Helfort's War: Book 1

by Graham Sharp Paul

  Moving away from SBS-20, Michael made sure that he and his fellow cargo handlers were clear of the container’s approach vector and would not be caught between 387 and the container as it closed; cargobots were very good, but nothing made by humans was infallible. The containers had a lot of mass and, once out of control, tended to stay that way until they either hit something or had been wrestled back under control. Even moving at less than a meter per second, the containers were lethal weapons. And the cargobots’ mass driver plumes also had to be watched. The safety sims had some gruesome holovid of spacers who hadn’t paid attention, and Michael had no intention of allowing any repeats.

  As the container approached, the cargobots began to brake the container. Must be heavy, Michael thought, judging by the prolonged effort it took to bring the huge box to a dead stop 5 meters off the open cargo hatch. “Leong, take the Anjaxx side. Athenascu, the planet side. I’ll go behind.”

  Leong and Athenascu, two bright strobe-marked orange shapes against the black nothingness of 387, spun on the spot, stopped dead for a second, and then accelerated into position, turning at the last second to drop into place, perfectly set. Show-offs, Michael thought enviously as he maneuvered himself much more carefully and, he would have been the first to admit, clumsily into position. It would be a long time before he was as good as the worst spacer on 387’s surveillance drone team, but then, they had had hundreds, in some cases thousands, of hours of practice. Michael commed the cargobots, confirmed that they had the correct cargo slot, checked that the team was clear, and then authorized the final approach. As always, despite the impressive finesse with which the cargobots handled the container, the last couple of centimeters required the combined efforts of all three of them to get the damn thing into position so that the locking pins could slide home.

  Finally, the container was where it needed to be. Mother signaled a secure lock and detached the cargobots as Leong and Athenascu connected the thick armored power and ventilation umbilicals. Two minutes later, Mother was happy that this was one container that would survive the trip, and Michael and the team turned to await the next; this one, according to Mother, would be the last to go into the starboard 3 Deck cargo space.

  It had been a long hard day by the time the last container had been pinned home and after an exhaustive gear check to make sure nothing had been left behind—captains got pretty upset if they had to stop acceleration to recover lost equipment rattling around loose in the cargo bays—and Michael could dismiss the team. He and Petty Officer Strezlecki did a last fly-past along the containers.

  “Looks fine to me,” Michael said as he checked out the last of the containers on the port side.

  “Me, too, sir,” Strezlecki confirmed. “All personnel clear and accounted for. All equipment accounted for. Button her up?”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  Michael and Strezlecki pushed back as Mother turned off the cargo bay lights and one by one closed the massively thick armored access doors until all that was left was an absolute and total nothing. Michael knew 387 was there because logic told him it had not moved and he could see her shape as a black cutout against the gray-black hull of SBS-20. But all of a sudden, the sense of form, solidity, and mass, of firm reality that the open cargo doors had provided, was gone. All Michael could see was void, a pit into which he felt for one awful moment he was going to tumble.

  Strezlecki also felt it. “That’s something, isn’t it? Never get used to it even after all these years.” Her voice brought Michael back to his senses.

  “Christ, thanks for that cheerful thought. I’d rather hoped I would get used to it.”

  “Never, sir, trust me,” Strezlecki said confidently as they turned to make a final inspection of the hull to confirm that every cargo hatch had sealed as flush as Mother said it had, guided only by the ship schematics brought up on their neuronics. Finally, the job was done and they made their way back to the personnel access lock, the ship passing below them unseeable and unseen.

  “Any thing else we—I—need to think about?” Michael didn’t think there was, but it didn’t hurt to ask.

  “No, sir, that’s it for today. I’m headed for the shower and then to the Fleet senior spacers club—got a birthday bash to attend.” Strezlecki’s voice made it clear that with a patrol scheduled to last almost two months less than twenty-four hours away, she intended to get in a final round of serious partying before they dropped.

