The Crypt: Shakedown: (A Military Sci-Fi Novel), page 16
Gillick had thick black hair, a round face, and a down-angled nose that made him look like he’d grown up in a Sino settlement. Daniels was a year or two younger, perhaps twenty-four. His close-scalp cornrows spoke of meticulous attention to detail, and his hazel eyes held the casual lethality of a bored housecat.
Neither man was anything special in the looks department, but they weren’t ugly by any stretch. An unremarkable face was a cornerstone of deep cover work.
“A trans-dimensional hop,” Gillick said. “I find myself looking forward to this as much as I look forward to a body cavity search.”
“Oh, come on, Jester.” Daniels pinched a piece of lint off the slate’s surface. “Depending on who’s doing it, a BCS isn’t so bad.”
Ah, the old boys will be boys shit, was it? Would they have said the same tawdry thing in front of an Intel Chief that didn’t have tits?
“This is going to be a challenging assignment,” Anne said. “We will execute the three pillars of BII—knowledge, discovery, and protection.”
Those words decorated the department’s crest. Saying them out loud was a bit officious, perhaps, but Daddy always said a good leader makes expectations known. Anne would ensure that her intel department ran smooth and by the book.
“When the time comes to share knowledge on any and all foreign governments, we will be ready,” she said. “When we have an actual intelligence mission, we will excel at discovery. For now, this department’s primary and ongoing objective is protection—to identify potential spies and to defend against saboteurs.”
Daniels sighed. “Permission to speak freely, Major?”
Did bored house cats sigh? Anne wouldn’t know; the Laffertys had always been dog people. If house cats could sigh, though, she bet they sounded exactly like this guy.
“Go ahead, Daniels.”
“We’re locked out of personnel records,” he said. “This ship is full of criminals. We have to assume some of the crew are significant intel risks. When do we find out what everyone did?”
A question to which Anne had an answer, one she didn’t like.
“We don’t,” she said. “Other than name, rank, serial number, and skill qualification ratings, we don’t know anything about the crew’s histories.”
Gillick rubbed at his eyes.
“This is such bunk,” he said. “How do we do our jobs if we don’t know who did what? We don’t even get to know who committed financial crimes? Those are our bread and butter.”
He was right about that. BII operated on the belief that if a fleeter would commit one crime for financial gain, they’d commit another. Particularly if there is a lot of money involved, and money was something enemy intelligence agencies threw around like candy. Druggies were a related story—once you’re addicted to a substance, you are controllable by people who supply that substance.
“I’m not happy about it either,” Anne said.
In truth, she was quite happy about it. Someone had tried to frame her for war crimes. She didn’t need people thinking she was some kind of psycho. Anne was ninety-nine percent certain not even Captain Lincoln knew what happened on Eden—Daddy would have seen to that.
“I’ll admit my wrongdoing,” Daniels said. “I took a big bribe and got caught. How about you two? What got you entombed?”
Gillick grinned wide. “Entombed. Sealed off in the Crypt. I like it. As for me—”
“Enough,” Anne said. “On this ship, past crimes, if any, are classified information. Do not share yours. I’ve been specifically ordered to not ask crewmembers about theirs. However, you both seem like gregarious types. If you have a casual conversation and accidentally learn the truth about what put a crewmember on this ship, you should quietly inform me about it so I can effectively counsel you on how to keep said information quiet.”
Gillick grinned. “We certainly wouldn’t want to learn anyone’s secrets.”
“Of course not,” Daniels said. “I, for one, would never intentionally pry into the private lives of my crewmates. To do so would be uncouth and unseemly.”
Prying was BII’s job—Jester Gillick and Akil Daniels would start doing so, immediately. They’d get information Anne wasn’t allowed to ask for. If someone ratted them out to the XO or to the captain, Anne had full deniability.
“Time to go,” she said.
