Solfleet: The Call of Duty (42 page)

Lieutenant
Junior Grade Mark Lombardo had just started his third year in the fleet, and he
couldn’t have been happier if they’d made him an admiral right out of the academy.
As a boy, he’d always loved to tinker with things. Every Christmas he’d begged
his indulgent parents for the latest electronic toys, only to dismantle every
one of them to see what made them tick as soon as he got them. The most amazing
thing though was the fact that he’d had a knack for putting them back together
as well, properly, and usually on his first attempt. Sometimes he even modified
them to add features or just make them work better. So an assignment to one of
the fleet’s newest starcruisers as a junior engineer was like a long term
vacation in Heaven for him.

When word
came down from the chief that he was looking for a volunteer to fly a work pod
out to the alien vessel and rig its hull with a series of portable thrusters to
stop its tumbling, Lombardo had been the first to volunteer. Only afterwards,
as he was suiting up and preparing to depart, did Commander Doohan come to him
and tell him one-on-one that he would have been assigned anyway, had he not
volunteered. The commander had then gone on to explain, almost as if to
apologize for that, that the job required a better than average pilot
physically strong enough to work under the difficult conditions this particular
job entailed—specifically, greater than normal G-forces. Regardless of the
reasons, he knew Doohan wouldn’t have chosen him if he didn’t have confidence
in his abilities, so being selected had been a great boost to his ego.

Now, if only
they had a larger work pod onboard...or at least one with a bigger cockpit. His
six foot five inch, two hundred eighty-five pound muscle-bound frame plus
double extra-large EVA suit made for quite a tight squeeze. He barely had room
to move his arms.

He piloted
the pod to within a hundred meters of the Tor’Kana vessel’s so-called danger
sphere—personally, he preferred to call it the sphere of death, though he
certainly hoped it wouldn’t actually live up to that name—then brought it to a
stop relative to the enormous vessel. Then, having not had an opportunity to
see the one they’d found last week because he’d been elbow deep in the guts of
the
Rapier
’s backup reactor at the time, he sat idle for a couple of
minutes, just to gaze at the tumbling behemoth. After all, he’d never seen a
Tor’Kana ship before, except in pictures, and if the rumors were true and there
weren’t many of them left, he might never have another chance.

Interesting
design, he thought. The vessel’s relatively smooth, roughly cylindrical primary
hull was comprised of three major segments, like the bodies of the Tor’Kana
people themselves. With an oddly semi-reflective black hull that was somehow
still easily visible, even here in deep space, it looked almost like a long,
slender ant, but with four needlelike jump nacelles instead of legs, spaced
equidistantly around the forward segment. The aft segment was obviously
dedicated to their sub-light drive engines and supporting systems, so most of
the habitable parts of the ship were probably located in the center segment.
Unfortunately, the main gun that he’d heard so much about had been completely
blown away, as evidenced by the huge gash along the ship’s underbelly. Too bad.
He’d been looking forward to seeing that.

“Wait a
second,” he mumbled, confused, remembering what he’d been told during his
pre-launch briefing. “
Rapier
, Pod One,” he called over his spacesuit’s
comm-link.

“
Go
ahead, Pod One,
” Commander Doohan’s voice came back immediately. The fact
that the chief himself was on the line was just one more indication of how much
he truly cared about his people. Another chief engineer might well have
delegated communications to a subordinate, but not Doohan. No, Doohan would be
right there with him through the whole thing, in spirit if not in body.

“I thought
you told me this beast was a pearlescent-white, Commander. I’m looking at a
black hull out here.”

“
That’s
not unexpected, Mark. I’ll explain the technology to you later.
”

In other
words, get to work. “Copy that, sir. Proceeding with mission.” He checked his
instruments. “I’m at one hundred meters and holding. Ready to set computer to
match target vessel’s pitch and yaw.”

“
Affirm,
Pod One,
” Doohan responded. “
Medical and Security teams are in position
and standing by. You’re clear to proceed.
”

“Copy that.
Proceeding.”

