1st to Fight (Earth at War) Page 16

  Finding my way to the human quarters from the sickbay wasn’t as easy as it sounded. The ship was organized horizontally, which made sense. They had artificial gravity and didn’t have to worry about acceleration from a reaction drive, so they could have arranged it however they wanted, but they’d chose to orient everything to an x-axis in line with the direction of travel and a y-axis perpendicular to it. Since the ship was freaking huge, this meant every level was just as freaking huge.

  And God alone knew what alien thought processes had gone into the floor plan for the place. The sickbay was near the center of the ship and so was the bridge, which both made sense in a way, since they were in a highly-shielded section of the vessel. But the food stores and the fabrication shop were also on the same level, which didn’t.

  I wandered through the fabrication section, the boxy machines inactive and un-crewed at the moment with nothing to make or repair. They’d been busy as hell when the ship first arrived in the system. I’d seen the footage of humans and Helta working round-the-clock shifts using raw materials brought up from Earth and later, the automated mines on the Lunar surface to fabricate the parts for our battery packs and KE guns and a thousand other things. Eventually, they’d been used to fabricate parts for our own fabricators, which were now running back in Daniel Gatlin’s shops on Earth.

  Gatlin had confided to me that the technology would revolutionize the global economy in a matter of years. Not decades, but years. And that wasn’t counting the fusion reactors, the medical technology, the batteries, the high-temperature superconductors, and a half a dozen other things I was probably forgetting. In ten years, our whole society would be unrecognizable. If we survived. That was the trick, the surviving part. Even if the Tevynians didn’t come for us, how much would it take for the Russians to lose their shit and launch a nuclear strike?

  I found myself wishing the ship had elevators. Starships in my books had elevators, starships in the movies and on TV had elevators, and the really freaky alien spaceships had gravity chutes and teleporters and cool stuff like that, but we got the aliens who liked to walk. I mean, walkways that took you at a ninety-degree angle to the decks were kind of cool and played hell with my inner ear, but I was still walking, and my hip was still sore.

  And I got lost. Twice. And somehow, I had the bad luck to get lost when there were no humans around at all. The Helta looked up from their tasks and regarded me with what passed for polite curiosity among the alien bear people when I tried to ask them which way to the crew quarters. One of them pulled out something that looked like a cross between a tablet and a scratching post for a miniature cat and did something to it and it spoke to me in oddly-accented English.

  “I do not speak your language. Please ask the translator any questions you may have.”

  I tried to smile, but managed more an exasperated baring of teeth.

  “How do I get to my quarters?” I enunciated carefully, not knowing how sensitive the thing was.

  “I apologize,” the translator said, “but I am unable to parse your accent. Please try again.”

  Accent? I was born in Florida and live in Vegas, I didn’t have any accent!

  “I said,” I repeated, trying to make my voice flat and Californian, “how do I get to the human living quarters?”

  “You seem to be asking for the life support control station. Is this correct?”

  “No, that’s not correct.” Damn, my hip hurts…

  I grabbed the translator out of the Helta’s hand and held it like a microphone on karaoke night at the bar.

  “Do you know where the humans are staying?”

  “Humans are located on Earth,” the machine said helpfully, “as well as Tevynia and a handful of colony worlds that…”

  I shoved it back at the Helta and walked away. It was only a starship larger than anything humans had ever built. I’d just wander around until I ran into another American, or collapsed of dehydration.

  Luckily, another American found me. It was Corporal Quinn, and I spotted him running down a perpendicular corridor as I was about to head up it, and my inner ear rebelled at the sight of him trotting down the side of a wall.

  “Hey, Major Clanton!” he yelled.

  Then I saw the frown cross his face, the same one I got whenever I came to a junction in the gravity-skewed corridors and my personal sense of up and down was insulted. He shook his shoulders as if he was trying to get rid of the disorientation, then took the last few steps past the curve to where I stood next to something that might have been a giant, cybernetic mushroom or the Helta equivalent of an espresso machine or anything in between.

