Terms of Enlistment (31 page)

We start our orbital approach to Willoughby right at the end of my watch. I’m tired and hungry, but I decide to stay in the NNC for a few more minutes to witness our approach to the first extrasolar planet I’ve ever seen.

I’m looking at the feed from the dorsal array when the hatch buzzer sounds. I walk over to the hatch and peek through the viewport to see Halley’s face.

“Hey, you,” she says as I unlock the hatch for her. “Mind if I duck in for a few minutes? I want to fill out this flight log without Lieutenant Rickman chewing my ear off.”

“Sure thing,” I say, and wave her in. She steps through the hatch and lets herself drop onto one of the chairs in front of the admin console.

“Isn’t your watch over?” she asks. “It’s 2230.”

“Yeah, I’m off. I just wanted to hang around to watch us go into orbit. Here, check it out.”

I point to the screen of my admin deck. She leans forward to look at it, and puts her flight log aside.

“Wow. That’s Willoughby? I didn’t realize we were already this close.”

“We’ll be in orbit soon. Aren’t you supposed to play taxi with those drop ships of yours?”

“Yeah, but not until 0600 tomorrow morning. I guess they’re not set up for nighttime deliveries down there.”

We look at the globe of azure and brown that’s slowly shifting around underneath the ship. It looks a lot like Earth, but there’s also something profoundly different about Willoughby. I’ve seen the familiar picture of Terra from orbit often enough that looking at a planet with completely different continent shapes feels a bit disorienting.

“Look at that,” Halley says. “Continents, and oceans, and everything. Looks a lot like Earth, doesn’t it? Do you think they have wildlife down there?”

“I have no idea,” I reply. “I don’t know how that terraforming thing works. Did they get to bring livestock from Earth when they set up the colony?”

“Maybe in a tube, as genetic samples or embryos. I doubt they would have wasted the cargo space on that colony ship for a herd of live cattle. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to transport a whole cow forty-two light years across the galaxy?”

The ship lurches to the side so hard that I lose my footing and stumble against one of the databank racks. Halley lets out a surprised shout.

“What the fuck was that?” I ask when I regain my balance.

The overhead lights flicker and switch to the red-orange combat lighting scheme. The overhead starts to announce Combat Stations, but whoever’s doing the announcement in CIC only makes it halfway through “
Combat
...” before the audio cuts out with a squelch. Then there’s the sound of explosive decompression coming from the deck below us. The ship lurches again, much more violently than before, and the sudden jolt throws me into another rack of equipment. The side of my head collides with the unyielding edge of a data storage cabinet, and then I’m prone on the rubberized deck and rapidly slipping into unconsciousness. I hear Halley screaming, and I register the thumping of the emergency locks on the NNC hatch, and then my brain turns off the lights.

I wake up to the sensation of cool air hitting my face. The right side of my head feels wet and sticky, and when I touch my fingers to my forehead, I feel a deep, bloody gash over my right eyebrow. It’s dark, and eerily quiet. All I can hear is the familiar soft humming of the data storage racks. I look up to see Halley standing above me.

“On your feet, sailor. We’re in deep shit.”

She looks at the gash on the side of my face and winces sympathetically.

“That looks awful. You okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll live.”

My admin deck is on the floor over by the rear bulkhead. I walk over to it and pick it up to find that the deck is still running, none worse for the wear. I put it back onto the desk in front of the admin console. Then I lean over to press the button on the priority voice link to CIC.

“CIC, Networks.”

There is no reply, and Halley shakes her head.

“Already tried that. The circuit’s fried. I haven’t heard shit over the 1MC, either. Place is quiet as a tomb.”

I tap into the system with the admin deck, and it doesn’t take long for me to realize that the Versailles is profoundly broken. Virtually every vital subsystem shows a long string of emergency alerts and error messages.

“Holy shit,” I say. Halley steps next to me to look at my admin deck’s screen.

“What is it?”

“Power circuits are out--everything down to the tertiary. That’s not supposed to happen, ever. We’re running off our backup power cells.”

“What about the reactor?” she asks. I check the engineering section, and an unwelcome feeling of dread gives my stomach a little twist.

“It’s out. We’re dead in space. This is not good.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured we’re in deep shit.”

I scroll down the list of priority system messages, and my feeling of dread turns into borderline panic.

“The Abandon Ship order came twenty fucking minutes ago.”

“Holy shit,” Halley says again. “How long were we out?”

“Almost an hour, it looks like.”

Halley walks over to the hatch and pounds on the control box with her fist.

“We got a red light,” she says. “Not enough breathable air on the other side. It won’t let us open.”

“Well, how the fuck are we going to get out of here? I’d rather not suffocate on this can, you know?”

“Chill out, Andrew. Check your toy, and let’s figure out how to get out of this room before the air runs out.”

I check the system for the location of the nearest unused escape pod, only to unearth more bad news.

“Fuck. They’re all gone.”

“What’s all gone?”

“The pods. They all launched. There’s not a single escape pod left in the hull. The last one launched seven minutes ago.”

Halley throws her hands up in an exasperated gesture that looks almost comically understated, considering our circumstances.

“Well, isn’t that just fucking awesome.”

“I can blow the lock on that hatch remotely with the admin deck, I think, but we won’t have any air to breathe.”

“Or any way off the damn ship.” She pauses for a moment and then snaps her fingers.

“Can you see if the drop ship is still on the flight deck?”

“Yeah, hang on.”

I flick through a dozen status pages and submenus until I reach the optical feed from the flight deck camera. The feed shows an empty set of docking clamps over a sealed drop hatch. The flight deck is empty and dark.

