Hell Week in the Marines was physically difficult. Surviving all seven days of it remains the single toughest thing I have ever done with my body outside of actual combat. And in the end, Hell Week didn’t break me. I broke myself. But Hell Week in the Navy…that was different.
Hell Week for cadets, officers-to-be, is quite different from Hell Week for raw recruits. The common soldier has to be physically tough, because much of their work is physical. Their duty is to carry out the orders they are given. Officers, on the other hand, need to be mentally tough. Their duty is to plan those orders, and oversee their execution. So the Academy instructors and the Department of Innovations, or rather, their psychology sub-division, work together in the months before the five day trial-by-fire of Hell Week to find and pick apart each cadet’s weakest points. To hammer home that weakness and force the cadet to confront it, over and over, until that particular cadet acknowledges that flaw at the very least, and hopefully figures out how to work around it.
Alas, they never did figure out what my greatest mental weakness at that point was. Or rather, who. The one person who did figure it out in time…well, let’s just say they put me through a version of Hell Week that was compressed down into a handful of minutes.
~Ia
Back on the TUPSF Liu Ji, Chaplain Benjamin had possessed a cramped little office, a somewhat larger counseling room that doubled as her living room, a cramped bedroom cabin, and a head, the starship nickname for a bathroom. Here at the Academia, her office was completely separate from her apartment. That office was in the administration hall, at the far end of the wing opposite the admissions desk. In fact, the easiest way to get to Bennie’s office was to use a side door near the wastebins holding those rare few things which couldn’t be recycled on the Academy’s grounds in some form or another.
Which is appropriate, Ia thought, her rare morbid sense of humor surfacing briefly, because I certainly feel like I’m about to be tossed into the rubbish bin like useless slag.
She did not like this amorphous, shapeless, senseless feeling of dread. Not since she turned fifteen and had her precognitive epiphany had Ia suffered from such sourceless fears. No, since that pivotal morning, her fears had taken on all too solid identities. Not now, however. Stepping into the shadow-darkened hallway didn’t help. It reminded her too much of old monster-in-the-closet fears, the kind where she didn’t know what lurked behind that closet door.
Ia hated—feared—the unknown.
Wiping her face with the back of her hand, and her palm on the back of her thigh, Ia squared her shoulders and touched the door buzzer. She was a full minute early, she had made sure of that much. When the door opened, she braced herself for the unknown. Show no fear. Know no fear. Confidence, calmness, these things will sustain, whereas fear will only drain…
“Come in, Cadet,” Bennie told her. “I’m glad to see you’re on time.”
“I strive to be, sir,” she muttered, following the chaplain inside. The front room of the suite served as the general office for all the Academy’s chaplains and psychologists. The rest of the rooms in this sub-wing were either designated office space or counseling space. They bypassed the door with “Cmdr. Christine Benjamin, Chaplain” on its nameplate and entered the room two doors down.
Meyun Harper rose from one of the padded chairs at the far end of the modest-sized room. He glanced between Bennie’s face and Ia’s, his expression as confused-looking as Ia felt. “Sir?”
The chaplain edged in behind Ia and poked at the door controls. The panel slid shut and clicked. “There. We are now locked in, only I have the access key, and this room is sound-proofed. It’s also after hours, I have turned off the recording equipment, and the two of you will discuss your problems under the privacy code of the confessional.”
She prodded Ia on the back, and when that didn’t move the stunned woman, pushed her forward a few stumbling steps. Comprehension dawning, Ia turned and narrowed her eyes. Bennie leaned back against the door, arms crossed over her chest.
“Meyun, the real reason why Ia, here, won’t talk to you when you’re alone together, or even look at you…”
“Oh, no you don’t,” Ia whispered, rage heating her cheeks.
“Is because she’s falling in love with you,” Bennie finished.
Embarrassed, furious, Ia clenched her hands into fists. Not from the urge to hit Bennie, but from the need to keep her gifts locked down. Glaring at the chaplain, she growled, “You know what? I take it back. You are a two-fisting bitch!”
“Ia!” Meyun snapped, striding forward. “You do not say things like that to a superior officer!”
He caught her shoulder. Overwrought by Bennie’s betrayal, Ia didn’t dare risk prolonged physical contact. Shrugging him off roughly, she backed up a couple of meters. “Don’t touch me! And she is one.” She pointed at the redheaded woman. “What I told her was said in the confidence of a soldier to her chaplain—in the confidence of the confessional! And that…skut just violated that!”
“Loving someone is not an unforgivable sin, you know,” Bennie snapped back.
“No, but violating military code is,” Ia retorted. “He didn’t need to know! Everything was under control before you stepped in.”
“You had nothing under control,” Bennie scoffed, giving Ia a disgusted look. “You were running away from the problem, not controlling it!”
Ia bristled at that. She wanted to protest it wasn’t true. If she did run from her problems, what the hell was she doing in the military? But…Damn her, she’s right. But that doesn’t make this right. “So?” she asked, arms folded tightly across her chest. “Lots of people do that. It’s a valid reaction.”
Bennie pushed away from the door, swaying forward with a glare of her own. “If you expect to become a successful officer, that means you cannot hide from your own emotions!” She pointed at Harper, who swayed back from her jabbing finger. “If you want to get out of here without this session being recorded and going on your permanent record, you will look at Cadet Harper and tell him exactly how you feel about him!”
“Excuse me,” Meyun interjected, “but can I join this conversation, or should I just pretend that I’m not actually a part of this?”
“Stand down and wait your turn, Harper,” Bennie ordered, pointing her finger at him. “Ia has the bigger problem at the moment.”
