Firestar
Copyright© 2009 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 10
Sonia and Heather were waiting for her at the front door of the Residence Hall. “I’m glad you could get away,” Corey said as she hugged them both.
“Work has been picking up,” Sonia said. “I’ve been staying in First Landing most nights this month. It’s good to get my head out of those reports for a few minutes.” Her tired face spoke volumes about whatever she was doing.
“This looks livable,” Sonia said, looking around the lobby. “I’m surprised.”
“This is the part only Family sees,” Corey replied. “I’m in the next wing over and three floors up.”
“It looks like those square cement-block buildings some of the poorer Families build,” Heather said quietly. Her lips had drawn down in a frown. “This lacks the variety, though. Honestly, Corey, doesn’t the Navy have any colors of paint except gray and white?”
“The Navy spends its resources on other things,” Corey said, “not luxuries.”
“Paint is not a luxury.” Heather stared, aghast. “Girl, somebody needs to straighten a few people out.”
“We save resources here so we can make our ships more livable,” Corey said. “Remember the pictures I sent you of our Ready Room on Jellicoe? That’s typical. And our cabins are nice, too.”
“Your cabins are tiny! There are three people in it. I’ll believe livable when I see it.”
“You don’t spend much time in your cabin,” Corey said. “Ask Cousin Mary the next time you see her. She’ll tell you the same thing about merchant ships. There just isn’t that much room in a ship.”
“Oh, I believe you,” Heather said, still looking down each of the halls, trying to find a hint of rebellion against all the uniformity. “If I can’t trust my sib-sister, who can I trust?”
“I know you two are busy,” Corey said. “I’ve been busy, too. They’re graduating all of us two months early. The next term is only 45 days long, not three months, and there’s only a three-day break between terms. Which means every teacher is doing her best to cram three months’ worth of work into our skulls in the next 45 days. We’re not even getting Ninthday off anymore.”
“It’s been hard knowing you were so close but we couldn’t see you,” Heather said.
“I miss you guys all day, every day,” Corey said softly. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get away, but it’s so good to see you now. Thanks for taking the time.”
“We miss you, too,” Sonia said. “Do you think you’re going to get some leave soon?”
“We have that three-day break between classes. That’s in just over a tenday. That’s when we’ll have to do it.”
“We’ll have to plan something,” Heather said. “Maybe we can make a real holiday of it and go riding or go to the beach or something.” She looked at Sonia. “You’ll have to tell your boss that you’re taking those days off,” she said firmly.
“Listen to her,” Sonia laughed. “Since she earned that certificate, she’s been able to tell her boss ‘No, I don’t think I’ll come in today’ and make it stick. Some people have all the luck.”
“You’ve been putting in one-and-a-half shifts a day for the last two months.” Heather wagged a finger at her sib and then turned to Corey with her hands on her hips. “She comes home on the last bus, when she comes home at all, and she leaves on the first one in the morning. Plant DNA can’t be that critical. I should know, I’ve designed a lot of it.”
Sonia smiled. “It is when you’re getting ready to seed another planet, and you’re doing Deviation Modeling. It takes 10 to 12 hours to do one model; you know that, Heather, and you don’t want to quit when you’re half done or you practically have to start over again from the beginning. If you want to help me, come up with a faster way to do it. Who knows, they might give you another Certificate for that.”
“You’re taking three days off,” Heather said firmly, “and that’s that. If we wait until you feel comfortable taking time off, Corey will have shipped out to the back side of the sky, and we won’t see her for another year or two.”
“Well, I have to talk to my boss, but I’m sure she’ll say yes.”
“That’s settled, then,” Heather said. “We’ll meet Corey here at this gate at 9 o’clock, 10 days from tomorrow.”
“I’ll be here,” Corey promised. “Look, I’ve got to run.” She hugged them fiercely, tears wetting her cheeks. “I’m missing you already.”
“Call us when you get the chance,” Sonia called over her shoulder as she pushed Heather towards the street.
“I will,” Corey promised. She hurried back to Building 4. It was good to see her sibs, even if only for a few minutes. She swallowed the lump in her throat and took the elevator back to the observation lounge. Alan was waiting for her, a strange expression on his face.
“All taken care of?” he asked.
“Thanks,” she said. “I know we should have taken the time to go over our presentation one more time, but I haven’t had a chance to see my sibs very much.”
When she had heard the Attention Call, she had expected anything other than Heather calling from the front lobby. She had stammered through a quick explanation for Alan. He had just smiled and said, “Go.”
“I thought we should have gone over the material for our presentation again.”
“Nonsense. If we don’t have it letter-perfect by now, we’re not going to make it so in the last hour. Don’t worry about remembering the minor points. They’ll come to you while you’re speaking.”
