Chapter 44

Third Mission, aboard the FUP Deep Space Exploration vessel Glenndeavor now in System RKO-289, 2401 CE

After our morning classroom work, the next two-and-a-half days were quite interesting.

The search of all compartments on the Ship, being carried out on the orders of the Captain, continued. After our first eight hours in the Simulation Bay, followed by attending PT again and then an hour on the Firing Range, we ate dinner in the Enlisted Mess. Returning to our suite after dropping off several crew members along the way, we each found a notice waiting in our email folders. The emails informed us that a full inspection of our quarters would be conducted beginning at 2230. That was an hour-and-a-half before we were to report to our duty station again the next morning at Tactical Simulations Bay 2. So we quickly squared away our suite, made certain our gear was shipshape for the inspection, and that all our weapons were secured as usual.

Anika also told us that she received an email from the Captain, asking how she wanted to deal with anyone who might decide she was a royal princess of the House Piast. In the email the Captain informed our Fireball that all the spaces in the Royal Shuttle, except Anika’s cargo bays, would be searched at the same time as our quarters. In addition, the team going to the shuttle would be supervised by one of the Warrant Officers of her personal security detachment.

In my email folder I also found an email from the Captain’s Yeoman with attachments containing all the files recorded of our marriage ceremony in the Captain’s office. While Juliet and Anika studied in C001, and Bea wrote emails at the desk, I went into C003. I took the big case holding my video devices and used the desk there to setup my video editing gear. It took about two hours to edit together a cohesive video using the professional quality files sent by the Yeoman and the amazing videos Bea took while she worked on setting up the grove in Hydroponics for our intended ceremony and the reception. I’d already perused her work, and had an idea how I was going to cut together the different scenes before I started to work.

The Captain’s audio-visual geek was good.

I began the video with a long introduction featuring almost all of the files that Beatrice captured in the Hydroponics Department. Her narrative as she videoed the place—before and after—along with Arrbra, and her Boys who’d helped her, was quirky, engaging, funny, and showed just how sweet and thoughtful Beatrice could be. The visuals displayed, in amazingly colorful images, how cohesive our commitment ceremony might have been. Bea even had videos of Juliet, Anika, and her own hot body all wearing their heart-stopping dresses right after Benny and his friends did the alterations, only Juliet appeared a little tipsy, but joyful.

Then next video sequence featured Beatrice singing the music of the Bridal Chorus from Wagner’s Lohengrin as she walked bent over and backwards with the camera held at knee level while the cats followed her down the flowered aisle from Arrbra’s shuttle bay hatch. I wasn’t surprised that there were buzzing halos of bees not more than a hand-span over the cats’ heads. Not once did any of the felines seem bothered or interested in swatting bees out of the air as playthings.

As Bea introduced them in the video the bees above were the attendants; Lilly, in her two-tone-gray-and-white fur and Casper, all in black, were followed by Princess Carlotta, a medium-haired calico, and Prince Ferdinand, an orange tom. While the feline stand-ins for the wedding party trailed Bea under their buzzing friends into the center of the grove, we learned from her ongoing narration that Lilly was her, Casper was Anika, Lotta was Juliet, and I was Ferd.

It was easy to see the cats were very intelligent and attentive to Bea. And, of course, she never once said they were spectacular products of Eridani bioengineering tinkering.

Somehow Beatrice managed to video Percy without his being aware she was near; or at least, in the video it seems that way. That scene was next, and in my opinion, it was the highlight of the whole piece. The Rasta herbsman and Scientist, as well as being a Master Plant-husbandry Specialist as Bea had told me, was a recognized member of the clergy on the Glenndeavor. Our Green Thumb Princess captured Percy as he was creating the wedding sermon for our service.

The first time I looked through Bea’s videos, I was enthralled. I will never get tired of seeing Percy deliver his heartfelt explanation of the relationships between men and women, Jah-hovah, marriage, and the sacred nature of all things. In addition, he brought his message to life in one go, after starting off by saying, “Now ... how shall I-and-I begin?”

