TRNS EARHART, MCMURDO SYSTEM (1,400 LS)
POV: Speinfoent, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: Beta Leader)
The Terran shuttle was clearly designed with a heavy emphasis on function over form. Her hull interiors embraced a minimalist palette, a symphony of dark grays and blacks, covered with unfamiliar scribbles printed in white that told of buried functionality within each of the many protrusions. The sparse side-by-side seating numbered just over a dozen, each accompanied by what was evidently a Terran EVA suit in a panel above their heads.
Speinfoent tried to imagine fitting his tail into one of them. They looked spacious enough but—
“Don’t worry,” Carla reassured, following the direction of his gaze. “It won’t be comfortable, but we checked: you guys are small enough to stuff yourselves in one of those in an emergency.”
She slid into a seat next to the cockpit and beckoned for the trio to each take one. Speinfoent took the one across from her, fastened his seat restraints, and began to gesture with his paw to Uintrei to show her how to operate hers.
Observing from the other side, Carla signaled them to tighten the belts as hard as they could. “Make sure to strap in hard. If the inertial compensators stop working—”
“—you’ll want to be able to identify our bodies,” Speinfoent finished for her.
A grin flashed across Carla’s face. “See? I knew our training system works.”
She reached above her with her arm, pointing towards a compartment concealing some hidden functionality. “This is your oxygen mask system. If we lose cabin pressure, or if the shuttle enters combat mode, it will pop open.”
She manually operated the simple latch with a flick of her wrist and pulled down an oxygen rebreather device, demonstrating its functionality. “When that happens, reach up with your paw and pull down the oxygen mask. Breathe in deeply, and it will automatically seal itself over your face. When a catastrophic loss of cabin pressure occurs, you will have about five to ten seconds of consciousness to do so, two minutes with combat injections. To help you out, the cabin will be quickly flooded with a backup non-oxygenated atmosphere, which will give your body pressure for about a minute, depending on the size of the hull breach. Use that time to get yourself into the EVA suits before you help anyone who is not yet pressurized. And make sure to do this before your lungs explode. Ninety seconds in vacuum, and you’re a satellite—”
“Lung,” Speinfoent corrected, a flicker of amusement in his eyes. “Unlike you or the Granti, we only have one.”
“Thanks for the xenobiology lesson, professor,” Carla teased. “In summary, put on the suit before your lung explodes.”
Carla pulled out another compartment next to her, this time grabbing what looked like a light stick out of it. “Oxygen candles,” she explained. “In case you run out of internal oxygen in your emergency suit. Stick it in your suit’s receptable in your hip, and it’ll keep you breathing for a while in case it takes a long time to rescue you after an accident.”
Durnio’s eyes darted about, betraying his nervousness. “Do these… accidents happen a lot on your ships?”
“Not usually out of combat,” Carla admitted, “But anything can happen. You will be issued custom EVA suits and drilled on putting them on once you get to Charon.”
Uintrei’s voice wavered between worry and wonder, “How far away is that?”
Carla counted on her fingers. “Four blinks: Flint, Hawking, Sirius, and then Sol. Just enough time to get comfortable. Why?”
Uintrei winced. “We didn’t bring over ration packs from the shuttle. I don’t suppose—”
“Ah. Don’t worry,” Carla said, glancing at her tablet. “Lunch will be served once we enter blink.”
“And you have… appropriate meals for our… distinct physiology?”
Speinfoent reassured her, “Don’t worry about that. Terran food is at least half the reason that almost everyone in Sixth Fleet who was eligible volunteered for the College.”
Carla winked. “There is meat, yes, if that is your concern. Shuttle food is not grande cuisine but given what I’ve seen of Sixth Fleet’s rations before our chefs took over their menus, I’m sure you will find it palatable.”
Speinfoent felt his whiskers twitch with anticipation. “Is there also—”
“Yes, we do have an ice cream machine on board the shuttle. And other snacks to tide you over before we get a proper meal,” Carla chuckled.
She reached into a compartment next to her and pulled out a few plastic vacuum-sealed packages. Holding them in front of her — one in each hand, she looked at the confused pair of Malgeir officers and the bemused Speinfoent. “I’ve got some jerky. Beef or turkey?”
“Beef,” Speinfoent answered without hesitation, and she tossed him one of the bags.
He tore it open with his canines, and the smell of the heavily processed alien meat, mixed with a slight tinge of spice, instantly wafted into the snout of the hungry Durnio next to him. “I’ll have what he’s having, please.”
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Uintrei’s eyes widened in disbelief. “So, rumors of the destruction of the Grass Eater fleet at Gruccud were accurate?” she asked in astonishment. “And the capture of their fleet commander?”
“Yes,” Speinfoent answered proudly. “And I was there to watch them tow away the hundreds of captured ship hulls and prisoners. I’m sure we’ll see them once we enter Sol.”
