Emerging from the after-hulls were two great curving, segmented structures, that put Keeler in mind of bones, of vertebrae.

  These connected the aft of the ship to the forepart, where the prow jutted forth proudly, determinedly.

  Keeler found himself without words, a rare occasion indeed. Here was this great ship, the highest achievement of his civilization, a vessel to knit the space between stars. How had he been chosen to command this thing? What were they thinking?

  The pilot maneuvered the Aves over the topside again, this time in a long shallow bank over the starboard blade. He spoke again as they cleared the fantail. “Another pass, commander?”

  “Neg, take her in.”

  “Prudence to Pegasus Flight Control, commencing final approach.” There was a row of huge hatches on the stern of the ship that guarded the landing bays. Keeler put his hand on the pilot’s shoulder as he angled his ship toward the hatch that was drawing upward. “So, do you mind if I ask you about that thing on your face …?”

  Reception Area – Pegasus

  When Keeler entered the reception area off Landing Bay Alpha, a blond woman close to his own age stepped smartly forward and saluted him. She was slight in build but carried herself with an air of crisp authority. “Prime Commander, I am Executive Tyro Commander Goneril Lear, your first officer. It gives me great pleasure to officially turn over command of the Pathfinder Ship Pegasus to you, effective immediately . Welcome aboard, sir.”

  The sight of two score senior officers and section chiefs assembled in full dress uniform filled him with the urge to say a few words. Keeler knew that the prospect of giving a speech would be bothersome to some people, but he could not for the life of him fathom why. In his profession, he had grown to appreciate nothing more than a captive audience obligated to listen politely to whatever he cared to say.

  “Thank you, Executive Tyro Commander Lear. When I was a boy, my mother, an astro-cartographer, used to take me walking along the lakeshore at night. She would point to this star, or that one, and tell me there was a world spinning around it on which people just like us lived. It always made me wonder if there were, on those worlds, other people pointing back at me. As I grew older, I began to wonder if there really were people left by those stars, or whether it was only on our two worlds that the torch of human civilization still burned.

  “There may be thousands of human colonies out there. Finding them, bringing them back into the family of humankind: that, ladies and gentlemen, is our real mission.

  “What awaits us? Answers. Questions. Wonders. Horrors. Humans so changed we may not recognize them as our own kindred. Worlds with stories, cultures, languages, philosophies that we could not, in our most fevered dreams, imagine.

  “And so forth we go, as explorers, as missionaries, as messengers, and as inheritors of the human spirit, keepers of the human flame. That spirit brought our ancestors from their ancient worlds to these new ones. That spirit, our birthright, built two great civilizations and one magnificent alliance. If – or, as I fervently hope and believe, when – we encounter other humans and other worlds, we shall speak proudly of what our race has accomplished here, on the worlds originally designated as 11 527 Pegasi four and 11

  606 Pegasi two.

  “I, for one, can hardly wait to begin. We have a fine ship, an excellent crew. Fear no evil. God is near.

  Thank you.”

  After the applause had died down, one of the ship’s Holy Women, an Iestan, came forward to offer a short prayer of blessing. “Brothers, Sisters, let us open hands and hearts to the blessings of the Eternal, who contains the Infinite. May this journey we are about to begin enlighten and purify us as the passage of Your Daughter Vesta through the wilderness. Pray that we may receive knowledge as did she. Pray that we may find on this journey the opportunity to demonstrate ourselves as worthy of the blessing the Eternal has bestowed upon us. In the name of the Son, and the Daughter, Amen.”

  “This is amazing,” Keeler said when she wad finished, examining the front wall of the Reception Area.

  “That portal creates the illusion of looking all the way to the front of the ship, through every section. Yet, instead of a jumble of decks and bulkheads, it all seems coherent. I can focus on a single section at a time.”

  “Perspective Perspex,” Lear explained. “Developed at your university by a Dr. Nachtmacher unless I am mistaken.”

  Keeler snapped his fingers. “Za, Doctor Nachtmacher, of course. I had to dismiss him after he tried to use it to peer into the showers at the Athletic Complex.”

  She bristled, the rest of the room chuckled politely. Keeler stepp
ed down from the podium and began working the crowd.

  Hangar Bay – Pegasus

  While the new commanding officer met his officers, Technician 3rd Class Eddie Roebuck was removing Keeler’s personal bags from Prudence’s cargo bay. He was lifting a large, hexagonal crate and almost dropped it when a voice came from inside. “Hoy, watch it. You want me to lose my lunch!” Roebuck bent over and peered into the vision slot at the end of the box. A pair of angry green eyes glowered back at him.

