Michael said very little during the meal, content to sit there as the tiredness washed over him in waves, contentment settling deep into his bones like balm. As ever, Sam took up the conversational slack, full of stories of life at the Manindi Center for Oceanic Research, where, at the ripe old age of eighteen going on nineteen, she had secured for herself a prime appointment as chief tank cleaner and general gofer since finishing school. With plans to become a serious marine biologist, Sam was in seventh heaven and made a point of ensuring that everyone knew it. Michael strongly suspected that the fact that Arkady Encevit, Sam’s long-standing boyfriend, had managed to find himself a job in Harbin only 750 kilometers from Manindi, a job, what was more, that involved no weekend work, had a lot more to do with Sam’s happiness than she was prepared to let on.
Michael awoke with a start. Christ, he had actually dozed off at the table, and so far as he could tell, he had just been told something significant. “Sorry, Mom. Missed that,” he said.
“You did.” Michael’s mother smiled. “I always knew the college was good, but how on earth did they teach you to sleep sitting up and apparently paying full attention to what’s going on?”
“Years of sitting through astrogation lectures, Mom. A necessary aid to survival. You should know.”
Kerri Helfort smiled indulgently. “Michael, I was just saying that Sam and I have finally fixed a date to go see Aunt Claudia. We’re—”
Kerri sighed as Sam cut her off, a bad habit the girl showed no signs of getting over. Sam never even noticed. “You can see Aunt Claudia all you want, Mom, but I’m going to see Jemma. It’s been so long,” she said firmly.
“Yes, dear, and Jemma’s probably the only person in this universe that you would give up Arkady to go see.” Game, set, and match to Mom, Michael thought as Sam sat back red-faced and suddenly silent. Michael laughed out loud at the sight and was rewarded by a scowl from Sam.
“Aunt Claudia,” Michael said. “I never could work out why she had to up and go all the way out to the Frontier Worlds, but I’m sure she had her reasons. We haven’t seen her for what, eight years?”
“Nine, actually, but who’s counting? It’s all arranged. We go on September sixth and should be back about three months later.” His mother’s face belied her confident tone of voice and betrayed the struggle going on inside her. Michael knew she badly wanted to see her sister again after so many years but was unhappy at leaving his father for so long, especially when the Flame tree seed harvest was due. Getting the seeds safely into storage was a tricky exercise at the best of times and not one she’d readily trust to Dad and his oafish, unreliable drinking buddy Maxwell Bassini. “Maybe we should wait until after the harvest—”
Andrew Helfort knew his wife well enough to see what was going through her mind. He leaned over and took her hand. “Don’t you start again. We’ve been through this a million times. She’s your only sister and you haven’t seen her for a very long time, so you must go. You know you must. And it would be good for Samantha to catch up with Jemma. So stop thinking about me. I’ll be fine. I’ve got Maxwell to help out at harvesttime. And despite what you think of him, he’s not a complete idiot.” Except after too many beers, Michael thought.
Michael broke the awkward silence that followed. “Well, one thing I do know is that Jackson is a long way away. The trip will take how long?”
Sam had it all worked out. “Fourteen days, and that’s including the time to get to Terranova first. Of course, I’m going to miss Arkady terribly, but I think it’s worth it even if we take ages to get there. Jemma vidmailed me, and there’s so much to do and she says the people are really nice and she’s dying for her friends to be able to meet me and I think we’ll have a great time.” Sam finally ran out of breath.
“Arkady, where are you?” Michael whispered teasingly.
Sam ignored him. “As I was saying, fourteen days there and fourteen days back gives us a good two months on Jackson. I bet we won’t want to leave, ’specially not to come back to a cruel pig like you, Michael Helfort!”
After a short flight down from the Palisades, Michael got the flier safely back in the hands of Avis. The sheer pleasure of flying the little Honda across the impossibly rugged landscape around the Palisades had been more than enough to make the uncomfortably high cost of hiring it bearable.