“I keep thinking that we’ve missed something major that only looks minor.”
“We won’t know until the time comes,” he had said. “Now I’ve got a question for you. Except for the clothes, I couldn’t tell you three apart. I think I hadn’t accepted how much you all look alike.”
“You were watching?” She seemed surprised.
“If I stood in the corner, I could see everything. I know you can tell each other apart, but how do other people do it?”
“You learn,” Corey said. “It’s something everybody works out. It’s not that hard, really. We might be identical in appearance, but there are little mannerisms and habits that give you away.”
“I’ve never understood that,” Alan said. “Back home, people treat twins and triplets as if they were the same person, but different copies. I rather like the way your people do it; everyone has their own identity.”
“I guess that’s part of it,” Corey said. “Don’t let me mislead you, though. When we’re growing up, we do silly things like that. Sooner or later, everyone tries it with her sib-sisters. People only do it once; there’s just too much confusion and, looks aside, we are three separate people.”
She shook her head and opened the folder containing her notes. “Now, there’s just one part in this section that I think we’ll get questioned on, and that’s when we established communication. I still don’t know how much detail I should go into.”
“Let’s not mention it unless we’re asked,” Alan said. “I’m not sure I know how to describe what happened. I was unconscious for part of the time, and anyway, I think that’s outside of a tactical discussion, which this is supposed to be.”
“What do we say if someone asks?”
“Tell them we’ll answer in more detail after the session, not during. That’s what we do in the PSK when we get a question that doesn’t bear directly on the topic.”
“That makes sense.” Corey glanced at the chrono on the wall. As always, it kept Fleet Time, not the time Sonia and Heather were on. “We leave in 30 minutes. We’d better finish getting ready.”
Alan bundled his notes up. “I’ll see you back here in 25 minutes.”
Back in their quarters, Commander Pagadan was checking his uniform in the mirror. “Are you sure you have everything?” he asked Alan.
“I’m sure,” Alan said. He thumbed through his folder of notes. These people didn’t have the electronic aids he was used to. Fortunately, the concept of laser pointers seemed to be universal. Corey had sketched out each phase of the engagement and had her artwork converted to holopics. She also had what she called film she had taken during the fight.
Alan had puzzled over the word. He’d eventually found the word in the dictionary of their reference log. It turned out to be a series of images laser-etched on a clear physical medium. The word “film” hadn’t been used that way in the PSK in over 350 years. The data viewer had replaced separate physical media long before.
The images Corey’s Second had taken were grainy and didn’t show very much tactical detail. But they had recorded the positions of several navigation reference stars. Corey had used those to reconstruct the physical details of the part of the system where they had fought: the background gravitational vector and radiation, even the presence of the wormhole she and Svetlana had used to sneak in close. For all their lack of modern hardware, the Families could wring a lot of information out of the slightest clue. One picture he had saved was of Spatha at the end of the fight. He had been appalled at the damage, and yet proud of the account she had given of herself. He had a copy of that holopic in his kit.
“I think that’s everything, then,” Commander Pagadan said. He looked at the other two officers. “Ready, gentlemen?”
“As ready as we’ll ever be, I guess,” Johann replied. “Though why I have to be present is beyond me. I have no idea how you gentlemen maneuver ships, nor do I really care. I’d rather be at an Internal Medicine seminar that’s going on here.”
“Maybe you’ll learn something,” Alan said. “Ready, Charles?”
Lieutenant Griffin, their communications specialist, set his data viewer to Record mode and slipped it into his pocket. “I don’t expect I’ll learn anything new,” he said. “But I’m always willing to be proven wrong.”
Corey and Captain Alexander met them in the observation lounge. Corey was nervously rubbing the thumb and fingers of her right hand together. Captain Alexander was in what Alan had learned was the full-dress uniform, complete with a row of decorations on her breast. Corey was dressed in a much simpler uniform without any decorations or even rank badges.
“There was so much interest in the presentations this morning that we’ve moved the lecture to another building,” Captain Alexander said as they waited for the elevator. “Ordinarily, we would walk, but given the circumstances, we’ll fly.”
“We understand,” Alan said. “How big an audience do you think we’ll have?”
“The last I heard, about 75 officers told me they were going to attend,” the Captain said. “I’m expecting more, including several civilians.”
“Great.” Corey shook her head. “I was nervous enough thinking I was going to have to speak in front of 10 or 12.”
“You’ll do just fine,” the older woman said. “After you get started, the size of the audience doesn’t matter. It’s all just a blur. I remember the night before my first presentation. I was so nervous I couldn’t sleep. I still get nervous in front of a group, but I don’t let it bother me until I’m done.”