They walked aft to the CIC entrance. Just inside were three stairs to port, which led to the xeno loft, and three to starboard, which led to the intel loft. Anne took her place in a raised acceleration chair at the rear of the intel loft, right behind Gillick’s and Daniels’s stations, which abutted a rail looking out onto the rectangular CIC.
She’d never seen a rectangular one before. Most were circular, with stations positioned to face a three-meter-diameter crystalium navigation orb. Most were significantly larger, too—even a small patrol ship’s CIC was four times the size of this confined space.
Keeling’s CIC was twelve meters long but only four meters across. The nature of the narrow space meant most stations were built against bulkheads, with operators facing away from the nav-orb, which sat dead center in the long rectangle. That orb was only two meters in diameter—tiny compared to the others she’d seen. There wasn’t enough room for a bigger one.
Captain Lincoln and XO Ellis stood side by side at the command slate, which was just aft of the orb. That put their backs to both the xeno and intel lofts. The XO’s coveralls looked clean. Lincoln’s were a disaster. When had she last laundered them? And that ridiculous black bandana on her head, as if she thought she was a pirate on the ancient seas.
Directly forward of the orb was the navigator’s station, where Doug Erickson was seated. He could face the orb or turn his acceleration chair forward and watch the pilot stations, which were only a meter away. On one side of Nav’s chair was a slate for when computers were functional, on the other, a manual array for when they were not. The manual array contained a bank of slide rules, the chrono controls, and a roll of paper for manual plotting.
The pilot station had two consoles, one for the pilot, one for the co-pilot. In front of them were large monitors that displayed a myriad of flight data needed to maneuver the ship.
Along the CIC’s port side, from front to back, were stations for darsat, signals, and ECM. Anne didn’t know those particular operators. She’d hadn’t memorized the entire crew but would have that mastered within the day. Aft of the ECM station was the Raider liaison station, where Lieutenant Lindros was sitting.
Along the starboard bulkhead, from front to back: the gun control station, occupied by Dardanos Leeds, artillery chief; the weapons station, occupied by Cat Brown, weapons department head; the bulky analog torpedo data computer station, currently empty; and finally, the ops station, occupied by Alex Plait, operations department head.
Captain Lincoln stood. “Nav, set the timer for fifteen minutes, activate on my mark.”
“Setting the time for fifteen minutes,” Erickson said. “Aye-aye, Captain.”
The CIC had three clock-timer arrays—one mounted near the ceiling halfway along the port bulkhead, one opposite it on the starboard side, and one above the pilot station’s monitors. The arrays consisted of two dials, the first being a 24-hour military clock set to standard Earth time, and the second a countdown timer. Utilitarian but beautiful in their simplicity, the brass and crysteel devices operated on wind-up springs that powered internal mechanisms.
The timer had stacked dials that showed days in the innermost ring, then hours, then minutes, then seconds. With no electronics of any kind, the mechanical devices worked flawlessly even when multiple, overlapping STC fields turned digital data into number-sludge.
Clock-timers were Anne’s favorite part of any warship or Fleet facility. There was something comforting about their mechanical nature. The same went for the analog gear all Union warships used, gear that made CICs look more akin to their mid-20th Century counterparts than to the sleek control rooms and holographic interfaces found on military vessels of the late 23rd.
Analog computing for warfare reached its first zenith six centuries earlier, when electromechanical fire-control devices altered the course of Earth’s Second World War. Purely mechanical devices with hundreds—sometimes thousands—of intricately machined parts were developed for tactical and strategic needs. Functions ranged from the two-dimensional calculation of artillery trajectories, to the three-dimensional computations needed for torpedoes and aerial bombsights, to machines that predicted the tides for amphibious invasions. Four to five decades after that war, most analog computational devices were replaced by more powerful and far more versatile digital electronics. Digital remained dominant for centuries.
Analog’s second coming was born out of necessity rather than choice. The development of space-time curvature manipulation rendered useless five centuries worth of advancements in digital, photonic, and quantum computing. Ships that operated solely on computers didn’t operate at all. No matter how bad space-time fuckery got, though, purely mechanical systems mostly functioned like… well… like clockwork.