The women got all teary eyed during that part when we viewed the finished video in high-def on the holographic system in C001. Only Juliet asked about the lush grove of marijuana where Percy was standing. He was barefoot on one of his paths when Bea snuck up on the planting bed where he was looking up into the foliage all around him. Caspar was pushing against the leg bottoms of his coveralls as well as the handle of the ancient hoe and tines Percy held like a traveling staff of office in his left hand, with the butt near his toes.

Next in the video were the actual scenes of us as the Captain performed the marriage ceremony in her office. I cut back and forth between the different cameras the audio-visual geek had set up. The ceremony was impressive and funny at the same time. Hearing Bur Brandt, decked out for combat and looking all roguish yet suave, chiding me, “Dang-it, Sitz, it goes on her trigger finger, you lopsided LERP!“ nearly had us rolling out of the bunk in laughter.

I’d followed the actual marriage ceremony scene with another video cut from Bea’s work. As she backed further out of the center of the grove where we would have stood during the ceremony, she was singing the notes to the ancient recessional created in 1826 CE—Mendelssohn’s Wedding March from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The cats were funny as they all ran off in four different directions instead of following Bea as they had earlier, and the bees slowly flew off in twos and threes to inspect the colorful flowers.

I was impressed with all the hard work our Green Thumb Princess had put into arranging so many flowering potted plants in and around the grove. The arrangements were beautiful—breathtakingly beautiful—and serene.

I was so impressed that I took Bea to bed that evening alone in C003. We heard laughing, shrieks, moaning, and pleading coming from the bunk in C001 for quite some time as we added our own noises. Beatrice Bernice and I made love several times, while Anika and Juliet experimented with the fiendish PPD—that, as our royal princess now claimed, followed her home. “Oh, my naughty husband, all three JJs being so cute, can I be keeping them, please?”

With the video proof for our families that I was a married man completed, which would keep my mother from doing jail time for murder, we sent our final emails, with video attachments, to the Communications Section in the morning. Well, Anika, Juliet, and I were finished; Bea was still typing in C003 when an ExServ Lieutenant, a Marine Corporal we’d all seen at several PT sessions, and two ExServ G3s showed up to carry out the inspection of our suite.

The team of four announced themselves at the hatch to C001, and I let them in. They were gunned up and armored, but only the Corporal carried substantial firepower; we were dressed and almost ready to depart for the Marine Barracks Block. All we had to do to be completely in uniform was retrieve our weapons from our secured lockers and drawers and then put on our Kilo helmets. Anika had been the one to suggest that we wait until the people coming to inspect our quarters saw that we followed regulations and kept our firearms, the limited amount of ammunition we kept in our suite, and our beam weapons locked up. She mentioned that not being armed would also keep whoever showed up relaxed.

As soon as she saw the pass-through from C001 into C003 as Bea walked into the compartment, Lieutenant Olafsdottir, with her red SPI bassard on her left sleeve and a ballistic vest over the chest of her duty blues, started chuckling. Shaking her Kilo-covered head, Olafsdottir said she now understood the strange annotations on her inspection list. As she supervised the inspection, Olafsdottir spent most of the time asking us questions about how we were lucky enough to have such cohesive quarters in this section of the Glenndeavor.

Then she quizzed me on how she might get assigned to this neighborhood on Seven Deck as the Marine Corporal Sicha and the two G3s, also from the S-and-I Department, carried out the search. No one seemed to mind that Anika, Juliet, and Bea shadowed the three members of the team as they got into everything; in an official, boot-camp inspection kind of way. However, they didn’t throw anything on the deck and demand we learn how to do it right before telling one of us to hit the deck and giving them twenty.

All the unsecured lockers and drawers were checked, the refrigeration units in both compartments were opened, and I was surprised the G3 who inspected the expanded head didn’t say anything about the water plumbing in the combined emitter stalls. At that point, we were asked to open the secured lockers and desk drawers they encountered. Like the three Exies in the inspection team, Anika, Bea, and I also wore red SPI armbands; and like us, Juliet wore her ballistic and beam vest too. Along with those clues, I was sure the information on the team’s data pads must have told them there would be weapons, ammunition, and power-packs in the suite per the regulations covering SPI agents having access to arms in their quarters.