He called up
the rates of the vessel’s rotations, factored in the hundred meters distance,
then initiated the computer controlled burn. The pod lurched to the left and
downward, relative to his own orientation, and nudged forward to maintain a
constant hundred meter distance around the sphere. Not unlike a vessel moving
into orbit around a planet, he supposed. As he watched through the large
canopy, the vessel’s bow whipped by from his two o’clock to his eight o’clock.
The stern followed seconds later from his five o’clock to his eleven o’clock,
but at a relatively slower rate. As seconds ran into minutes, the ship’s
rotation rate seemed to grow steadily slower. Before long the stern stopped
coming so close, while the bow no longer pulled so far away.

Then,
finally, he found himself staring steadily at the leading edge of the bow.
Except for the vessel’s counterclockwise roll, all sensation of movement had
gone...as long as he ignored the thousands of stars in the background, and the
occasional glimpse of the
Rapier
as it soared by in the distance, and the
constantly shifting G-forces. Speaking of which...

He loosened
his harness and found it a little difficult, though not impossible, to lean
forward against those forces. But leaning forward in a work pod seat was hardly
the same thing as working. How was he going to get the job done if he could
barely climb out of the pod? How? He was a Lombardo—the latest in a long line of
them who’d served with distinction as Solfleet engineers. That was how.

“
Rapier
,
Pod One,” he hailed with renewed determination. Then, without bothering to wait
for a response—he knew the chief was monitoring him constantly anyway—he
reported, “I have matched the vessel’s pitch and yaw at a steady one hundred
meters distance directly off the bow. G-forces are pretty strong, but I think I’ll
be all right. Resuming approach.” How much difference would a hundred meters
make? Probably not very much, considering that the vessel was over two thousand
feet long. He nudged the stick forward—just a tap. Outside, the rolling Tor’Kana
vessel appeared to be creeping slowly toward him on a collision course.

“
Slowly,
Mister Lombardo,
” Doohan warned him. “
I’m not wearing my catcher’s mitt.
”

Lombardo
grinned. “Baseball’s dead, Commander,” he reminded his superior officer. “It
died a slow and painful death a long time ago.”

“
Not in
my home town, it didn’t, son.
”

Lombardo
laughed. Son. That was what he liked most about Commander Doohan. He thought of
the ship’s entire Engineering staff as his own sons and daughters and treated
them accordingly. Hell, he was probably old enough to have fathered every one
of them.

He glanced
down at his instruments. Eighty-seven meters. Eighty-six. Eighty-five. Too
slow. He was anxious to get started. He nudged the stick forward again, even
lighter than before. His rate of closure on the Tor’Kana vessel increased, but
so minimally that he could barely perceive the difference.

“
That’s
fast enough, Lieutenant,
” Doohan told him. “
I don’t want to have to
scrape you off their hull any more than I want to have to catch you.
”

“Copy that,
sir.”

All Lombardo
could do was watch and wait while the numbers fell through the seventies, the
sixties, the fifties, and so on, until they finally reached the teens. Then he
quickly throttled back and adjusted until he was within twelve feet of the
massive black surface.

“
Rapier
,
Pod One. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot there for the pod’s grapplers to
grapple. Are you sure the claws can bite into their hull?”

“
Affirmative,
Pod One,
” Doohan answered. “
They were constructed specifically for that purpose.
”

“If you say
so, sir. Deploying grapplers.”

He squeezed
both triggers on his stick at the same time, as though he were firing all weapons
at an enemy fighter in one last act of desperation. The twin four-clawed grapplers
shot forward obediently and dug into the Tor’Kana hull, several inches deep
from the looks of it, and with one last, sudden jolt that threatened to rip the
claw’s arms from their housings the pod started rolling with the ship. Now,
from his point of view, the only thing that appeared to be moving was the
entire universe around them. He, his work pod, and the Tor’Kana vessel were
motionless.

At least
that was what he intended to repeat to himself, over and over and over, until
he finished the job.

“I have a
good grab,” he reported. Then he tapped the ‘grasp’ and ‘retrieve’ controls to
bring the pod itself into contact with the ship. “Closing now. I’ll be getting
to work inside two minutes. Wish me luck, Commander.”

