by Tom Germann
The short-term answer that I could come up with was, I no longer had the stresses that had been affecting me on the course. The routine I was following was very regimented. There was a time for everything—sim training, food, exercise, and even the specific types of exercises that I did. All had been trained into me. At the end of my “day” I had time to study and review material that I had only skimmed before.
I understood that on long deployments, most Marines ended up with several degrees, if not finished then at least started until something more important or interesting came along. Yet while this was covered in briefing notes, it also was pretty clear that no new Marine would start taking courses other than mandated training for the first six months.
The rationale behind that made no sense. They told us it was that I was going to be too busy and working too hard. Given that I had five hours per twenty-four-hour cycle to myself, I thought that was pretty strange. It didn’t matter, though. All the available courses on the ship’s net for self-improvement were locked out to me on every ship on my journey to the edge of human space.
After a few days we stopped at the outer ring space station, where I unloaded to a small cubby the size of a closet. The freighter dropped off some other passengers and freight and picked up return passengers before departing and heading back in-system. She would stop at every facility on the way back, dropping off food, equipment, and personnel.
I was going to be here for at least five days. Star travel is not an exact science yet. My wait could be much longer if anything went wrong on the ship’s journey.
So I had some time. I, of course, kept my schedule going. I worked on the armour. Since I couldn’t get access to it on-station I was working in sim mode every time. I was supposed to work on my armour a minimum of two hours a day. I sat in that sim for three or longer. I had the latest updates, so spent time making sure that I was current on the suit.
Then I spent two sim sessions a day training, offensive and defensive. The sims were never that realistic due to processing power. I had limited use of the station’s AI so I did the best I could. I knew deep down that my training was not very realistic, but it was the best that I could do.
I was better able to work on my orders and drills. Those needed evaluation, but there was no real sim element to it and the station computer was able to effectively check them over. I wasn’t bad at writing or giving orders. I was just not that great when leading squared-off humanoid shapes into battle against other squared-off humanoid shapes.
Then I spent dedicated time in the gym, first on strength training and then doing various cardio exercises. The outer ring station is not on an Earth-type schedule. The main lights are always on and twenty-four hours a day, people are going. Humans are not meant to be “up” for twenty-four hours a day, so the station has a “dark side” where the living quarters for the staff are located. Down the one hallway where the sixty crewmembers that live and work here sleep is always a bit dimmer than the rest of the station.
For the rest of us, our small cubbies are right off a brightly lit corridor, which doesn’t really matter as none of that light gets into your room. It just feels weird, getting up and opening the door to such bright lights, as if it’s day when you go in and day when you come out. It throws your system off, even though I started to adjust to it slowly.
So with the unique scheduling on the space station, the gym was never empty. The small but high-tech gym always seemed to have someone around. Given that there were sixty crewmembers and another thirty personnel waiting for transit to deep space either through courier or one of the freighters that made regular runs, I was glad to get any time in the gym at all.
The one thing the station had going for it was its size. It was all long, spindly arms around a series of large habitats. Those spindly arms were actually quite large and were used by everyone as exercise tracks. Both running and speed-walking were popular, and while it was not really that far, at least you could get out and stretch your legs. I would do a few dozen circuits a day at a fast run.
Other than that, I stayed in my room and ignored everyone else there. I know that they were curious about me, or rather the Marines, and they had questions. But I really didn’t care. My job was to keep myself mentally and physically fit for this deployment.
My “holiday” mentality continued and I didn’t stress over it. I was just here for a short time.
On the morning of the seventh day, I was notified that my ship was inbound. A day later it docked, and four hours after that, I was allowed to load myself and my personal gear onto the ship. Before any of this happened, though, I had to go through the protocol to board.
One of the officers came off the ship and briefed the four people that were going on the courier. She was called the Dancing Wind, and she was small but had a good reputation.
Before I was allowed to board I had been shaved. Completely shaved. Every bit of hair removed. Courier boats are small and have small crews and do not have a use for gravity, aside from a “gravity room,” which is usually the gym. Something as fine as a hair could cause a problem with some of the systems. So they eliminate most of those potential problems before they even leave the station. All meals and food are eaten in the small galley, and nothing leaves. I thought that was a bit paranoid, but the rules are the rules and they need to be followed.
We had loaded ourselves on board, and were told to go to our cabins and secure ourselves when we were not involved with some element of ship life. There is no gravity on the small ships, which means that there is no up or down. Our “cabins” were three foot by three foot. They weren’t part of the normal ship, though. As passengers were loaded or removed, the crew would shift the internal storage containers around. I was sleeping in a three-by-three room that had been used to store dry goods before I boarded. There was Velcro on the wall with a sleeping bag attached to it. I just zipped myself into that and slept floating.