  “Quinn,” I said, wanting to hug him, “I have never been so glad to see a familiar face. For the love of God, tell me you know how to get to the crew quarters.”

  “It’s back up this way,” he said, pointing to the way he’d come. “About half a mile through life support, then up another deck and on your right. But you’re not going there.”

  “And why would I not go there?” I asked him. “I’m tired, I just had my hipbone fused with a laser and I’ve been told I stink and need a shower.”

  Quinn took a whiff and his nose wrinkled.

  “They were telling you the truth, sir,” he agreed. “But you’re still not going there. Colonel Brooks sent me to find you. She said Colonel Olivera has been trying to reach you but you’re not answering your comms.” He tapped the tiny, flesh-colored bud barely visible in his right ear. It was, I knew from previous briefings, connected to something similar to a cell phone or small tablet attached to his belt, except that this model worked via radio waves, WiFi or satellite signal, whichever was available.

  “I’m not answering it because I don’t have one yet,” I said. “Since I came here directly from a battle and went to the battle directly from a borrowed car, and I think even my damned cell phone is still sitting in that car.” I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment in frustration. “And dammit, I didn’t even remember to put my cell service on hold while I was gone. If one of those damn Space Force clerks finds my phone and starts streaming porn—”

  “Colonel Olivera wants you on the bridge, sir,” Quinn interrupted. “He said to drop whatever you’re doing and get up there immediately.”

  “Shit.” I didn’t want to sound like a whiner, but I did. “I was just up on that level! In the sickbay, getting my broken hip fused. Couldn’t someone have checked?”

  “Sorry, sir,” Quinn said. “I’m just following orders.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Unless you brought a wheelchair with you, you can call and tell them I’m on my way.” I turned around and began walking back the way I’d come. “Limping,” I added over my shoulder.

  The Helta I’d passed stared at me as I passed them coming back the same direction and I wondered if they thought all humans were this peculiar or if they’d just pegged me as the weird one. I was beyond caring. The local anesthetic had worn off and beyond the dull ache in my hip, my shoulders, neck and lower back were one giant mass of bruised muscle, and I wondered just what the hell was so important that Olivera thought it couldn’t wait.

  The bridge had changed quite a bit from my last visit, more than any of the rest of the ship I’d seen so far. Duty stations had been added to let human crewmembers stand watches alongside their Helta counterparts, to learn on the job for when we had our own ship, and most of the holographic displays had English readouts beside the Helta language. Julie was at the helm, with a Helta driver on one side of her and another human trainee on the other, because the Helta trusted her abilities now more than they did their own. Joon-Pah was still at the captain’s station in the center of the compartment, but Olivera had a chair at his right shoulder, a back seat driver.

  “Clanton!” Olivera said, rising from his chair as I got to the bridge. “You got here just in time.”

  “What’s up, sir?” I asked him. “Sorry I don’t have comms yet, there wasn’t time before we had to leave on short notice.”

  “Yes, I he
ard what happened.” Olivera hopped out of his chair with enthusiasm in his step. “That’s why I called you here. You kept us from possible disaster and I thought, given your background, you might like to be on the bridge for this historic occasion.” He grinned like a kid at Christmas. “We’re about to jump into hyperspace, for the first time in human history.”

  Unless you count the Tevynians. I didn’t say it, though. He was obviously psyched for this, and who was I to harsh his buzz?

  “Is there someplace I could sit down?” I asked him.

  “No need to strap in for this one, Andy,” Julie answered for him, twisting around in her seat, favoring me with a smile. “We’ll either make the jump or we won’t, no turbulence involved.”

  “There is nothing to threaten us in hyperspace,” Joon-Pah expanded. “Or, rather, whatever else is in hyperspace is impossibly isolated from us.”

  They’d all misunderstood, but I didn’t try to correct them. Olivera obviously thought he was offering me a rare honor, and even though I’d been played for a fool by the Russians and would have probably fucked up the whole mission without Jambo, I wasn’t going to ruin the whole thing for him by acting like a wimp.

