Breaking Wave
On my twentieth New Year’s Eve, I mingled with a crowd of drunken revelers in the village below the palace. The evening began mild and sweet, although smoke from a bonfire irritated my nose. All around me people blew on cheap horns, making a painfully loud, ugly and distressing sound. A girl I was interested in appeared, five or six partygoers between us, illuminated by amber colored fireworks. Someone without imagination had synchronized the fuses because the flashes were boringly regular. The girl, Marian? Madalyn? I knew her slightly; she looked back and smiled, encouraging me forward. I pushed toward her through the shouting and the ugly horns, while criticizing the fireworks to no one in particular. A bag of potatoes jostled me from the side, throwing my balance off. When I looked again, she had vanished. Then I found myself naked and disoriented in the crowd. And, tentatively, awake.
The ship’s horn was intolerable. Every five bleats it would cease and command, just as intolerably, “Abandon Ship!”
We were in free fall. In shorts, I pushed down the passage toward the midship airlock, as assigned and practiced many times since we sailed. Abandon ship indeed, I thought, yet another drill, and a damn convincing one. There were odd objects in the corridor, some plates from the galley, a rubble cloud of potatoes to bat aside. The air was tainted with the smell of burnt insulation.
Getting into the suit required another effort at waking up, but I was tight in the required time, and even had the good sense to hook up the catheter. If we were doing realistic drills it could be a long night. Our crew was hard core on drills; this might be a thorough rehearsal for a worst-case scenario. I grabbed a handhold, and had just resigned myself to staying awake, the New Year’s dream lost while climbing into cold fabric, when Mag shot into the airlock.
My suit came alive, molding itself around me while the AC cycled a couple of times. Status displays filled the hard helmet, with Mag and the airlock visible in the background. The suit stats showed a dim green, all good, but the ship projection was painted in alarming colors overlaid with, to me, inscrutable glyphs. The glyphs were paired with numerical countdowns I had never seen before, measuring a handful of second by second marches toward zero. I wondered if the exercise would conclude when one of those countdowns reached zero.
Mag made the signal that I should join him on the other side of the airlock. I pushed off sharply, adrenaline surging, but he caught me easily enough and spun me around to check my suit stats. He was holding me by the life pack, facing the outer door, talking the whole time.
“Change of plan, Trik. Don’t panic but stay off comms. Ok? … You ok?”
“Ummm, yes.”
“Good,” he said as he gave me a hard shove, then reached up and popped the outer airlock door. The air, quite a lot of now expendable equipment and tableware, and I abruptly frothed from the ship. In my first tumble I saw Mag gripping handholds with one hand and both feet.
The airlock, which I could still see for ten rotations, was then empty, lit a dull orange, scuffed through in a few spots down to a gray primer, colors subdued from exposure to UV and vacuum over the ship’s three hundred years’ or so lifetime. The diminishing orange port, along with the solid glow of billions of stars, was held in a suspension of deepest black. Every minute or so the ship would pass across my view, getting smaller and smaller.
The thought of hanging there, watching for millions of years as the galaxy rotated by, occupied me for a few minutes. I was confident and optimistic by habit but now bewildered. Of course, I was wrong about the galaxy spinning away. My body would spin right along with the other ship debris.
Stars rolled up from my feet and passed overhead, putting me into a hypnotic state. There were no star constellations that I could identify. Stare at infinity. Repeat. Stare. Repeat. My suit sighed to itself every so often as if it had expected this catastrophe for a long time. The trance was well settled, numbing, when a hand suddenly gripped my elbow. My spine jerked as if from an electric jolt.
Mag spoke to me via an infrared link. “Trik, hang on. Someone shot up the ship. Stay here. You have at least 24 hours of air and juice. Don’t use comms. We’re playing dead. I’ll be back.” The grip released, and turn as I might, there was no sign of the man. Mag was irritating like that.
