We Are All Enlisted

by Michael A. Hooten

  I looked over at Holmes, but he just shrugged and we both started strapping in. It was a simple five point harness, but Mr. Eliot had to help King with his. King was a big guy, and not very bright. Both worked against him in new situations. Mr. Eliot had just enough time to get strapped in himself before all the screens in the room, including our tablets, started flashing red, and a woman calmly explained, “The space elevator is preparing for ascent. Please make sure your restraints are tight and all gear is secured.”

  The voice repeated this at thirty second intervals for a full five minutes, and then it went into countdown mode, starting at sixty seconds. When she got down to ten, we started chanting along with her, and at zero, I think we all clenched a little. I know I did.

  But the start went pretty smoothly. We were pressed back into our seats by the acceleration, but not uncomfortably. It felt similar to a jet taking off. One of the monitors showed the cable from the top of the elevator, and another from the bottom. The top didn’t show any noticeable change, but the bottom showed the elevator bay receding, and after just a few minutes we could see all of Port Dover.

  I had just started to relax when the real turbulence kicked in. It felt like we were swinging back and forth, with some serious vibrations that made me grip my seat arms tightly. “Not too scary, is it?” Mr. Eliot asked, and I wanted to answer The hell it isn’t! But I was afraid that I might scream if I tried to say anything.

  King lost his cookies first, and of course the big lunk forgot his barf bag. The smell of it alone set off three more people, but they had already grabbed their bags, and I shut my eyes and tried to breathe through my mouth. Mr. Eliot said, “Tsk, tsk, seaman King.”

  The turbulence lasted maybe thirty minutes, and there was nothing to do but suffer through it. In the end it passed into a calm that felt deceptively normal. I was able to pull out my tablet and call up an app that told me that we were travelling at 300 mph, and that we had already gotten some 200 miles from the surface.

  The monitors flashed green, and the woman’s voice said, “You are now free to move about the elevator. Please use caution.”

  Mr. Eliot released his harness and said, “Welcome to the exosphere, gentleman. You’ll notice that gravity is greatly reduced, yes? But your steel suit will stick to the floor, and you’ll get used to it fast enough.”

  He got up and walked to a cabinet on the wall and retrieved a vacuum and container of wipes. “Now seaman King, you’ll need to get yourself cleaned up. Vacuum everything you can, then wipe up the rest. Very easy to understand, yes? Now, please get started before anyone else feels unwell, thank you.”

  King, still looking a bit green, started his clean up, and Mr. Eliot came to each of the rest of us in turn, patting our arms and asking us a few questions. When he reached me, he said, “Seaman Wright, you’re not feeling wrong, are you?” and chuckled gently.

  “Not too bad, sir,” I said. “Why don’t they warn us about that?”

  “Because we’ve discovered sailors don’t listen well,” he said. “Say something, don’t say something, and it’s all the same. And your expressions when it happens are quite amusing.”

  “What about the civilian elevator?” Holmes asked. “Do they get warned?”

  “No need,” Mr Eliot said. “They get much less speed, so much less shaking. It’s a vacation experience, and it takes them ten days to reach the top. The Navy doesn’t like to wait that long, of course, so we’ll be there in about four.”

  “Figures,” Holmes said. “We’re just more cargo.”

  “Yes, exactly,” Mr. Eliot said. He looked over. “All done, seaman King? You missed a spot there. Ah, yes, now you’ve got it. Please dispose of the mess in the corner chute, and return to your seat.”

  Mr. Eliot walked back to the front of the space, and assumed his best professorial look, which was not much of a stretch for him. “Now that we have that taken care of, gentlemen, let’s get started. You have learned about all the mechanics of travelling in space, how to use your steel suit and such, but now we need to talk about culture. You have been learning the way the Navy does things, and that is good, but on the space stations you will be interacting with civilians, and they do things a bit differently than they do on earth. It’s like living in the United States and visiting Thailand. People are people, but how they approach life may seem quite alien.”