  “Roebuck,” called the other technician assigned to his team. Horatio Halliburton was perhaps thirty Republic years old, rather thickly built, with a habit of hanging his lower jaw slightly, a posture that made him seem dull-witted. Roebuck walked to the rear of the Aves just slowly enough to annoy Halliburton without actually setting him off.

  “Do you have any idea what this is?” Halliburton indicated an oblong, glossy black casket with the crest of the planet Sapphire – four flags, representing each of the four continents, arrayed around a triangle, a landscape of mountains, ocean, and three crescent moons within - picked out in silver on its surface.

  “Screws me. A container, I guess.”

  “Oh, brilliant. Crown jewel of Sapphirean educational techniques, you are,” Halliburton said. From someone quicker, the comment might have seemed biting. “This is routed to the Prime Commander’s quarters. Inspection protocol overridden.”

  “Krishna! Must be something heliy-impressive in there.”

  “It’s none of our business,” Halliburton sniffed. “Get a transport pod, move it with the other items.” He reached for the container Eddie had just set down. Eddie was about to warn him when he let out a yelp and jerked his hand away, blood dripping from four slash-marks on his fingertips.

  Primary Command Deck

  After Keeler had finished working the reception, meeting his command staff in a blur of Republicker handshakes and Sapphirean back-slaps, Lear and Keeler left the reception and exited to the adjacent dock, where a transport pod, a small vehicle shaped like an egg with a flattened bottom, awaited. She commanded the vehicle to take them to the Primary Command Center.

  “You mean the Main Bridge?” Keeler asked.

  “Some crew members call it that. I prefer Primary Command 1, or PC-1 for brevity.” The pod glided forward, and nosed into the Intraship tubeway for the short climb to Deck 100, Section Alpha.

  They exited at the transport dock. A pair of large, heavy hatches slid aside, and showed them the Command Center. There was a crystalline dome overhead, looking out to the stars. Twenty people or so occupied stations along the outer bridge, which wrapped around the inner bridge in a parabolic curve.

  The walls were white, inlaid with different kinds of instruments in black panels and displays trimmed in navy blue, the floor was dark gray carpet. The seats for each station were large and suede gray. All in all, Keeler decided, not a bad place to work, albeit a little subdued for his tastes.

  A tall thin officer with Tyro Commander’s stripes on his red-trimmed jacket interrupted. He wore fingerless leather gloves, the kind Master Artists wore on Sapphire. The lanky lieutenant lay his hand on Keeler’s shoulder in the standard Sapphirean greeting. “Tyro Commander Philip John Miller Redfire, Officer of the Watch. Welcome to Main Bridge, Prime Commander.” Keeler laid his hands on his officer’s shoulder. “I remember you Redfire. Spring Term, 7285, you and a group of students occupied my office and used my ceremonial robes to wipe your bottom.” Redfire smiled. “I’m glad you remember.”

  “I remember everyone who does that.”

  “So, how does a University Chancellor find himself in command of a starship?” Keeler sighed. “One can only refuse so many times before concluding that the Odyssey Project is not going to take a hint. How did you end up here?”

  “I applied for the program, I was selected, and, on the basis of my degree, they put me in weapons training.”

  “Za, I remember. Master’s in Pyrotechnic Art. Class of 7286. For your Master’s Thesis, you wanted to blow up my ancestral estate.”

  “I was motivated by art, not hostility.”

  “No doubt, but I was impressed by the simulation you did construct. The image of me running outside in my bunnybeast slippers with my mistress while the House Proper collapsed in flames was especially inventive. Casting Professor Starcross of the Erotic Arts faculty as my mistress was even more inventive.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “Gentlemen,” Lear interrupted. “Perhaps you two would like to reminisce after the tour of the Command Tower?”

  “Of course,” Keeler said. “Tyro Commander Redfire, show me the ship’s weaponry.” Redfire crossed to a tactical station on the perimeter of the bridge and brought up a display. “With this ship’s weapons, we should be able to broast anything that looks at us the wrong way. Last week, I carved my initials in an asteroid.”

  “You’re lucky the Mining Guild didn’t file a protest.”

  Redifre grinned. “Every day is like Solstice Day, and I’ve been a very good boy. The directed energy weapons are supplemented by Hammerhead and Jackhammer missiles, as well as Aves and Accipiters.”

  “Accipiters?” Keeler asked.

  Redfire brought up a schematic of what looked like a vicious metal butterfly. “Accipiters are multi-purpose tactical craft, they can carry one pilot, or operate autonomously or by remote control.”

