Firestar
Copyright© 2009 by Prince von Vlox
Chapter 8
“This trip is taking longer than I expected,” Commander Pagadan said 11 days later. “And why won’t they give us a tour of their ship?”
“Would you give a stranger a tour of one of our ships?” Alan asked idly from his bunk.
“That’s not the issue,” Commander Pagadan said. His voice had taken on that petulant tone Alan had often heard in the privileged when they were denied something they expected as their due. So far as he could remember, Commander Pagadan came from a family that was solidly mid-level.
“We can go from here to that lounge just down the hall, and we can go to the fresher. Why won’t they let us go anywhere else?” He scowled at the bulkhead. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot. Johann can go to the Sick Bay, but only when he is escorted.”
Alan marked his place and thumbed the reader closed. Of the four of them, he had been the best prepared for the length of the trip. So far, it had taken 11 days, and he had learned more about his fellow officers than he cared to.
Commander Pagadan was a classic dirtside officer. Alan didn’t even flinch any more when he heard the passageway called a hall or the deck a floor.
Their Doctor, Lieutenant Altenschmidt, was easy to peg. He spent most of his time in the Sick Bay, only dragging himself back to their quarters to sleep. Alan had initially thought Lt. Griffin was their Security minder. That thought had lasted less than 15 minutes; Lt. Griffin was a computer and communications specialist. He was here to find out more about the Families’ computers and communications protocols. Only he wasn’t finding anything that made sense. It wasn’t that these people didn’t communicate; it’s just that they did so in ways he couldn’t unscramble. And none of his probes could make any headway with the ship’s main computer. It was almost like there wasn’t one, or if there was, it was operating on principles that nobody recognized. Their minder from Kingdom Security had to be Commander Pagadan.
“Anthony,” Alan said. “As an intellectual exercise, if a group of foreign officers like us visited one of our ships, how would you handle it? Forget Johann, I don’t think he would recognize a missile launcher if we gave him a holopic and put his hands on it. Assume someone put a Computer and Communications Officer like Charles, a Tactical Officer like me, and a Systems officer like you on board a cruiser. How would you handle it?”
Commander Pagadan laughed. “I would lock them in a storage compartment and throw away the key. The only thing they could report to their superiors would be the color of paint we used inside our storage compartments. And I might turn out the lights so they couldn’t even report that much.”
“And how would that go over with your superiors? How would the Admiralty take that?”
“My superiors wouldn’t care,” Commander Pagadan said, “and that’s all that would matter.”
Now I know why I outrank him, Alan thought, even though he’s in charge of this mission.
After his interview with the Admiral, he had taken the time to get an updated Seniority List. The Seniority List ranked all officers in each grade. The annotations that accompanied the list were an unofficial current history of the Navy, and made interesting reading.
Anthony Pagadan had been promoted to Commander a week after Alan, during an administrative realignment following the Second Battle of Ashizawa Nexus, and was near the bottom of the seniority list. Alan had learned he had been bumped upwards, 150 spots on the list, to rank in the top third. That was only proper. Combat officers always got the edge over those who sat safely in the rear. By ranking in the top third, Alan could win command of a Cruiser in no more than two years.
Not bad for a middle-station officer who had had to enter the Academy by competitive exam, he thought.
Commander Pagadan was aware of their respective positions on the seniority list, and he was trying hard to keep on Alan’s good side. He knew that Alan would write the performance review for this mission.
“I know you’re right, Alan,” Commander Pagadan said, relaxing. “I’m just getting so damned bored cooped up in this room.”
“You haven’t been meeting their crew in the lounge?” Lt. Griffin asked, looking up.
“I have, but none of them will talk to me. I just can’t seem to make headway with anyone.”
“Maybe it’s what you want to talk about,” Lt. Griffin said. “They have this game that’s like Go, but you can move the pieces after you place them instead of placing a new one. It’s really fascinating and I’ve had a chance to talk to several of their crew about it.” He had a small board set up in front of him and was working through combinations of moves.