“It’s gone. Looks like your pals left without you.”

“Well,” Halley says. “Then that’s that.”

“Don’t you guys have more than one drop ship on this tub?”

I see excitement in her face, which is a lot better than the fear that was there just a moment ago.

“Yeah, the spare. It’s in the far corner of the flight deck, in a berth. Can you see that on the camera feed?”

I cycle through all the visual feeds from the flight deck. Finally, one of the overhead camera lenses gives me a perfect oblique view of a Wasp-class drop ship.

“There it is. Looks like they didn’t want to take the time to fire that one up, too.”

Halley leans over my shoulder and studies the screen.

“That bird is dry and bare--no fuel, no ordnance. Even if we can lock it into the clamps and drop it out of the hatch, we’ll go in ballistic. We’re too close to that planet.”

“Well,” I say, “isn’t the refueler automated?”

“Yeah. The ordnance monkeys have to load the ammo by hand, but the computer does the refueling. I have no idea how to work it, though. They usually have it filled up and ready by the time they hand me the keys, you know.”

“Well, I don’t know how to do it, either, but I bet the computer does.”

For a minute or two, I dig through the systems that are still talking to the Neural Network, expecting the automated flight deck modules to be offline, or the system objecting to my poking around with a security lockout. Luckily, neither event comes to pass. The refueling module on the flight deck is active and idle, waiting for human input. I log into the refueling console remotely, and point to the screen of my admin deck to draw Halley’s attention to the menus.

“That’s gotta be the one,” she says, tapping the screen over the menu item that says “READY FIVE LAUNCH PREP”.

“Good thing they label their stuff clearly,” I say, and activate the sequence. The menu status changes to “INITIATED/IN PROGRESS”, and I switch back to the optical feed to make sure that something is really happening down on the flight deck. Near the drop ship, a warning strobe starts flashing. As we watch, the robotic arm of the refueling module comes into view and swivels around the Wasp to dock with the refueling port in the top of the hull.

“That takes care of the gas,” I say. “How long does it take for the tanks to fill up?”

“Ten minutes,” she replies. “Another five to fire up the avionics and do the pre-flight self checks, and two to move the whole thing over to the drop hatch.”

There’s a low rumble going through the hull that makes the floor shake slightly underneath our feet. Over by the data storage modules, something starts to beep, and all the lights in the room go out briefly. When they come back on, all the storage banks in the NNC fall silent at once. I’ve never been in this room without hearing the drone of the cooling elements for the storage banks, and the lack of background noise is ominous.

“I think your shit just broke,” Halley says flatly.

“Yeah, no kidding,” I reply.

My admin deck is still running, and the local telemetry is still up, but the link to the hangar bay systems is gone. The neural network of a warship is terrifically resilient, backup data links on top of backup links, but now I can’t see anything beyond the local telemetry range, half a deck in either direction. Something big just broke, and the Versailles is dying. If the link had gone down twenty seconds earlier, I wouldn’t have been able to verify the presence of the drop ship on the flight deck, much less activate the refueling sequence.

“Let’s get out of here while we still can,” I say.

“No argument,”Halley replies tersely. “Let’s.”

I can’t see much through the viewport of the NNC’s hatch. The corridor outside is dark, and I can’t tell whether there’s smoke outside, or hard vacuum. The system only knows that opening the door would be dangerous, so the safety lock keeps the hatch closed.

“Can you unlock that with your toy?” Halley asks, pointing to my admin deck.

“Yeah, I can override the safety. There’s no air on the other side, though. It’ll blow all the air out of this room, and then we’ll suffocate.”

“What about the NIFTIs? We got a ton of those on every deck.”

“Of course,” I grin, and feel like slapping my forehead for overlooking the obvious. The NIFTIs--Navy Infrared Thermal Imagers--are stored in emergency lockers on every deck on the ship. They’re little masks with infrared goggles and a small oxygen supply, designed to let a crewmember see and breathe in the event of a major fire on the ship. I open the admin deck and check the emergency chart for the nearest NIFTI locker.

“There are three right on the bulkhead just before the aft staircase,” I say. “Twenty yards to the left. Think you can hold your breath that long?”

“I guess we’ll find out. If I faint, you’ll just have to drag me, you fierce combat grunt.”

“Like I have a choice,” I say. “I can’t fly a drop ship for shit.”

We both laugh, even though we’re scared almost witless.

“Where are we going after we get the NIFTIs on?”

I consult the admin deck again.

“Staircase, and down to Deck Seven. This thing doesn’t show any fires. We should be okay with the infrared from the NIFTIs. Just watch your step.”

“Let’s hope your toy is right about that,” Halley says as she zips up the collar of her flight suit. “I’d hate to open a hatch and get baked.”

“Check the hatches with your hand before you open them,” I say, recalling the firefighting lessons from Navy Indoc.

“Right. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

I don’t really want to trade the relative safety of the NNC and its autonomous oxygen supply for the air-deprived corridors on the other side of that access hatch, but there’s no way of knowing how much longer the Versailles is going to hold together. I open the admin deck and find my way to the emergency override for the fireproof hatch in front of us. Once again, I expect the system to refuse my request, but the light on the door panel switches from red to green without complaint. I close the lid of the admin deck and stow the device in its carry pouch.

“Ready?” Halley asks, her hand on the door release.

“Left turn, twenty yards. Ready,” I say. “Go.”

Halley slaps the hatch release with her palm, and the locking bolts on the hatch retract with a loud clacking sound. Then she pulls the hatch open, and the room immediately starts filling with smoke. We step over the threshold of the hatch and rush out into the passageway.