“
Good
luck, Lieutenant. Hold on tight.
”

The troop
shuttle soared several miles above the vast, dark island jungle in virtual
silence. Even from inside its dimly lit and slightly chilly passenger cabin, Dylan
could barely hear the subdued whisper of the small vessel’s engines with their
tactical noise dampeners fully engaged, and no one had spoken much more than a
few words in the hours since departure, so the flight had been nearly as quiet
as it had been long. But that was normal for a combat mission. There was
something very humbling about the very real possibility of not living to see
another sunrise that tended to plunge even the bravest of Marines into quiet
reflection.

Not for the
first time since he transferred to the Corps, Dylan had spent that time
thinking back over his career—how it had begun almost before he realized what
he was doing, how it had progressed over the roughly ten years since the that
early baptism of fire in the middle of which he and his fellow recruits had
found themselves on Tamour IV when they should have been going through Basic
Training’s Final Phase dozens of light years away, how it had affected his
marriage, and where it might take him in the future—and he’d found himself
wondering what he was doing in a Ranger unit of all places.
Any
Ranger
unit, let alone a unit in Special Ops. A combat line unit was the last place he’d
ever expected to end up, and it certainly wasn’t what he’d originally enlisted for.

Lacking any
firm sense of direction of his own at the time—he hadn’t exactly benefitted
from a lot of adult guidance growing up—Dylan had followed one of his high
school friends down the path he’d chosen and had enlisted in Solfleet’s Delayed
Entry Program for the Military Police career field during the summer after
eleventh grade. They had reported for Basic Training together the following
year just two weeks after graduation, Dylan having given up a surprise
scholarship to the U.S. Aerospace Force Academy in favor of sticking by his
friend’s side and following the only path that
guaranteed
he’d make it
into space. As it turned out, he’d also given up the love of his life, though
he’d certainly never intended to.

Ironically,
the friend he enlisted with, who’d suffered from a severe superiority complex
for as long as Dylan had known him, turned out to be one of the weakest
recruits in their platoon, and it quickly became apparent that he wasn’t going
to make it through training. He had the physical strength but not the stamina, and
he became ill with some sort of condition that Dylan could never remember. Late
in the third week, at Sergeant Carlson’s recommendation, the company commander
ordered him discharged and he was sent home.

Dylan on the
other hand, as much to his own surprise as anyone else’s back home, did very
well, due in large part to Pat’s influence—Recruit Pat Thomason, whom both
Dylan and his friend had befriended from the very beginning. A distantly
related indirect descendant of the infamous U.S. Army General George S. Patton,
Pat had easily been the most highly motivated recruit in the whole company, and
that motivation had had a way of rubbing off.

After Tamour—someday
Dylan would tell that story...to someone—Dylan attended and graduated from
Military Police training at the top of his class, earning a Security Forces
specialty code in the process. That code would forever identify him as one of
the top ten percent of his class who, in addition to their regular police
duties, were qualified for assignment to away team and first contact mission
security units, and he felt proud to have earned it.

He took to
his duties as if he’d been born to them. But rather than congratulate him for
his success, that same so-called friend he’d originally enlisted with began to
ridicule both the service itself and Dylan’s involvement in it at every
opportunity, attempting but failing miserably to disguise his cruel comments as
good-natured humor. They crossed paths from time to time over the ensuing few years,
usually while visiting mutual friends, and each meeting felt more awkward than
the one before.

But perhaps
worst of all, the former close friend soon got into the habit of referring to
himself as a military veteran, the very thought of which angered Dylan as it
would anger any member or former member of the service. The man had never
served a day on active duty, had spent less than a month in Basic Training, and
had failed at that. He’d claimed his failure was due to the sudden onset of his
illness, but Dylan had never completely believed that. More likely the illness
was just an excuse he’d come up with because he couldn’t bear the thought that
Dylan might actually be tougher—might be more of a man—than he was. Regardless,
his claim of veteran’s status was a slap in the face to
real
veterans
everywhere. A slap that had ended their friendship forever.