That was why for every transistor there was a gear, for every diode there was a pulley, for every chip there was a chain drive, and for every massive-multi-processing quantum computer there was a human brain.
Next to each clock-timer, a digital readout displayed the same time span. Digital systems were perfectly reliable outside of combat, but for Anne—like most sailors and strikers and Raiders—nothing beat the tick-tick-tick of cogs and mainsprings.
At his station, Erickson turned manual dials, setting the time. He pressed a button. Hidden gears whirred—the minute hands on all three clock-timers swung to the 15 position.
“Finish your prep, people,” Lincoln said. “When Colonel Hasik takes his station, we dive.”
18
Master Sergeant Sands’ voice boomed through the weird compartment that would be Nitzan’s home for the next two years.
“Any clothing you are not wearing must be stored in your coffin bunk,” Sands said. “Especially boots and socks. We are about to travel to another dimension, which our clam brethren call going transdim. When we go transdim, you will stay in your rack. No matter what you see or think you see, you will stay in your rack.”
Nitzan was already in his bunk. He was scared. He wouldn’t admit that to anyone, but he was.
If he only looked up, things seemed normal enough. Another bunk above him, barely a handspan from his nose. His bedding and blankets were the same as he’d had on any other ship. To his left, a meter-wide aisle, then another row of bunks. To his right, though? That weirdly textured, dark-copper metal, which was even darker in the bunk’s shadow. He would sleep next to the inner hull—beyond it, the endless, unforgiving void.
He wished he’d drawn the middle row.
He fingered the plastic thread that held his dog tags. The plastic felt so weird. He’d had a metal chain around his neck for so long he’d forgotten it existed.
Nitzan reached up and slapped the frame of the bunk above.
“Hey, Bennett. What do you think it will be like?”
Bennett’s head peeked over the side. “I got no idea.” He was in skivvies, as was Nitzan and the rest of the platoon. “I’m sure it will be fine.”
The guy’s voice had a soothing burr to it. Nitzan hoped he was just as calm in battle.
“I think it’ll be awesome,” said the man in the bunk below Nitzan’s. “Another dimension? How fucking extreme is that, man?”
Nitzan, looked down to the bunk below, into the wide eyes of Jim “Beaver” Perry.
“Didn’t ask your opinion, Boot,” Nitzan said.
Beaver smiled, nodded, and slid back into his bunk.
Nitzan had seen many soldiers like Beaver, all gung-ho, smiles, and optimism. Once the shooting started, though, once they made their first trip across the gap, once they saw people in their unit transformed from Human to hamburger, the gung-ho went goodbye.
“Fucking clam cumstains.”
Mafi again, as eloquent as ever. He was on the middle bunk across the aisle to Nitzan’s left. The man was so broad in the shoulders he couldn’t even roll over—to flip from his back to his belly, the lummox had to get out and get back in.
“They shoved us into this weird room,” Mafi said. “Packed us in here like… like…”
“Like bullets in a box?” Shamdi offered.
Mafi thought for a moment. “Naw, that ain’t it. That’s fucking stupid.”
“You muttonhead,” Shamdi said. “It’s a perfect analogy.”
Beaver’s head slid out. “How about those foam peanut things they use to pack stuff?”
“Yeah, that’s it.” Mafi gave him a thumbs-up. “Thanks, Beaver.”
The big idiot thought packing peanuts were a better description than bullets in a box? Whatever.
Mafi was right about one thing, though—the room was weird. Long and narrow. The clams called it the forward lower bow protrusion. Nitzan couldn’t help but think of it as living in the hollow jaw of a long-mawed monster.
Everyone in the platoon, including crawler crews and techs, was packed into three-bed bunks, laid out in three rows of four bunks each. The population density level was “nuts to butts,” as PXO Winter described it. Aft of the bunks and to port, the head and showers, to starboard, Lieutenant Lindros’s small compartment, which contained a bunk, a planning table, and four chairs.