Ia closed her eyes, struggling for self-control…and the strength do it. She knew Bennie wasn’t bluffing. With Harper standing next to her, there was nothing she could to but comply, in order to navigate the invisible rocks that threatened to overturn all her work. But it wasn’t that simple. It could have been so easy, to just tell him—and Bennie—the truth of her work. Tell them both about her gifts, and the future she was driven to save.
But Meyun Harper was the Great Grey Mist in her mind, his actions obscured, his motives unsure. She had no way to foretell what he would do with that information. That meant she could not risk telling him any of it…and by extension, that meant keeping her friend and chaplain in the dark as well. Letting it all go, Ia breathed deep and opened her eyes again. She glanced at him. He was busy giving the chaplain a dark look; somehow, that made it easier to confess what she had to say.
“Meyun Harper…you scare the shova out of me.” That shifted his gaze from Bennie’s face to hers. She looked into his dark brown eyes and continued. “I find you brilliant, funny, handsome, sexy, companionable…I stand in awe of your technical genius, and since you’re a heavyworlder, I don’t quite feel like I’m going to break you in half if I so much as sneeze on you. I can’t predict what you’ll do or say, and that scares me, yet it fascinates me at the same time, since I never know what you’ll do next. But.”
“But?” he repeated, folding his own arms defensively over his chest. “But, what?”
“But, I am going into pilot training after the Academy. Every sign indicates I will be posted to a Blockade Patrol, where I know I can do some real good in the Service…and I cannot be assigned to the same ship as you. Not on Blockade. Everything about you is a distraction to me.” She glanced at the chaplain waiting patiently by the door, then back to Meyun. “Don’t mistake my meaning. I do want to get to know you better…on several levels…but I cannot afford it. You cannot afford it. Between the rules against fraternization between cadets, and the fact our career tracks are taking us off in two different directions, we have no viable future together.
“So I was ignoring it,” she groused, shooting Bennie another dark look. “Not running away, just ignoring it. I apologize if that spilled over into ignoring you. I’ll try to be less of an asteroid in our quarters from now on. That is, presuming all of these ‘confessions’ don’t disgust you.”
“Oh, they don’t disgust him,” Bennie interjected, earning another glare from Harper. “He’s already confessed to me that he’s fallen in love with you.”
The blood left Ia’s face. In fact, it looked like it went straight to Meyun’s. Tan cheeks reddening, he sputtered a moment, glanced between the two women, then growled at Benjamin, “Ia’s right. You are a two-fisting—!”
Ia’s rare sense of humor surfaced, at that. Smirking, she met Bennie’s scowl. “As you said when you arrived here, Bennie, I have a quick, keen grasp of most situations. Pain in the asteroid, isn’t it?”
Bennie scoffed. “Except when it comes to your own heart, you don’t. Meyun, look Ia in the eye and tell her how you feel.”
Like Ia, it took him a few seconds to gather himself before he could look her way. She held herself still, waiting to hear what he had to say. Wanting to hear it, and dreading it.
“Exactly how you feel,” he murmured. “I feel it, too. I like you, I’m surprised by you, and you make me laugh. I enjoy just sitting in the same room with you, both of us working on whatever… but I don’t like being ignored. That hurt.”
Ia nodded slightly to acknowledge his pain. She looked down, only to glance up sharply again as he continued.
“I want your eyes on me. I want your mind on me, your hands on me. I’ve probably spent three out of every seven showers playing with myself, thinking about you—”
Oh, dear god…She blushed so hard at his confession, it felt like her feet were going to faint.
“—and the other four banging my head against the wall of the stall. I know you’re headed for a Blockade Patrol, whereas I’ll get whatever duty post the system throws at me,” Meyun admitted, his own face red. “I admire your devotion to duty at the same time that I hate it, because I want to keep you to myself, yet I couldn’t keep you here and keep you the woman that…the woman that I’m falling in love with.”
Taking a step closer, Meyun caught one of her hands, sending a thrill of excitement and fear up her nerves from the warmth of his fingers cupping hers.
“You’re absolutely right, this could torpedo our advancement possibilities if it gets out of hand…but the bitch of it is, Chaplain Bennie is also right. If we don’t confront this, get it out in the open and deal with it, we won’t stand a chance at effectively leading anyone under our command.” Holding her hand a moment longer, he squeezed her fingers and released it, stepping back. Tucking his hands into his trouser pockets, Meyun shrugged. “So. The question is, where do we go from here, and how do we handle this…attraction…between us?”
“I don’t know. I’ve never had to deal with this situation before,” Ia admitted honestly. “I’ll try not to ignore you in our quarters, but…I won’t compromise the rules.”
“If I may make a suggestion—and no, you may not say I’ve already suggested enough,” Bennie interjected, “I’d like to point out that there is a narrow window of opportunity that both of you are overlooking.”
Both Ia and Meyun gave her bemused looks.
“Just because your careers are headed in different directions doesn’t mean you can’t have a little fun before parting company,” Chaplain Benjamin pointed out. “After all, most cadets are given a week of Leave after graduation before being shipped out.”
“I was planning on saving that week for later, so I could have more time to get back home again in a few years,” Ia pointed out.
“I’ve done the calculations. The next round of the flight school you’ve picked doesn’t start until five days after you’re scheduled to graduate, or twenty-five days after, and I know you’ll be aiming for the earlier session,” Bennie said. “Factor in a day for travel to the Academy Saturnia, and that gives you four whole days with nothing to do. It’s not like you can offer to do guard duty around here in the interim, like you did back on the ship,” she added pointedly. “Take the vacation, take each other off somewhere, and take some of the edge off your sexual tension—if nothing else, it’ll be a good test of your characters, holding off when you know you do have something to look forward to,” she finished.
