Safety, Chapter 1

 

"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason."
–Ernest Hemingway, ‘Notes on the Next War: a Serious Topical Letter’, Esquire; Sep. 1935


Chapter 1
10 24 Saturday 14 October 2299.
Monarch Sector, disputed zone, USCS Rolling Thunder, deck #10, situation room.

“How could this have happened?” he asks while holding the object and rapidly repeating the same question in his head. All things considered, a lesser man would be well past the verge of panic.

“Quite simply, cap’n… it can’t. Those ablative rods are designed to sustain an equivalent of five tonnes of pressure per field square centimeter before failing. In addition to that,” the Salvage and Recovery officer, chief petty officer Toby Kennison, tells his captain, “no rod has ever, in the history of research, development, testing and actual field use, been broken in that manner.”

“Then how the fuck did it happen?!” the captain, commander Julius Blue, shouts. He believes that he has a right to be angry; because of that failed platinum-molybdenum rod, the force field maintaining a section of damaged hull in the stern had failed, causing a small hull breach to become an explosive decompression, killing sixteen crewmen after the inner hull they were bunked against gave way to the explosion one deck above them. They were killed, mercifully, in their sleep, the concussive force of the explosive decompression ending their lives near instantly. So quickly, in fact, that their nervous systems couldn’t possibly have been able to process any sensation before their deaths. For Blue, however, this offers no solace.

“Sir,” the first officer, lieutenant commander Delman Tharsis says, “I do believe that there will be a rational explanation for this.”

“I want it ten minutes ago! Let me hear conjecture, now!” he says in the calmest possible voice allowed, fingering the split metal rod, the inanimate object blamed for causing the death of his crewmen.

“May I speak frankly, Sir?” Kennison asks.

“Yes,” Blue says, his patience wearing down.

“Take a look at that rod,” Kennison bravely speaks up. “Tell me what you see.”

He took twenty seconds to analyze what he was holding. He saw, among other things, a two centimeter by four millimeter rod, split lengthwise about five percent off-center.

It would have been so much better for him, Blue thought when he saw the responsible machinery face-to-face, if the rod had not borne the serial number ‘M5DGA115.’ That dread identification seemed to taunt him, graphically. Had the rod been blank, he thought, it could tell him nothing that his mind could interpret as a form of communication. But that alphanumeric code, split through the middle of the characters, just seemed to taunt all that can see it. “I see a particularly murderous and remorseless piece of machinery, Chief.”

“Anything about the detail that you think would be relevant?”

“What's your point, Chief?!” Blue snaps.

“There should be a slot in the negative end, Sir.”

“Looks like a manufacturing defect to me,” he says, looking at the rude, three-millimeter square slot in the negative end. “The whole fucking thing is split right down the middle from this.”

“Sir, defects as blatant as this are impossible. That would be like a car floating off of an assembly line without a lift system! This is definitely not a defect.”

“Are you saying that this was sabotage?” Blue asks, calming down significantly in the hope that there was someone connected to this loss of life that he could personally rend limb from limb.

“More heinous than sabotage, Sir. In my opinion, this was the result of a precisely planned and coordinated attack.”

“So someone opened up the field emitter ‘box,’ and split this thing in half?”

“No, Sir. The ‘box’ was sealed shut, almost completely intact, factory sealed, whole with the exception of the failed rod and some damaged components.”

“Then what did happen!?”

“If one were to shoot an Yvellian micro plate from a highly calibrated MP rifle at the negative end of statically charged ablative absorption rod that was, at the time, part of a closed circuit, one would get that as a result.”

“That’s impossible. A rod in a closed circuit cannot have its polar ends accessed in any way without first opening the circuit,” lieutenant Francis Henry, Chief of Security, states, speaking up for the first time.

“That’s right, Sir. Hell, if it weren’t for the uranium residue found on shards of the field generator and that rod, I’d be forced to agree. Though the rod itself was split, the ‘box’ survived well, and shows no evidence whatsoever that an Yvellian bullet passed through it. Even I have to admit: this does seem impossible.”

“Then how can it have happened!?” Blue inquires for what seemed to him to be the fifteenth time.

“I try to keep up with the rumor mills these days, Sir. Among the things currently being written about is a revival of the field of teleportation theory.”

The short silence that ensued was broken by the words elicited by a few menacing stares. The current mission of USCS Rolling Thunder, a Lakota-class destroyer, was known only to three people aboard, all of them being in this room, and a few privileged people at Command and Intel. The mission involves surveillance of a Yvellian planet called Gelenk’rt, known to be experimenting with the very technology Kennison named.

Currently aboard Thunder are a pair of small Fleet craft converted to appear to be common freighter ships. Two matching Yvellian national freighters, traversing the Monarch Sector, are slated for interdiction for this mission, to be replaced by the doppelgängers aboard Thunder. Cargo from their external bays will be delivered via the planet’s merchant satellite network, but the weapons that will be used to destroy the facilities that produce the technology will use a more direct method: gravity. The goal is simple: capture any technology if possible, then, captured or not, destroy the subterranean labs with low-yeild tactical nuclear weapons.

Blue knows of this technology simply because he was charged with this mission.

Tharsis knows of this because the man whom he is expected to replace is aware of it.

Henry knows of this in order to take certain precautions against the spread of this information about the ship.

But should the chief petty officer in charge of Salvage and Recovery need to know this? they wonder.

“Toby,” Blue says, breaking the silence, “…I’m going to tell him, Del,” he says at his first officer, responding to a very direct stare. “Toby, our current mission is to launch several craft to reconnoiter a planet in Yvellian space that’s experimenting with teleportation technology.”