  And so for the next three days we learned about the way space culture has evolved, from a historical and practical perspective. I could tell you about the cotillions, the professional parents, the incentives for men to be with women, and the need for children in the space stations. And Mr. Eliot was pretty straight forward: what we encountered was pretty much like he said. Men and women interact very little outside of professional activities, and the social interactions are extremely structured. I’ve heard it’s more like living in the 19th century, socially speaking, but who could say? You’ve seen vids of it, I’m sure. All I know is, no woman ever chose me, back then. Now it’s a little different.

  But I’m telling you about the military side of things. As much as I liked Mr. Eliot, even more when I found him to be accurate in his descriptions, the military is always different from civilian life, even in space: they get cotillions and formals, and we get socials and mingles. So when we docked at Port Washington, or Space Station One (depending on your military affiliation), we stepped into a new paradigm. And that’s not just a business slogan, either.

  Chapter 4

  We spent the first night in the barracks on the military side of the station, Port Washington. And when we woke the next morning, we had instructions on our pads about where to report next. I had to report to Level 5, room 14 to start “A” school. Holmes got docking station 6; he had “A” school too, but it was at Port Jefferson/Space Station Two. We did that awkward guy thing, where we know we’re parting from a good friend, we never know if we’ll see them again, but we don’t want to be too emotive. So it was a handshake, a back slap, and a “See you around.” And then we headed our separate ways. That’s how it works in the military.

  Port Washington reminded me of the building where I got kicked out of the nuke program. There were classrooms, office space, and everything was painted institutional green. There are a few windows where you can watch the Earth spinning away below, but they are mostly in the officer’s mess and in the officer's quarters. We got monitors showing vids and infotainment channels, and in the exercise room, a full wall display showing various peaceful earthside scenes.

  And it was eight hours a day of classes, and every three days we had to stand a four hour watch.

  Honestly, it was easy to forget you were in space sometimes. Our steel suits kept us walking in the same orientation, and I got new coveralls and boondockers with magnetic soles for those places where suit discipline could be relaxed.

  Being in space as opposed to being on Earth was mostly a matter of adjusting our amusement. In class on Earth, we would flip our stylus’ up and try to get them to stick in the ceiling tiles. On Port Washington, we would let them go in midair with a little flick, trying to get them to rotate in place. On Earth we would spend our liberty trying to find a bar with plenty of girls. On the space station we would try to get invited to a social. On Earth we would go outside on our breaks; in space we would just go to the break room where they always had funny videos going on the monitors. Lots of cats. And people hurting themselves by being stupid. And they were all old, stuff my Grampa would have recognized.

  My classes were interesting at least. I had been tagged in high school as having an aptitude for math and mechanics, but I never really enjoyed either, at least not the way they were taught. I learned a lot more from Grampa and his ham radio rig. But now I didn’t have a choice, and got a crash course in electronics. Once I got past the basics (five weeks learning about DC electronics, five weeks of learning AC electronics), we delved into some pretty interesting things. We learned how to repair computers, communication systems, and 3D printers. We
learned electromagnetic propagation, encoding, and detection. And we learned ballistics.

  The last seemed a little esoteric to me, but Fire Controlmen really do run the weapons systems, and even though everything is guided these days, the Navy’s philosophy is that you learn underlying principles even if you never think you’ll use them. And some ratings are worse than others: info techs learn morse code, boatswain's mates learn how to splice rope, and quartermasters learn how to navigate using dead reckoning—and that’s not easy in space, but it can be done.

  My class had a dozen people, and two of them were female. That surprised me, but they were pretty cool. We spent 48 weeks together, and I couldn’t tell you any of their names, though I remember the one guy who had a nose like an eagle’s beak, and I remember that one of the girls was brunette and the other blonde. I was the only Earthborn, and everyone knew I was part of the special program to get more of us into space. I got some good natured ribbing about it, and some that was pretty petty and mean. But overall, I did pretty well. I even graduated at the top of my class, which I would have felt prouder about except that it didn’t seem that hard if you just paid attention and worked hard. And had a Grampa who taught you a lot about electronics when you were a kid.

