“Uh-uh.” Jesse shook his head. “I’ve been here since this morning, and as soon as I got off the bus, the Marines had me moving food pallets.”
“Better get checked in, then, you need a medical eval before you take the magic carpet ride up into space. You see that big circus tent over there, the one with the UN flags?” He wasn’t joking, it really was a circus tent. “Get over there on the double, the elevator’s leaving at 1700 hours.”
The tent was a madhouse. Jesse and I weren’t looking forward to getting poked and prodded by Army doctors, we needn’t have worried. The medical exam consisted of standing fully clothed in a booth the size of a shower, and having a light beam run down, up, down and up again. When I stepped out, the doctor didn’t look up from his computer. “You’ll live, Bishop.” I could see a file with my picture on the computer screen, the doctor clicked a few buttons, and the file was replaced by some other guy’s. “Next!”
“Excuse me, sir, is that it?” I asked, confused.
“That’s it. You just got your first exam with a Kristang medical scanner, and it says you’re healthy enough. Move along, people, we haven’t got all day. Next!”
After the medical exam, we got showers, with honest to God hot water, although we weren’t issued new uniforms so we put our old clothes back on, and then went to another tent for a hot meal, Army style. As far as I was concerned, Army-style was a good thing, it meant I got plenty of food. I went through the line, and was standing with my tray in hand, looking for a place to sit, when Jesse stood up and waved me over to his table. "This here's Gus, 1st Armored," Jesse said through a mouthful of cornbread, pointing to a guy sitting next to him.
“I thought only infantry was going on this trip?” I asked.
Gus shrugged. “I drove a Bradley, I guess they need drivers for whatever they’ve got up there.” If the Kristang thought we needed drivers, then hopefully that meant the infantry wouldn’t be walking every place we went.
Cornpone used a piece of bread to soak up gravy from the meatloaf. "I don't know where we're going, but if it means three hots and a cot, I'm all in. Things were pretty lean this winter at home."
I didn’t know what I expected the space elevator to be, but it wasn’t what I expected. It looked most like a waiting lounge at an airport. The huge disc-shaped elevator car had four levels, with the lowest level containing the machinery. Or so I supposed, since we were only allowed on the upper three levels. Cargo pods were slung below the bottom of the car. The habitable levels were each divided into eight wedges, containing row after row of thinly-padded plastic chairs. Chairs with seat belts. The trip up to the orbital station was scheduled to take nine hours, hours enlivened only by crowding around the viewports and looking down at our receding planet’s surface. After a while, even that got old. The elevator was a no-frills contraption, designed to transport a maximum number of troops in a minimum amount of time. Comfort on the trip was not a Kristang priority. There wasn’t even a snack bar built into the elevator, so the Army had set up a portable kitchen on each level, and the food was plentiful. I had my first decent cheeseburger in a very long time, then went back for another. Jesse and I explored the place, wandering around, meeting the soldiers we’d be serving with, swapping stories, listening to contradictory rumors. Since the elevator had a capacity of five thousand humans, a good part of a full army division was aboard on our trip. We wandered by one wedge that had been set up as an impromptu officers’ mess, poking our heads in, before moving along to mix with the rest of the grunts.
After I’d downed three sodas, alcoholic beverages not being supplied by the Army, I needed to check out the bathrooms, which I had been dreading. What kind of plumbing had the Kristang provided? Either the Kristang had similar biological functions, or they had consulted human plumbers, because I need not have worried. It looked like a typical highway rest stop bathroom, only new, and cleaner. The dispensers even had soap.
The trip at first was slow, it really was like riding an elevator, there was a subtle pressure of extra gravity, and a faint vibration. As we climbed and the atmosphere thinned out, we accelerated, and the artificial gravity kicked on to compensate, at what we were told was about 85% of Earth normal. I talked to one of the Army cooks, who had been up and down on the elevator several times. As we approached the space station, he explained, we would slow down, but we wouldn’t feel any movement because of the artificial gravity. I expressed doubts about the safety of riding a lightning bolt, especially with Ruhar raiders still harassing the Kristang, the cook told me not to worry. Earlier in the week, a Ruhar frigate had popped out of hyperspace while the elevator car was halfway to the space station, at its most vulnerable point. The frigate had fired off two missiles before it got popped by a pair of Kristang patrol destroyers, and defensive lasers on top of the elevator car took care of the incoming missiles. It was nice to know we weren’t entirely sitting ducks, while we ate snacks and sat in uncomfortable chairs.
