Local gangs would have lent him the money for a heavy price, which probably would have meant entry into a life he didn’t want. The idea of the Terran Space Force had entered his mind while gazing up at the shiny strip of High Terra against the moon, and he figured that if the operation meant servitude, the best choice was the one that got him out of Summerville. Why not get off Earth altogether?
* * * * *
Andy checked the time in his helmet display. The suit was still glitching, dropping its connection with Sunny Skies then picking up without adjusting for the lag. He figured he still had an hour before he needed to get to sleep himself. The kids wouldn’t let him sleep in.
Pulling the weapons case up the ladder tubes wasn’t as hard as he had expected, although he kept scraping his knees as he worked his way upward. The crate bounced against the inside walls, leaving swipes of gray paint in several spots. He’d have to make up a story for Cara to explain the new marks. She noticed things like that. She was like her mother, that way.
In the last corridor before the accessway to the habitat section, he hooked an arm around a support strut and rested. Looking down on the crate where it floated above the floor, he thought it looked a bit like a coffin. He pushed the thought out of his mind.
* * * * *
The two sergeants were on their feet the minute he walked through the door. Behind them, all the furniture was the same dull color he would come to know as “TSF Gray.” In all the times Andy had visited the recruiting station, he couldn’t recall ever seeing anyone sitting behind the big block-shaped desks that looked like folded defense mechs.
Andy was wearing the best clothes he could get together, his hair carefully combed and all his identification cards in his front pants pockets.
The first sergeant was tall and thin as a bone, while the other looked carved from a boulder. The thin one whose nameplate read Kass, reached Andy first. He was already frowning.
“You,” he said sharply. “Where’s your token? Why didn’t the door pick you up?”
Andy was taken aback by the tone of the man’s voice. He opened his mouth to force out an answer but the muscled sergeant, Hilton, cut him off.
“He’s pure, sergeant. Doesn’t have any EMF whatsoever.”
“Pure?” Kass said, sounding like he’d been told Andy was an alien.
“No broadcast,” Hilton said. “No origin indicator, either. Where’d you come from?”
“Summer—” Andy started.
“I don’t care where you came from,” Kass said, cutting him off again. “We’ll get to that later if it matters. What’s your name?”
“Come on,” Hilton said. “Answer.”
“Andy Sykes,” Andy said before one of them jumped in again. His voice sounded unnaturally high in his ears.
“Sykes,” Kass said. “First names are a waste of time. TSF doesn’t issue first names.”
“Sykes,” Hilton repeated. “I like it. Private Sykes. Maybe we’ll get you to Private First Class Sykes before you leave for Basic. What do you think about that?”
“Hold on,” Kass said. “Before you worry about that. What do you want to do, Sykes? You want to be a killer?”
Andy looked at each of them, figuring out this was all an act. He’d watched his dad play a similar game while working a hustle. Charlie would rain words on his target until they simply gave in and agreed with him. The key was to slow down his responses, make his words worth more than theirs.
He shrugged. “I’m here to learn,” he said.
The two men looked at each other. Andy figured they must deal with applicants without Links all the time. This was Summerville, after all. He supposed a Link would have allowed him to do all the research he wanted, watch all the first-hand video from combat reviews, even apply for entry without ever setting foot in a recruiting station.
“Why don’t you have a seat,” Kass said, motioning toward a conference table to one side of the room. Its surface was a display console.
“Thanks,” Andy said.
Over the next hour, they explained the many different jobs he could potentially perform in the Terran Space Force, from broadcast information specialist to freighter pilot. They talked about benefits, travel, education.
“How’s all this sound?” Hilton asked.
“It sounds good.”
“You interested in the aptitude test?” Kass asked.
“I am.”
The man’s skeletal face split in a grin.
The aptitude test was one of the strangest things Andy ever attempted. The questions started out overly simple and progressed until he was drawing on some of the more obscure elements of philosophy or history that his mother had insisted he think about.
“Don’t repeat it back to me, Andy,” she used to say, staring into the middle distance between them as she verified his answer against the database. “Tell me what you think. Get to the bottom of it.”
“That’s not fair, Mom,” he had whined. “You’re cheating.”
With a feral smile, she’d answered, “Yes, I am. Someday you will, too, so I have to abuse you now.”
His mom and dad were alike that way: they knew how to read people. His mom knew how to play him like an instrument, push him to the limits of his mind. When he’d finally received the neural Link, he’d felt like the house of his mind was suddenly filled with windows and doors—and she had built the walls to hold him up and protect him from the tsunami of adding the Link to his thoughts.
The questions shifted from too easy, to tricky, to obscure and esoteric. He guessed at the outcomes of mechanical schematics and finished logic circuits. Some of it was obviously ancient history, asking him to analyze spectrum circuitry, while other questions hinted at subjects he had only just read about.
He knew now that the test was progressive. For every correct answer, the questions branched and went deeper. He was sweating when he finished. The test didn’t tell him when he’d reached its last question. The screen merely asked, “Are you sure?” and prompted him to answer yes or no.