After I opened the locked drawer in my desk, Corporal Sicha immediately picked up the highly polished, light-green wooden box with the beautiful dark-green grain pattern, while paying no attention to my holstered pistol, or the holstered hand laser and the EMP gun that was also in the drawer, along with extra magazine pouches. As she gazed at the box, I saw a questioning look appear on her face under the POT helmet she wore. Holding the beautiful, old wooden box in the palm of her left hand and putting the fingers of her right hand on the back of the box, she pushed her right thumb against the round, sparkling button above the keyhole.

Nothing happened when she tried to lift the top.

Nothing happened because it was locked. I’d worked for almost fifteen frustrating minutes to get the catch to engage the last time I closed the box, so I’d locked it. That and I didn’t want anyone who might somehow accidentally see the box to be able to open it. The ring inside was much too impressive and would cause a lot of questions if someone outside the household got a glimpse of the ducal signet. Now I was glad I’d follow the advice of my paranoid ass-wipe.

“That is personal property, Corporal Sicha,” I told her—she was my height and we were eye to eye. “It’s a wedding present from my younger wife. As you can see, it’s locked. It’s not contraband, and what is in it doesn’t concern you.”

When the Marine continued to look into my eyes, I said, “Lieutenant Olafsdottir?”

“Corporal—” said Olafsdottir in a neutral-sounding voice.

“I guess you don’t want me to inspect your POC, either,” Sicha said to me with a cute grin, a little snort, and a twinkle in her brown eyes under the rim of her helmet that disarmed her words. “I’ll have you know, I lost credits to that speckle-faced Irishman over you, Mister Sitwell. So, is this box where you keep your secret decoder ring?”

Anika started giggling from behind me, and then I heard something weighty being put on the bunk followed by locks being released.

“By the love of all that’s holy—“ I heard the female G3 say in an amazed voice from over my shoulder, “Lieutenant, is this what I think it is?”

“G3 Mirriam, would you be caring to be allowing me to introduce you to one of the Jameson Juniors here?” I heard my Polka Fireball ask as I started to turn around. “I am thinking you are of a mind to be appreciating at least one of him under my direction.”

Once the inspection team was satisfied, in their professional roles, they had us each thumbprint their data pads indicating we’d observed the inspection and understood there was nothing in our quarters that violated regulations. Anika had taken the empty champagne bottle down to the Royal Yacht the day before along with the empty wine bottles and hadn’t brought any full bottles back with her. Lieutenant Olafsdottir told us it had been an eye-opening experience as they departed while we started getting ready to leave as well. Bea was back to writing one more email to send off before she contacted the Movement Control Center.

“Thank goodness,” Beatrice Bernice Henderson sighed from the bulkhead desk in C003 as she fingered the Send button in the holo-field in front of her while we waited for her finish. “I know my sister and dad will really enjoy lookin’ at our video. I wonder how soon Sissy’s gonna enlist?”

Since it was a rhetorical question, nobody answered.

I wonder how that particular video attachment, going out from four different crew members as it was, and being sent to at least eight different addresses around the Federation that I knew about, was going to be handled. I still hadn’t talked to Anika about what she intended to do with her copy. I know she sent out several messages, but I didn’t ask who she was sending them to, where the messages were going, or if she’d attached our wedding video to any of them.

I was aware that all the emails and attachments the crew wanted shipped out on the upcoming post-warp drone first would be processed by the automated screening and censorship program in the Communication Section. As it happened, I’d helped update the software before this mission began. After each submitted message and any attachments were scanned, the program would do one of a number of things next. The system would pass an email and its attachments on to the redundant databanks in the drone if nothing in the items raised any kind of a flag from the security scan.