  “I wish I had half your luck. Quiet evening for me and then a decent night’s sleep would be good.” In the frantic scramble to get everything done in time, Michael had managed only about three hours of sleep since he had stepped—sorry, stumbled and fell—aboard 387.

  According to Michael’s neuronics, they were only two meters from their destination, and in confirmation Mother opened the outer hatch of the forward personnel access lock. The brilliant white light from inside the ship seemed to come from nowhere.

  “Age before beauty,” Michael commed, pointing for Petty Officer Strezlecki to go first.

  “Remember the rest of that aphorism, sir, and don’t tempt me into saying something that should stay belowdecks,” Strezlecki retorted as, without fuss or wasted effort, she pushed her boots into the air lock clear of the rungs of the ladder that dropped into the brightly lit space three meters below them. The ship’s gravity tugged at her feet and drew her in, gloves braking the fall to drop her neatly to the deck.

  Michael laughed. “I didn’t want you to see what a screwup I’m going to make of this,” he said as he struggled to emulate Strezlecki’s effortless move into the air lock without a great degree of success. First he wasn’t dropping fast enough and then he was falling too fast, his boots thumping onto the deck, the weight of his suit almost forcing him to his knees. But finally he stood there as Strezlecki commed the close command to Mother and they waited as the outer hatch closed and the air lock pressure equalized. At last the flashing red light gave way to a steady green, and the inner door opened onto the drone hangar deck.

  Ten minutes later, with suit turn-around completed, Michael stood there, his gray one-piece innersuit rumpled and sweat-stained. “That’s it,” he said to an equally disheveled Petty Officer Strezlecki. “Enjoy the party and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Sir.”

  As Michael turned to go below, the XO commed him. “Finished?” she asked.

  “I have, sir, yes.”

  “Okay. My cabin, now.”

  “Sir.” Shit. That didn’t sound good. What now? Michael thought as he dived for the ladder down to 3 Deck.

  Seconds later, Michael was at the XO’s cabin. Seeing him at the door, she waved him into the one and only chair in the cramped compartment where Lieutenant Jacqui Armitage both lived and worked. For a couple of seconds, the young woman just stared at him from brown eyes set wide in a ruddy, almost windburned face overshadowed by a shock of barely controlled brown hair, her face a set of flat planes that made it look as if she had been chiseled out of stone. Her mouth had a firm set to it that all of a sudden told Michael that he wasn’t there to be told what a good boy he was.

  “Pretty good job you and your team did, Michael. You certainly look like you’ve been working hard.”

  “Thank you, sir. We have. Though I need a lot more practice before I’m as good as they are.”

  “That’s what I knew you would think, Michael, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Young officers are always over-impressed by space gymnastics.” Armitage paused for a second. And here it comes, Michael thought, at a loss to know what he had missed. “I had Mother analyze the whole operation end to end, and she agrees with me. While acceptable, your oversight of the safety aspects of the operation was close to being compromised on three occasions. Have a look.”

  Armitage popped Mother’s analysis up on Michael’s neuronics. “See? Here you got so close in to the container that you missed Leong drifting off-station. A few more meters and he could have been in trouble. Now, he’s a good spac
er and caught himself in time. But you should have seen it first just in case he didn’t. People with their heads down very often don’t. And here, Leong again. And here, Athenascu. Too close to that mass driver efflux for comfort. So Michael, the moral of the story is this: You are paid to command, so stand back and command. You are not paid to be just another cargo handler. And nothing will lose you respect faster than a damaged team member. So learn the lesson and do better next time, okay?”

  “Sir.” There wasn’t much Michael could say. Armitage was right.

  “Okay. That’s all. See you at supper tonight.”

  Tired but reasonably content even after the moderately severe singeing he had received from the XO, Michael sat quietly in the wardroom on 3 Deck.

