Test of Mettle (A Captain's Crucible Book 2)

by Isaac Hooke

  Even during deployments, such as the current one, the interests of the younger MOTHs were basically the same: after mandatory PT, war game training, and security duty, they spent their free time in virtual strip clubs and bars. It was quite ridiculous.

  He had the same thoughts of leaving at sixty and seventy. By the time he was eighty, he realized there was no point in denying it: being a MOTH assigned to starships was all he knew how to do anymore. The only other option was to become a private contractor—a morally ambiguous slope he wasn’t ready to climb. Every time his enlistment came up for renewal he always received a slew of messages from companies inviting him to join their private mercenary armies. So far he had always refused the requests. But the day might come when he would either agree, or start his own security firm.

  I’m ninety-eight years old, Rade thought. Not young, but still vigorous, thanks to the rejuvenation treatments. I have at least another hundred and fifty years left in me.

  He sighed, unfolding his arms. Where the hell was his daughter? He glanced at his shaking hands and chuckled softly.

  Ninety-eight years old and I’m afraid of my own daughter. Ridiculous.

  He managed to calm himself with a controlled breathing technique he had learned way back in his spec-ops rating school. Though he hated it at the time, looking back, that school had taught him the mental discipline he needed to survive as a MOTH all these years. The most important lessons he had learned in his life had come from that time.

  But man, the training had been brutal. He rarely had nightmares about an operation or mission he was involved with. Instead, his dreams were haunted by memories of his rating school, even at his advanced age. University students dreamt about missing exams or entire classes. Rade dreamt about shivering in the icy waters of the New Coronado bay, locked arm and arm with his classmates; he dreamt of ATLAS portage, carrying the earlier variants of the robotic suits across the sand while instructors screamed at them; he dreamt of infinite PT—push-ups and burpees and scissor-kicks performed in the sand without end until most of the class was throwing up.

  And while those dreams mostly sucked, he welcomed them, because he would find himself with his brothers again, most of whom had died. After hard deaths in his first few deployments, he had learned to harden himself and not get too close to people—that was another reason he didn’t fit in anymore. Eventually, he even pushed away his family, farther than anyone else. They were a vulnerability inside him that he had needed to excise.

  Yes, he had treated his own daughter as if she were someone else’s.

  My own daughter. I’ve been such a fool. What was the point of fighting all those wars, those battles, if not for her?

  And then he saw her.

  His heart rate tripled anew.

  Sil joined him, setting her water bottle down on the table. Her expression was unreadable.

  “You’re not going to eat anything?” Rade said.

  “Where’s your plate?” she shot back defiantly.

  He shrugged. “Not hungry.”

  “Neither am I.”

  “Okay then.” Rade leaned back. This is going to be harder than I thought.

  Her eyes defocused and it was obvious she was checking a message via her aReal contact lenses.

  “Can’t you catch up with your friends later?” he asked, remembering when she would send messages to friends like that at the dinner table while growing up. “That’s really rude, what you’re doing.”

  “They’re not friends,” she said. “Believe it or not, I’m actually doing my duties. Technically, I’m still supposed to be in the lab right now. Unlike you, I have real work to do all day. Other than push-ups and bench presses in the gym.”

  “You’re an assistant now,” he retorted flatly. “How much work can you be doing?”

  “I have a degree in xenobiology. It’s kind of a big deal. The scientists are constantly asking for my input. And I still have the rank of captain, I might add.”

  “All right.” Rade pushed back his chair. Throw her rank at him, would she? He’d had enough.

  Sil’s eyes abruptly focused on him. “You claim to love me, yet you have the oddest ways of showing it.”

  Rade froze. Her words cut worse than any knife.

  “What are you talking about?” he said.

  “You know,” Sil continued. “When you were down there in that alien ship, and I thought you were going to die, I actually believed the final words you sent me over the comm. That you regretted not being a better father to me, and that if you could do it all over again, you would have left the navy and raised me proper. Well you’ve gotten your second chance, but you’re only doing the exact same thing all over again.”

  Rade sighed. “I haven’t gotten any second chance. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m still enlisted in the navy. And my service term isn’t expiring any time soon. And you’re right, I’ve been a bit slack on the communication front lately. But I wanted to leave you alone. Give you some space to live your life.”

  Sil sighed, smiling sadly. Her cheeks dimpled the same way as her mother’s when she did that. “I have my space, dad. All I ask is that you show some interest in me once in a while. Send a message to my aReal. Inbox me. Say hi. Ask how my week is going. Normal father-daughter stuff, you know?”

  Unable to meet her eye, he looked guiltily at his hands. “I’m sorry. I’ll try.”

  “This is the first I’ve heard from you in over four months,” Sil said. “Out of nowhere you send me a casual message, telling me you’re going on a mission. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out you’re heading down to the planet. Commander Cray instructed Connie to have the psi-shielded MOTH jumpsuits ready, along with the spacesuits. Who wears that, do you think?”

  Rade didn’t say anything, keeping his gaze glued to his hands.