Trance broken, I mused on that encounter, thinking up clever retorts. When Mag had been appointed my bodyguard, a month or so before embarking, I asked around the palace to see what sort of person he was. We had been introduced, of course–Prince, this is your bodyguard; Bodyguard, meet the Prince–the standard politeness exchanged, but Mag was too formidable for me to question head on. He was Navy and therefore details about his service would be lacking. One of Father’s aides let me know, however, that Mag had been in command of a Mother Hittoni for five years. Originally conceived as a last-ditch defensive ship, the Mother Hittons were reinforced for long duration missions to harass enemy fleets around their own ports. The ships and crews were small, but the responsibility was great. Mother Hittons carry weapons of enormous destructive power, better suited for that final defense mission. Misused, in aggression, such an attack could enrage an enemy to outsized retaliation in response to gratuitous civilian fatalities or catastrophic damage to a planetary ecosphere.
If you imagined an actor playing the part of Mag in some military romance, you would have a working estimate of his appearance. From across the palace inner courtyard, his expression was predatory, a hawk adroit with killing force. At a personal distance you would first notice the laugh and smile lines on his face, and you would probably be greeted with a direct gaze ready to appreciate a joke. He was deeply tanned from his year of leave, his hair bleached golden on top but remaining a warm chocolate color underneath.
My research, which took a bit of prying and a hefty restaurant bill that came out of my allowance, illuminated Mag’s last year. On hitting planet-side from a combat tour he went straight from landing to the best casino in the capital. He took his combat bonus and proceeded to explore that facility. Someone said he was there a week, someone else said a month. I think a month would have been the minimum for a man of his capacity. At any rate, one morning (my source said morning), Mag woke up, shooed his companion out of the suite, enjoyed the luxury of a long hot shower, and eased down to the hotel patio for coffee. While readjusting to being outside, enjoying a grand view of the city, nothing between himself and a bright sun but a wisp of atmosphere, he thought to check his finances. Surprisingly, they were in better condition than when he checked in. The roulette wheel, attractive to a man who had made split second wagers for far higher stakes, had siphoned his funds. Blackjack, however, was more congenial to his razor-sharp tactical brain. Further addition involving his back pay gave him an idea. He ordered breakfast and asked for his bags to be packed and sent down to the patio.
Three weeks later, Mag was in Cook Harbor in possession of a sloop rigged wooden sailboat, somewhat over twenty meters. A few Navy buddies on leave were added as crew along with several young women and men of “uncomplicated personality and no immediate career imperatives” as Mother put it, recruited locally. A man calling himself a captain and professing knowledge of every bar in every port on the Ring Ocean was signed as sailing master. Mag was skeptical of the Master, but the female members of the crew were enthusiastic, so that settled it. And off they sailed for a year of swimming, spear fishing, volcano climbing, hog hunting, and so forth punctuated with frequent resupply and bar crawls.
Mag filled in some of those details, on this long night or that, passing time on our journey. I realized in one of these conversations that I had previously met one of Mag’s shipmates. What seemed like an inconsequential fact derived from idle conversation came together with another clue. There was a young woman I knew, appointments secretary for a palace functionary, whom I had to go through to appeal for increases to my allowance. We were chatting about cooking on boats, I think. So, Mag had a palace connection prior to his taking me on.
I asked once what had become of the sailboat; it seemed like paradise to me. Mag said it was still circling the planet, an informal Navy R&R barge. The crew came and went as leave and inclination permitted. Mag still had a share in the ownership. The questionable Master had turned into a real seaman and his knowledge of the bars on the Ring Ocean was now probably without peer.
After more monotonous tumbling, some common sense kicked in, and I began to take stock. First, to thoroughly refresh my knowledge of this particular model suit. Next, I entertained a fantasy of startling Mag, so that he lost his composure, even for a second. I checked the air filter status ten times, then was back to thinking up clever retorts, mostly sarcasm about the ridiculous order to “stay here.” The gods knew where that was. Futile thoughts, but better than aimless panic. Never underestimate the value of whimsy.