  “The ship that brought me here carried those the tip of each wing,” Keeler said.

  “Some personnel call them ‘Shrieks’ for short. The Accipiters supplement the Aves’ capabilities for reconnaissance, strike, and point defense. And, at the top of the line, we have these.” He brought up a schematic of a craft that looked like a small, slender Aves with its wingblades clipped. Contained within, twelve coffin-shaped projectiles. “The Nemesis Mark V Anti-Matter Missile and Variable Yield Warheads, affectionately known as the ‘Big Dam.’”

  “Big Dam?”

  “Developed under the ‘Big Damage’ Advanced Offensive Weapons Project. The smaller yields can vaporize cities, shatter whole ecosystems. At maximum yield, you can smash an entire planet to dust. The Reps really didn’t want us to have them.”

  “I can understand that, why would we need to blow up a planet?”

  “We don’t know what’s out there, Prime Commander.”

  “The weapons systems are certainly interesting,” Lear interrupted, het tone suggesting otherwise.

  “However, there’s much more to this ship than guns and warheads. This way, Prime Commander.” Keeler proceeded on his survey, pausing over another station. “You look busy, crewman. What’s going on here?”

  The Specialist at the station was a dark skinned woman with close-cropped blonde hair. She introduced herself. “Specialist Shayne American. I’m trying to isolate a problem in waste reclamation.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing serious. It shut itself down for twenty minutes this morning … it’s probably just…”

  “A system glitch,” said Keeler, American and Redfire in unison. Keeler looked at the other two.

  “Somebody owes me a gaseous beverage. Have you had many system glitches?”

  “No more than one would expect for a ship of this complexity,” American answered.

  “I didn’t think there were any other ships of this complexity,” Keeler said.

  “Prime Commander, I have personally reviewed the error logs,” Lear interjected, rather urgently.

  “The glitches have all been minor.”

  Redfire was standing behind her, and Keeler detected just the slightest shake of his head, and a glance at the deck. Keeler nodded. “Very well, I’ll review your analysis later. Is that my chair?” They had completed a circuit of the Command Center, and arrived at the Inner Bridge. The Inner Bridge was at center rear, raised above the level of the rest of the deck, shaped like the business end of a shovel, containing four stations for the ship’s top officers. Keeler took his place and leaned
far back. The chair was comfortable, although his office chair had been better.

  “Prime Commander … ” Lear asked.

  “’Commander’ will do,” Keeler said. “I realize Republic kept a whole whoop of unemployed linguists and otherwise unemployable relatives of Ministry adminicrats employed for twenty years working out the titles and honorifics for the Odyssey Project: Prime Commander, the Tyro Commanders, and below them the Lieutenant Commanders, and below them squads of Lieutenants and Tyro Lieutenants and Specialists and Technicians. And I understand it, but I am a simple man, and I like things simple.

  Commander, captain, or even, ‘High Sailor,’ suits me fine.”

  Lear blinked at him, then continued. “Would you like to see the rest of the Command Tower? I have planned to show you telemetry labs, sensor stations, Primary Flight Control, Environmental Control, the Primary BrainCore, and one of the ship’s four Mediplexes.”

  “I’ve been in transit for most of the last three weeks. Frankly, what I would like to do is settle into my quarters.”

  “Very well. We can pick up tomorrow after your status briefing. I’ll give you a synopsis on the way to the Habitation Complex.”

  “Perhaps Tyro Commander Redfire could escort me. We could wax nostalgic… I mean, unless there are ladies present. The last time I waxed my nostalgic in front of a lady, I nearly got arrested.” A flash of reluctance crossed Lear’s face, but she erased it with a perfunctory smile. “Of course. We follow Sapphirean Time-Keeping on this ship. First watch commences at 0700 hours. I’ll see you then.” She turned briskly and set off to the other end of the Bridge.

  Redfire clapped him on the shoulder, “You offended her, Ranking William,” he said, using a customary Sapphirean honorific. “I like that. The last commander never had such low-swinging tonkas.”

  “God rest his soul,” Keeler finished for him. The two men strode toward the double hatch at the rear.

  Keeler paused before exiting, turned to address the Bridge Crew. “Well done, one and all. When I was offered this command, the overpaid adminicrats at the Odyssey Project Directorate assured me I was getting the finest crew in the entire fleet. Nothing I have seen has contradicted that assertion. Carry on.” With that, he tucked his walking stick under his arm, and proceeded to the transport dock.