Twisting his mouth, Meyun pulled his hands out of his pockets. Eyeing Ia, he fisted his fingers, gesturing forward and down with both arms in silent insult. Ia snorted and nodded in equally silent agreement. Watching them both, Bennie tightened her mouth for a moment, then flipped her hands at the seats in the room.
“Sit down and talk it out. Whatever you decide to do is whatever you decide, but ignoring it won’t make it go away.”
Meyun eyed Ia, lifting his brows. She smiled mock-politely at him and gestured toward the seats. He mock-bowed in return and took himself back to the chair he had been occupying upon her entrance. Following suit, Ia dropped into one of the thickly cushioned chairs across from his and curled up her leg, tucking her ankle behind the other knee. Both of them ignored Bennie, who remained leaning against the counseling room door.
“Alright. Fine. How do we go about resolving this?” Ia asked him. “It’s not like we can do anything about it while we’re still both cadets, roommates or otherwise.”
“Well, it is the elephant in the corner of our dorm room,” Meyun agreed. “I like having you as a friend. I enjoy talking with you. But we can’t go any farther than that. So…let’s just keep a watch on each other’s conduct. I want to talk with you, but if we start straying into the wrong topic, or look too long, we just say…‘elephant’ I guess.”
“A code word?” Ia asked. He nodded, and she nodded as well. “Yes…that could work. I do miss talking with you. It was just easier to do it when other people were around. I was always aware about not going beyond the bounds of propriety with them there.”
“I can understand that,” he acknowledged. “It was a pain in the asteroid, because I didn’t know why you were being so friendly in public and so…not…in private, but it makes sense. So. The rest of the term is covered. What about Bennie’s suggestion for the days immediately after? Would you care to get a hotel room somewhere nearby and go at it like a pair of rabid rabbits for a few days? Get it out of our systems?”
Ia blushed at the suggestion.
“It’d be something to look forward to,” Harper offered lightly. “A way to deal with the elephant in the room, even if it’s a delayed one.”
“Harper…I haven’t ever ‘gone at it like rabid rabbits,’” she warned him. “I’ll probably be lousy at ‘it.’”
“Nonsense, you’ll do fine,” he dismissed, flicking his fingers. “Everything else I’ve seen you try, you’ve picked up quickly and competently.”
Yeah, but that was with the forewarning of precognition guiding me, she thought. Sighing, Ia rubbed her forehead with one hand. The idea of finally getting her hands and other things all over him was too appealing to resist. I’ll have to contact the priests back home, see what tips they can give me for locking down my gifts during intimacy so they hopefully won’t trigger. Or rather, find something in the Nets that’ll give me a clue, since my calls are probably all monitored as a “cadet of interest” to the DoI, and a conversation that blatant would give everything away. My gifts, our attraction to each other…
“Besides, I could always try teaching you. Not that I’m the best myself, but practice does make perfect,” Meyun joked.
That coaxed a rueful smile out of her. “Only a few days’ worth…I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
A snort from the far side of the room drew their attention back to the other elephant on hand. Bennie pushed away from the door, approaching the two of them. She rolled her green eyes at Ia. “If you give yourself enough time to talk yourself out of a solution as simple and elegant as this, Ia, you will regret it. Your restraint while in the Academy is both admirable and necessary. But once you’ve graduated, so long as one of you isn’t placed in the chain of command over the other, such restraint will no longer be necessary. If you talk yourself out of this and turn him down, so help me…”
“Excuse me, but my sex life is my own business,” Ia reminded the older woman. “Or the lack thereof.”
“But don’t you want to know?” Meyun asked her. Ia looked back at him. “Don’t you want to know what it’s like to make love with someone who cares about you? I don’t know about you, but if I don’t take the chance, I know I will regret it for the rest of my life.”
Ia flushed, unsure what to say. Duty demanded she ignore her desire and focus on the future. Desire demanded she take that handful of days for herself, as compensation for everything else both her conscience and Time itself were forcing her to give up.
“What was it you said in our Ethics course two months ago?” Meyun muttered. He lifted his chin after a moment. “That you’d rather be damned for something you did, than something you didn’t do?”
Ia winced inside. Everything she was doing, she was doing because of exactly that: She knew she’d be damned, one way or the other, but it was far better to be damned for what she had to do, than to do nothing at all and be damned by the consequences of her failure to act. To hear him using her own words against her like this was a lower blow than he could possibly imagine.
A resolve-shattering blow. Giving in, Ia sighed roughly. “You’re right. And I probably will be damned for this, since we do have to part company afterward…but you’re right.”
He frowned at her. “Oh, gee, thanks for making lovemaking with me sound like a trip to the guillotine!”
She made a face at him, sticking out her tongue a little. “I’m not talking about the act itself. I’m talking about the possibility that either of us could end up wanting a lot more than our career tracks would permit. Just…I don’t want to hurt you, Meyun. Ever. If nothing else, please believe that. Whether it’s out of friendship, or love, or whatever, I don’t want to hurt you if we try hopping on the back of this particular elephant together.”
“And I don’t want to hurt you,” he returned, tapping the table between them. “But I’d rather be damned for giving it a try—in the right time and the right place, obeying the letter of the regs—than be damned for turning my back on this chance and walking away.”
Silence fell between them. At least it wasn’t as strained as before. Shifting her hands to her hips, Bennie nodded. “Well, then. That’s better. A lot better. The two of you are finally working through your differences, confronting your feelings and figuring out how to handle them in a responsible and mature manner.”
Meyun dropped his head onto the padded back of the chair, while Ia rolled her eyes at her chaplain friend.