Of course, being on a courier boat, there are also rationing rules for water. There are no water showers on board. You have to dry-clean yourself, and it is a strange experience, but after a few dry showers I could go as fast as everyone else. Later I understood that while you were “clean,” you still ended up smelling. The strong odours that I had first smelt when transferring onto the courier wasn’t really ship smell. It was the crew’s body odour.
I had only been with them for three weeks, and during that time I had not been able to check my armour over at all. It had been secured in the cargo area and the crew was really nervous about me going near it. I guess they had images of the new guy going insane and smashing the ship up. So instead, I had spent as much time in sims and working out in the tiny gym machine that they had as I could stand. In those three weeks I ate when I ate and simply carried on with my life based on the Earth standard day that I was used to.
Every time I went to sleep, I dreamed. I kept seeing my armour out of the corner of my vision. Seven was standing with it. Both of them had their arms crossed, and Seven was always talking to my armour. If I struggled, I could just make the words out. The message was always the same faint whispering: “Do you see? He isn’t even working on you. He could have pushed and made sure that you were in the same room. His performance always was sub-par. He is so lucky that the higher ups took pity on him. . . .”
I wanted to tell them that I was not allowed; that the box was sealed and in cargo storage, even though I had asked for it. There was also no room in my “room” for a full suit of armour. Not unless I stayed in it. There wasn’t even a place to plug in the umbilicals that give the suit its power and life support.
I tried to scream at them both. But I couldn’t. I was stuck going through the routine.
After a few weeks of living in this haze I was convinced that I was going to die, or at least lose my sense of smell forever. For some reason the smells that everyone else grew accustomed to just seemed to get worse for me. Living in
a small cubby that smells like rotten milk and gym socks was not a thing I enjoyed.
When we finally arrived at the moon outpost, which orbited around a sun that I had forgotten the name of as fast as they’d told me, I quickly unloaded and I had the distinct feeling that the crew I left behind was glad to see me leave. But the only thing that was important to me was the outpost designation, Eight Two Papa. Everything else was just so much useless info.
I hadn’t cared. The ship, while in excellent condition, stank . . . and they had their own quirks and inside jokes that meant nothing to me. I was glad to be out of there.
The outpost was much better. As a stationary outpost on the surface of a small moon, it had been built larger with some underground caves that were dug out of the moon itself. Those would originally have been for storage and living. Then, as the outpost had expanded, they were used for storage and movement.
It is almost impossible to imagine what it is like living, working, and eating in an area totalling maybe three square metres. The suntan machines that are standard on every outpost humanity has established are great for “sunlight,” but really, deep down, we need open spaces, grass, fresh wind in our face, and an open sky above. The best the outpost could offer was a large cave with fake grass around the edge on a walkway about four feet wide. There were special heat lamps in the cave that were on every day for a certain amount of time. You could go and walk along this path during that time and pretend you were in a better place. . . . just so long as you didn’t look at the shipping containers stacked up in the centre of the room.
In space, there is not really any free space to use. Every little corner has to have two or even three uses.
I had met the outpost commander, and she was happy to leave me alone and for me to leave everyone else alone. I had a smaller cave that was off to the side where I could work on my armour, and I spent the weeks there establishing my routine. Typically I’d work two hours a day working on the suit and spend four hours a day working out, splitting the time between strength and stamina training with at least forty minutes on the cardio wheel running. Even on an outpost, there was not enough space available for a true running track. Of course, one of the benefits of running wheels was the power that you could generate. It was a competition point in most outposts to see who generated the most. Again, I never understood it, but both courier boat crews and smaller outpost crews tend to be clannish and view the entire universe with an us-versus-them mentality.
Then I would spend up to two hours a day in sim training based on the latest data from Earth. The processing power of the outpost AI was not that high, as it could never give me much capability. It really felt like I was playing some old-style video games. There was no reality there at all. The only effectiveness that I found there was in working on weapons-handling drills and the simplest range setups I had that I could load.
The one person at the outpost that I could relate to was Slick. Everyone called him that. It wasn’t the name that he was born with, but one that he had taken for himself. Slick was a strange guy. He smelled worse than most of the rest of the crew. He didn’t even take the one real shower a month he was allowed. He only ever dry showered.
Small, grubby, with a nervous twitch, smelly and almost rat like. He was also the best mechanic and technician that I had met yet. He could fix just about anything and would spend hours on end making parts in one of the three small workshops he had access to.
I met him when I found him spying on me while I worked on my armour. He was standing off to the side behind some crates, completely still. I don’t know how long I had been working before I realized that I was being watched.
I am highly trained, and some of that training was absolutely hellish. With my implants and the level of paranoia that they instilled in me in training, I should have been aware of him.
But I wasn’t. I didn’t even realize that he was there until I smelled him.
When I turned, he waved from where he was. He kept bobbing back and forth behind the cargo boxes like some sort of animal afraid to come out of its hole.