The rest of Michael’s leave passed in a tornado of furious activity as he attempted unsuccessfully to cram into two and a half weeks all the things he had planned to do in four. A riotous reunion with his friends in Bachou (that was two days gone, of which Michael remembered almost nothing), a four-day trip to surf the Point Barrow break, on a good day, the most perfect left-hander in the entire universe, and then a couple of days to catch up with Charles Mbeki, who was killing time waiting for his ship, the venerable heavy cruiser Arcturus, to return from patrol.
But finally his time was up. After the duty visits to family—his mother’s instructions had been quite clear that they were not optional—and with less than a week before he had to leave to join his new ship, the less than romantically named deepspace light scout DLS-387, he was on his way home to wrap things up, and then he’d be on his way.
Saturday, August 22, 2398, UD
Outside the Diplomatic Compound, City of McNair, Commitment Planet
The fear gripping Digby felt like a hand plunged deep inside his stomach trying to pull his guts out.
The stress of making his way unseen every second night, ducking and weaving to avoid the random Doctrinal Security patrols, was beginning to tell. Worse, time was starting to run out. This was his last chance. If he couldn’t get to Kumar unnoticed this morning, Kumar would not be able to get any messages up to the fortnightly routine starship courier to Sylvania—leaving in less than eighteen hours, for Kraa’s sake—for onward transmission to the Feds in time for them to do something about the Mumtaz. And that assumed that Kumar took him seriously enough to order the mership to drop out of pinchspace to make the pinchcomm transmission.
Digby could just imagine how a commercial mership skipper, even one under contract to the Sylvanian government, would respond to that suggestion.
The only thing about Kumar’s routine he had managed to establish was that the bloody man didn’t really have one.
Some mornings—Digby laughed bitterly; on this planet, that could mean anything from broad daylight to, as now, pitch darkness—Kumar jogged alone. Sometimes, in company. Sometimes, not at all. Sometimes, three days in a row. Sometimes, not for a week. The only thing definite about Kumar was that when he did go jogging, he always left the compound between 06:00 and 06:10. Even better, DocSec had given up escorting him as it should have; the prospect of running in the dark early-morning hours clearly was not to the taste of the average and usually overweight DocSec trooper.
So it was that Digby stood in the deep blackness of the trees shading the Avenue of Heroes as it ran up to the one and only gate giving access to the diplomatic compound and waited.
Twenty agonizing minutes later and with a heavy heart, he tasted the bitter fruits of failure. The road from the diplomatic compound had remained empty, the only sign of life being the bored DocSec guards at the compound gate. Digby stood in the shadows, lost. He had been sure that, provided that he was prepared to take the terrible risk, and he was, there would be a chance to slip a message into Kumar’s hand in time to avert the catastrophe. But Kraa had decided otherwise. Now he had missed the starship due out that night, and the next one wouldn’t go out for another two weeks. Even if he could get a message to Kumar, the man would have one hell of a job getting a seat on any starship at all with the Establishment Day holidays coming up. Digby cursed his fate. It was getting too late.
Digby waited in the shadows, undecided. Did he give up and hope for the best, or did he at least try to lessen the damage by making it clear to the Feds that the entire affair was the unilateral action of a chief councillor gone mad? Would they even believe that? he wondered. He wasn’t at all
sure that he would. But it was all he could hope for now, to lessen the blow that would surely fall on the Hammer Worlds. He slipped away through the darkness unseen.
He knew he had no choice. He would have to be back in two days to do it all over again. He’d gone too far to turn back now.
Friday, August 28, 2398, UD
Torrance Airport, Ashakiran Planet
Michael turned to walk through security and onto his flight back to the Arcadia spaceport, from where he would catch the up-shuttle to the planetary transfer station.
Behind him stood his mother, teary-eyed, and his father, tight-lipped. It would be months before Michael saw them again, but that was part and parcel of Space Fleet life, as they knew better than he did. Worse, he wouldn’t be seeing Anna.