  “So I get your message, and I insist we meet,” Sil continued. “And you say no, there’s no time. And I say yes, let’s make time. And so here we are. I only just sit down, and spend a moment to answer a high priority message from Connie regarding the suit fittings, and you already start getting up, ready to leave me here without saying anything more than a few words.”

  “Sil, I—” He sighed. He still couldn’t meet her eyes. “I’m not good at this. I’m sorry. But I do love you. Believe me.”

  “I know, dad,” Sil said. “But as I said, sometimes you could try to show it a little better.”

  “I’ll try. Look, I do actually have to go. You were late.” That, and the conversation was becoming far too uncomfortable for him. He started to get up.

  “Wait, I want to go down there with you,” Sil said. “I’m the best qualified, because of my degree.”

  Rade shook his head. “Talk to the captain.”

  “Oh I will,” his daughter said. “Stay, please. Just a bit longer.”

  He sighed deeply, then remained seated. “A few more minutes.”

  She seemed like she was going to say something, but then smiled nervously instead.

  Rade pursed his lips, and was about to tell her to speak her mind when she did just that.

  “Something’s been bothering me,” she said. “Remember what you told me after you got back?”

  “What did I tell you?” he asked warily.

  “That you saw a ghost.”

  Rade shook his head fervently. “It was nothing. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  “If it was nothing, then why were you shaken and pale,” Sil said. “Distracted. A ghost. There are so many things I can read into that.”

  Rade shrugged, unsure what to say.

  “Come on dad,” she pressed. “I’m your daughter. You can confide in me. What did you see? Was it someone you knew?”

  “No, nothing like that.” When he realized she wasn’t going to let him go until he told her, he said: “I saw a man on the alien ship. I didn’t know him.”

  “A man? What do you mean? You saw quite a few men when rescuing the crew of the Selene from that ship.”

/>   “No, I saw him after that,” Rade said. “When you and the others had launched in your Dragonflies, and I stayed behind with the combat robots to cause as much damage as possible. That’s when I saw him.”

  His daughter frowned. “You saw a refugee we’d missed? Someone roaming the passages in a spacesuit?”

  “That’s the thing,” Rade said. “This man... he wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. He was just huddling there in the vacuum, looking right at me.”

  “How do you know he was alive?” she asked.

  “He was moving, Sil.” Rade wasn’t going to tell her that he could have sworn the man had mouthed his full name.

  “You reported this to your commanding officer?” Sil asked.

  “Of course,” Rade said. “First thing when I got back. I had no proof, though. On my video logs, some sort of interference caused my recording to blank out moments before I saw the man. And he didn’t show up in any of the combat robot logs—none of the Centurions had seen him. My LC told me it was probably a stress hallucination.”

  “What happened to him?” Sil said.

  “I don’t know,” Rade said. “One moment he was there, I look away, and then he’s gone.”

  She regarded him uncertainly for a moment, then rested a hand on his knuckles and smiled. Likely she believed it was a hallucination, too. “Thanks for confiding in me.”

  Yes, from that patronizing tone, he was sure she thought that.

  I didn’t hallucinate it.

  He stood, extricating his knuckles out from her under hand. “But now I really have to go, Sil. Goodbye. Thanks for meeting me.”

  “Take care, dad,” she said. “I mean it. You’re coming back.”

  Rade forced a smile. “Always do. Got another hundred and fifty years left in me.”

  “You’re not going to give them all to the navy, I hope.”

  “Maybe another hundred,” Rade joked.

  THE CAPTAIN SAT in his office chair. He had the commander’s contact lens video feed piped into his aReal, and he watched as Robert made his way across the hangar bay toward the down ramp of one of the two Dragonflies involved in the mission. They were long, thin metal crafts, with two broad, stacked wings protruding from either side near the front, somewhat similar to their insect namesakes.

  Robert wore one of Connie’s custom, psi-shielded spacesuits, though he currently carried the helmet in one hand. The lag was less than a few microseconds at the moment, though when Robert reached the surface, that lag would be three seconds, at best. Ensign McNamara, the second watch ops officer, had estimated they would have to deploy at least one signal boosting drone between the surface and the ship.

  A holographic display request from Captain Sil Chopra appeared on Jonathan’s aReal. He accepted, opting for audio only.

  “What is it, Captain?” he said.

  “Requesting permission to join the away team, sir,” Chopra sent.

  He frowned. “Permission denied.”

  “I have a degree in xenobiology, among others.”

  “So does O’Rielly.” That was the science officer who was going along.

  “I specialize in first contacts,” Chopra insisted. “I’ve studied all the major protocols.”

  “I don’t think your father could do with the distraction of having you along, Captain,” Jonathan told her. “Look, even if I wanted to let you go, we don’t have enough spacesuits with the necessary anti-psi modifications. However, because of your rank I can allow you to sit in on the proceedings with the other captains, but no more.”

  There was a long pause. Then: “Okay.”

  “I’m transmitting the access code now,” Jonathan said. “You’ll have read-only permission to Commander Cray’s feed.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Chopra transmitted.

  He closed the connection, only to open another one from McNamara.

  “The aliens have transmitted the final coordinates,” the ops officer said.

  “Dispatch them to the away team pilot,” Jonathan instructed McNamara.