Andy had stared at the screen for a minute, trying to second-guess the question, before finally answering: Yes.
The screen instructed him to wait for results, so he sat in the small room with its promotional display on the wall reading: Terran Space Force Onward! Outward!
After what felt like an hour, the door swung out and Sergeant Kass stood in the opening.
“You got your ID on you, right?” the thin man demanded.
“Yes,” Andy said. He couldn’t understand why the sergeant sounded furious. Kass had checked his identification cards before seating him at the terminal.
“Good. Come on.”
Chapter Six
STELLAR DATE: 07.25.2981 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Sunny Skies
REGION: Approaching Asteroid Belt, Jovian Combine
Andy opened the storage cabinet and maneuvered the crate until it was sitting in the bottom of the locker. To a cursory glance, it might almost look like the bottom of the cabinet. It might fool a customs agent but it certainly wouldn’t get past Tim and Cara. He locked the cabinet with his personal security token just to be safe. If Cara did try to open the cabinet and discovered he had locked it, the worst she could do was come to him and complain about it. If she tried to force the lock, he’d get an immediate alert over the ship’s diagnostic system—as long as the system was functioning. The problems with his suit proved it was barely reliable.
Andy yawned and stretched. He glanced down the corridor where the ladder led up into the habitat ring. As soon as he returned to the command deck, he would double-check the ship’s EMF signature for responses that didn’t make sense. It bothered him that Sunny Skies might have already been broadcasting unknown signals from the stowaway crates for most of their trip.
If their onboard firmware was hiding activity, the crates could be serving as some kind of relay node for encrypted criminal data and he was going to be held accountable when they reached Cruithne
. Why else would someone hide crates aboard a slow-moving private freighter?
The TSF detail on Cruithne could certainly be tracking any errant signals. It was a mission he had done himself many times. That would explain why he hadn’t been boarded weeks ago. The TSF would sit back and capture all the data going in and out, then pick up the rubes piloting the ship when they arrived. The TSF detail was probably partying in one of Cruithne’s many clubs right now, laughing.
He kicked off for the ladder, trying to defend the possibility that the cargo was something simple, like drugs or illegal tech, something cheap enough to risk on Sunny Skies but valuable enough to smuggle. What if his ship was just one of hundreds, and the smugglers were gambling on half the ships arriving as scheduled? That made more sense. That pointed toward drugs. He could deal with drugs. They weren’t on his manifest and he could make a statement to station security when he arrived. No one was going to try to board the ship for drugs.
Drugs didn’t explain the weapons, though. It was entirely possible that a crate of TSF weapons had made it onto his ship by coincidence, part of the same sort of large smuggling operation. It was also part of the ship’s record that he was a veteran, so he supposed someone could be sending him a message. But what sort of message, and why? If it was personal, that made even less sense, but it worried him more.
As a former TSF combat pilot with ground experience, he’d had plenty of offers from private security firms when he had first left the service. Those had grown fewer over time and at this point he couldn’t remember the last time a headhunter had sent him a message that wasn’t a blanket offer.
As he pulled himself into the habitat gate and endured the stomach flip of taking on gravity, Andy grinned to himself letting his memory of the recruiting station run its course. Sergeant Kass had been a character, accusing him of being a plant from Higher Command, come to verify their testing techniques.
“You’re a cheater,” Kass had accused.
Andy had stammered a response, not understanding why he was suddenly under attack. He’d expected them to tell him he had failed and to kick him out the front door. Instead, Kass and Hilton had sat him down at the conference table and leaned in close on either side, glaring at him.
“No way you’re some kid from the Summerville slums,” Hilton growled. “Where you from really?”
“I’m from Summerville,” Andy said, not knowing what else to tell them. He wanted to get up and run but Kass had taken his ID card to enter his citizenship number in the system for a third time.
When Andy finally ran out of excuses, the two men sat down on either side of the table, crossing their arms. They looked at each other, and Andy recognized the expressions of men trying to figure out how to capitalize on a situation.
Kass motioned with a finger. “So, here’s what happened,” he said, eyes narrow with suspicion. “If you’re telling the truth and really don’t understand how you did on the test.”
“You did well on the test,” Hilton interjected.
“You did too well,” Kass said. “You did the kind of well that makes the system think it’s being hacked. We get tested by Higher Command every quarter to make sure we’re not cheating, bringing in recruits who don’t meet the standards.”
“You can do that?” Andy asked.
Kass gave him a withering look. “But some people, people who work for rogue corporations and things like that who want to hack the government, they’re always looking for a way in. So, we also get people who come in to take the test just to see what new methods TSF is using for selection.”
“That’s what you look like,” Hilton said. “Only you took the whole test, which most of them don’t. They get to the questions they want to analyze and then try to run.”
“Try to run? Can’t they leave if they want?”
“Nope,” Hilton said. “TSF Code 418.8 provides for the integrity and security of the recruitment process. Once you enter those doors, you are under the jurisdiction of the TSF.”
“I didn’t know I was agreeing to that.”
Kass pointed a long finger at the entrance. “It’s posted right on the door. If you’d checked the security token with your Link when you came in, it’s bright as day.”