Corey clutched the folder tighter against her. “We’ll see.”
Two aircars were waiting in the garage in the basement of the building. Captain Alexander led Commander Pagadan and Johann into one.
“Make yourselves comfortable,” Corey said to Alan and Lieutenant Griffin as she dropped into the driver’s seat of the other aircar. She slipped her hand into the control glove. She reached through her shank, ran through the checklist, and started the car. As the engine warmed up, she noticed both Alan and Lieutenant Griffin looking around the interior of the aircar.
“Is something the matter?” she asked politely.
“Where are the controls?” Lieutenant Griffin asked.
Corey adjusted the idle. “Right here,” she said, waving her hand in the shunt glove.
Both Alan and Lieutenant Griffin looked at the glove that just covered the back of her hand. A cable connected it to the dashboard. “That’s it?” Alan looked surprised. “How do you control the car through that?”
“Through my shunt,” Corey said. She saw the other car begin to move. “Excuse me a moment.” She followed Captain Alexander’s car out of the garage and into the air. As they gained altitude, she glanced at Alan. He had picked up the control glove on his side of the car and was examining it closely.
“You’re controlling it through this?” he asked, finally. “How?”
“Through my shunt,” she repeated. They don’t know about the shunt, she reminded herself. Of course, why should they? I’ll bet it’s one of the things we’ve never explained.
She locked the controls when they reached cruising altitude. “We’re going to a presentation hall next to Government House,” she said, pointing up ahead and to the right. “It’s one of the white buildings on the other side of the river. We’d fly there directly, but we can’t cut across the flow of traffic.”
Alan glanced out the front of the car and then back at Corey. She was moving her gloved hand around, and the car was maintaining its course. What did she mean by shunt? Over the last several days, he had seen the glint of metal on the back of her hand. Was that it?
He had thought those were just spots on her hand, now he wasn’t so sure. That glove covered just the back of her hand. It couldn’t be a VR glove; the car would have moved when she pointed. Come to think of it, everyone seemed to have those metal-looking spots on the back of their hands. How did they get there?
“This city doesn’t seem to be as large as I thought it would be,” he said, changing the subject. First Landing appeared small by anyone’s standards. Though it lay on both sides of a river, it couldn’t be more than 10 kilometers across. There were only a few tall buildings, and there seemed to be a lot of parks. The Navy base was nearly as big as the city. “The capital of the PSK is more than a hundred kilometers from end to end,” he added for comparison.
“First Landing isn’t a commercial city,” Corey said, “at least not anymore. When it was the only city on the planet, it was pretty big, but now it specializes in government. Over the years, commercial firms moved to other cities, and the old factories were either converted to other use or replaced with parks. I once saw a holopic taken of First Landing about 400 years ago. The city was all tall buildings and crowds of people.”
Alan looked around. In the distance, he could see at least two smaller towns. There were no visible roads connecting them, but he could see a large number of aircars. That would eliminate a great deal of surface traffic.
“Everything around the city is so green,” he said.
“I think that’s by intent,” Lieutenant Griffin said. “Back home, all of the cities are surrounded by crops and greenery. It helps maintain the ecosystem.”
“That lake over there is circular,” Alan pointed. “Was that deliberate?”
Corey glanced at the lake, and her expression turned grim. “In the early days, meteor strikes were a constant menace. That lake was one of them. Home’s system is relatively young, as systems go, and it’s still full of rocks. One of the reasons we went back into space was to keep things like that from happening.”
Alan looked in the other direction. Mountains of red granite lined the eastern horizon. The most distant ones were white with snow. He could see the blue of an ocean off to the west. Forests and the green of crops covered everything in between.
“What’s a shunt?” he asked without turning away from the view.
The car started to descend. “It’s a...” Corey paused, focusing on landing the car. Alan looked; her hand was resting against her leg. “It’s hard to explain,” she said. “Your doctor probably can tell you better than I can. But it’s an interface between the controls and our nervous systems.”
The next few minutes passed in a blur as they landed and were swept through a succession of short halls, finally ending up in a small conference room with a view of the presentation area. Captain Alexander spoke to someone before closing the door.
“There are three presentations today,” she said. “You’ll be giving the second one.”
“Will we be permitted to hear the other two?” Commander Pagadan asked.
“If you think you’d get something out of them. The presentations are normally in our own language, but everyone who leaves the surface of Home must be proficient in Common, so you should have no trouble understanding what’s said.”
“I think it would be interesting,” Commander Pagadan said. “We’ll be out in the audience, of course.”
Captain Alexander looked faintly uneasy, but controlled her expression. “You’ll be able to see and hear everything from here.”
