by Jay Allan
My first few years in the Corps hadn't been easy and, though I didn't know it yet, the next few to come would be even more difficult. But as I sat there and took stock, I came to realize that I had indeed found a home. Yes, we fought and struggled, and some of us died, but there were things on the frontier worth fighting for. When I was discharged from the hospital on Armstrong I spent my month's leave on the planet. I had the time to just look around, and what I saw amazed me. The people were busy, industrious...and free.
They were having local elections when I was there, and half a dozen candidates were running. I stood one day and watched a live debate in the main square. I was mesmerized - they were actually arguing issues and hurling pointed questions at each other. It was nothing like Earth, where the elections were a farce and the government controlled every aspect of its citizens' lives. These people were building a future, for themselves and for mankind, and we were here to protect them.
It made me think about Earth and wonder why the people accepted the system that oppressed them so badly. It was a nightmare, a grotesque, a hideous perversion of the human condition. But it worked, after a fashion. The Cogs were ruled by deprivation, by the need to focus solely on the basics of survival. The middle classes were governed by the fear of losing what they had. They could see how the Cogs lived, and to them, not born to such deprivation, it was a terrifying prospect. Part of me resented that they, mostly educated and vital to the functioning of society, meekly accepted the system when they could have agitated for change. I wanted to despise them as cowards and blame them for the plight of the Cogs, for the reality that my parents were forced to live.
But it is easy to make such judgments, and far more difficult to be honest with yourself. If my father had been offered a middle class life, if we’d been able to live in an apartment in the Louisville Downtown or the Washbalt Core instead of some miserable leaky hut on the farm…I’m not so sure I wouldn’t have been ruled by the same fear of losing it. I like to think I would have fought for change, but I’m not so sure. I would now, of course, but then, never having seen what was possible? I just don’t know.
But none of that mattered anymore. By a bizarre road I had found my path. For the first time I felt my life had purpose and I knew the sacrifices were worthwhile. I was finally home.
Bitter Glory
Crimson Worlds Prequel II
By Jay Allan
To the wise, life is a problem; to the fool, a solution. - Marcus Aurelius.
Chapter 1
Control Center
AS Wasp
In Earth Orbit
The command chair was surprisingly hard and immobile. Garret would have sworn the small ridge along the back was designed specifically to poke him in the spine. He’d ached to sit there for so long, but always in his imagination the captain’s seat was comfortable, inviting. Now that he was there, shifting his weight awkwardly, he had a new thought…maybe the captain shouldn’t be too comfortable. Perhaps it was the fate of the commander to be constantly on edge.
Whatever the truth, he would soon find out. The privilege of command was now his, and the burden as well. He’d longed for this day since the first time he donned his midshipman’s whites, and his service since then had been an uninterrupted road to the captain’s chair. Garret was a brilliant officer; all of his commanders agreed on that. But he was cocky too, an arrogance based on enormous ability, but one still uncontrolled by wisdom. His evaluation reports all said the same thing - he was a tactical genius with an uncanny capacity to anticipate enemy maneuvers. They also said he was audacious, even reckless…that he lacked caution.
Many young officers were overly ambitious, thinking themselves immortal, going into battle boldly, fearlessly. Most of them gained caution with age and learned to understand the realities of war. Those who didn’t usually died. But Augustus Garret was too skilled, too capable. His enormous abilities saved him multiple times when his daring seemed likely to get him killed. His ego grew, and he came to believe he could handle any situation, that no crisis could overwhelm him.
He’d talked many times with one of the professors at the Academy about the heavy responsibility of being in that seat, of the sometimes terrible consequences of decisions that were the captain’s alone to make. Captain Horn had been a decorated officer with a spotless record and an unimpeded trajectory to the admiralty. Instead, he ended up, years later, still a captain, but now behind a desk teaching midshipmen. One of those decisions years before had gone horribly awry, but Garret never knew just what it was that had so affected Horn he could no longer face the command chair. He was very fond of Captain Horn, but he was also young and arrogant enough to be sure nothing like that could ever keep him from his own destiny. Horn had sent Garret a message after his promotion, congratulating his old student. He ended with a reference to an ancient passage, saying to Garret that it was now time to put away childish things. He doubted the heroic young captain would take his council to heart, or even grasp his meaning, but he tried nevertheless.
Garret smiled as he glanced around the small control center, each of its five workstations gleaming white and silver. Wasp was so new they were still peeling protective polymer wrapping off the equipment. She was the second ship of the class to enter service, and she was all his. He had already decided she was perfect…other than the hideous chair.
His crew hadn’t boarded yet. Technically they were all still on leave like him, scheduled to report the next day….today, actually, as it was well past midnight, station time. But Garret couldn’t stay away. He’d wandered down to the bay, intending only to take a quick look at the ship sitting in her docking cradle. It was quiet on the station, almost eerily so, with no one around except the skeleton crew working late night maintenance.