If a yellow flag resulted from the scan, the sophisticated software might pass the message, but delete any questionable attachments. The programming could redact parts of the text in an email the algorithms determined to contain any casual reference to sensitive or classified information, while passing the email on to the drone. Or the program might send the email back to the crew member to rewrite with a list of specific items not to be communicated. However, I’d never heard of a message being returned. All the yellow-flagged messages would end up on a report someone in the Security and Intelligence Department looked over. A report would show up on the sender’s personnel records along with a notice in that person’s incoming email folder with a meeting time to discuss their message with someone in the Security and Intelligence Department.

If a red flag came up during a scan, the program would kick out the offending email and any attachments. When that happened the programming initiated an immediate human inquiry into the possible subversive nature of the communiqué or attachment, or scheduled a Captain’s Mast to deal with the illegal pornography that might have been discovered in a video attached to any email and also would red-flag the submission.

Graphic text descriptions of planned reunion activities and other endearments were allowed by Federation law. However, explicit visual depictions that included any person serving in any branch of Federation service were not allowed to be transmitted inside, from, or to any Federation installation, base, ship, unit, or organizational entity, et cetera, et cetera. That sometimes put a lot of strain on the facial and body recognition software. When no faces were shown or any personnel were matched to any of the body parts visible, ExServ policy assumed that the participant or participants were members of ExServ. I wondered what they were going to do once ships like the Glenndeavor started carrying paying passengers out into the All Alone.

As I went into C001 and finished attaching holsters to my cushy, matte-black vest, I didn’t expect any message from our suite would trigger any redacting, deletions, or an inquiry. Once we were all gunned up, with our helmets on, and our itinerary for escort duty between our suite and the Marine Barracks Block came in from Movement Control, we headed out. Again, our first pickup was our neighbor and classmate, G4 Melvina Bimini.

Yes, it was an interesting two-and-a-half days.

In the line of duty, we were back attending Marine PT, as well as having extensive Range time and instruction when not working with Fire Team One, Delta Squad, Second Platoon. My inner geek loved all the classroom material and the hands-on experience we did in the simulators. My paranoid ass-wipe made snarky comments about farts and erections in tightly enclosed spaces and diapers—although they weren’t diapers.

My PAW also made comments about what might happen to Anika if the siren struck while she was suited up and breathing canned air. I was getting worried because she hadn’t had an attack lately, and my PAW wondered if her super-duper pheromones might build up, because if they did the next siren event would probably register an 8.8 or higher on the Richter scale of sexual seismic eruptions. I decided that if it was going to happen any time we were in the Barracks Block, it would be best if she was sealed up inside an EMU suit.

In boot camp, all ExServ personnel are introduced to and trained with the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU. It is the basic space suit worn in the vacuum of space or in atmospheres that contain anything poisonous or detrimental to humans. During our morning of classroom work the first day, and then later in the sims, Anika, Bea, Juliet, Melvina, and I were introduced to, and then got to experience what the Marines called a vac suit before each of us began learning our, sometimes, limited roles in the exercises designed to prepare us for boarding the Artifact. If the Captain deemed we should even get the opportunity.

The Marine vac suit is their version of an ExServ Crew Armored Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or CAEMU. That is a space suit with an armored, construction-grade exoskeleton. The Marine’s version is called a Platoon Armored Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or a PAEMU, which has an armored, combat-grade exoskeleton.

In a CAEMU, you wear something called a snoopy cap on your head inside the armored bubble on the suit’s shoulders. The snoopy cap is a skull cap that can keep your head warm and keep long hair out of your eyes, or in extreme cases, prevent the hair from suffocating you. The snoopy cap also provides biometric readings to the PAEMU system and has a pair of ear-buds as well as tiny microphones built into the cap along both cheeks for communication. A heads-up display in a holographic field provides the GUI to operate the suit.

In a PAEMU, you wear your POT helmet if you’re a Marine. We wore our Kilo helmets. There are articulated clamps that secure the rear rim and crown of your helmet to the suit’s interior suspension. You can move your head and helmet around just as well as you can outside the suit once you get used to the setup, and the field of vision through the clear armor of the bubble on the shoulders of the PAEMU is great.