  So the last week, they had a chief come in and talk to us about where we were going next. He pulled up a list of possible duty stations on the front monitor, and told us a little bit about them. Several of them were ships—going straight from A school to the fleet. I didn't want that, so I looked at the other stations offered. They weren’t actually places, but schools—there was the Vulcan system, with a couple of different specialties, and the Excalibur system, again with different specialties. I kept looking back at one in particular: sensor tech in the Vulcan system.

  The chief looked at us and said, “You will be called one at a time. First come, first serve. Highest GPA goes first.”

  My heart leapt when he said, “Seaman Wright, which duty station do you want?”

  Everyone else was busy looking up the different things in their tablets, but the chief was giving me that hard stare that meant he needed an answer. “I don’t know, chief,” I said.

  “Just pick one,” he said. “They’re all fine.”

  Something in his tone made me think otherwise. Probably all those stories Grampa told me growing up. On a hunch, I said, “Which would you choose, chief?”

  “Me?” he said with a grin. “Now that’s a good question. I’d go with Vulcan , because it’s used everywhere. Very useful for not being locked into one type of duty station. Excalibur is good, but it’s only used on battleships and dreadnoughts. But then again, so is Vulcan .”

  “You wouldn’t go straight to the fleet?” I said. He just gave me a glare at that, so I said, “Vulcan sensor tech.”

  “That’s your choice?” he said.

  “Aye, that’s the one.”

  He scanned my tags, and the monitor took off that choice. My tablet started beeping at me, and the chief said, “You’ve got your orders. Good luck, sailor. Dismissed.”

  I looked, and found directions to a part of the base I hadn’t been to before. I followed it to the detailer’s office, where a bored E6 scanned my tags, told me a bunch of stuff he read off a screen, and had me sign his screen. Then I was on my way on a transport to Port Jefferson, at the Earth-Moon L4 point.

  Stepping off the shuttle onto Port Jefferson felt like deja vu. Everything looked pretty much the same as what I had left, and following the directions up to my intake it seemed like even the people were the same. The only real difference was the lack of civilians.

  I got settled into the barracks, which had two man bunks separated by thin walls so that you had a little more privacy. My bunk mate FCSN Morris, was pretty cool. He was about a month ahead of me (it’s a six month school), and he liked to spend his free time creating insanely detailed drawings on his computer. His most ambitious weighed in at a whole terabyte. That thing worked at sixteen different zoom levels. Crazy stuff.

  I joined my class a few days later, and they were all older, higher in rank, and returned from the fleet. And all male, which was fine by me. I was the only Earthie, and the only one fresh out of A school. They treated me like a gifted younger brother, which means that they had my back while teasing me unmercifully.

  If you’ve never heard of the Vulcan system, I wouldn't be surprised. It’s a fire control system, meaning its entire purpose in life is to target what the Navy wants to destroy. But it’s not the guns and the missiles, which are the sexy part of a weapons system. No, my job was just to make sure the gunner’s knew where to aim, but they got to pull the trigger. We called them baby killers, they called us butt boys. And heaven help anyone not in those ratings who used those terms to describe us.

  The Vulcan system has three subsystems: sensors, computers, and interfaces. The interface guys worked on the consoles and monitors, and also maintained the apps that disseminated the info to whoever needed it. The computer guys maintained the central computer, which actually had several redundancies and a lot of software that had to be kept happy. I got the sensors, which included the radar, lidar, and all the passives.