“I assumed as much, but now that I know what we’re about, it makes everything a whole lot clearer, Sir.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, that battle we had getting here, Sir; I remember reading the logs when I was working on the recovery. When our shield systems went down, the Yvellian ships ceased fire. According to the logs, they paused, fired a few times after shield power was restored, then left.”

“What are you saying?” Henry asks.

“I believe, Sir, that there’s a mole incorporated in this plan at the Fleet Command level, and a spy on this ship who has and knows how to use an MP rifle equipped with a very capable teleportation device,” Kennison says.

Silence ensues, broken only by the commands of the captain.

“Del, sound general quarters, plot a speed course to bring us to the next waypoint,” Blue says, not bothering to look in Tharsis’ direction.

Tharsis leaves the conference room immediately, after responding with: “Aye.”

The door of the conference room closes to the sound of Tharsis shouting commands to the crew of the conn.

Blue continues, calmly, as the room reverberates with the sound of the Klaxons: “Henry, I want the whole ship searched from bow to stern for an MP rifle, but do it discreetly. Use the internal sensors if you have to.”

To which Henry replies: “Aye Sir,” as he stands to leave.

“What about me, Sir?” The chief asks.
The captain brings the Chief up to speed on the plans ahead. A good two minutes of operational information, with only the most secret details left out. “…You will assist us on these plans from this point on as an advisor, and you are to tell no one, understood?”

“Sir, yes, Sir,” the chief responds, aware that his captain had just given him a field promotion to Intel Branch.

“Head to security with a copy of the sensor readouts for the last fourteen hours, and tell the lieutenant I said to look for any odd activity.”

“Aye Sir,” he says as he stands and leaves.

Blue examines the pieces of the platinum alloy rod in his hands one last time, and returns them inside the clear silver antistatic 'EVIDENCE' envelope, throwing the package back on the table. He stands, calmly, and walks to the large wall-mounted computer console on the far side of the conference room. He thinks of the crew he lost in the attack.

Knowing that someone out there could be held responsible for this attack turns his rage into a ball of black light in the pit of his stomach.



Once upon a time, just ten years after the fall of the Federated Earth Space Armada and the formation of the United Space Command, seven years after the armistice and the alliance with Arctau’rus, many years before he’d even so much as heard of the Fleet, Julius Benjamin Blue was a poor orphan child on the mean streets of Los Angeles on Terra, living day-to-day, stealing what he needed to survive.

One day, while scrounging for food money, his hand unknowingly slipped into the back pocket belonging to perhaps the greatest middleweight in the history of the Allied territories, Grand Middleweight Champion Maxwell ‘Junior’ Harding.

Junior used his lightning fast jab, an asset which almost single-handedly made him one of the greatest fighters ever to carry the title, to grab the wrist of the fourteen-year-old imp trying to lift his wallet. Blue, frightened beyond reason and struggling against the powerful grasp of the veteran fighter, did the only thing he could think of at the time: he struck the Old Pug in the face with a hard left, breaking his nose.

Junior, amazed at the spunk and power of the kid in his hand, was unfazed by the hit, which, by this point in his life, was a minor wound to him; his nose had already been broken no less than fifteen times, but never by anyone so young. His mind was not on the pain of the cracked bridge or the hot, wet feel of blood as it ran down his face and chin onto his two hundred credit dress shirt. His mind was now on the potential Galactic Welterweight Champion in his hands.

Junior dragged the screaming and sobbing form of Julius Blue, who was begging for mercy and swearing the whole way, to the gym he owned with his mentor, Gordon ‘Hoplite’ Perry. Instead of being cut from chin to groin, getting hung on a hook to bleed dry, and having his liver cut out and used as bait, like Blue thought would happen, Junior instead taped up Blue's wrists, put gloves and boots on him, and forced him to show his power on the heavybag to Hoplite.

Words such as ‘impressive,’ ‘unprecedented,’ and ‘meteoric’ don’t begin to describe Blue’s rise in the world of junior boxing. The fact that he started, impoverished, with a chance encounter with the middleweight champion of the known galaxy, would have put him in the boxing history books, had he made a career of it.

But, by the time Blue graduated four years later from the high school he never dreamed he’d attend, Junior had turned the street urchin smelling of joint and month-old clothes into the reigning Three Time Terran Junior Welterweight Champion, and a straight 'A' student on his way to the Fleet Officer's Academy in Portland, Oregon.

It broke Junior’s heart to learn that his star pupil would not be pursuing the Galactic belts of Boxing, but Junior’s tears of disappointment turned to tears of joy when he realized that Blue wouldn't have to take the long, hard road that he did to achieve success.


Blue, a boxer at heart, glances one last time at the bag on the table. The words of his mentor concerning a broken nose, the advice given to him in his corner after the third round in a fight against a boy called “Full House,” who just gave Blue the affliction for the first time, come to mind only now: “Just hit back! Don't miss a beat, because that’s what that bum over there wants most!”

Blue, standing off to the side of the conference room table, begins to imagine a humanoid face. The face appears as an amalgam of all the fighters he had ever faced up to that point, combined with the emotions of malice and hatred, motivated by a feeling of vengeance. Indeed, it is a disturbingly ugly visage.

Blue, the air surrounding him seeping with noise, faces the wall opposite his seat at the head of the table, concentrating on that face, using it to represent the man that killed sixteen of his most experienced enlisted officers.

The hole his fist leaves in the wall next to the primary console of the conference room would need two days of work to effect repairs. The viewer itself, on the other hand, would never again display as clear or sharp as it did before.