She was the most beautiful thing Garret had ever seen. Aerodynamics wasn’t an issue in spacecraft design, but Wasp had a sleek, streamlined hull anyway, largely the result of the need to wrap the ship around its dual torpedo tubes. The heavy plasma torpedoes were something new, and they made Wasp a very dangerous vessel, one with a punch that could hurt even a capital ship. Nothing was free, of course, and that offensive power came at a high cost in sacrificed armor and defense. The fast attack ships were known as “suicide boats” for a reason, though the crews tended to take the name as a badge of honor.
Garret admired his ship’s form, 102 meters of dark grey heavy metal alloy, held in place by two large brackets and connected to the station by half a dozen snaking umbilicals. They were almost done fueling the reactor; the food, equipment, and other supplies had already been loaded. In another hour she’d be ready to go, waiting for her new captain and crew to board and take her out.
He had promised himself he wasn’t going to go aboard again tonight, but after standing in the docking bay for a while he couldn’t resist. His captain’s credentials gave him 24 hour access, even though the ship was technically closed to all but maintenance personnel. He climbed through the access portal and made his way methodically down the tube. The umbilical was a zero gravity environment, and it was slow going, grabbing the handholds and sliding himself along.
The attack ships didn’t have the same level of artificial gravity as larger vessels. When the ship was underway, the core would rotate, providing the feel of partial gravity to much of the vessel, but that would be half Earth-normal at best. In the docking cradle she rotated along with the station, and once Garret climbed out of the tube he experienced a reasonable facsimile of the station’s 0.85 Earth-normal gravity. It wasn’t actual gravity, of course, but it felt real enough.
He lost track of how long he’d wandered around the ship, prowling its empty compartments, before he ended up on the bridge, back in his uncomfortable but prized chair. A capital ship had many levels, and mazes of corridors, but Wasp was a vastly simpler vessel, with three decks, two above the spinal-mounted torpedo tubes and one below. Each deck was traversed by a single primary corridor with several small lateral accessways. Serving aboard
Wasp would be a cozy affair.
He leaned back in the command chair and breathed in deeply. There was an odd collection of smells in the air, the scent of plastic packing materials mixed with faint burning odors from new systems activated for the first time. Later today he would sit in this very spot and give the orders for Wasp to break free of the station’s embrace and begin her voyage to whatever destiny awaited her. The Alliance was at war, so that future would no doubt include a considerable amount of combat. Garret had no idea whether Wasp would be assigned to a battlegroup or a detached hunter squadron but, wherever she went, he was certain his crew would do their duty. He would see to that.
He knew he should go back to his quarters on the station and get some sleep; the day ahead promised to be a momentous one. But he couldn’t bring himself to leave the ship…his ship, and every time he shifted his body to go, he just ended up sliding around in the chair. Eventually he closed his eyes, not sure if he was asleep, awake, or somewhere just on the cusp between the two. His mind drifted back, dreamlike, over the years that led to this day, to his service as a junior officer, and deeper into the past…to a younger Augustus Garret, what seemed like a lifetime ago.
Chapter 2
Bluestone Manor
Alliance Sector
Terra Nova – Alpha Centauri A III
The Garrets had lived on Terra Nova for almost a century. Indeed, for as long as there had been a Terra Nova, there had been Garrets living there, and for the last 70 years Bluestone Manor had been their home. The first Augustus Garret on Terra Nova had arrived as a penniless adventurer, one of 40 brave souls sent to claim the first habitable world man had discovered outside his native solar system. The family documented its history well, especially the early days on Terra Nova, but no one could ever seem to recall why the oldest son in each generation was saddled with the name Augustus. Reasons had long become immaterial, however, and the custom was deeply forged in family tradition.
The Manor was really just a large house, ramshackle in design and expanded haphazardly over the generations as the family grew. Despite the grand name, there was nothing extraordinary about Bluestone Manor; it was big, but by no means a mansion. The Garrets got by fairly well, but they were not truly wealthy. Few people on Terra Nova were.
Man’s first interstellar colony had never lived up to its early promise. The planet proved to be lacking in many resources, especially compared to other worlds being rapidly discovered, and it was quickly bypassed for more promising destinations. The early settlers also discovered that Terra Nova was home to a massive array of local bacteria and viruses, many of which were highly resistant to treatment. The young colony suffered a number of devastating plagues before its medical services caught up with the virulent native pathogens.
Terra Nova had become an aging world, a place from which young people with options emigrated, leaving behind older generations and those lacking the resources or motivation to start over someplace else. With the Alliance’s massive expansion into space, there were always opportunities for adventurous colonists willing to leave all they knew behind and step into a new life, and many young Terra Novans did just that, draining the colony of its most promising and dynamic inhabitants.
There was another route off Terra Nova…military service. The Alliance Marines and navy had expanded rapidly as the number of occupied worlds increased, and the Superpowers battled for control of the choicest real estate. The Marines were somewhat of an odd organization, recruiting most of their strength from the slums of Earth. It was an unorthodox strategy, but one that seemed to work well. The Alliance Marines were considered one of the finest military formations in space, and their record was largely one of victory.