I managed to fall asleep, slumped over in a chair, I woke up when a Marine kicked my foot. “Rise and shine, sleeping beauty. This joy ride is coming to an end. Collect your gear, if you have any.” The Marine moved away, kicking awake other sleepers.
Jesse had been asleep on the floor behind me, using his duffel bag as a pillow. I shook his shoulder. “Oh man, your ugly face isn’t what I want to wake up to.” He said grumpily. “What’s up?” He managed to say through a jaw-stretching yawn.
“I think we’re approaching the space station. Want to get a look-see?”
The station was a donut, with six arms radiating out. At the end of two arms were what I assumed were Kristang ships, resting what looked like belly-down on platforms. One of the ships was sleek and dark, the other much larger and not as powerful looking. While Jesse and I gawked, the cook I’d been talking to earlier came over and squeezed through the crowd to stand next to us. “That,” he pointed to the smaller ship, “is a cruiser, and the fat ugly one next to it is the transport ship.”
“You been on it?” Jesse asked.
“Nah, they only let us on the station while the elevator car is unloading, then it’s right back down to Ecuador for the next group. I hear the transport ship can hold this whole group, as soon as you’re aboard, they’re leaving.”
“Any idea where they’re sending us?” I figured the cook might have heard something on one of his trips.
He shook his head. “I don’t know, and if any of our officers know, they ain’t saying. Personally, I think the Kristang are keeping it on a need to know basis, and we humans don’t need to know.” We watched silently, as the elevator car slowly approached the station, until the bulk of the station cast a shadow across the window, and hid the cruiser from view. “I wish I was going with you, tried to switch to infantry," his uniform patch said he was 1st Armored, "but the Army says my MOS is cook, so that’s what I’m doing.” He sounded bitter.
“Hey, you make a damned fine cheeseburger.” I stuck out my hand.
He wiped his hand on his apron, gripped my hand fiercely, and looked me straight in the eye. “You guys are going to kick ass, right?”
“Damn straight.” I answered with conviction. I didn’t know if I was coming back, but I was going to kill as many hamsters as I could. Every soldier and Marine I’d talked to felt the same way, the same deadly sense of purpose. We’d been attacked, the very survival of our species threatened. Rage wasn’t an adequate word to describe how we all felt. In the train station in Boston, I had been walking through with three other soldiers, headed for outer space and war, and the crowd noticed us. People stopped, spontaneously started saluting, then they applauded. It really touched me. I remember one old guy, must have been a grandfather, had his young grandson with him. He showed the little guy how to stand, and positioned the boy’s hand to salute us. The expression on the grandfather’s face, right then, told me everything about how people felt about us soldiers in the United Nations Expeditionary Force. We were carrying all their hopes, and not only hopes
for vengeance. Hope for survival, survival of the human species. That’s what made this war different, for the first time we really were all in this together.
“Fuckin-A, man, we’re going to kick ass.” Jesse said with all seriousness, and we bumped fists. “Army strong, can’t go wrong. Hoo-ah.”
Like the cook, we didn’t get to see much, after we left the elevator car. US Marine guards directed us into the space station, which generated the lightning bolt we'd ridden up into space. We lined up single file, to do what, I didn't know. The station was big, I wondered aloud how they'd built it so fast.
"A Thuranin star carrier brought it here in sections, and they assembled it." A lieutenant in line ahead of us said.
"Sir?" I asked. "What is a Thuranin?"
"The Thuranin are the patron species of the Kristang." Reacting to the totally blank stares he got from me, Cornpone and everyone else, he stepped slightly out of line to speak to us. From his uniform patch, I could see he was with the 3rd Infantry. "Didn't they tell you people anything?"
"Sir, I'm from northern Maine, we first got the internet a week before the Ruhar attacked." I could see he didn't appreciate my attempt at humor. "I've never heard of the Thuranin, sir."
