“Sir.”
As Ribot walked away, radiating extreme unhappiness with every step, Michael sighed deeply. This was not the start he’d been hoping for. Oh, well, he mused, things can only get better. In any case, he couldn’t spend any more time worrying about Athenascu. The final ops conference to review 387’s upcoming mission was due to start in less than an hour’s time, and Michael intended to be fully prepared for it.
With the ops conference over and only a hurried break for lunch, the rest of the day involved hard physical work for Michael and his surveillance drone team, which also doubled as 387’s cargo handlers.
Of course, Michael thought as he, Athenascu, and Leong wrestled a recalcitrant cargo container into position outboard of the mass driver storage bins on 3 Deck, the cargo always arrives last, and late, and nobody can ever explain why. Despite the mission having been scheduled for more than three months, the Defense Gravity Project had managed to get the massive gravitronics arrays up to SBS-20 only late that morning, leaving Michael and his team precious little time to get them secured by the XO’s deadline of 18:00 that evening and get the ship patrol-ready.
Finally the massive container, painted a light blue to show that it was vented to space and required no external services, was secured and the locking pins were rammed home and checked visually. Mother signaled a secure lock and detached the cargobots, and Leong and Athenascu maneuvered up and out of the brightly lit cargo bay to await the next container.
Michael did the same thing and then paused for a moment.
Above him was the enormous spherical gray-black bulk of SBS-20, to which 387 was securely berthed, its 400-meter diameter dwarfing 387, her stealthed hull a formless, bottomless, impenetrable black pit punctuated only by the brilliantly lit silvered inner surfaces of the open cargo hatches. Thousands of kilometers below him swam the glorious swirling blues and whites of Anjaxx itself. Beyond and above the planet hung its two moons, both silvery gray in the harsh light coming from Prime, Anjaxx’s orange-red main sequence dwarf star only 81 million kilometers away. Providing the background to it all were the billions of diamond-sharp pinpoints of light that made up the rest of the galaxy. It was a sight Michael had never gotten used to and, if his parents were any guide, never would.
“Incoming, sir.” Leong’s comm interrupted his little reverie, and Michael turned to see the next container, another big one but this time a luridly bright green to show that it was pressure-and temperature-controlled. It swam slowly into view around the sharp curve of the battle station’s outer hull, two Day-Glo orange cargobots attached one to each end, their mass driver thrusters firing brief silver-gold plumes of incandescent matter as they moved the container in a slow and carefully coordinated arc around SBS-20’s hull.
Moving away from SBS-20, Michael made sure that he and his fellow cargo handlers were clear of the container’s approach vector and would not be caught between 387 and the container as it closed; cargobots were very good, but nothing made by humans was infallible. The containers had a lot of mass and, once out of control, tended to stay that way until they either hit something or had been wrestled back under control. Even moving at less than a meter per second, the containers were lethal weapons. And the cargobots’ mass driver plumes also had to be watched. The safety sims had some gruesome holovid of spacers who hadn’t paid attention, and Michael had no intention of allowing any repeats.
As the container approached, the cargobots began to brake the container. Must be heavy, Michael thought, judging by the prolonged effort it took to bring the huge box to a dead stop 5 meters off the open cargo hatch. “Leong, take the Anjaxx side. Athenascu, the planet side. I’ll go behind.”
Leong and Athenascu, two bright strobe-marked orange shapes against the black nothingness of 387, spun on the spot, stopped dead for a second, and then accelerated into position, turning at the last second to drop into place, perfectly set. Show-offs, Michael thought enviously as he maneuvered himself much more carefully and, he would have been the first to admit, clumsily into position. It would be a long time before he was as good as the worst spacer on 387’s surveillance drone team, but then, they had had hundreds, in some cases thousands, of hours of practice. Michael commed the cargobots, confirmed that they had the correct cargo slot, checked that the team was clear, and then authorized the final approach. As always, despite the impressive finesse with which the cargobots handled the container, the last couple of centimeters required the combined efforts of all three of them to get the damn thing into position so that the locking pins could slide home.
Finally, the container was where it needed to be. Mother signaled a secure lock and detached the cargobots as Leong and Athenascu connected the thick armored power and ventilation umbilicals. Two minutes later, Mother was happy that this was one container that would survive the trip, and Michael and the team turned to await the next; this one, according to Mother, would be the last to go into the starboard 3 Deck cargo space.
It had been a long hard day by the time the last container had been pinned home and after an exhaustive gear check to make sure nothing had been left behind-captains got pretty upset if they had to stop acceleration to recover lost equipment rattling around loose in the cargo bays-and Michael could dismiss the team. He and Petty Officer Strezlecki did a last fly-past along the containers.
“Looks fine to me,” Michael said as he checked out the last of the containers on the port side.
“Me, too, sir,” Strezlecki confirmed. “All personnel clear and accounted for. All equipment accounted for. Button her up?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
Michael and Strezlecki pushed back as Mother turned off the cargo bay lights and one by one closed the massively thick armored access doors until all that was left was an absolute and total nothing. Michael knew 387 was there because logic told him it had not moved and he could see her shape as a black cutout against the gray-black hull of SBS-20. But all of a sudden, the sense of form, solidity, and mass, of firm reality that the open cargo doors had provided, was gone. All Michael could see was void, a pit into which he felt for one awful moment he was going to tumble.
Strezlecki also felt it. “That’s something, isn’t it? Never get used to it even after all these years.” Her voice brought Michael back to his senses.
“Christ, thanks for that cheerful thought. I’d rather hoped I would get used to it.”
“Never, sir, trust me,” Strezlecki said confidently as they turned to make a final inspection of the hull to confirm that every cargo hatch had sealed as flush as Mother said it had, guided only by the ship schematics brought up on their neuronics. Finally, the job was done and they made their way back to the personnel access lock, the ship passing below them unseeable and unseen.
“Any thing else we-I-need to think about?” Michael didn’t think there was, but it didn’t hurt to ask.
“No, sir, that’s it for today. I’m headed for the shower and then to the Fleet senior spacers club-got a birthday bash to attend.” Strezlecki’s voice made it clear that with a patrol scheduled to last almost two months less than twenty-four hours away, she intended to get in a final round of serious partying before they dropped.
“I wish I had half your luck. Quiet evening for me and then a decent night’s sleep would be good.” In the frantic scramble to get everything done in time, Michael had managed only about three hours of sleep since he had stepped-sorry, stumbled and fell-aboard 387.
According to Michael’s neuronics, they were only two meters from their destination, and in confirmation Mother opened the outer hatch of the forward personnel access lock. The brilliant white light from inside the ship seemed to come from nowhere.