  Supper over, the wardroom was filled with the give-and-take of team members who knew one another well. Sitting at the mess table, Armitage and Michael’s boss, Maria Hosani, were in the middle of a spirited debate on the relative merits of planetary life compared with life on orbital habitats. Michael suspected it was a debate months in the making and with many more to run. Sprawled in the two armchairs at the far end of the compartment in front of an impressive holovid of a large fireplace set into a stone wall, complete with a cheerfully blazing wood fire, were the navigator, Leon Holdorf, and John Kapoor, the proud commander of 387’s lander, Jessie’s Hope. Why Jessie’s Hope? Michael had had to ask. Because, Kapoor had explained patiently, probably for the hundredth time, the rest of the crew wouldn’t allow his first choice, Mom’s Hope, so he’d had to settle for her first name, “Jessie.” Yes, and the “Hope” bit, Michael had prompted. That he’d come home safely, Kapoor had said with a faint air of embarrassment and a shrug of the shoulders. Michael had laughed. He’d liked Kapoor from the moment they had met, and as the only other junior lieutenant onboard apart from Michael, he was a natural ally. Though not for long. Kapoor was about to pick up his second stripe.

  Sitting next to them on one of the benches that ran down the length of the mess and as officer of the day the only person in uniform was 387’s chief engineer, Cosmo Reilly. With the aid of a firmly pointed forefinger, Reilly was at that moment making the point very emphatically that warfare branch officers paid too little attention to engineers when it came to the conduct of Space Fleet business. Michael had to smile as he watched Reilly’s impassioned diatribe. Long, long ago, Space Fleet had decided in its infinite wisdom that too much engineering was a bad thing for the officers responsible for fighting on the Federation’s ships and had split engineering and warfare officers into two specialized streams. The merits of that decision still were hotly argued, a never-ending debate and one that Michael was sure went on in every mess in the Fleet most nights of the week.

  Kapoor just couldn’t resist. “I remember one time on the old Zube—”

  “Don’t you mean the Zuben-el-Genubi?” Reilly interrupted indignantly. “You bloody warfare types can’t even get the names of your ships right.”

  The rest of the officers broke out laughing. Michael just smiled. Clearly, teasing Reilly by shortening ship names was one of those long-running gags that made small ship life bearable. Michael reckoned that Reilly played up to the rest of them by putting on the personality of a cantankerous old space dog.

  “Enough of this,” Reilly said, waving the debate to a halt as he climbed to his feet. “Time for a walk-around. Can’t let the masses think management isn’t paying attention.” Michael was beginning to suspect that Cosmo Reilly was only half joking; of all the officers onboard, he was the most old-fashioned and almost always had an authoritarian tone to his voice. Be interesting to see what the troops think of him, Michael mused as Reilly left the mess.

  Kapoor’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Michael, you’re far too quiet. Get your fat ass over here and tell us what you think so far. But before you do, refill these glasses.”

  As instructed, Michael refilled the two port glasses at the little bar before sitting next to the fireplace, which, if it had been real, would have fried the lot of them long before.

  Soon he was deeply involved in a debate about the merits or otherwise of the Honorable Valerie Burkhardt, the Fed Worlds’ current moderator, whether she and the New Liberals had any chance of being reelected to the government in the forthcoming elections, and whether Space Fleet would be better off with a new federal minister of defense given the view commonly held in the Fleet that the present incumbent was a party hack promoted not because she had any talent for the job but because she had a hold over Valerie Burkhardt. Soon the debate sucked in Armitage and Hosani, and by the time Reilly returned from his rounds, the wardroom was well into an appraisal of how the Space Fleet had had to put up with an endless succession of ambitious but not necessarily capable ministers and so on and so on.

  Probably, Michael thought as he sat back to let the debate rage around him, if you did a survey, four or five topics would account for 80 percent of all conversation in officers’ messes across the Fleet, and this was surely one of them.

  Finally, he’d had enough. “If you’ll excuse me, people, I am going to make this an early night. Big day tomorrow.” He rose to his feet.

  “Can’t persuade you to step ashore to sample the delights of the Fleet O club? I think everyone else is up for it.” Hosani’s suggestion was tempting in the extreme, but Michael shook his head.

  “Not this time, sir.”