He twirled his finger in the air. "This station, the elevator, that's all Thuranin technology, the Kristang don't even have artificial gravity aboard their ships."
"Sir?" Jesse 's face began turning green when he heard that. Everyone in the line was looking queasy at the idea of experiencing no gravity. "Zero gee? We haven't been trained for that, at all."
"That's why you're in line here, to get meds to prevent space sickness. We can't have humans puking their guts out, in a Kristang transport ship."
"We're not going on a Thuranin ship?" I asked, feeling queasy already. I was deeply regretting that second cheeseburger. The line moved forward, and we shuffled our feet along the deck.
"Thuranin star carriers rarely venture down into a gravity well, they stay well out in the Oort Cloud of any star system." Seeing more blanks looks, although I was feeling smug that I knew what an Oort Cloud was, he added "That means out beyond the orbit of Pluto, where spacetime is flat, and it's easier for their star carriers to form a jump field. Kristang ships can only jump short ranges, we guess six to eight light hours, which is about here to Neptune. They make a series of small faster than light jumps like that, out to where a Thuranin star carrier is parked. A star carrier is a big, long spine, with hardpoints for short range ships to latch on. The star carrier has an advanced jump drive, way beyond what the Kristang have, so the Thuranin carry Kristang ships between star systems. G-2 thinks the Kristang ships can't actually travel between stars; with their short jumps, and the need to recharge engines between jumps, overall they travel at less than the speed of light. It would take them more than four years to get to the nearest star from here. The Thuranin, we think, can travel something like three hundred times the speed of light, in jumps of about one lightyear."
I didn't like the math that was running around in my feverish brain. Three hundred times the speed of light was incredibly fast, but it also meant that if we were going to a planet that was, say, a mere hundred lightyears away, it would take four months to get there! Four months. Stuck on an alien ship. In zero gravity. And a hundred lightyears sounded like a lot, but the galaxy is huge. Somewhere in school, I'd learned that Earth is twenty seven thousand lightyears from the center of the galaxy, and the whole galaxy is something like a hundred thousand lightyears across. I hadn't considered any of this when I was so eager to get of Earth and fight the Ruhar. "Sir," I asked slowly, "where are we going?"
"That's not a secret. We're going to a planet the Kristang have set up as a training base for us, we're calling it Camp Alpha."
"And how far is that?" Cornpone asked as he shot me a look. He was doing math in his head also.
"The Kristang won't tell us, but people who've been there took pictures of the night sky, and from the position of stars, our astronomers have got it fixed at 1223 lightyears from Earth." Just then, one of the doors at the end of the line opened, and the lieutenant was called in.
Oh My God. A twelve hundred lightyear journey, aboard a ship that traveled three hundred times the speed of light, meant we were going to be stuck aboard a Kristang ship attached to a Thuranin star carrier, in zero gravity, for four years! I'd heard the troubles astronauts had aboard the international space station in zero gravity, how their eyesight deteriorated, their bones became brittle and their muscles wasted away after a couple months. What good were human soldiers going to be after four years in zero gravity? I was so shocked, it didn't even occur to me the lieutenant had said somehow humans had already gone to Camp Alpha and come back, obviously in much less than a year.
"Four years, dang! Is that right, twelve hundred lightyears away, at three hundred a year?" Cornpone's voice reflected the shock we all felt. "Maybe they're going to freeze us, make us sleep the whole way? They did that in Avatar, right, you saw that movie?"
People were grumbling, stunned at the implications of what the lieutenant had told us. Then it was my turn with the doctor, who was wearing civilian clothes and a white lab coat. She looked bored. "Do I need to take my shirt off, ma'am?" I was hoping I could keep my pants on. It was embarrassing enough standing around in my boxer shorts in front of a male doctor, with a female doctor it was worse. I mean, I didn't want my friend to be obviously happy to see her, if you know what I mean. But maybe it was worse if he didn't rise to the occasion. The doctor was cute, and I was a healthy guy, so I felt that out of respect for her I should at least have a semi-
"No, soldier, keep your shirt on. Lift your chin, please." She held what looked like a plastic and chrome gun under my left ear, and squeezed the trigger. I hardly felt anything. Same thing on the right. She put the gun down and checked a computer display screen, tapped it a few times, and said "Looks good. You've been injected with Kristang nano machines, that will soon migrate to your inner ears, and prevent you from feeling nauseous in zero gravity. They will dissolve after a while, and you shouldn't feel any effects. If you do feel like your balance is off while you're in gravity, contact the medical staff aboard the ship."