Commander Pagadan started to say something, and then appeared to think better of it. “You’re right, Charles,” he said with a deep sigh. “And I’m glad you’ve shown the initiative.” He turned. “And you, too, Alan.”
Alan tossed his data viewer to one side and got up, slowly stretching. “I’m going down to the lounge. I’m tired of looking at your ugly mugs.”
“Not that the women on this tub are any knockouts,” Commander Pagadan said. “They’ve all cut their hair, no make-up...”
“You’ve got to stop thinking of them as women,” Alan said. “They’re women, but not like we think of women back home.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself,” Commander Pagadan said. “Then I see one of them in a jumpsuit and I can’t help it.”
“I’ll see you two for the next meal,” Alan said, letting that remark go. “If one of the crew is in the lounge, I’ll ask her how much longer this trip is going to be.”
“Could you?” Commander Pagadan asked. “You seem to have a good relationship with the Captain of this tub. Maybe you can get her to tell you.”
Alan smiled and wandered down to the lounge. They had been confined to their portion of the ship by a simple mechanism. In the PSK, there would have been armed guards at each hatch. Here, they merely closed the hatch and required some sort of passkey to go through, a passkey that Charles couldn’t decipher. He had studied the crew members as they’d come and gone on their errands, and he knew it had something to do with the square black plate next to each hatch. The crew member would put the back of her hand against it and then open the hatch. When Alan had tried it, the hatch had remained closed. There had to be a sensing device in there that could tell the crew from the passengers. It was as effective as armed guards would have been.
As he had hoped, Squadron Lead Andersen was in the lounge browsing through a stack of papers. “Hi, there,” he said, sitting across from her. “Where’ve you been keeping yourself?”
“Oh, here and there,” Corey said. She tossed the papers down. “I’ve been busy with all of the standard things you do on any ship to pass the time: routine paperwork, readiness drills, exercising, things like that. I was about to take my turn in the Exercise Bay just now. What have you been up to?”
“Reading, mostly,” Alan said. “Updates to orders, updates to Standard Procedures, all the things I’m supposed to know.”
“I didn’t see you bring any books on board. Where did you hide them?”
“I just brought my viewer and the data strips it reads.” She looked blank. “My data viewer.” He had a moment of insight: never assume they’re like us. You just got finished telling Anthony that, and here you are doing it yourself. “You do know what a data viewer is, don’t you?”
“I don’t think so.” Her eyes widened slightly as she thought of something. “Your viewer, it’s electronic, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. It’s a cheap version that uses printed circuitry. When I was fresh out of the Academy, I couldn’t afford anything fancier, and I’ve been too stubborn to replace it ever since. It works, and I don’t like getting rid of something that works.”
“That’s the problem,” Corey said. “Electronics don’t work very well for us. The radiation in the Nebula affects them.”
They don’t have modern electronics? Alan tried to hide his surprise. How did they make their ships work? What about computers? He bit back his questions. He had to be patient and pull the information out slowly.
“That’s the second time you’ve mentioned radiation. It must be pretty fierce if it affects electronics.”
“It’s something we live with every day. Some of our planets are safer than others. On Home, an unprotected person is relatively safe.”
“That’s the planet where you first settled, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “We tried to reduce the surface radiation during the terraforming. We haven’t been entirely successful.”
He wrinkled his brow. “That’s right, your people had to terraform the planet before you settled it. Captain Valentine mentioned something about that.”
“We were lucky. The colonizing fleet included quite a few biologists, chemists, and physicists. It took nearly 300 years after we arrived before Home was even marginally livable, and another 250 before people could live safely in the open.”
“Did they have to start with a bare planet, or something?”
Corey shook her head. “The planet had an atmosphere, an ocean, continents, things like that, so they had something to work with.”
Thinking of the work that involved, Alan shuddered. “Why didn’t they leave and find some place habitable?”
“The ships had been damaged, and they didn’t know where they were. The whole expedition was way off course.”