Pretty sure Mag meant I should not go jetting around, and quite sure that he had good reasons; the next topic for consideration was why wasn’t I asleep on the ship rather than drifting in space? It seemed like a perfectly good ship just … two hours ago. Really, experiencing the bombardment of such bright light from immense distances was intimidating, but there was no obvious answer to the affront to my comfort. So, adolescent male that I was (age twenty years), in mental shock, I did what I did best then and drifted back to sleep.
I slept a half hour and awoke smoothly to a calm alertness. “This is alarming. Stay cool and check the ship now.” It was very like The Goddess to appear in times of crisis. She urged calm but her own voice resonated with low frequencies of urgency. I looked around but she was present only audibly.
The display showed the ship more or less as before: magnified, but a mess of curving, twitching, coral-colored lines and dead black shapes. Some of the countdowns had stopped, some expired, a couple continued to tick down—an unhealthy picture. The outside view suddenly blackened, then slowly revealed overlapping balls of hot gas where the ship had been. I zoomed in. Parts of the ship were going separate ways.
“Vectors!” I commanded in a high-pitched squawk. The pieces I saw, and dozens of smaller ones I had not yet noticed, projected lines of travel in all directions. None was dead on for a collision with me. Slowly the lines cleared.
“What now?”
The Goddess was more collected, “Hmmm, look for curved vectors.” As I watched, a few pieces near the previous location of the ship slowly drifted together. The colored lines were all that connected me with, well, anything.
“Project vectors.” After an awfully long wait there was one line, arcing right to me. Then there was a dark shape that blotted out the stars. “COME ABOARD,” appeared next to a green rectangle in the vessel’s hull. I didn’t have to be asked twice.
The Goddess, just as I got to the airlock, said rather brightly but with relief in her voice, “Woo-wee!”
Cycling through the airlock after hours of alone you really must experience to appreciate, I passed into a compressed cacophony. The crew and the boat were in competition to see which could make the most noise. The boat whined and groaned as it re-balanced gravitation to include our crew, as well as adjust to an unfamiliar planetary system. At the same time, it had determined that filtering the air of all the impurities we had brought in was an emergency. The crew, perforce, shouted over all that racket. I wanted to yell, “All of you shut up!” but I wasn’t in charge. The lifeboat, which I had been in once or twice, was doubly small crammed with the seven of us. Everyone was in suits and helmets, so I stayed suited up as well, much as I wanted to rip it all off and look for a shower.
Mag and Cheri conferred in the cockpit; Cheri strapped in, Mag hanging in zero-G gripping the seat back. Cheri’s blond curls swung back and forth as they studied a starry field centered on the boat. The image abruptly altered in scale and orientation as the two considered possibilities and discarded them. Instruments glowed dully green around the Nav image, which collapsed from stellar distances to the local star system at a wave of Cheri’s hand. They regarded that silently while Cheri’s dancing fingers summoned colored tags for various solid bodies.
I drifted nearer and grabbed a handhold. Everyone else was busy with some job or another, mostly legs and butts sticking out of lockers.
Mag sighed and reached into the image, “Has to be here. They’ll find the boat eventually, wherever we put it.”
Cheri nodded reluctantly. The image exploded again, revealing a planet and a tiny moon, dingy gray objects reflected in Cheri’s purple irises. Usually her eyes held a gentle, amused expression, unhurried, efficient. In other circumstances there was something of a playful and mischievous cherub about Cheri, which might be mistaken for innocence. Mistaken. As well as our pilot, Cheri was a practicing clinical psychologist. I often felt she saw a much larger universe than I saw. Certainly, she saw more deeply into space and human nature than the vast majority of people I had known. Whatever weight of understanding she had accumulated, it didn’t slow her down. She showed no sign that she had arrived at a spiritual refuge from the flow of life and conflict around her. Or desired to. Some restless spirit within Cheri needed an outlet, even an outlet expressed at times in violence. The closest I ever understood Cheri’s unusual alloy of professions was her statement, “I don’t like being in my own head all the time.”
Having made his decision, Mag said, “Hide us, quick, before the debris dissipates. Let’s hope it’ll take ‘em awhile to sift through the mess we’re leaving.”