With your helmet connected to the suspension device, if your suit encounters any high-G force—say a nearby explosion strong enough to toss the suit into a bulkhead, a girder, or up into the atmosphere—the almost instantaneous dampening effect of the internal suspension keeps your neck from snapping. The exoskeleton protects the rest of your body from harm. Well, within certain very hefty parameters; but way more than any regular EMU. In addition, we wore our duty blues and vests inside the suit. All of our hand weapons and belt gear we needed were in armored holders on the outside of the suit; our POCs too. If there was the possibility that you might get out of your suit somewhere else, there was a place to store your boots on the back.

Our Kilos did all the things the helmet system did so well outside the suit. Through our data visors, called electric eyes by the Marines, we had immediate access to all the PAEMU controls and systems that weren’t locked out. We had all qualified in EMUs during basic, and had studied the primary systems of a CAEMU to prepare us for further training if our rating skill-sets called for using CAEMUs on duty. Being in the Engineering Department, Anika had already passed her certification test. What the rest of us remembered from basic made it easy, even for Beatrice, to acquire the basics of moving around and communicating in a Marine Platoon Armored Extravehicular Mobility Unit and qualifying for our PAEMU tickets. That happened right after our classroom portion of the training was over and we’d eaten rations for lunch.

Of course, we wore Augmentation Level One PAEMUs, so our armored exoskeletons were rigged with only magnetic boots and the Jump Assist packages, and the JA units were disabled. The Marines of Fire Team One, Second Platoon, Delta Squad were decked out in Augmentation Level Three PAEMUs. All of their Augmentation Units were enabled and operating in the High Power, or HIPO, range.

Watching Private Benson and Private Yalvay crouch down and lock their boots on one side of an airlock frame in vacuum and zero-G and then carefully stand while pushing with their armored gloves against the leading edge of a stuck hatch was amazing. After a few seconds, and with my inner geek’s imagination filling in the missing screech of stressed metal and gears, the two of them slid the massive exterior hatch back into the framework of the simulated hull without damaging the workings too much.

That happened just after lunch on our first full day in the simulator, and I’d already done several hacks on my PAEMU’s systems. Because of that, using my electric eyes, I was watching the dynamometer level readings from Benson’s suit as she and Yalvay did the open sesame trick. Her musculature efforts only brought the Augmentation Units involved up to about 60 percent output; nowhere near the red line of the systems.

Finally, my inner geek crowed, technology allows human beings to equal the power-to-weight ratio of some ants!

It’s good that their suits are only Aug Ones, my PAW quipped, that way none of your women can bite our head off!

As it was, the Marines only enabled their Augmentation Units as needed. In that way they didn’t accidentally crush their weapons in the excitement of our dynamic combat entry scenarios. When we first did an opposed entry scenario at the end of our first, long day in the sim, all the realistic defensive fire we experienced was overwhelming, even covering the entry team’s drag where we three Irregulars were assigned.

In the special PAEMU suits used in the Sims, a laser hit will heat up the corresponding spot on the interior of the suit, sometimes disabling the section struck. The shock of seeing real lead slugs star the armored bubble in front of my face before getting knocked over from other hits on my Hard Upper Torso unit was terrifying; and my magnetic boots were secured on the decking. That was another reason to keep doing all our stretches, and why I was wearing what is basically a diaper inside the PAEMU under my duty blues—there was no way I was going to get catheters just for simulated scenarios.

When I was knocked backward by the hits, at least I hadn’t floated off in zero-G and got in the way of G3 Henderson and G2 Sitwell-Blaugelt behind me. My inner geek started wondering what kind of opposition the team was facing in the scenario, as whomever or whatever was firing lead slugs propelled by some form of high velocity gas and didn’t seem to be affected by Newton’s Third Law of Motion in the weightless environment of that particular situation. That was why everyone in the boarding party was all armed with a special laser pistol and a high-power laser rifle designed to be less prone to damage if you accidentally applied too much pressure with your augmented hand or fingers to the trigger assemblies.