On previous Keeling outings, Nitzan assumed the long compartment had been used for storage. Definitely not refrigerated storage, that was for sure—he could hear AC units blowing in a futile attempt to combat the heat.
He’d been onboard for all of an hour, and he was already tacky with sweat. So were the other Raiders. Things were going to get quite stinky down here in the days to come.
“This sucks,” Mafi said.
“Quit your bitching, Mafi,” Sands called out. “If your accretion disk of an ass didn’t have its own gravitational pull, you’d fit in your bunk like the rest of us.”
The 1MC whistle sounded.
“This is the captain. We are about to transit to another dimension. For our new crewmembers, this is not something you can prepare for. Every individual reacts differently. Some hallucinate. Some experience crippling terror. Remember that this is a training hop that lasts only fifteen minutes, at which time we will return to realspace. During that time, no matter what you see or hear, stay where you are. Remain at your post, even if your post is your bunk. That includes those who might vomit, urinate, or defecate during the process. All bio incidents can be attended to after I release you from your current location. Do not move until I give the order to do so. That is all.”
Nitzan’s heart beat faster. The not knowing was as bad as those moments right before crossing the gap, wondering if your number was up.
He put his hand on his dog tags, pretended they were the infinity symbol necklace he’d worn everywhere before the Cloister sent him to Thomas 3 to start his new, fake life.
Silently, without words, Nitzan prayed: High One, protect me from evil.
“I hope I don’t shit myself,” Beaver said.
That much, at least, Nitzan and Beaver had in common.
19
Colonel Hasik climbed into the xeno loft. He swayed slightly, slumped into his acceleration chair.
Trav faced forward. “Captain, the xeno station is manned.”
“Very well,” Lincoln said.
Trav sensed the tension hanging in the CIC. The captain had warned the entire crew that they might piss themselves. The newbs looked rattled. The vets, even more so—not a good sign.
Waiting for Lincoln’s next command, Trav focused on the nav-orb, getting his mind around how it was a third smaller than any he’d seen before. An arrow in the orb’s center represented the Keeling. The arrow never moved—it remained flat, pointed perpetually in the direction of the ship’s prow. The rest of the orb represented the area around the ship, zoomed out to a large scale when navigating, zoomed in closer when docking or in combat. When Keeling pitched up or down, if it banked or yawed, the arrow’s position remained fixed—everything in the orb moved in relation around it.
The command slate was familiar tech. On most ships, the XO and the captain had their own slates—on the Keeling, they shared. Trav sat at the slate’s left, Lincoln at the right. Between them was the ship’s public address system. Good old analog. The 1MC broadcast to all areas of the ship, while other circuits broadcast to individual sections, like engineering or the torpedo room, or to individual compartments, like the curvine room or the infirmary.
In a rack above the slate was a row of sound-powered phones, one for each key area of the ship. They required no external electricity, generating power solely from the speaker’s voice. Even if the main circuit system and the ship’s electrical failed, the six-century-old technology worked. Sound-powered phones played a critical role in ship-wide communication during combat situations.
“XO, prepare for transdim entry,” Lincoln said. “Use the checklist. It won’t always be this formal, but for now do it by the numbers.”
“Preparing for transdim, aye-aye, Captain.”
Lincoln wasn’t wasting any time breaking Trav in. He called up the checklist on the command slate. It showed the order of events and who manned each station. The list went counter-clockwise around the CIC, starting with the station located port-forward.
“Darsat,” Trav said, “any contacts in our sphere?”
Corporal Kanya Saetang checked her station’s displays. DARSAT—Detection and Ranging, Space and Time—measured gravitational imprints in a sphere radiating out from Keeling to an effective range of 10,000 kilometers, with another 5,000 kilometers of semi-effective range beyond that. While darsat could make an active ping, it was currently in passive mode, reading the ambient curvatures of nearby space-time.