“I’m a psychologist as well as a priestess. Deal with it,” Bennie ordered both of them. “Speaking of which, I’m going to want weekly evaluation sessions with each of you, separately and together. Just in case the ‘elephant in the room’ starts getting out of hand. You both have promising military careers ahead of you. Let’s not shoot it all into the nearest star, shall we?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Ia muttered. Meyun grunted and lifted a hand in acknowledgment.
“Good.” Folding her arms across her chest, Bennie studied both cadets. “Now, as for calling me what you did, regarding the…?” She freed her arms long enough to show two fists, then tucked them back together again. “I’ll admit my method of forcing this confrontation was a bit blunt, but I wouldn’t say it was that blunt. Apologize, both of you, and I’ll let the matter drop.”
“Sorry, sir,” Meyun apologized promptly. “It won’t happen again.”
“Yes, I’m sorry, too, sir,” Ia added. “You know I do respect you.”
“I know it won’t, and I know you do. Apologies accepted. One more thing, before I kick you out and send you back for the rest of your study hour,” Bennie said. “Ia…what exactly is a ‘skut’?”
“You know, I’m not entirely sure?” Ia quipped, looking up at her friend. “It was a new form of insult being tossed around on my homeworld, back when I was on extended Leave, but nobody ever actually explained it to me. Using it just seemed to fit the moment.”
Bennie chuckled. “Next time, Cadet, if you’re going to insult an officer? Be damned sure you know what that insult means. Particularly if you really mean it.”
“Oh, I meant it,” Ia quipped. “I don’t know what it means, but in that moment, you were one. And a total, complete one at that, I’m sure of it.”
Glancing between the two women, who were now smiling at each other, Meyun flopped his hands in a shrug. “Now I know the two of you are best friends.”
As much as Ia wanted to protest otherwise, she kept her mouth shut. In her mind, best friends didn’t keep major secrets from each other. Her best friends were her brothers, her family. But if it was possible to call someone a close friend who didn’t know the most important parts of one’s life, then Bennie would be at the top of that list. And, scary as it was to include her Invisible Rock in the Timestream, Meyun Harper was high on that list, too.
I am so shakked…
“Go on, get out,” Bennie ordered, moving back to the door to unlock and open it. “I’m sure you both have homework to do. I’ll set up weekly appointments for each of you—I’m supposed to be setting up counseling appointments with most of your class anyway, to make sure none of you are getting close to cracking from the strain of the fast-track pace. I’ll just schedule yours back-to-back, so we can have a few minutes of mutual elephant-discussion time.”
Ia pushed to her feet. “Understood, Commander.”
“Thank you, sir.” Rising as well, Meyun followed Ia out. He waited until they were outside, walking through the golden light angling in from the west, where the sun was getting close to the horizon. Glancing around to make sure they were alone, he asked, “So…will you plan on spending some of your postgraduation Leave days with me? You never did say an outright yes.”
She sighed, gaze more on the path they were taking back to the dormitory building than on him. “Yes. I will go with you to a hotel after we’ve graduated, and try all the things we cannot do while we are still enrolled in this Academy. But between then and now, it is the elephant in the corner, and we must ignore it so that it stays in the corner.”
He nodded, but said nothing more. Tucking his hands behind his back, he strolled along beside her. Halfway to the dorm rooms, Meyun finally spoke.
“I think it has roller skates.”
Thrown off by the non sequitur, Ia blinked at him. “What?”
“The elephant, in the corner of the room,” he stated, shrugging. “I think it has roller skates. What do you think?”
“Ahh.” Caught off guard by the quip, she scrambled to think of a suitable reply. “I…think it’s…black with gold polka dots?”
That made him laugh, while Ia chuckled. It also released some of the tension still lingering between them. Some, but not all. There was still an elephant between them, after all.
July 25, 2493 T.S.
Hell Week, TUPSF Vasco da Gama
They tried everything to break her. They tried demoting Ia to the lowest ranks, where she simply performed to her best ability, earning praise from the crew and the other cadets. They tried assigning her to the wrong departments for her skill sets. She asked questions, picked the right people for the job, and let them handle the crises afflicting the ship, giving praise when they handled it. The testing staff moved her quarters on board the da Gama seventeen times; she just packed and unpacked each time with heavyworlder speed and Marine Corps efficiency.
Sleep deprivation was nothing new for her, though it did cause several of the others to stumble. They were given slightly more sleep than the recruits back in Basic had been allotted, but never quite enough. On the last day, with everyone—even Ia—numb-tired from constant alerts, battle scenarios, engine breakdowns, stellar anomalies, pressure-suit drills, and more, the orders Ia had anticipated finally echoed through the ship’s intercom system.
“Cadet Ia, report to de bridge on de double. Acting Keptin Wong, prepare to transfer command of de da Gama to Cadet Ia.”
Pausing just long enough to lock and web her cleaning equipment so it wouldn’t go flying about in sudden maneuvers, Ia left the upper lifesupport cabin at a fast jog. Her uniform was damp and dirty in several places from mopping up spilled tank contents, she hadn’t had time for a shower in three days, and she hadn’t dared eat a heavy meal the last time one had been served.
A deck and three bulkhead seals later, she had reached the brain of the ship, the bridge. Unlike the old seafaring ships, the bridge on a Space Force starship was buried deep in its interior, behind layers of extra plating and redundant circuit relays. This one was located slightly above the middeck, and on the Frigate Class slightly to the aft as well, but otherwise more or less centered.
Cadet Wong unstrapped himself from the captain’s console. Saluting Ia, he stated crisply, “Acting Captain Ia, you have the bridge.”