But Terra Nova was a naval community through and through, and most of those who sought adventure or opportunity in the military signed up for service with the fleet. Though the divided world was itself demilitarized by the Treaty of Paris, the inhabitants of the Alliance Sector provided the navy with its single largest source of new recruits.
The Marines started everyone at the bottom…even the Commandant of the Corps had made his first assault as a private. But the navy was different, and the divide between officers and crew was more pronounced than that in the Marine Corps, the stratification more rigid.
Most Terra Novans, uneducated and living in the planet’s ramshackle ghettoes, joined the enlisted ranks of the navy and served out their careers in that capacity, usually becoming specialists in one area or another. Few enlisted crew advanced to the officer ranks, and there was a practical and social divide between the commissioned and non-commissioned personnel. While most Marines came from Earth, the vast majority of the navy’s recruits were colonists, pulled from all the worlds the Alliance had settled.
That divide between the classes was a reality within the active service navy, but entry into the coveted officer corps was entirely egalitarian. Every year the fleet recruitment office offered the Test, which was open to any applicant. The Test was infamous, not only for its great difficulty, but because it was highly unorthodox. It annually confounded the majority of those who took it, including many of the most intelligent and educated applicants. But each year a small number, substantially below 1% of those who took the Test, received the coveted invitation to take the formal entrance examinations to the Naval Academy. To anyone who had passed the Test, those exams were a formality.
Augustus Garret, at least the eighth of the family to bear the name, had wanted to go to the Academy as far back as he had memories. As a child, his room was filled with models of the navy’s most famous ships and, as long as he could remember, his only goal in life was to take the Test…and to leave Terra Nova to become a naval officer and win glory and fame.
Garret was a poor student, though everyone who knew him agreed he was extremely intelligent. He was rebellious, unhappy at being stuck on Terra Nova. He argued with teachers and was prone to skip classes and get into all sorts of petty trouble. There was nothing on Terra Nova he liked, not school, not friends, not the Garret family businesses…nothing but Charlotte Evers. Charlotte was a tall, thin girl, with a striking mane of red hair. He’d known her as long as he could remember. He had no memories that didn’t include Charlotte, at least no pleasant ones. They’d grown up together, and they’d been inseparable.
No one in the family thought the surly and rebellious Augustus would ever pass the Test, and they all assumed he’d marry Charlotte and settle in to take his place managing the moderately successful Garret businesses along with his cousins. Time, age, and responsibility would mature him, they thought, and he would settle in and find his place. But Augustus had other ideas.
The day of the Test finally came, and the 18-year old Augustus reported to the naval testing center. He was told to arrive two hours early to clear the DNA testing, but he made sure to be there four hours ahead of time. The Test was serious business, and the navy made it virtually impossible for anyone to cheat. After his identity was confirmed he was led down a long, narrow corridor by a Marine in spotless gray fatigues. The floor was a utilitarian composite tile, and the walls were bright white. There were small doors, hatches really, on both sides of the corridor every four meters or so, though there didn’t seem to be handles or controls on any of them. They passed at least ten of the doorways before his escort stopped and pulled a small controller from his pocket. He pressed a button, and the hatch on the right slid open.
“When I seal this cubicle, you will be locked in for the duration of the Test. You may activate the Test whenever you wish by verbally advising the AI that you are ready. From that point you will have six hours to complete all sections.” The Marine sounded bored, monotone. Garret imagined he’d been through the speech more than a few times.
“The cubicle contains a relief facility and a station that dispenses water and nutrition bars.” He motioned for Garret to step inside. “The red lever is your distress control. If you suffer a medical emergency or need to leave for any reason, activate
this lever, and assistance will be dispatched. In this event, your test results will be invalidated.” The Marine paused, allowing Garret to consider what he had said. “Do you understand everything I have explained to you?”
Garret looked back over his shoulder. “Yes.” He was trying to hide his excitement, but it was difficult. All his life he’d been dreaming of this moment, and now it was here. He was scared too, though he wouldn’t let himself admit it. In the back of his mind the uncertainty played on him…what if I don’t pass?
“As I explained, when I close this door you will be locked in until the Test is complete.” He stepped out into the hallway, leaving Garret inside, standing in front of the workstation. “Are you ready?”
Garret sat down in the seat. It was some type of imitation leather, and it was surprisingly comfortable. He leaned back and let a small smile creep onto his lips. “Yes, I’m ready.” The door slid shut behind him, leaving him alone, sitting silently staring at the workstation.
He could feel his heart beating, pounding loudly in his ears. Garret was prone to bravado, and he’d expressed nothing but cool confidence about the Test. But now it was just him, and it was time. His tension was building. His mouth was dry, his stomach tight. His life’s dream…and it all depended on the next six hours.
He took a deep breath, and he pushed the fear aside and stared at the workstation’s screen with a focused intensity. “I am ready to begin.”