“We’re still figuring out a good way to use those captured hulls,” Carla chuckled dryly. “One of the admirals wanted to put them into service for your Navy, and he changed his mind after a ten-minute tour.”
Uintrei’s brow furrowed in confusion. “What’s wrong with them? They seem to fight us in them just fine.”
“Size. Znosian crew members are too small,” Carla explained patiently. “About twenty percent of the ship would not be comfortably accessible for Malgeir crews, not to mention Terrans. And we’d have to re-train your people to operate those alien ships — after we figure them out ourselves. It would take too much time, and it would be easier to build new Malgeir ships of our designs.”
“Did their fleet commander reveal anything important?”
“A few things, I’m sure. But that’s way above even my new paygrade. One thing they did tell us though, was how to feed the almost hundred thousand prisoners we took to Naval Station Europa. Turns out their diets are even simpler than yours.”
“What do you feed them?” Speinfoent asked.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“Lettuce. Overcooked lettuce. And if they behave, they seem to enjoy carrots too. So we just ship them in by the shipload from Terra. And,” Carla winked, “Some of them appear to enjoy dairy cheese on the side.”
“No way.”
“Oh yeah. They can’t digest them, of course, but it looks like the concept of food for more than sustenance is catching on.”
“Does your people have a long-term plan for what to do with them?” Uintrei asked.
“Not really,” Carla confessed. “I’m not sure what we could do with them. We can’t hand them back to the enemy for obvious reasons. Nor to your people yet because they know too much about us. Can’t put them to work because we can’t trust them to do anything except the most basic tasks like cleaning up after themselves and because we just don’t need that kind of labor.”
“You can always just purge them, right?” Uintrei asked, looking intently at the Terran.
Carla shook her head vehemently. “Not our style. And if we were going to do that, we would have just blown up their shuttles at the battle site far away from everyone else. Maybe we can exchange them for your people one day. Who knows? Keeping them alive isn’t that expensive, and they might come in handy one day.”
“What if they escape? Or collectively break out?”
“They won’t.”
Uintrei shrugged, her eyes distant with memory. “That’s what we said early in the war in the ground campaigns when we captured them. They are more resilient than their small statures suggest…”
“They won’t escape. Not alive, anyway. We have… measures in place.”
After a brief awkward silence, Carla looked kindly at Uintrei. She squeezed the skeptical Malgeir on her shoulder lightly. “It is good that you are asking about these details though. I noticed that some of your spacers don’t ask a lot of these kinds of questions. One thing we teach at the Staff College is that it’s important to think through and be self-critical of your plans like that.”
“So, we actually are going to learn to fight,” Durnio said, catching up in the conversation as he finished licking and playing around with his snack bag.
“Of course. There’s only so much we can do with a few weeks of field exercises and joint operations with Sixth Fleet. That was always a stopgap measure in response to Datsot. The enemy is going to learn and adapt from what we’ve done, and you need to be prepared. To fight your own battles without us if you have to.”
“We’ve been fighting on our own for years now,” Uintrei pointed out, some pride in her eyes.
“Yeah? And how has that been working out?”
“Things could be better…”
“Exactly. Besides, it’s also a chance for us to learn from you and for us to improve our models of how you’d behave in a fight.”
“Still… a year. That seems like a long time for us to be out of the fight.”
Carla explained, “That’s already an accelerated schedule for ship command. The problem is that most of our most experienced ship commanders have thousands of orbital flight hours, either with parasite craft, law enforcement cutters, or even transport ships in the civilian sectors. We need to bring you up to speed with basic orbital maneuvers and small unit tactics, historical battles et cetera, before we can get into bigger topics like joint operations or enterprise strategic planning. But if you end up getting the subjects faster than usual, we can discuss how to shorten it even further.”
Uintrei decided to change the subject. “Anyway, what were you calling Speinfoent earlier? A Sphinx? What’s that?”
“Ah,” Carla’s lips curled into a sly smile. “That’s his callsign. It’s like… a nickname we use. All our ship commanders get one eventually.”
“So what does Sphinx mean?”
“It’s a really long story,” Speinfoent interjected, a little more loudly than his voice needed to be. “Don’t worry too much about it.”
Uintrei’s gaze lingered on him oddly, then asked, “So how would I get a… callsign?”
“You’ll be assigned one eventually if you command a ship.”
“What if I don’t like the callsign they give me?” Durnio asked with concern.
Carla grinned. “Oh, that’s not a problem at all. Just complain about it, and we’ll give you another one.”
Speinfoent generously saved him from committing the cardinal sin of callsigns. “No, definitely don’t do that. They will give you another one you will like even less. We had a captain in our squadron who the Terran exercise trainers started calling Wheelbarrow.”