  “All stations,” Olivera said, hands on his hips, consciously melodramatic, “are we go to depart Earth orbit?”

  “Engineering is a go.” The squat, troll-like Space Force officer was Captain Cochrane, a PhD in physics qualifying him to train under the Helta hyperdimensional specialist. I hadn’t met him, but Olivera had given me a rundown on the crew after we’d received our Ponce de Leon shots.

  “Tactical is a go,” Major Baldwin reported. She was new to the Space Force, transferred over from the Navy due to her combat experience. She was a soft-spoken, petite woman and I never would have guessed she was the only Naval officer to ever sink a Russian destroyer in battle.

  “Docking bay is a go.” Major Franich. Yet another Navy transfer and I wondered if they were going to have so many Navy officers, why didn’t they just make it the Space Navy instead of keeping it under the aegis of the Space Force? But he’d been the CAG on an aircraft carrier during the Venezuelan War, which made him, in my opinion, overqualified to wrangle a pair of shuttles.

  “Life support is a go.” Captain Bennett was the only one on the bridge below the rank of O-4. She’d been a civilian NASA employee before the Helta had shown up, and the Space Force had brought her over to learn how to keep us alive in space.

  “Helm is a go,” Julie confirmed. “We are ready to break orbit, sir.”

  Julie was a Lt. Colonel now instead of a Captain, because, well…Space Force. Air Force ranks, which came from Army ranks, instead of Navy ranks, and yes, I know I was entirely too bitter about there not being a Space Navy and Space Marines. Damn Army.

  “Take us out of orbit, Colonel Nieves,” Olivera said.

  I felt nothing, of course, which seemed anticlimactic. My grand total of two trips into orbit had made me an expert on what space travel should feel like, and I wanted acceleration pressing me into my seat. The view in the holographic display was spectacular, real enough I could almost have believed I was looking out a window instead of sitting close to the center of the ship watching a feed from the external cameras. But without acceleration, it was like watching a rollercoaster ride on television instead of being in the car on the track.

  This particular track led us away from Earth with the ease of leaving the rollercoaster station, skipping the multiple gravities a rocket would have required, skipping the orbital transfers for raw power, punishing spacetime for trying to stop us instead of us for defying gravity.

  “How far away from Earth do we have to be to jump?” I wondered, my curiosity overwhelming the aches and pains trying to distract me.

  “Just beyond Lunar orbit is good,” Julie told me, her voice a bit distracted, most of her attention on manipulating the helm controls, setting the ship’s course. “We’re going a bit farther just for safety reasons, since this is a government operation.”

  “You’re lucky they aren’t making us all wear reflective belts,” I reminded her, which drew sharp, snorting laughs from all the military veterans, though Captain Bennett looked clueless.

  Joon-Pah also seemed confused and cocked his head sideways toward me.

  “Are these reflective belts a defense against laser weapons?”

  Julie laughed so hard I thought she was going to take the ship right into the Moon and make another huge crater beside the one the Tevynian ship had left.

  While Olivera endeavored to explain to the Heltan about the military’s obsession with making men in a combat zone wear reflective belts when they were doing PT for fear of traffic casualties, the Truthseeker, as a poet might say, slipped the surly bonds of Earth. The stars didn’t twinkle outside the atmosphere, I noticed. With no air to distort them, they were preternatural in their clarity, too beautiful to be real, an ocean of them with not a single patch of blackness bare of the distant glow of alien stars.

  I was hypnotized by them, lost in the depths of interstellar space, and I wasn’t aware of the passage of time until I heard Julie’s voice again.

  “We’ll be clear to jump in five minutes,” she announced.

  I blinked, wondering if I’d simply been woolgathering for that long or if the ship was even faster than I’d imagined.

  “How do you navigate in hyperspace?” I asked, the question like bread scattered on the waters, waiting for whoever might be able to answer it.