She saluted back. “Thank you, Cadet Wong. Report to Acting Lieutenant Jinja-Marsuu in lifesupport, on the double.” Dropping into the seat, its cushions still warm from his body heat, she strapped herself in and entered her command passcode, then toggled the intercom system on. “All hands, this is Acting Captain Ia. I believe we have only a matter of hours left before the end of Hell Week, so prepare for the absolute worst they can throw at us. But don’t worry. Obey my orders, put your trust in me, and I’ll do my best to see that we make it through.”
She didn’t bother to request a greenlight from all stations. They had been at this for a solid week, with the non-cadet crewmember swapping out every eight hours in different duty shifts, the same as their evaluators. But not the cadets being tested. In space, there would be no chance for a greenlight ready-check. Whatever happened, whenever it happened, they would have to be ready for it as they were.
Right now, Ia was tired enough that skimming the timestreams took more energy than she wanted to spare, because right now, the probabilities were just about dead even that any single one of a dozen different scenarios would be played upon them. The level of confusion was not quite to the point of forming a grey mist over the streams, but it was close.
Swapping channels, she contacted the Special Forces captain she had met on her first full day at the Academy, the chief officer of the DoI oversight team assigned to evaluate each and every cadet in Class 1252. “Acting Captain Ia to Captain Rzhikly, the Vasco da Gama is ready for orders.”
“Your orderz are to rendezvous vit Battle Platform Freeman. Coordinates are being zent to your left secondary—”
“Query, sir,” Ia interjected before he could order the start of the simulation. “Is the location of Battle Platform Freeman at the rendezvous point widely known, or a military secret?”
“Vhy do you need to know dat?” Captain Rzhikly asked, his confusion conveyed in his tone.
“It might have a bearing on my command decisions, sir. As the captain, I’d know in advance if its location was public knowledge, or if it had been secretly moved to this location for whatever reason.”
“Ehhh…fleep a coin!” he ordered over the comm.
A couple of mouths twitched upward on the cadets around her. Ia quickly patted down the front of her shirt, squirmed in her seat, and dug a handful of brown tenth-credit chits out of her trouser pocket. “Right. Heads, it’s a secret rendezvous; tails, it’s a widely known location.”
Flicking the quasimetallic coin with her thumb, she tumbled it up, down, and deftly caught it in her left hand, slapping it onto the right one. Lifting her hand away, she displayed the “heads” side of the iridescent chit balancing on the back of her hand toward the observation pickups in the ceiling.
“Heads, sir. The rendezvous coordinates are a military secret. I will keep them as a secret for my eyes only, and relay only directional instructions to the crew.”
Dropping the coin in her shirt pocket, Ia studied the coordinates on her left secondary screen, then closed the file, locking it to her command passcode. She tapped in a quick query to identify their ship’s location in the simulation, and noted that they were just a single star system away. That suggested they were going to be hit hard and fast before they could even leave this system. Another touch of the controls pulled up information on both systems, this time on her right secondary screen.
“Right. Anything else we should know about this simulation, Captain?”
“Just get your ship and her crew bekk to de Platform, Cadet. Scenario beginz in five…four…tree…”
“All hands, brace for anything,” Cadet Bruer muttered. A couple of the others laughed mirthlessly at that. The green lights indicating the pause between simulations faded out, leaving the normal white-spectrum lights glowing softly overhead. Ia was the last cadet to be given the captain’s position. Their last test had begun. From this point forward until the end of the exercise, they were to treat everything as if it were real, from actions to reactions, ranks to regulations, essentials to emergencies. Just like they had all week long, whenever they were freed from the verdant glare of the green overhead lights, this was all presumed to be real.
Nothing happened.
In fact, nothing happened for several minutes. Ia didn’t trust it. There were still too many choices for the testers to pull on them. She spent those minutes checking the database records on the local system, and the system where they were to rendezvous with the Battle Platform. Tired as she was, reaching deep enough into the timestreams to gauge the probability of which scenario would actually be picked would be too exhausting. There were too many choices, and she had to stay too close to the real world to be able to react in time.
It was better to stay loose and flexible right now, and that meant having plenty of information at her fingertips. They were on the fringe of Terran space, not far from the Tlassians and the Choya. Neither system was inhabited, which would cut down on the potential for civilian casualties—crossing off at least three possible scenarios on her precognitive list—but then neither was fully mapped, either. That added at least two more possibilities. Ones which, at FTL speed, made her nervous.
“Helm, slow to one-quarter Cee. Shields up and sensors on full. Navigation, get us the system buoy pings, on the double.”
“Aye, sir.”
“Aye, Captain.”
The ship lurched as it slowed across the lightspeed barrier. Centuries ago, either Einstein or the people who followed him had made a major mathematical mistake. Faster-than-light travel was quite possible, but the Terrans had reached for the stars believing it was impossible, developing other-than-light technology instead. It took the other races of the Alliance to introduce them to the gentler, healthier, if slower FTL method of interstellar travel.
“Sir?” Bruer asked from his position at the gunnery system. “Insystem speeds? You only want to go a quarter the speed of light?”
“This system is only partially surveyed. I don’t want—”
CLANNNGG!
The ship rocked, jolting everyone in their seats. The interior force fields snapped on, cutting down on the bad bruising the restraint straps would have delivered. They cut off a second later, just as loud klaxons blared in the eerie up-and-down stuttering wail of a hull breach.
“That to happen,” Ia finished, teeth clenched. “All stop! Report!”
“All stop, Aye, sir!” Cadet, or rather, Commander Vizzini called back, hands working the helm controls.
“Captain, hull breach on Decks 2 and 3, starboard bow,” Abbendris reported from her position at the ship systems station. The decks rumbled with the application of the thruster fields, and everything swayed forward. “We’ve lost L-pod 1 and P-pod 1, sir.”
“Do we have casualties?” Ia asked.