She had commed him to say that Damishqui’s program had been changed at short notice to go to Anjaxx and that their two ships would be berthed together on SBS-22 for eighteen glorious hours. But just as Michael’s elaborate plans to make the most of the few hours they would have together had begun to take shape, another comm had come in from Anna. It was as unwelcome as it was short and to the point. Damishqui’s program had been changed again, and they would miss each other by a day. Sorry, can’t be helped. Love and kisses, Anna.
Michael cursed his luck, the Fleet, Damishqui, and anything else he could think of.
So slowly that the change had been almost imperceptible, he’d begun to miss Anna, really miss her. That was not surprising, he realized, since he’d spent the best part of three years with her at the college, not really appreciating that graduation meant they would go their separate ways.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he muttered aloud as he made his way to the identity station, automatically presenting himself for the routine DNA and retinal checks. No wonder Space Fleet people had trouble keeping a relationship going. They were never together long enough for there to be a relationship.
Michael shut Anna out of his mind and turned his attention to a more immediate concern: the reception that awaited him onboard DLS-387. Michael hoped that Fielding’s call to his new skipper would at the very least mean that he’d be given a fair chance. Oh, well, he thought as he joined the line to make his way onboard the up-shuttle, only one way to find out. Thirty-five minutes later, as the shuttle blasted its way into orbit en route to the huge transfer station hanging in geostationary orbit, Michael put his seat back. Seconds later, despite the chorus of oohs and aahs of the space travel virgins transfixed by the magical holovid image of Ashakiran as it fell away below the incandescent mass driver plumes of the up-shuttle, he was asleep.
Sunday, August 30, 2398, UD
Deepspace Light Scout 387 Berthed on Space Battle Station 20, in Orbit around Anjaxx Planet
“Welcome aboard, sir. Identity check and orders, please.”
Even as she saluted, the quartermaster’s voice betrayed none of the fun she’d had watching the young officer make a complete mess of crossing the line. She’d known he would do that the second it became obvious that he wasn’t going to use the lubber’s rail, because crossing the line was not the straightforward exercise it first appeared. As one approached any berthed starship, up was definitely and without doubt up. Down was down. Left was left. Right was right. Easy and, after millions of years of evolution, something the human mind was well able to manage.
But as you crossed the line that marked the change from the space battle station’s artificial gravity to ship’s artificial gravity, up could be down or sideways or all three mashed together. In this particular case, 387 was berthed so that horizontal became down by way of a sharp, almost 90-degree lean backward coupled with a slight right-hand twist. And Leading Spacer Matthilde Bienefelt had seen everyone from admirals down to the youngest and most inexperienced recruit ignore the lubber’s rail and make a mess of a deceptively simple problem: how to cross a red and white striped line, adjust to a new gravity field, and maintain some semblance of balance, control, and dignity in the space of less than a second. But after more than twenty years in Space Fleet, Bienefelt knew full well that the human brain simply could not cope with the instantaneous rearrangement of the forces of gravity through three axes and that Junior Lieutenant Helfort was wasting his time trying. His brain’s balance control system would stay shut down until it was ready to cope. That, of course, was why the lubber’s rail was provided, though a remarkably large number of spacers let ego override common sense and ignored it.
He would learn, Bienefelt thought, standing patiently as Michael scrambled his way across the threshold and fell rather than climbed down the ladder into the ship’s surveillance drone deployment air lock. He arrived at her feet standing up, thanks to a desperate lunge for the ladder handrail.
After a few seconds and conscious that he, like generations of junior officers before him, had just made a complete ass of himself, Michael’s brain came back online and he recovered his balance and composure, if not his dignity. He presented his thumb for DNA checking and his left eye for retinal scanning and then commed his orders to Bienefelt, marking his formal arrival onboard Space Fleet’s second youngest deepspace light scout, the name-challenged DLS-387.
Michael didn’t approve of warships not having names, but Space Fleet policy was unshakable. In its view, there were simply too many small ships—light scouts like 387, courier ships, and a multitude of small auxiliary support ships—to give each one a name. So numbers it was, something Michael had always thought depersonalized a ship. That was a pity. With its master AI, a ship was in a way a living thing and as such deserved better. Still, that was the way things were, and he’d never be able to change them.