During the first two days in the simulation bay, we three Irregulars went through scenario after scenario learning our responsibilities in support of Fire Team One. In several scenarios I was tasked with discovering what I could from the exterior controls of several types of hull airlocks we were training to enter, all done in vacuum and zero-G. Some hatches were controlled with a basic electronic system; some were computerized with an amazing array of different programming schemes; some used plasma conduits, relays, and electromagnetic actuators; one was totally mechanical and controlled by something that resembled an antique pocket watch movement.

After each of us had earned our Aug 1, PAEMU tickets after our initial classroom work, Juliet and Melvina Bimini went through other simulations in different compartments. I learned, possibly from another hack I might have done on my PAEMU system, that Bimini’s role was to attempt to communicate with anyone inside the artifact with the gear in her secret backpack and what seemed to be a whole raft of special comm software packages. During her Sim scenarios, she was put through all kinds of distractions. She experienced changing gravity conditions, traumatic compartment depressurization, power fluctuations and failure, because in several scenarios her shuttle came under fire from the Artifact both en route and just prior to docking with its hull.

Juliet learned to handle a shuttle from inside her PAEMU while the flight deck was at zero-G and in vacuum, as well as facing distractions similar to those Bimini encountered. However, my first wife would be piloting shuttles during follow-up visits to explore the Artifact and take away technology, and only after the Marines determined the Artifact to be secured and safe. They put her through whatever they could think of anyway to see how well she could react, adapt, and overcome; and it would earn her another specification grade on her shuttle ticket as well.

None of us Irregulars, or Juliet, or Melvina, did any training with our PAEMUs attached to a Manned Maneuvering Unit. The MMU jetpack was powered and guided by venting nitrogen out of 25 different nozzles located around the unit. The Marines did do one scenario with half of them linked to their own Armored Manned Maneuvering Units that they called ArMMU attack packs. The different weapons packages an ArMMU could be configured to carry was so cohesive, I thought my inner geek was going to soil another diaper.

Watching the Marines maneuver in the ArMMUs in the Sims compartment under zero-G and in vacuum, I imagined how an ArMMU unit created by Anika’s family would perform. By using the miniaturized anti-grav tech available to Nowe Gniezno in counteracting the mass of the unit and a Marine in a CAEMU, instead of nitrogen jets having to overcome the mass during accelerating, decelerating, and maneuvering, the units would operate in even more spectacular fashion. My inner geek informed me that with the Nowe Gniezno AG tech as part of the design, there would be no need to use nitrogen for propulsion. All the space taken up by pressurized gas bottles and plumbing could be used for something else, probably weapons systems.

I was beginning to appreciate some of the now obvious reasons why the Brotherhood was behind, or at least was supporting, the civil war Anika’s family faced.

If we thought the first two-and-a-half days of training in Tactical Simulations Bay 2 was interesting, we really got a surprise the next day.

We knew from our Morning Orders and Announcements that today the Glenndeavor would be breaking out of warp at approximately 0445. The Ship would translate somewhere into the outer reaches of the first solar system listed on our new Order of Survey. Soon after that we’d be cruising in-system toward the star along the plane of the ecliptic. I’d figured we’d remain in Tactical Simulations Bay 2 for that event, but I was wrong.

After going through three-and-a-half hours of simulations, we were given an hour and twenty-five minute break just before the time Gunny Krychenkov usually handed out the ration packs for lunch and we opened our PAEMUs to eat. Along with our time off, we were ordered out of our vac suits on the bounce and Kiari Krychenkov told us to return to our quarters and to report back for training by 0515.

As I started blinking through menus on the heads-up of my electric eyes to shut down my vac suit and crack the access seal, I knew we were being ordered back to our quarters so we could be on our bunks during Break Out. There are restraints built into the side frames of all the bunks on the Glenndeavor. Those are supposed to be used by crew members to restrain themselves only during Break Out. Buckled onto your bunk you are safe if it might happen that re-entry into normal space is ... well, bumpy ... or if the gravity fields in your section failed momentarily.