“No one was in those pods, sir,” Bruer reminded her. “The last scen—Ah, the last duty watch didn’t need them to be manned.”
“All hands report for greenlight,” Lieutenant Abbendris ordered over the ship comms. “Repair teams suit up and report to Decks 2 and 3, Section 1 interior airlocks.”
“Captain.” That came from Cadet, or rather, Lieutenant Shinowa, stationed at the navigation post. “System buoys are silent. I’ve tried pinging them, but I’m getting nothing. We’re flying blind on lightspeed wavefronts only.”
“I’m not getting a ping on any of the system hyperrelays, either,” the communications officer, T’siel, warned her.
“Either they’ve been destroyed by an enemy, sir, or there’s one hell of an ion storm coming our way,” Lieutenant Chen stated from his seat at the engineering workstation. “System buoys and hyperrelay stations are over-engineered to prevent casual failures.”
Both, her precognitive instincts warned her. But there were still too many possibilities. “Until we find out otherwise, we will presume we have lost the buoys to both solar storms and enemy ships, and act accordingly,” Ia ordered. “Engineering, standby on external repairs.”
“Sir?”
“Repair teams are to use remote drones to survey the damage, first. If the drones can’t manage the repairs, the teams will have to suit up in ceristeel, in case it’s an ion storm,” she ordered. “Helm, roll the ship to put the system sun on our portside. Gunnery, crew the aft Sections 3 and 4 P-pods and launch seven scanner probes, six in the cube and the extra sunward, staggered, so we can get realtime estimates if there is an ion storm out there.”
“Rolling the portside to sunward, Captain,” Vizzini stated, complying with a touch of the controls. The ship swayed slightly under them, but the hint of a tilt was subtle at best.
“Seven scanner probes launched in the cube, two to the sun staggered, aye, sir,” Bruer agreed, repeating her orders. That meant launching one probe in each direction, to the fore, aft, dorsal, ventral, starboard, and two to the port, the second one several seconds behind the other. He relayed them on his comm headset directly to his gunnery teams, not over the intercom like Abbendris’s orders had been sent.
“Captain! We’re in the yellow for three enlisted personnel,” Abbendris told her. “They’re trapped in a maintenance locker on Deck 3, Section 1. All the others managed to evacuate.”
“Are the door seals holding? Do they have p-suits and oxygen in there?” Ia asked.
Abbendris relayed the query, reporting within moments the results. “Captain, they say the door seals are leaking very slowly, but they’re suited up, with two-hour standard emergency oxypacks each. However…they’ll freeze within the hour, with the starboard side now in the shade. The damage interrupted most of the power to that area. They have some gravity, but zero heat, sir.”
“Captain, scanner pods away,” Bruer told her. “They’ll be up to full insystem speed in twenty seconds, deadheading away from us in the cube.”
“Noted. Lieutenant Abbendris, send the Section 1 schematic to my primary screen,” she stated, addressing the cadet by her scenario simulation rank. “I want to know exactly where our three trapped crewmates are located, and what’s around them.”
“Aye, sir. The damage alterations will be incomplete until we get pingback from the repair drones,” Abbendris warned her. “Most of this will be an intact schematic.”
“Understood, Abbendris,” Ia told the other woman.
“Repair drones are now launching, sirs,” Bruer stated. That was his duty as the gunnery officer, though it was up to Abbendris to make sense of the readings, just as it was up to astronavigation officer Shinowa to make sense of the data the launched sensor pods were collecting and sending back. Each one was equipped with insystem thruster fields, minimum shields, enough ceristeel plating to protect the delicate instrumentation in most conditions, and more.
The repair drones had a variety of flexible servo-arms to make repairs, while the sensor drones bore miniature hyperrelay units to boost the data streams above the speed of light. Both kinds were expensive, if necessary, and it would be a mark against her if Ia didn’t make sure each one came back intact.
Within moments, her largest, central screen brightened with the three-dimensional wire sketch framing the decks of the da Gama’s foremost section. Three yellow humanoid shapes lit up one of the cube-chambers. Frowning in thought, Ia tapped the screen, rotating the image, zooming in and out. She touched keys on her console, adjusting the opacity of walls, highlighting power conduits and other ship systems, coaxing her tired mind into thinking.
“Lovely…” Abbendris murmured. “Captain, we’re beginning an exterior survey of the damage.”
“Noted. Send a couple remote ’bots through the section airlocks, too, to examine the damage from the inside.”
“Aye, sir.” The cadet overseeing ship systems relayed the orders, then hesitated. “Captain? Aren’t we going to send in a rescue team to pick up the yellowlights?”
“Not until we get a system report. We are still lightspeed blind, Lieutenant,” Ia reminded her. “We have three problems that are slightly more urgent at the moment. We don’t even know yet what we hit, if it was an isolated asteroid or a chunk of ship. There might be other debris out there. If we get overtaken by a solar storm and the radiation gets in through the cracks in the hull during a rescue operation, it’ll kill those three faster than if they stayed locked up for half an hour while we wait to find out. And if there are enemies lurking somewhere nearby, taking out those system buoys, better for our crewmates to be in an intact cabin with functional interior fields to help cushion them from sudden maneuvers, if we have to bolt and run.”
“Careful observation leads to comprehension,” Bruer murmured.
Ia smiled wryly. “Exactly. Right now, our biggest need is information.”
Shinowa spoke up. “We’re getting initial system telemetry from the probes, Captain. We struck one of…what looks like seven asteroids within twenty lightseconds of our position. Comparison with known system data suggests these are unregistered bodies, possibly rogues. There’s also some strange radiation in the system. Some of it’s leaking from the damaged ship section, I think. I’ll have a better analysis of it in a few moments…”
“If we hadn’t slowed down, the FTL field should have pushed them aside,” Chen groused. “Slowing down caused the collision.”