“The moon?”
“Good.”
“Ok, ten minutes to calculate a close orbit to the small moon.”
Mag was already disinterested. His tone signaled that he was on to the next problem, “Thirty seconds. Take your best guess. Get close to the moon if you can.”
Cheri’s hand strayed toward the battle stations button, but she dismissed that idea, and leaned into her Nav display. She touched something and instruments in the cockpit lit up in warning amber, blinking in a chaos of different rates. Staccato horn barks added to the background din. Cheri carefully adjusted the shape of her model, then leaned back in the pilot’s seat. Mag’s voice in everyone’s helmet over all the racket, “Hand for the boat.”
My head and body went in four, or … I’m never sure how many different dimensions. I gripped hard and managed not to throw up. Then we were elsewhere. Making a gravity jump near significant bits of matter is analogous to jumping from one small ice floe to another, moving in a strong current. Doing it in three dimensions just means it’s much harder than the analogy implies. The mass of the ship we had just left was well known, but now it was in hundreds of pieces scattering along not at all random vectors. The moon, planet, and star were known only as perfect spheres, not as real objects. Cheri was cutting it fine at ten-minutes. She did it in fifteen seconds.
Once you experienced Cheri’s intensity and distrust of arbitrary rules you would understand that Navy combat pilot was, for her, about right. She was, of course, disciplined. Her professions required that. Cheri didn’t seek out rules to flout, but she was joyously opportunistic.
What Cheri really enjoyed, I think, was honing her instinct for when to stop thinking and to act.
My head shrank to normal size as the vertigo from the jump abated. Torsos and heads came out of the lockers and the heads looked around. Seconds later they were re-addressing whatever task had been interrupted. Discipline. Cheri took a couple of quick, deep breaths, shook her blonde curls in amused disbelief as the cockpit lighting flickered from red and amber to green.
As near as I could tell, we were drifting with an irregular rock in orbit about a much larger planet. The rock was all glare and dark shadows. The planet filling the view was tan wrapped in white cloud swirls.
“Great,” said Mag, just a flicker of relief passing across his face. “Can you get us in a little tighter?” It was a question, but Cheri could certainly do that.
She gave a couple of quick nods and said something so low it took me a few moments to decode, “I’m putting myself in for a medal.”
I don’t know if Mag heard or understood that statement, but he had a smile on his face as he pushed off, impatient to organize the rest of his flock. He seemed to have spent a lifetime thinking up all he required in this specific crisis. “Clara. Everything we need to know to travel anywhere down there for months. One hour. Transmit to everyone. Anything you find on location of population centers, space defense, to Cheri as you find it. Coordinates of several unpopulated areas for landing asap to Cheri.” Clara nodded and turned back to a display she had commandeered. Clara was librarian, scholar, data analyst, doctor, and the person who could always suggest a good entertainment you had never experienced before, from the millennia of recorded human creativity.
“Oh, code everything as ‘Afghanistan banana stand’,” giving a name to everything we were about to experience.
“Bill, let Kekui do that.” Bill was emerging from a locker with a military looking backpack. “Get all the signals you can while we’re flying around this ball. Record as much as you can ‘til we hit the ground. We can decrypt later. I hope.”
Bill gave a crisp “Sir,” clutched the pack to his side and pushed off for the mess compartment. I always referred to Bill as the excursion accountant, or bookkeeper, just as he called me ”The Prince” or ”Your Highness” in mock reverence. I realized I wasn’t going to be able to use the ‘bookkeeper’ jab again. Everything was going to be very different now.
Bill, Infantry, was senior in rank after Mag. Infantry took command wherever use of force intermingled with civilian populations. One tended to think of Infantry acquiring and maintaining order in habitats, but they might also be employed on a planetary surface. Infantry always attempted to be knowledgeable about the population and infrastructure where it served. Navy was more strategic. Civilians, from the navy point of view, were mostly passengers in some other hull.