“Are we off course? We seem to be taking a long time to get where we’re going.”
“No,” Corey said. “We’re still about four days from one of our bases, and then we’ll change ships. That’s where the ships accompanying us will stop. We have at least another 12 days of traveling ahead of us.”
Alan laughed lightly. “I’m not sure I can take 12 more days with Anthony and the others. We’re starting to get on each other’s nerves.”
“Clearly you need to get away from each other,” Corey said. “I’ll mention it to Captain Valentine and see if she can do something for you. Maybe you could exercise or something.”
“That’d be good for us,” Alan said. He slapped his stomach. “We’ve all put on some weight.”
“I’ll do that right after my exercise period,” Corey said. “The Exercise Bay is usually deserted during this watch, so the four of you could use it after Josie, Marcia, and I do.” She gave him a sly smile. “You could join us if you want.”
“Who are Josie and Marcia?”
“That’s right, you wouldn’t know. They’re the other two pilots on board.”
Alan glanced down at his undress uniform. “I’m not exactly dressed for exercising. Let me go change.”
“I’ll wait here,” Corey said. “Don’t be long.”
Alan didn’t offer a word of explanation to the others; he just donned his fatigues and returned to the lounge. “All set.”
Corey headed for one of the hatches. She paused at the hatch to put the back of her hand against the black plate. Alan could hear a faint click as the lock disengaged. He followed her through the hatch, staggering suddenly at the increase in weight.
How do they do that, he asked himself? On a PSK ship, the gravity generator treated the entire ship as a single Mach field and applied a vector to it to produce the artificial gravity. That meant the same gravity gradient was applied everywhere on the ship. But here he had just stepped from a 1 G field to a higher one. George Herman Mach’s integration of the Unified Field Theory must not apply here.
But that was ridiculous, he thought. It has to apply. The gravity gradients between the different sections of the ship would tear it apart over time. He wanted to experiment, but the hatch swung shut behind him.
Corey stretched. “Your part of the ship always feels funny,” she said. She started down the corridor, humming something under her breath. “I take my microgravity exercises when I’m supposed to, but I guess I’m not used to the compensators being adjusted like that.” She looked over her shoulder and smiled. “I’m a pilot, so I don’t think about it. Most of the time, gravity is just a navigational concept to me.”
“You produce different gravities in different parts of the ship? Isn’t that hard on the ship?”
She shrugged. “Of course. But it’s easy to build the ship’s structure so it isn’t a problem. Doesn’t the PSK do that?”
“We just use a single gravity setting on our ships,” he said. He stopped, struck by something ... the corridor was covered by a constant and ever-changing mural. The one on his left depicted an outdoor scene with trees in the foreground framing a small clearing with animals peeking shyly out of the brush. The artwork was more enthusiastic than accurate, but it carried a vivid sense of life. The one on the right was the view from a hill overlooking a small lake. People--he noted they were all women--were standing on the shore. In the distance, the sky was bright with colors.
“Not too bad,” Corey said from behind him. “I think the perspective is slightly off, but other than that, it’s pretty good.”
Alan saw another mural farther down the passage. “Is the whole ship decorated like this?”
Corey followed his glance. “It helps pass the time. Every section in the crew will take a passageway and try to brighten it up.” She looked at him in speculation. “Don’t your ships do something like this?”
Alan shook his head. “No, we don’t. It’s all Navy Issue paint.” He touched the bulkhead. “Is this real paint? It feels so smooth.”
“It’s really a polymer of some kind,” Corey said, “so it binds to the metal of the bulkhead. Real paint gives off fumes and would be a fire hazard in combat.
“Now come on, the Exercise Bay is just down here,” she said, turning away. “I have to change first, and then I’ll join you.”
The Exercise Bay looked like every other gymnasium Alan had seen. Two women in shorts and halters were already working out. One was on a rowing machine, the other, taller and slightly older, was in a harness that had extensions covering her arms and legs and was running on a treadmill. They both gave him a strange look.