Shinowa shook her head, her gaze dancing between her primary, two secondary, and bank of tertiary screens. “Incorrect, Lieutenant Commander. If we hadn’t slowed when we did, we would have plowed into the largest of them, which is now dead ahead by five thousand klicks. We are damned lucky we stopped when we did. FTL can’t push aside a rock that’s 2.3 kilometers long. Instead of being banged up by a rock two hundred meters across—which I’ll admit would have been pushed aside by the warp panels—we’d have been dead. Very dead.”
“This system is only partially surveyed,” Ia reminded the others, backing up her navigation officer’s assessment, and explaining her own reasoning. “Prudence demanded that we drop to sub-light speeds and ping the buoys for the latest system updates. With those buoys dead, it’s even more imperative we hold position until we know what’s out there. That’s why I ordered the scanner drones deployed.”
“Those are rather large for rogue asteroids. They should’ve been on the system charts at that size, rogue or otherwise,” Bruer muttered, staring at his screens.
“We deal with what is, not with what we want it to be, Lieutenant Bruer,” Ia reminded him.
“Scanner probes edgeward are picking up traces of massive ion trails, Captain,” Shinowa reported. “Looks like this system’s been hit with a really big solar flare in the last week—ah—!” She slapped the intercom. “All hands, brace for an ion storm! It’s a big one, Captain, coming up fast. We have maybe twenty minutes at lightspeed before the worst of the radiation hits. We’re going to have to seal as many sunward ports and panels as we can. It’s either shut it all down for the duration, or be rendered sensor-blind on that side.”
“Right.” Tapping her screen and her console, Ia sent the sketch she made to the ship systems station. “Lieutenant Abbendris, to your primary. Use this plan to get those crewmates out of that locker.”
“Sir?” Abbendris asked, looking up from her screen to Ia. “This plan?”
Ia met her gaze impatiently. “You heard Lieutenant Shinowa. You have less than twenty minutes. Execute it.”
“Aye, sir.” Turning back to her station, Abbendris started relaying them, directing the repair crews to power up a welding drone, empty out a storage crate, and have two team members don stevedore mechsuits. The plan was to use the welding drone to cut through the back wall of the supplies locker from another room deeper inside the ship, and bring up the two-meter-square storage chest for the three pressure-suited crewmembers to crawl into, so they could be carried out of the damaged sector.
P-suits were silvery grey to help retain body heat and ward off some forms of stellar radiation, but an ion storm would pass its energy right through the relatively thin material. The ceristeel chest wasn’t very dense either, but then neither were the stevedore suits; their only advantage was that they would be more protection than the p-suits alone. All five crewmembers would be at risk until they reached the safety of the unbroken ship sections, where layers of ceristeel would absorb and diffuse the energies hurtling toward them from a mass ejection of the local sun’s corona.
Connecting her headset to the infirmary, Ia contacted the head of the medical cadets undergoing their own version of Hell Week along with SF-Navy Class 1252. “Captain Ia to Doctor Underhill. Prepare to receive five patients. Three will have decompression sickness and all five will probably have ion radiation burns.”
“Understood, Captain.”
Tense, quiet minutes passed on the bridge. Abbendris reported the extent of the damage to the starboard hull, in between reporting the progress of the welders. Shinowa reported increasing levels of ionized gasses expelled from the system’s star. T’siel warned Ia that the ion storm was now so intense, their connection to outsystem hyperrelays were failing. More than one tertiary screen at the various bridge workstations included shots from the cameras on the welder drone and the stevedore-suited crewmembers hauling the oversized ceristeel crate.
A subdued cheer broke out among the cadets on the bridge when the oval slice of metal was extracted from the wall. Another muffled cheer accompanied the sight of the crewmembers climbing into the crate, piling one on top of another, and the lid being fastened.
“Eyes to those boards, sailors, and keep your minds on your jobs,” Ia ordered the others. “We’re still running lightspeed blind.”
“Here comes the radiation crest!” Shinowa warned everyone.
“Repair Team Sierra, the ion storm is cresting. Get everyone back through the section lock, bounce it on the double,” Abbendris ordered the men and women listening on her headset. “Don’t make any careless mistakes.”
“Lieutenant Shinowa, what’s the estimated density of the storm?” Ia asked.
The other cadet shrugged. Navigation was not her track specialty. “It’s a big one, Captain. Big enough, the crest is starting to push us, sir. If there were other, relatively recent storms the size of this one, they could have altered the orbits of those asteroids, turning them rogue.”
“Rogue asteroids and ion storms, just our luck,” Vizzini muttered. “Captain, do you want me to use the thrusters to maintain our position? We’re starting to tumble from the stellar winds.”
“Maintain portside sunward, Commander Vizzini,” Ia instructed him. “Protect that broken hull section. But the moment those crewmembers are safely in Section 2, I want you to swap ship ends.”
“Sir?” he asked, giving her a puzzled look.
“Point the bow back the way we came, maintaining portside to sunward,” Ia clarified crisply. Unclipping the stylus from the edge of her workstation, she lifted it in her fingers and twisted her wrist, using it to demonstrate how she wanted the ship ends swapped.
“Sir?” Vizzini repeated. “I don’t understand, sir. Wasn’t the direction we were originally headed the correct one, Captain? Why would we go back?”
“Repair Team Sierra has reached the airlock, Captain,” Abbendris reported quietly. “They’re cycling through, sir.”