  He terminated the line and watched Robert buckle himself into the Dragonfly.

  A tingling sensation passed up and down Jonathan’s spine. He couldn’t shake the feeling that a trap awaited below. Clairvoyance, or mere intuition?

  He suppressed the urge to swap out the commander for someone else. He had to stick to his decisions. Second-guessing and indecisiveness were the downfall of many an officer before him. Robert would simply have to take care of himself down there. He was certainly capable. Besides, he had the indomitable Chief Galaal with him, and a platoon of combat robots spread across two shuttles.

  The commander was completely safe.

  At least, that was what Jonathan told himself.

  nineteen

  Robert took a few deep breaths, trying to accustom himself to the stale air of the spacesuit. The suit had already injected the necessary accelerants into his body via the radial venous network of his hand: it would help him adapt faster to the inner environment of the suit, allowing him to avoid the effects of any decompression sickness.

  “Prepare for launch,” the pilot said.

  The ramp closed. Robert felt the compartment shake as the engines ignited. Through the small window across from him, between the shoulders of Chief Galaal and another MOTH, Robert saw the hangar bay doors open, revealing the bare stars. The curved profile of the planet consumed the entire right side, those yellow-brown clouds concealing its surface.

  The craft countered the artificial gravity of the hangar bay and floated into the air. The aft thrusters ignited and the bay slipped away. He could already feel his stomach doing flips—with the ship behind them, the artificial gravity had lifted, and in the ensuing weightlessness he had no sense of balance or direction. Was he upside-down or right side-up? It was difficult to ignore the confused signals his inner ear was sending his brain.

  In his helmet, slightly damp electrodes rested just below each ear. These were supposed to fire signals into the vestibular nerve to restore a sense of balance, but it never really worked for Robert. There were similar headphones designed for VR that utilized galvanic vestibular stimulation to help counter sim-sickness by making the brain believe its body was moving in relation to the camera in a virtual experience—but those never really helped him, either.

  He glanced at the science officer beside him. O’Rielly was holding up quite well. The last time they had gone on an away mission the man had vomited in his helmet because of the nausea-inducing weightlessness, but he seemed fine today.

  “Are you all right?” Robert asked him over the comm anyway.

  The science officer forced a grin. “Peachy.”

  “Initiating deceleration,” the pilot said.

  Reverse thrust apparently engaged, because the craft began descending toward the upper atmosphere. Thanks to the inertial compensators, Robert felt no Gs. Probably a good thing. But what the engineers really needed to do was come up with shuttle-based artificial gravity, because seeing that planet tilting outside made him feel queasy all over again. It didn’t seem like such a great technological leap to Robert to extend the inertial dampening to provide the feel of gravity, but the scientists claimed there was more to it than that.

  Beyond the window, the curved surface quickly became planar, swallowing the horizon on both sides. The view abruptly vanished in a haze of red-and-orange as the shuttle initiated atmospheric entry. All it would take was one heat shield to fail at that point and the Dragonfly and her occupants would incinerate. There was no other indication of the danger they were in: no shaking, not even a subtle vibration. The wonders of super-gimballed seats.

  The flames cleared, leaving behind a brown sky as the craft continued its descent into the upper atmosphere. The free fall continued for several minutes.

  “I’ll be stabilizing our descent shortly,” the pilot announced. “Prepare for realization of gravity.”

  Robert felt his weight slowly increase as the descent abated, and his sense of up
and down returned. When he thought the craft had stabilized, he checked the current gravity as recorded by his helmet aReal: point nine Earth G’s. He had felt no other G forces during the process: the compensators were designed to counter local inertial effects, not the external influence of a gravity well such as a planet. The strange choices of engineers...

  Beyond the window lurked a twilight landscape of black rock and yellow snow. The icy crags and glacial plains ranged as far as the eye could see.

  “I thought the scientists said this planet was supposed to be warm?” transmitted the human MOTH seated next to Chief Galaal. Robert’s aReal identified him as Aaron “Helium” Johnson. He was leaning forward, obviously looking out the portal behind Robert. “Something about a greenhouse effect?”

  “It is warm, given its location from the sun,” the science officer, O’Rielly, replied. Was that a slight nervous tremble in his voice? “What were you expecting, a tropical paradise?”

  “Let’s just say, when I hear the word warm, I think of green grass and blue skies, not some snowy landscape from hell.”

  “Shouldn’t hell be fiery?” O’Rielly said.

  “Maybe yours,” Aaron said. “Not mine. Mine is a very cold place. Sign up for MOTH training sometime and you’ll understand.” He paused. “Look at that. Yellow snow. It’s not often we can take a piss in the ice without leaving any evidence.”

  “Helium,” Chief Galaal said. The warning was obvious in his tone.

  “Sorry, Chief.”

  “I’m doing a fly over of Calypso,” the pilot announced. That was the code name of the target site. A moment later: “Looks no different than the surrounding territory.”

  “Any odd gravimetric readings?” Robert sent the pilot.

  “I’m not getting any from up here. I am, however, detecting a temperature drop of at least a hundred degrees directly around the site.”

  “Why didn’t we detect that from orbit?” Robert asked.