  Port Jefferson is a major training center for the Navy, and we actually got to work on the equipment, but never at a normal time. Everything had to be scheduled around all the classes going on, and so one week we would be on afternoons, the next on graveyards, and then something in between. A few times we got day shift, but it didn’t happen often. I looked up Holmes to see if we could get together, but he had already shipped out to the fleet, on a tender ship between Earth and Venus. Which meant about as far from combat as it was possible to be.

  I learned all about how to work on electronics in zero G, which involves a lot of signal tracing to replaceable components. But there are some three thousand sensor ports on your average ship, with twice that many passive receivers. I had to be able to find a failure, fix it, and get the system back up. We got weekends off, and there were even some socials that we got to attend, with actual women and everything, though I never got a chance to hook up. But we were getting so crammed full of facts, figures, and formulas that I couldn’t worry about it. Some days it was an effort to remember my own name.

  And that’s part of the reason I got in trouble.

  It was a simple enough mistake. We had gotten a rare daytime shift, but we still got to stand watch. I thought I had watch at 0400 hours, but I really had it at 0000 hours. I read the schedule wrong. You’d think that it would all be programmed, but changes happen, so the Navy takes the attitude that you have to be responsible for checking everything yourself; it’s supposed to reinforce the whole “don’t take anything for granted” attitude. I had looked at the schedule before I went to class, and then forgot all about rechecking it.

  The guy I was supposed to relieve called me at 0030. “Where the hell are you?” he said.

  I had fallen asleep with my tablet floating just above me (there are some advantages to zero-g), and I didn’t understand what was going on. “What?” I said. “Is it 0330 already?”

  “Dude, it’s literally zero dark thirty. And you were supposed to be down here a half hour ago.”

  “What?” I said again.

  “Wake up, man,” he said. “Your watch started at midnight.”

  “No, I’ve got the next one,” I said.

  “No, you’ve got this one,” he said. “Get your ass down here.”

  So I managed to get up, get dressed (just coveralls, thankfully), and down to the watch station, which was just the entrance to the enlisted quarters. “I’m so sorry,” I said as soon as I saw him. His name patch said Owens, but he wasn’t in my class.

  “Yeah, whatever,” he said. “I logged it all.”

  I wished he hadn’t, but I said, “You gotta do what you gotta do.”

  He just grunted and headed off to his rack.

  The night was quiet. They usually are, and I spent the next three hours studying waveguides. My relief was r
ight on time, and I got a couple more hours of sleep. And woke to a message from my section leader to meet him after muster.

  So when everyone else headed for class, I followed him into his little office. “I heard you missed your watch,” he said. His name was Spitowski, but we just called him Spit for short.

  “I didn’t miss it,” I said. “I was late.”

  “If you’re not there fifteen minutes before your watch starts, you’re late,” he said. “You know that. Well, in the same way, if you’re not there when your watch starts, you’ve missed it. Even if you get there a single minute later.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, thought better of it, and closed it again.

  “What, no excuse?” Spit said.

  I shrugged. “I misread the schedule. I thought I had the 0400 watch.”

  “That’s not an excuse,” Spit said.

  “I didn’t say it was. I just meant that’s what happened.”

  Spit nodded. “I get it. I really do. But it’s not going to cut it, especially for someone like you. They’re watching you Earthies pretty close. So I have to send this up the chain.”

  I nodded.

  He cocked his head. “You’re not even going to try and protest?”

  “What good would it do?” I said. “I screwed up. I know it, you know it, Owens definitely knows it.”

  Spit shook his head. “Get to class. I already sent your instructor a note that you would be late.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  Everyone already knew the whole story, or variations of it, even though I hadn’t talked to anyone. So I got a lot of advice during the day, which fell into two basic philosophies: deny everything, or don’t say a word. The day went pretty normally otherwise, but afterwards, I got a message from Spit. I would have a preliminary hearing the next morning. I made sure I was on time for that.

  We met outside a door that was labelled “Conference Room 2”. Spit was there, as was his superior, Chief Clooney. He looked me up and down. “You’ve never been to one of these, right?”