  “Okay. Get your beauty sleep. God knows you need it.”

  “Night all, see you in the morning.” With that, Michael turned and left. He really must vidmail his parents and reply to Anna’s last comm before they left.

  As the wardroom door hissed shut behind Michael, the group was quiet for a moment.

  “What do you think of our latest recruit, Jacqui?” Holdorf looked at the XO, his face quizzical.

  “Too soon to say. But he looks like he’ll be okay. He did well enough today for his first time out, and he took the obligatory dressing down without complaint. Remember McPherson’s first cargo op?” Armitage laughed as she recalled the three-ring circus that Michael’s predecessor had managed to create. “And he turned out okay.”

  “What do you think, Maria?” Armitage asked.

  “Like you said, not too bad for the first day. And he’s certainly not hard on the eyes. Pity he’s in the chain of command,” Hosani said, aiming a playful wink at Armitage, who winced. An improper relationship in the chain of command? Now, that was the best definition of an XO’s nightmare Armitage could think of.

  Kapoor came to his feet. “Look, you lot! Enough. Time is getting on, and the O club calls. Are we on or not?” His insistent voice made everyone grin.

  “I can’t see any reason to hurry, can you? Time for a few more drinks?” Holdorf teased, “Unless of course there is a certain someone that John feels the need to get close to.”

  “Bastard. You know there is. So can we go?” Kapoor said, standing up. “Because if not, I’m off. Night, Cosmo. Keep her safe.”

  Tuesday, September 1, 2398, UD

  DLS-387 Berthed on Space Battle Station 20, in Orbit around Anjaxx

  “All stations, this is command. Stand by to drop in fifteen minutes.”

  The captain’s voice jerked Michael back to reality. He and his team, now morphed from cargo handlers into 387’s emergency extravehicular activity team, were assembled in the surveillance drone hangar, fully suited up with uniforms chromaflaged to Day-Glo orange and personal maneuvering units locked into position on their backs. The wait was beginning to tell on the team. The full EVA outfit added more than 30 kilos to each spacer’s body mass. The only thing to do was to hunch forward and let the suit’s inherent stiffness take some of the weight. We must look like a bunch of hunchbacked trolls, Michael thought, and big lumpy orange ones at that.

  The team had been split into three groups. Two of Michael’s team crew members stood by the forward personnel air lock, two waited aft, and the rest—four in all, including Michael, personal call sign Alfa—waited insi
de the big surveillance drone deployment air lock. Arranged around each group were emergency repair packs and laser cutting equipment. As he stood there, Michael wondered when an EVA team had last been needed in earnest.

  He checked his neuronics. Ten minutes to go. “EVA team, this is Alfa. Close up suits, report when nitrogen-free,” he commed, to be rewarded by the solid clunks of seven armored plasglass faceplates shutting. His followed quickly as the suit integrity check reports came in from the team.

  “Command, this is Alfa. EVA team suit integrity checks complete. Suits nominal.”

  Helped by an autojected nitrogen-purge chemical cocktail that Michael didn’t like to think about and by the suit’s 100 percent oxygen atmosphere, the suit AI reported his body nitrogen-free less than a minute later. They were ready to decompress from 387’s ambient pressure down to a suit pressure of 0.2 atmospheres if required to deploy, something Michael fervently hoped would not be necessary. The minutes dragged past until Michael could have sworn that he now carried not 30 kilos on his back but 300.

  “All stations, this is command. 387 is go for launch. May God watch over us this day.” And with that, there was a gentle push as SBS-20’s hydraulic locking arms pushed 387’s fully loaded mass away from the space battle station and down its designated departure pipe.

  The seconds passed, and Michael began to relax. He had a busy morning ahead of him before standing his first watch in the combat information center at 12:30. By that time they should be clearing the clutter in orbit around Anjaxx and beginning to align 387 for its high-g burn toward its pinchspace jump point.

  Two hours or so later and a good ten minutes early for his 12:30 watch, Michael stood at the back of combat information center, ready to understudy Hosani as officer in command.