“Wheelbarrow?”
“It’s an old Terran farming tool— Anyway, they called him that because he only works when pushed hard. When they explained this to him, he didn’t like that at all. So he whined about it to the squadron leader and insisted everyone call him by his real name.”
Carla suppressed a snicker. “What callsign did they end up giving him instead?”
“Blisters. Because he only appears after the hard work’s been done. And he’s a pain to deal with…”
“Ouch.”
“Word of advice to you two: don’t tempt them to change your callsign if you get one. The people who think these things up — they’re very bored spacers and this is what they think about all day. You can’t win, and you don’t want to be reminded of that on the radio until the day you retire.”
Carla shrugged. “It is possible get a new callsign if you do something more… interesting, but I’m guessing that’s not going to happen for someone who got assigned… Blisters.”
“Speaking of callsigns, Mark never ended up telling me what Amelia’s callsign was back when she commanded a ship,” Speinfoent said.
“Jaws.”
“Jaws?”
“Her flight instructor at the time called her that because she wouldn’t stop talking in class and in briefings. And later she had a reputation for being aggressive as a shark in tactical training, so it worked out and the name stuck.”
“What’s a shark?” Durnio asked, puzzled.
“What’s that have to do with your jaws?” Speinfoent asked simultaneously.
Carla’s face broke into a wide grin. “You guys are going to looooove movie night at the College.”
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TRNS EARHART, CHARON (120 KM)
POV: Speinfoent, Malgeir Federation Navy (Rank: Beta Leader)
Speinfoent stared at the shuttle’s external cameras capturing the stark beauty of the approaching moon’s frozen expanse. He noted a curious red blemish near the north pole, its rough surface contrasting with the dominant smooth white and gray.
He shared his observation with Carla, who smiled and explained while tracing the crimson on the screen, “Frozen gaseous condensates from Pluto, I’m told. The locals here refer to the area as Mordor.”
“Mordor? That sounds familiar. Is that one of the astronauts in your history?”
“No. It’s a reference from a classic fantasy movie,” Carla replied, jotting it down on her tablet. “Another one to add to the movie night list.” She frowned and added, “I think the movie was based on an old book, but I never read the book myself.”
Speinfoent nodded, his eyes still on the monitors. “I’m guessing that’s not where we’re headed.”
“One does not simply fly into Mordor,” Carla quoted, then pointed at a cluster of valleys near the equator. “Instead, we built the Naval Station Charon main campus on the less volatile water ice.”
Uintrei chimed in, skepticism in her voice. “This doesn’t seem like a very habitable planet to me. A moon this small: it can’t have an atmosphere.”
Carla nodded. “It isn’t, and it doesn’t. There are some vapors near the surface, but nothing breathable. The bigger problem, however, is the temperature: negative two hundred degrees Celsius is considered a balmy sunny day in summer. If you go outside on Charon without a suit, you’ll instantly go into shock from the cold before the vacuum kills you.”
“Why did you Terrans decide to colonize such an inhospitable planet? It must have been so costly!”
Carla shrugged. “Because we can, probably. As you might have noticed, there aren’t a whole lot of livable planets in our neighborhood, especially given our caution against spreading out too widely. For its part, Charon is positioned nicely outside the system limit, near where we can blink to Sirius, for the next few decades or so of Pluto’s orbit anyway. The lack of atmosphere and low gravity are seen as particularly advantageous characteristics for the Navy. With inertial compensators, the base structure itself has an artificial 1G gravity field, and it’s convenient enough to turn it off at the spaceport whenever we need to launch something.”
“Military and defense priorities seem to dominate your species’ decision-making,” Uintrei observed.
Carla pondered it for a second. “Historically, I would say that’s true for much of Terran history, as you’ll learn at the College, but you’ll notice that we didn’t really colonize Charon. Like our base at Europa, it’s mostly research and military facilities. The remaining population mostly exists to support those activities. Despite having bases in multiple systems, we are essentially a one-system species, and this is our frontier. Which is why it was so important that you agreed to keep our secret.”
“How long do you think you can keep your existence a secret from the Grass— from the Znosians?”
“A few more months to years, at least that’s what we hope. It will get out eventually, and that is a risk we accepted when we joined your war. You have to remember that despite our constant conflicts in our system, we as a species haven’t fought an all-out war for almost a century. It takes time to mobilize the economy, industrialize war output, and get everyone on board. We can only hope to prepare for when our time is up.”
“For when your time is up?”
“Yes. The instant the enemy learns about our existence, they are going to come at us with everything they have. As well as we’ve done so far, we are not betting the continued existence of our entire species on our slimming technological advantage and continued dumb luck.”
“Then what are you betting it on?” Uintrei pressed.
Carla smiled faintly. “You, of course.”