“Commander Vizzini, you are to swap the ship ends, keeping the portside sunward and the damaged hull to the edgeward side of the system, in the lee of the ship. You have your orders. If you are too tired to carry them out, let me know and I will relieve you of the burden of commanding the helm so you can get some rest. Are you tired, Commander?” Ia asked her second-in-command softly.
“Sir, no, sir,” he responded, turning back to his controls. “Helm is now swapping the ship ends, keeping the portside sunward, sir.” Left hand in the thruster glove, right hand dancing over the buttons on his console, he slowly rotated the ship. Half under his breath, he muttered, “I just don’t understand why…”
Ia didn’t explain. Instead, she worked on building a new set of orders. Her right secondary screen flashed with an incoming comm message. Linking to it, she listened to the report from the infirmary, and nodded.
“Thank god…The infirmary reports they have received all five crewmates and are treating them for very minor ion storm burns,” she told the rest of the crew. The others cheered. Ia allowed herself a small smile, until her right secondary screen flashed again, this time with a text message from a different part of the ship. “Well. It looks like supper for the cadre has now been prepared.”
“Rapture,” Bruer quipped. “Redlight or greenlight, routine or emergency, the cooks keep on cooking. Pass along my compliments to…uh…Lieutenant Harper? It’s his duty shift, isn’t it?”
“Yes, he took over from Lieutenant Jinja-Marsuu three hours ago. She swapped back to lifesupport for the second half of her duty shift,” Ia said, calling up and checking the duty roster. “Given our delicate situation, and the general exhaustion of the crew—meaning we don’t have a lot of choices for relief watch officers—I am going to authorize permission to the bridge crew for us to go eat one at a time.”
They looked at each other. The order wasn’t usual, though it wasn’t unheard-of. Chen shrugged. “Who goes first, Captain? By rank, or…?”
“All bridge stations, ping me a standard RNG to my tertiary three. Highest random number goes first, lowest goes next to last. I’ll take the absolute last supper in the rotation, and handle each of your stations in the meantime.” Waiting for the numbers to scroll up the center of her five bottom screens, Ia touched the monitor as soon as all of them had reported in. A swirl of her finger on the screen and a tap of the other hand on the keyboard reorganized the numbers in descending order. “Congratulations, Lieutenant Commander Chen; you rolled a ninety-seven, which means you get to be the first victim of tonight’s version of a culinary masterpiece.”
“My stomach thanks you from the bottom of its random number generator, Captain,” the man at the engineering console quipped. “Transferring engineering command to your station, Captain.”
“Transfer received, thank you,” Ia murmured a few seconds later. “You are free to leave the bridge, Lieutenant Chen. Don’t eat so fast that you choke, but don’t dawdle, either. Commander Vizzini will be next.”
Unbuckling himself from his seat, he hurried to leave. She envied him; she hadn’t eaten a lot at their last meal, for fear some of the scenario options selected would be too rough a ride to keep the food down. But the job of being the ship’s captain—of being an officer, period—meant asking nothing of her crew that she wouldn’t ask of herself. That meant waiting until last.
“Commander Vizzini…I am having the engineering department reverse the directional pulse pattern of the insystem thrusters. Upon my command, you will put this ship in reverse, quarter speed,” Ia commanded. “Lieutenant Shinowa, alter course of the sensor drones. Keep them in the cube, but match course and pace to our own. Heading is one eighty-three by one seventy-two. Maintain portside to sunward at all times.”
“Uhh…reverse, sir?” Vizzini asked. “You want me to back up the ship?”
“We cannot go forward into a solar storm as dense as this one, Commander,” Ia said. “The holes in our bow would act like a scoop, gathering up far too many ionized particles for our safety. We will therefore, as you put it so succinctly, back up the ship. We cannot afford to waste time sitting out a storm this bad. It’s either move to get out of the storm and stay on course, or move to find a planet to hide behind, and we’re in the wrong quadrant for that this year.”
“Aye, sir,” he agreed, shrugging and returning to his controls. “Ahe…er, reverse engines, one-quarter speed, heading one eighty-three by one seventy-two.”
Satisfied he would comply, Ia relaxed a little. Her screen flashed again, this time a request for a private commlink. Ia linked into it. “Captain Ia here.”
“Captain, this is Lieutenant Commander Jinja-Marsuu, down here in lifesupport,” the other woman spoke, voice projecting solely into Ia’s left ear. “I trust this is a private channel? It’s not something that needs be broadcast to the crew.”
“Go ahead, Commander,” Ia replied, adjusting her headset a little more comfortably in her ear. “You’re in the clear.”
“Captain, your, ah, replacement, Lieutenant Wong, has taken his sweet time getting down here to lifesupport. In fact, I was told by Lieutenant Harper that he swung by the officer’s galley and chatted up some of the crew, cadging a snack before making his way down here. And when he did finally show up, he broke one of the drinking water pipelines, and made a mess of repairing it. I would like to request permission to replace him…and to ask if you think I should write him up for a Fatality Four, Dereliction of Duty.”
That was a fairly serious charge for a cadet to accrue during Hell Week. It was something that would go on his permanent record, in fact. For a moment, Ia wondered why Wong—who had looked reasonably alert when she had reached the bridge and was relatively competent in his lifesupport classes—would have been so tardy. Curious, she dipped into the timestreams, looking into the past, not the future, for a glimpse of what had delayed him.
What she saw widened her eyes. Blinking as she came back to herself, Ia quickly smoothed out her expression and silently weighed the best options based on the variables she could foresee. “Replace him, but order him confined to his quarters for the next eight hours. Make a note of the incident, but do not put any charges into his record at this time. We’re all exhausted by now, Commander. Hopefully with a bit of sleep, he won’t be so slow to report next time.”
“Understood, sir. Jinja-Marsuu out.”