“I think we need to be out where we can participate in the give and take that follows any presentation,” Commander Pagadan said. “This is supposed to be an exchange of professional views, and though we are not part of your culture, the original premise for our mission means we would be expected to participate in discussions such as this.”
Alan kept his face expressionless. Anthony had phrased that just exactly right, leaving Captain Alexander no real counter-argument.
Corey looked at the Captain, wondering what she would say. The older woman just nodded slightly, as if acknowledging a clever gogeste move. “I’ll see what can be arranged,” was all she said before leaving. In a minute, she was back. “If you would follow me, please.”
The presentation hall resembled a theater in the round. There were four screens above the central dais. People entered the hall from the last rows, descending to their seats, each of which had a microphone and a small desk for note-taking. There was no place to plug in a data viewer, but Alan noted the ubiquitous black rectangle set conveniently on each desk.
Right where someone could rest the back of a hand, he thought. Corey controlled the car through her shunt, and I’ve seen others press the backs of their hands against these things to open doors. Maybe this is the communications method Charles has been looking for, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t explain it to him.
Their entrance caused a small stir. As they made their way down the steps, Alan could hear whispers and muted comments from around them. He suddenly felt conspicuous in his white uniform. Until that moment, he hadn’t considered how much it stood out in the dim light of the room.
At first, the people entering behind them chose to sit elsewhere in the room, but after Captain Alexander and two other officers made a point of sitting next to them, people entering the hall began to find seats near the PSK officers. Nobody sat too close, though.
“Are we that alien?” Alan joked softly to Corey.
“What?” She looked around, seeing the others for the first time. Her knuckles turned white as she took in the surrounding faces. “Uh, yes,” she said. Her mouth worked several times, but only a slight sound came out of it. She cleared her throat and swallowed. “No, you’re not alien. I mean, you are, but you’re men.” She turned to stare at the podium again, looking for all the world like a prisoner examining the gallows.
“You’ll be fine,” Captain Alexander touched her arm reassuringly. “Just focus on what you’re saying. When you’re at the podium, you can’t really see anyone out there.”
“Aye, Ma’am,” Corey said. She stared straight ahead, her lips pale and her jaw clenched.
“Have you spoken in front of a large audience before, Commander Young?” Captain Alexander asked.
“Several times, Ma’am,” Alan replied. “I couldn’t graduate from our Academy without giving several lectures, and since then I’ve participated in a number of forums like this.”
“Then you’re well-experienced at this.”
“I wouldn’t quite say that,” he said, grinning. “There are a great many things I’d rather do than speak in public. But if you have to do something, you might as well be as good at it as you can.”
“That’s good advice,” she replied. “I think I’ll tell that to my students.”
The room was gradually filling. There were gray uniforms as well as blue ones, and here and there he saw someone who wasn’t in a uniform at all.
“What’s the difference between the uniforms?” Alan asked the Captain.
“Those in gray are in the Commercial Service,” she said. “Those would be the officers of our merchant ships. We have two branches in our Space Service. Well, three actually, if you count the Survey people, but they almost never come to these meetings. The Navy is in blue and the Merchants are in gray.”
“What about those others?” he asked, nodding toward a few who weren’t wearing either blue or gray.
She smiled faintly. “Those are members of the Executive Council. They sit in from time to time, especially if there is something that may affect Families’ policy.” She glanced at a note card in her hand. “All three presentations today may do that. I imagine they’re here to inform themselves.”
“Ah, politicians,” Alan said. Captain Alexander looked at him with her eyebrows raised. Alan decided he had probably used a word she didn’t understand. “Is that an unknown word here?”
Captain Alexander hesitated for several seconds. “We use the term, but we don’t have what you might consider to be politicians, Commander Young. A politician is someone who makes a living as a representative or leader of a political group. That’s all they do. True?”
Alan smiled. “More or less.”
She settled back in her seat, making herself comfortable. “The only representatives we have in our government are the Eldests, the Head of each Family. They’re the ones who sit in the Council, unless they’ve appointed a representative, as most do. Running a Family composed of between 60,000 and a million people is a full-time job, so you can appreciate that they cannot devote the time to sit on the Council.”
“What about in each Family?” Alan asked. “Or is all of their leadership unelected?”
“Each Family chooses their elders by whatever means they want.” Captain Alexander shrugged. “Some choose them by seniority, others by election, still others head their own internal councils. Nobody makes their living solely by representing other people.”
Alan considered her explanation carefully. “Some people in the PSK might not even think you have a government.”
Captain Alexander smiled. “The original purpose of the Council was twofold: to settle inter-Family disputes, and to negotiate genome swapping. Only later did it evolve into what limited form of government we have. It works for us.”
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