Corey disappeared through another hatch, reappearing a few minutes later in shorts and a halter. Painfully aware of her petite but curved body, Alan swallowed and looked away.
“I missed yesterday,” Corey said as she hooked herself up to a treadmill, “so I’m going to have to do a harder workout today.” She pointed at a nearby rowing machine. “Be careful with that one, the gravity adjustment needs to be reworked. Right now it can pop you up to 3 Gs without any notice.”
Alan eyed the machine curiously. “You have individual gravity controls on your equipment?”
“Not so you’d notice on that one,” said the woman on another rowing machine. “That one barely works.” She stopped and got off her machine, the sweat gleaming on her skin.
“Here, use mine. I’ve done my 30 minutes.” She looked at Corey. “Mind you, Corey, 15 kilometers, I’ll check the pedometer to make sure you actually did it.”
“Josie’s the junior one of us,” Corey said. “So as Eldest here I appointed her our exercise-minder.”
Josie slapped her flat belly. “I need to lose a kilo or two,” she said. “So minding these two forces me to exercise more often.”
The other woman hadn’t said a word through this, but she stepped off her treadmill and wiped the sweat from her eyes. “How about a game of handball?” she asked Josie.
“Only if we do it in half G,” Josie said. “Setting the wall to randomly spot change the gravity is just too hard on my nerves at the moment.”
“But it’s good training.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it, Marcia. This is supposed to be recreation, not training. Besides...” Their voices faded as they walked away.
Alan’s head was spinning. They casually assumed a refined control over gravity that he didn’t think was even theoretically possible. These people had more to teach than he had imagined.
“What does that machine do?” he asked, looking at the treadmill and attachments Corey was putting on.
“This?” Corey asked. “These provide resistance that makes me work harder. The treadmill just gives me a place to run.”
He had to force his attention back to what she’d said. “Does it have its own gravity?”
“No,” she laughed. “Why should it?”
He sat in the rowing machine and took the oar handles. “Why does...” he began, and stopped. The entire compartment spun, and for a moment he thought he was about to fall off. Now he knew what they meant about a gravity generator with each machine. He tried rowing. It was a lot harder rowing uphill than he thought. The exercise machines on Spatha were a lot easier than this. In five minutes, he was drenched in sweat. After 15 minutes, he was done. He was gasping for breath and could feel his heart pounding in his chest.
Corey took a deep breath and started jogging. She started slowly at first, but was pumping her arms and bringing her legs up. Gradually, she leaned forward and ran harder.
She grew up in this gravity, he thought, watching her. And after a moment, he grudgingly admitted that she had to be in better shape than he was.
He just sat in the rowing machine and watched. Corey was still laboring on the treadmill, her face a mask of concentration. It was obvious she wouldn’t be able to answer his questions. He didn’t want to get off the machine. Despite what he could plainly see, his mind told him he was on the slope of a hill and about to fall off. He studied the small control panel as he caught his breath. There was a timer and a dial; at the moment, the dial was set to 1.5. There was a red line on the black facing at just a fraction over 1.0; he assumed that was for their normal gravity. He set the dial to 1.0 and grasped the oar handles again. After a few strokes, he stopped, just as puzzled as ever, but feeling as if he had achieved something. He was rowing in “normal” gravity.
He got off the machine and set the pointer back to 1.5. He could feel the tug of gravity on his arm as he leaned over the machine. It eased off as he pulled his hand back. That was interesting; the gravity effect extended no more than 10 cm from the apparatus.
His knees were still wobbly, and so he wandered around the compartment, inspecting the other equipment. Almost everything was a variation of the equipment he would find on any PSK ship.
The sound of running feet changed. Corey was slowing down. She finally stopped, breathing hard. She bent over, resting her hands on her knees, until she caught her breath. Then she looked up at him with a smile. “There, 16 kilometers. I’ll just have to do my normal 10 tomorrow.”
“Do you normally have to work this hard?”
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