Like Mag, Bill projected a one hundred percent male presence, though he lacked the media star looks. Also, like all our crew, Bill had that medium all-purpose body, which in him tended a little taller, a little beefier. Sandy hair cut close. When he talked to you, he was likely to tilt his head a little to the side, and simultaneously a little toward you. The forward tilt indicated he took you seriously. The side tilt contrarily suggested skepticism. In a religious context you could see him as the brew master at a distinguished monastery, socially and spiritually easy going, but attentive to the demands of the material world. Religious ideas sometimes accompany high command, and Bill had been a brigade commander before his side-step to a technical side of his profession. He may have been disappointed in promotion, which is quite competitive at that level.
Bill, born and reared on Y to a family that had devoted itself to terraforming the planet for generations, went into Infantry early in life. It was probably the promise of adventure that led Bill up and out. His Infantry career had uncovered a talent for operational data collection and analysis, and from there to a gift for signals analysis and AI application. He was solid military, likely still to be on a path to higher rank.
Mag was not done. “John. Survival gear, provisions, tools. Pack a couple of the escape pods. Configure for extended planet-side recon patrol. Set the personnel pods to dig in on landing. Gang all the pods in group ‘Afghanistan banana stand.’” Since the lifeboat was operating properly, John had been re-purposed for survival logistics.
“Kekui, weapons, security. Light stuff. Hand out sidearms to everyone. Priority on all the bots you can find. Prepare a briefing on the pods.” Two nods, a “Sir” and doors on the escape pod corridor popped open and gear was moving into them even while Mag pondered his next move. Kekui had several roles, as did everyone but me. As most junior officer, she got all the odd job assignments, and she was prepared for violence, of the close-up, hand to hand combat type if that became necessary.
Mag observed the effect of his stream of orders for a few moments, then noticed me and grinned. “Glad to have you back. Sorry to disturb your nap.”
Cheri’s head snapped around, “You were asleep out there?!” Seeing no denial from me, she rolled her eyes, and said something I didn’t catch.
“Anyway, get your ass in that seat and help Cheri. She has way too much to do.”
I was grateful for the direction. As I clicked into an engineering seat in the cockpit, Cheri sat startled for a second, and then grasped the situation. The lost look on my face gave me away as a completely unassigned resource. “You can monitor a bunch of these comm channels for anything directed at us, or about us. Just keep your ears open. The AIs can be stupid.” Thirty or so icons tucked themselves in my helmet. A staticky hiss overlaid noises from the boat. “And. There,” she said, and pointed to a key in the console, “defenses.” I clicked the key and the whole defensive program appeared. It was just a lifeboat after all. “See what we can do with … ah … ten percent of our current power. Ten percent down to zero. Against energy weapons. No point in worrying about projectiles.”
No battle-hardened veteran, I risked a question, “Ten percent?”
“Yeah. Assume we’ll be using the rest to run. Runnin’ like a blind three-legged rabbit.” That last phrase was spoken in a soft, contemplative voice that trailed off as Cheri’s concentration refocused.
So I dug in, using all my battle game simulator hours to what I hoped was advantage. It was brought home to me more than once over the next few months that a lot of my education and play had been gently directed toward real world situations. The boat and the noisy re-sorting around me disappeared while I put together models for energy frequency, intensity, continuity, pulse rates, and a couple of common combinations. That plotted against time, our countermeasures, and energy consumption. Cheri looked over a few times, studied the shape of the models, but made no comment. Breaking into my absorption was an awareness that Cheri conferred softly with Clara or Mag from time to time. The comm channels enveloped me like the sound of the ocean.
I was downgrading some parameters based on the gaps in coverage of our little boat when Cheri leaned over and tapped me on my shoulder. “Ok, good enough. Now hook it up to a tactical, and program it to engage in this domain,” pointing to a ball indicating failure of the boat. “Tell me when you’re ready,” she said, turning back to her work.
A few minutes later my model was integrated into the ship’s program. I had done something useful, perhaps, for the first time since we embarked. Totally unfounded expectations of the model protecting us glowed between my shoulders.