With nothing better to do, I decided to follow Aleg Oberland’s advice and browsed the latest news broadcasts. I clipped on a pair of mediaLink shades and tapped the power button beside the right lens.
MediaLinks let you browse the news, send letters, or place calls. They were the basis of civilian communications, but their signal could not be secured. Enemies could tape them or jam them in combat. The shades worked very much like the visual controls in my combat helmet. Selecting topics and scrolling through menus by twitching my eye, I began searching for the Senate hearings that Oberland told me about. I selected the “News and Information” option rather than “Entertainment Programming” or “Correspondence.” A menu appeared offering “Pangalactic Highlights,” “Local News,” “Sports,” “Entertainment News,” and “Business.” I chose Local News for Scutum-Crux.
Stereophonic speakers along the sides of the shades rumbled a businesslike tune as two newscasters discussed big stories around Scutum-Crux, a backwater arm politically, with important strategic implications. The first story involved a planet called Ezer Kri sending a delegation to Washington to meet with the Senate.
At first glance, I thought I must have tapped into the wrong story. This was not about a planet that wanted to break from the Republic. All the people of Ezer Kri wanted to do was rename their planet. They held an election and a sizable majority voted to rename the planet “Shin Nippon.” The report explained that “Shin Nippon” was Japanese for “New Japan.” When the governor of Ezer Kri notified the Senate, he was informed that the name change was out of the question. The governor and a delegation of Ezer Kri politicians were summoned to DC to discuss the matter before the Senate. No arrests, no rebellion…why had this seemed important to Oberland?
I paused the broadcast. Though I had never heard of Ezer Kri, I remembered hearing something about a colony of Japanese people refusing to integrate. The rumors did not mean anything to me when I first heard them, but there must have been more to it. I scanned ahead.
When the Unified Authority first settled Ezer Kri, (I’m not sure what the name “Ezer” referred to, but “Kri” was a notation used for planets that had engineered atmospheres.) in 2303, the planetary administrator was of Japanese ancestry. Working quietly, he appointed several people of similar descent to his cabinet. When the administrator retired, he appointed his own successor. Not surprisingly, the new administrator was Japanese.
Over the next two hundred years, there was a Japanese migration to Ezer Kri. While the rest of the galaxy integrated, 35 percent of the population of Ezer Kri was Japanese. The non-Japanese population complained about discrimination, but a U.A. investigation found that Ezer Kri was productive and law-abiding—a model planet with an excellent educational system and one of the best economies in the Republic. For some reason Oberland equated the proposed name change with sedition. So did the Senate, apparently. It meant nothing to me, and trying to reason it out gave me a headache. I switched off my media shades and went to sleep.
Including stops at several space stations, the trip took nearly twenty hours. By the time we reached SC Command, thirty new passengers had boarded and divided up by rank and phylum. Pilots and other officers sat in the front of the cabin. Tight clusters of sailors sat in the back. There were an even dozen Marine grunts on board.
“We’re coming up on the Kamehameha,” one of the officers said, waking me out of a light sleep. Hearing this, I looked out my window. All I saw was an endless field of stars.
The corporal in the row across the aisle woke up and stretched. He saw me pressing against the window and decided to help. “Do you see a pale gray star at one o’clock?”
There were a lot of gray stars. I felt the cramp in my back, heard my stomach growl, and knew that my patience had worn thin. Then I saw it. The other specks of light twinkled. The Kamehameha was a pasty gray dot.
“See it?” he asked.
“Flat-colored speck?” I asked. “It looks pretty small.”
“It gets bigger.”
It did indeed. As we approached, the bat wing shape of the hull seemed to stretch for miles. The top of the ship was so smooth that it looked like a running track. The top of the ship was the color of a shark, and its front face was lined with windows and weapons arrays. The bottom of the ship was beige in color. Huge antennae, at least fifty feet long and ten feet wide, protruded out of the top and bottom of the wing at each corner. During battle, these antennae emitted the magnetic currents that formed the ship’s protective shielding.
The Kamehameha grew larger by the moment. Soon I could see blue-and-white plumes flaring from its giant engines. We might still have been fifty miles away when we slowed to approaching speed, but the old fighter carrier already looked considerably larger than the transport in which I had traveled. Another minute passed, and I could make out the individual gun placements.
“It’s huge!” I said.
“First time on a carrier?” the Marine asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“It gets a lot bigger.”
Again, he was correct. I lost sight of the ship as we circled it from above to make our final approach. When we came around, we were less than a hundred yards from the rear of the ship. We could have landed our transport inside one of the dormant emergency engines, and the emergency engines were less than half the size of the main engines. Our pilot adjusted his approach, and we coasted onto a landing dock in the terraced rear of the ship.
Then something made sense. I had heard stories about these ships intimidating insurgents into submission, but I never understood. Teachers back at the orphanage told us the sterile facts about fighter carriers. They showed us holographic images. They cited measurements. Images and measurements meant nothing until you saw this ship in person; any impressions I formed listening to measurements and staring at images were dwarfed by its immense size.
“You won’t even know you are on a ship,” the corporal said. “It’s not like being on a transport or a frigate. You won’t feel it move or hear the engines. It’s like living on base.”
The corporal looked like a freshly minted clone. He had the stubble-cut hair of a young cadet but the small scars on his face and neck suggested he’d seen action. Military clones were a squat and powerful breed standing just shy of six feet tall. This man, however, clearly a bodybuilder, was wider than most. His shoulders and packed arms were not government-issue.
“You must have spent a lot of time at your last assignment,” he said. “I’ve never met a corporal with less than two years’ time on a carrier. This is my third, and I was lucky—I made corporal in five years.”
The transport’s booster rockets hissed as our pilot jostled the ship into position. I heard motors whine as electromagnetic skids dropped out of the transport, and locked us into place in the docking bay. Deckhands opened the hatch from outside the transport and the officers at the front of the cabin filed out.
“Unless I miss my guess, we’ll probably end up in the same platoon,” the corporal said. “I’m Vince Lee, just transferred up from Outer Scrotum.” Seeing my confused reaction, he laughed. “The Outer Scutum-Crux Fleet.”
“Wayson Harris.” I said, standing up and pulling my gear from the locker above my seat. I followed Lee off the transport and into a large receiving area. Two officers, a young Marine captain and a slightly older Naval commander, stood on deck. The other passengers had already grouped by branch by the time we stepped down the ramp—the sailors proceeded on ship, the Marines and pilots remained. Lee and I took our spots at the head of the Marines.
Had I not recognized their uniforms, I would have guessed that the captain was the pilot and the lieutenant commander was the Marine. The lieutenant commander stood well over six feet tall and had the barrel chest and the intensity of a fighting man. I had trouble imagining him crammed into a cockpit. He called out the names of his pilots, and each responded, then he looked at his clipboard and smiled. “All accounted for.”