"Ma'am, how long will we be aboard-"
"You will receive a full briefing aboard the ship." The door opposite where I'd come in opened, and I took a hint to leave. The gravity was working fine, it was the thought of being injected with tiny machines that was making me queasy. Microscopic alien robots were swimming in my blood. It was creepy.
Once our group was all done with the doctors, guards directed us to the transport ship, and hustled us along with no time for sightseeing. There wasn’t much to see on the station corridors anyway, blank walls in a light blue color, with markings in several human languages attached to the walls. The Kristang ship was more interesting, lots of access panels, corridors going in every direction, pipes or conduits along the ceilings. The walls and floors had recessed handholds, I guess for when the ship was in zero gravity. No Kristang were visible, I still had never seen one of the lizards in person. A Marine took charge of our group, and directed the men into one compartment, women into another. The compartment I was in had row after row of bunk beds, stacked three high. Each group of three bunks was attached to an arm that could rotate the stack 90 degrees for when the ship was under thrust. The Marine told us this was a Kristang multi-mission pod, which was currently configured for troop transport. We were lucky, he said, that the bunks were sized for Kristang, who were slightly larger on average than humans. I shrugged and found an empty bunk, tossed my small duffel bag into it, and secured it with a strap that I figured was there for that purpose. The bunk wasn’t bad, seven feet long, and about four feet to the bunk above it. Luxury. Somebody already had a card game going, Jesse wandered over to the game, while I flopped on my bunk and pulled out a book to read on my tablet. I was getting anxious about the tablet, it was down to about 25% power, and there didn't appear to be an electrical outlet anywhere. I
t looked like I'd been stupid to bring the thing into space with me.
A sergeant came to stand in the doorway. He cleared his throat to get our attention. I was amused to see he was wearing the same out-of-date style uniform camo top that I had on. “I am Staff Sergeant Raynor, I'm in charge of this compartment, and the two on either side of you. In two hours, this ship will undock, and boost out of Earth orbit. You all need to be in your bunks and strapped in, ten minutes before departure. If you don’t know how to work the straps, Specialist Edwards here will show you. After we depart from the station, the artificial gravity will cut off, so make sure you don't leave anything loose that can float around. This ship will boost for about an hour, the acceleration is only thirty percent of normal gravity, it's not like NASA rockets. Then the ship will make a jump through hyperspace. You will be able to get out of your bunks once the Kristang give the all clear, in about ninety minutes. After that, you’re free to move around, keep in mind we'll be in zero gravity. I don't want any jackasses horsing around in zero gee! Once the ship gets far enough away from Earth, we will be making a series of hyperspace jumps, and you will need to be in your bunks for those also. Our ultimate destination is a planet the Kristang have set up as a training base. If you have any questions, you will get an opportunity to get answers later.”
If I was going to be stuck in my bunk for over an hour, I decided to hit the bathroom first. I went back out the door and asked the Marine guard where the bathrooms were. He pointed down the hall, with a wry smile.
The restroom facilities were interesting. There were no urinals. You could sit normally, but the toilets were designed for zero gee, and there were straps to hold you in place and the seat formed a seal on your backside. And there was a flexible tube, with disposable cups, if a guy only had to pee. The stalls all had instructions plaques in several human languages, and it was not as complicated as it sounds, the toilet's computer took care of everything. Score a point for technology. Kristang also apparently had unisex bathrooms, so we took turns; five women, then five men. Damn, women take forever. There were a lot less women than men, so it wasn't a big deal. On my way back to my assigned compartment, there was an Army captain standing in the hallway, reading something on a tablet. I saluted, and stopped to talk to him, if I could. “Excuse me, sir, how do you charge your tablet?"
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