“Thank you, sir. Welcome aboard. I’m Leading Spacer Bienefelt, and I’m in your division.” Bienefelt stuck out a hand the size of a plate and proceeded to crush Michael’s in a grip like a steel vise. Michael resolved on the spot not to argue with Bienefelt unless it was absolutely necessary. She was at least forty centimeters taller than he, maybe more, and probably a good 50 kilos heavier, to the point where she was as close to being declared a cyborg as any Worlder he’d ever seen; she’d make Karen Sutler look small. In fact, if she were any larger, she might be declared an illegal and expelled from the FedWorlds.
“Sir, the captain asked that you see him as soon as you came aboard; he’s in his cabin.”
Michael grimaced. He needed a shower. “What do you think, Leader? Time to change?”
“I think you’ll find that when the skipper says now, he generally means now, sir.”
“Oh, okay.”
“You have the ship schematics, sir?”
“I do, thanks, Leader. Can someone take my stuff to my cabin, please.” Michael gestured at the battered trunk and a couple of smaller bags, all of which had been unceremoniously dumped just outside 387’s open air lock by the baggage bot and containing everything that Space Fleet deemed necessary for the proper conduct of his duties.
“No worries, sir. Leave it with me. Karpov, you fucking worm.” Bienefelt turned to the young spacer standing slightly behind and to one side of the quartermaster’s desk, “Gear. Junior Lieutenant Helfort’s cabin. Now. You’ve got two minutes.”
Bienefelt turned back to Helfort. “I’ve commed the captain to let him know you are on your way. Anything else I can help you with, sir?”
“No thanks, Leader. It’s good to be aboard.”
“Good to have you, sir.”
Michael hoped she meant it.
And with that, Michael brought up the ship’s schematics on his neuronics, nominated the captain’s cabin as his destination, and set off through the massive doorway that opened from the drone deployment air lock into the brightly lit drone hangar deck. He paused a moment to catch his breath. Ahead of him, blackly menacing in their stealth coats of radio frequency and light absorbent material, sat two massive Mark 88-K surveillance drones, to the human eye just two bottomless holes. The nothingness was absolute, so completely did they absorb the light thrown at them.
A
long the hangar walls, six smaller drones sat in two neat rows on the gray ceramsteel deck, three to a side. My babies, he thought, just the things to keep an assistant warfare officer busy. His neuronics pointed the way down through a small personnel hatch set in the deck to his right.
Michael dropped down the ladder onto 2 Deck, the upper accommodation level, and followed a passageway lined with the usual clutter of pipe work and cabling broken up every so often by damage control lockers, firefighting equipment, and all the other odds and ends that warships used passageways to store. Michael went forward for 10 meters or so before dropping down another hatch in spacer style, boots on the outside of the ladder, hands braking his fall at the very last minute, to thump onto 3 Deck. The ship’s main cross-passage, leaving the galley and the wardroom on the left and the combat information center on the right, finally brought him to the captain’s cabin at the far end. He hadn’t passed another soul. Not surprising, he thought, this early on a Sunday morning. He’d be in bed if he had the choice.
Michael stopped outside the closed door to straighten the rather rumpled clothes he’d been wearing since he had left home. Taking a couple of deep breaths, he knocked on the door.
“Yes, Helfort, come in.” The voice was incredibly deep, with rich warm overtones.
Should have been an opera singer, Michael thought irreverently as he stepped into his new captain’s cabin.
Twenty minutes later, any irreverence Michael might have felt toward Lieutenant Jean-Pierre Ribot, JP to his friends and captain-in-command of the Federated Worlds warship DLS-387, had evaporated in the face of a very detailed statement of what Ribot expected him to do to become a useful member of 387’s command team. And with the ship due out on patrol in forty-eight hours, the list of things he had to do before it departed seemed to be a million strong. But first things first.
Helfort's War: Book 1 Page 8