He looked harmless, so I just asked him, “Do you want to check out my armour and gear?” It was all right. The armour is coded to the wearer. The coding can be changed, but it takes specialized equipment that this outpost wouldn’t have, and it was powered down so I thought he couldn’t damage anything.
Then he fully popped out. I did everything I could not to laugh. He must have been five foot six and looked like he weighed maybe a hundred and twenty pounds soaking wet. His dark hair was a fuzz on top of his head, and he had stubble all over his face. He looked skinny as a rail, but I had the feeling that he was strong as the filthy arms of his overalls were rolled up and his arms had some sort of tattoos on them. It was difficult to tell as he looked like he was covered with a layer of grease. He had some sort of goggles on that were so dirty, I couldn’t really see his eyes.
He looked at me nervously and then started talking. His questions came fast and he wasn’t loud, so he had to come closer to me. After a few seconds of these rapid-fire questions about speed of deployment, difficulty of spare parts, and so much more that I just missed right out on, I just asked him again if he wanted to check it out.
I stepped to the side of the armour and he walked right up to the other side. He was so intense in looking at the suit that I wondered if he was a stowaway with mental health issues.
Then he looked over at me and made an effort to speak louder. His voice was still almost a whisper. “You spend hours on this every day. I bet that combat repairs are a problem. How are you supposed to deal with an extended deployment where you move past the mandatory service time by two or three times what is recommended? What happens? I bet you that the system goes down.”
He hadn’t been asking me. He was telling me. I couldn’t feel Seven or my armour standing in the background anymore.
Slick would come over every day and go over my armour with me. For someone that was the outpost handyman, I thought he knew a lot. Sometimes he would say things and I was sure he was wrong. Then I would go digging through the manuals later in the evening and find out that he was, in fact, correct. The armour had gone through over a dozen generations and was now actually the Mark Thirteen. Every variant was in the manual still, though, in a previous section.
Slick could point out more efficient or simplistic fixes to maintenance and repair problems than I was aware of. I never asked him, but he had to have access to the manuals or some of the sims for the armour. He could troubleshoot better than I could, and had suggestions on how to improve different functions.
Those were a good few weeks, and I spent every day learning a bit more from him.
Yet again, I had my own routine separate from most of the outpost crew—except for Slick.
Smaller crews have their own ways of doing things, and I hadn’t fit into any of them. When my section’s ship came in-system to pick me up, they deployed a fast shuttle to come get me. I had received the notification that my ride was inbound shortly after I had gone to sleep. I was up and ready to go in minutes. I moved my armour case and other equipment to the loading point and was set to go half an hour before the shuttle had even landed.
Again, I didn’t think that the crew was really going to miss me when I left. When I had arrived, it was a point of celebration because the monotony and sameness of the outpost’s life had changed. A bunch of strangers had arrived and brought news and the latest entertainment for those people stuck out here in the middle of nowhere, doing research that may take decades to complete. But the novelty wore off pretty quickly.
I was at the airlock, ready to board, standing next to a rep from the outpost that was there to collect any small material handed over at opening and make sure I didn’t leave the door open when I left. Then Slick came down a side tunnel and sidled up to me without really looking around.
“Hey, I just wanted to say good lu
ck, and keep that suit looking good, kiddo. I saw how poorly some of your tools were, so I built this for you. It’s an older design that they don’t use anymore, but it’ll get you in those little spots on the armour.” He handed me a tiny little tool and then he was gone down the passage without a word. He just zipped away and disappeared.
Next to me, the outpost rep was wide-eyed. She looked at me. “I didn’t think that Slick could talk. I’ve never even heard him speak or grunt, and he talked to you and even made you a tool? He must really like you to bless you like that.”
I stared at her. “Why would that be a blessing? Isn’t he your general technician or handyman for the outpost?”
Her mouth was hanging open and she was just blinking at me. She hadn’t appeared to be an idiot on the one or two occasions I’d seen her before. In fact, she was cute and worked out a lot.
She shook her head. “Handyman? He’s the chief assessor for all systems on the outpost. He evaluates everything and rebuilds stuff all the time. He spends most of his time in his workshops, and has built most of the mining equipment that the Corporation uses.”
I loaded onto the shuttle as soon as it had landed and the secured doors unlocked and opened. The boarding tube was big enough that I could push my armour case through it with no problems. There were two crewmembers aboard to receive me, but they weren’t part of the section, just pilot and co-pilot. I loaded the last few cases onboard while the co-pilot talked to the outpost crew, and then we left.
I had secured the last piece of my cargo in the open hold area, and as the co-pilot closed the door, retracted the umbilicals, and then locked everything down, he called over his shoulder at me from the hatch. “We are off the pad and heading home in less than five.”
He tapped a screen a few times and then walked past me quickly, heading for the bridge.