“I don’t have a Link,” Andy said, finally giving up his bargaining chip. “That’s why I’m here. I heard all TSF recruits get an implant.”
Hilton’s eyes widened. He looked at Kass, who was slapping his knee and wheezing laughter.
Kass pulled in a breath and let out a whooping laugh. “You’re telling me, you passed the assessment exam without a Link?”
“I guess?” Andy asked. “Did I pass?”
Looking irritated with Kass, Hilton said, “Yeah, you passed. Like we said, you did too well.”
As Kass tried to catch his breath, Hilton tapped the edge of the table and brought up a display that hadn’t been part of the initial pitch.
“I believe you, kid,” Hilton said. “I’m not from Summerville but I grew up in a place like it in Utah. I get it. So, I’m showing you this but it’s not something we’re supposed to just advertise. You have to ask about it. So, I’m going to ask you once: Did you come here to learn about the TSF Officer Corps?”
Andy stared at him, not fully understanding the question. “Officer Corps? What’s that?”
“Excellent question,” Hilton said, tapping the table. He brought up another display with information on a special academy.
Kass had finally gained his composure. His face was still flushed. “You’re really going to show some hoodrat information about the academy?”
Hilton didn’t look up from the display. “His scores allow access.”
Kass snorted. “You’re talking him out of our bonus, there, Sergeant. He goes to the academy; we don’t get our cut.”
“It’s like that?” Hilton said.
“Yes, it’s like that.” Kass motioned toward Andy. “You think this kid is Academy material? He wants a neural implant. He doesn’t want to serve.” He turned his gaze to Andy. “How about it, kid. You here for yourself or for the TSF?”
Andy blinked. He’d never considered the question. Why would he want to “serve” the TSF? The thought had never entered his mind.
“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But if it will get me out of Summerville, then I want to hear about it.”
Hilton slapped him on the back. “Exactly,” he said. “Sounds like me when I was sucking dust back in Provo.”
Kass grumbled but didn’t say anything.
“I have a question, though,” Andy said. “What’s an officer do, exactly? In most of the history I’ve read, they’re either idiots or they die during the first battle.”
* * * * *
In the control deck, Andy eased himself into one of the three console seats and brought up the ship’s status on the display. He frowned as he realized how intermittent his data stream from the monitoring systems had been.
In truth, Sunny Skies needed a complete overhaul. The ship was a mess of short-term fixes stacked on top of one another. Getting caught in the debris storm was just the latest example of how failing systems on the ship were starting to impact each other. In a perfect world, the point defense system should have picked up the larger bits of debris long before they hit the torch, and he shouldn’t have had to cut off the shields and sensors if he didn’t have to EVA to fix a burned external power coupling. It was like trying to repair a sand castle in the wind.
He checked their progress along the flight plan. They were decelerating on schedule. Cruithne was just now reaching its furthest point from Earth, which would bring them into a rendezvous in thirty days. His fuel calculations had been correct, unfortunately, and they would arrive at the station with no way out unless he could buy more deuterium, which was probably going to be twice as expensive on Cruithne Station. He didn’t want to pull up market rates and depress himself even further right now.
A fluctuation on drive control drew Andy’s attention. Tempe
ratures were rising in the reaction bottle. He frowned, pulling up the control console for the drive containment system. An erratic flow of readings indicated multiple failures all across the system.
“No,” Andy said under his breath.
Rotating the diagnostic display, the fractures aligned in a straight puncture from the outer hull directly through the propulsion section and out again. Debris had penetrated the containment bottle and Alice hadn’t spotted the puncture during the exterior scan.
Andy swallowed, amazed the engines had held until now.
He attempted to decrease output. Gradually at first. He had a tight delta-V to Cruithne and couldn’t afford to lose deceleration thrust at this point in the flight plan. They’d overshoot the station and…he didn’t want to think about what would happen if they overshot Cruithne.
Andy pulled up the emergency monitoring system and saw that it had turned itself off at some point. Had he already set an override? He couldn’t remember doing that. It certainly wasn’t something the kids would have played with.
He shook his head. He would have to find the software bug later.
The erratic readings continued to shift all around the drive’s containment system, like lightning crackling around an egg. The weak spots were growing. Breaking out in sweat, pain jabbing his side as he shifted in the seat, Andy continued to chase thin points in the bottle, shifting resources even as other sections thinned in response.
After ten minutes, he accepted the mad chase was futile. The drive was going to fail.
He quickly pulled up the flight plan and checked their current delta-v to Cruithne. They were close. He could bring Sunny Skies in under chemical thrust if he dropped another ten percent.
Andy gritted his teeth. The kids weren’t in crash couches. If he did what he had to, it would be like hitting them all with a sledgehammer.
He didn’t have time. He had to slow the ship or they would be stranded between Earth and Cruithne, praying for TSF or anyone else to pick them up. They didn’t have enough food on board.
Lyssa's Dream - A Hard Science Fiction AI Adventure (The Sentience Wars - Origins Book 1) Page 4