  “They explained all that to us in training,” Julie said. “Turns out there are these gravimetic lines of force running between all mass everywhere, and when it’s something as big as a star or even a planet, the slope is sort of downhill, to force an analogy that’s way too broad to be meaningful except as an illustration. In practice, what it means is that there’s a sort of roadway system all throughout the universe, and the closer shit is together, the more roads there are to choose from. So, from here, it’s a matter of putting ourselves in the right spot to hit a major road to another star system.” She smirked as she glanced back at me. “Then, when the interstellar roadways intersect, we take a left turn at Alpha Centauri.”

  I grinned back at her. Julie was a smartass and I could always appreciate a good smartass.

  “You need a road map for that kind of thing?” I wondered. “I’d hate to have been the first guy to start jumping around without one.”

  “The first Helta to take a starship into hyperspace didn’t return,” Joon-Pah said. His English was getting better and I could hear the obvious pride in his voice. “Neither did the second, nor the third. And yet, we persevered.”

  “Must have all been male pilots,” Julie murmured. “Too stubborn to stop and ask for directions.”

  Even Olivera couldn’t contain a snort of laughter at that one, though I felt a little bad for Joon-Pah.

  “We are at the on-ramp for the great interstate in the sky,” Julie said. “Sublight drives to full stop. Request permission to make the translation to hyperspace, sir.” Her eyes narrowed as she awarded Olivera a glare. “And don’t you dare say ‘make it so,’ Colonel.”

  “Damn,” Olivera said, and I wasn’t sure if his disappointment was feigned or he’d actually been about to say it. “Very well, Helm. Jump at your discretion.”

  “I could do some melodramatic countdown,” Julie said, “but there’s no real reason for it, so….” She put her fingertips against four glowing orange circles hanging in the holographic control board and stroked them downward. “Jumping now.”

  The view in the main screen shifted, the stars seeming to rotate counterclockwise, slowly at first and then twisting into a kaleidoscope of color, coalescing into a rainbow ring around a hole into nothing. Not blackness, just…nothing. An absence so complete I couldn’t even look at it straight on, just get a sense of it out of the corner of my eye. The absence swallowed us up and reality seemed to shift, stretching me out and spinning me around and sending my stomach outward through my mouth, then e
verything snapped back to normal and the view on the holographic display went to a simulated image of the exterior of the ship.

  I stumbled back a step, though the experience hadn’t been a physical one.

  “We’re in,” Julie announced. “We are in hyperspace. Twenty hours until our first navigation check at Alpha Centauri A.”

  A cheer went up among the human bridge crew, which seemed to bemuse the Helta. I suppose it would be like people cheering when their plane took off from the airport to them.

  “You’re part of history now,” Olivera told me, his smile stretching wide. “Twice over.”

  I was. But all I could wonder standing on that bridge, heading for another star system, was if my son would ever hear about it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I shoved the pillow over my head, but the knocking persisted.

  “I don’t want to go to school, Mom,” I moaned, so wonderfully comfortable under the almost unbearably soft blanket.

  “Get your ass out of the rack, Andy,” Jambo replied, his voice was so clear on the compartment’s intercom, he could have been standing right at my bedside, “beforeI use my master code on the door and drag you into the hallway naked.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, loud enough to be heard through the closed hatch. “Gimme a minute.”

  I made a face he couldn’t see and swung my legs out of the bunk, sitting up in the darkness for a moment to get oriented, then touching the glowplate on the bulkhead next to me. Soft light filled the compartment, the lines familiar to me, if roomier than I’d ever had on a cruise in the Med. We’d built the crew quarters. The Helta didn’t have the concept of private rooms, instead sleeping communally on what I’d first thought of as a big trampoline. That was something that obviously wasn’t going to translate for humans, but thankfully, our specs and their construction bots made short work of turning some spare storage into crew compartments.

  I performed a short self-diagnostic before I stood, preferring not to find out the hard way that one of the gigantic bruises I’d collected in the fight yesterday was making my leg muscles cramp up. Nothing seemed to be malfunctioning, and I actually felt better than I’d thought I would.