Lt de Soto or rather Miguel, as he insisted, was certainly a new experience. I had never in my life been under an officer that didn’t just tolerate informality, but demanded it. It honestly had me rather unsure how to proceed. As he marched me out of the berth and down the passageway, he gave me a wide grin.
“So, Damien, tell me about yourself? Where are you from?”, he inquired.
“Uh, I’m from Rigel,” I stated.
“The new terraformed colony?”
“Yes,” I confirmed.
“Well, tell me about it!”, he exclaimed. “What’s it like living out on a fresh terraform?”
“Well,” I began, thinking over how to explain it. “You can’t really leave the boundaries of the colony. Actually, scratch that, you technically could but you’re not allowed to. The ecosystem is still fragile outside of the main colony site so the colony admin levies pretty heavy fines for people that head out and put the project in danger.”
“Interesting!”, said Miguel. “Any family? Parents? Siblings?”
“Just my mom. From how she tells it, my dad left when he found out she was pregnant,” I explained. “She’s a botanist. Brought in to help with the final stages of the project and oversee some of the more experimental growth sites. When I wasn’t in school I spent a lot of time in her lab helping out,” I paused. “Oh, I guess there’s my uncle too, but he lives back on Terra, so we didn’t see him that often.”
“Hmm,” he mused. “So what inspired you to join up rather than follow in your mother’s footsteps?”, he queried.
“Eh, science was never really my thing,” I said dismissively. “I’d help around the lab with some of the more physical tasks, but sitting around measuring blades of grass was never really my idea of a good time.”
The conversation reached a lull as we turned into a large room, evidently the mess hall. There were several long tables with benches fixed to their sides lining the room, and a counter dividing a smaller section of the room off, presumably the kitchen. A few crew members sat around, eating or chatting amongst themselves, and I could see two men in the kitchen scouring dishes and carrying on a lively conversation regarding whether or not Drexii had penises.
“Everybody!” boomed Miguel, “I’d like you all to meet EN3 Damien Manelis!” He turned to me. “Damien, this is the mess hall as I’m sure you gathered. One of the places where the crew most frequently spends their downtime.”
The scattered crew and one of the men from the kitchen moved to approach us. The one from the kitchen, presumably the cook, reached us first and held out his hand.
“Pleasure to meet you Damien,” he said affably as he shook my hand. “Culinary Specialist First Class Seamus Kelly. I’m responsible for turning those blocks of matter we keep in the coolers into something that’s actually edible.”
He was rather short, with sandy blonde hair, and a narrow nose beneath gray eyes wrinkled by smile lines.
“A pleasure to meet you too,” I responded. “I’ve heard some good things about your work. A couple of my bunkmates were arguing about which meal was best when I went to stow my gear.”
“Ah, yes,” he remarked with a twinkle in his eye. “You’re in the Wind Tunnel. It’s always rather amusing to watch those two go at it. They never run out of topics to argue about.”
A few other people came and introduced themselves before Miguel cut in to the chatter. “Alright people, lay off the newbie, we have the rest of the tour to get to.”
He took me by the shoulder as the crewmembers went back to whatever they had last been doing, and the tour continued. We visited the “rec closet”, where one could check out sets of weights, or neural patches for VR. We visited the environmental section, where a bored looking technician sat reading a tablet, occasionally glancing at the terminal next to him where a diagram of the ship’s environmental systems sat next to a stream of data, logs, and self checks. We stopped by the bridge, where I could see the station out by the window, slowly orbiting the gas giant we were parked at. All with the same smooth surroundings and warm lighting.
—
“And this will be your wheelhouse,” said Miguel, gesturing around us. We stood in an intersection of sorts, with several doors leading to various rooms and passageways. Behind us and to the left of the passage we arrived from stood a passageway labeled “Primary Reactor/Dedicated Weapons Reactor”. Directly ahead of us one more passage was marked as “Slipspace Drive/Primary Propulsion”. Lieutenant Michaels sat in a tiny office off to the side, and gave us a small wave and a smile, before getting back to whatever work he was doing on his holodisplay.
“Now here in engineering, there’s typically 3 crew on duty during each watch section. One each for the primary reactor, the slipspace drive and our main engines. If and when we receive firing orders, we spin up the secondary reactor while en route, and unfortunately, at least a few of you guys get your off time cut into. But, well, that’s true for most of the ship,” explained Miguel.
The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
“I assume the secondary reactor is just for the main gun?”, I ventured.
“Got it in one,” smiled Miguel. “Now, that secondary reactor has a few differences when compared to your typical antimatter reactor. Something about needing to tune it in a specific way to power the rails and the wormhole generators efficiently. That information is pretty classified, given that we’re pretty sure none of the other powers in the galaxy knows quite how the gun on an Io-class works. Unfortunately, because of that, we can’t really train you new engineers up before you’re on board. So, because of that, you’re gonna get some assigned reading tonight. Read through it, maybe grab a neural patch from the rec closet to go through a sim. Chief Rukundo is going to give you a small test tomorrow morning.”
I must have made a face at that because he laughed, and reassured me. “Not to worry Damien, not to worry. From what I’ve heard the test is pretty easy, and you wouldn’t have been assigned to the ship if command wasn’t confident you could do it. Hell, you’ve probably already taken it without knowing. Command has a habit of slipping the questions into the tests for the engineman rating when they’re planning on sending someone to an Io-class.”
“But, uh, Miguel,” I hesitated. “The incident with Carmichael was only three weeks ago, right? I got my rating almost two months ago.”
Miguel got a conspiratorial look on his face and leaned in. “Can I tell you a secret Damien?”, he said in a faux whisper. “The captain contacted command about a month and a half before Carmichael’s little hissy fit, trying to find a replacement for him. Given that right around the time you took your tests, she stopped pestering them, I’m guessing you have taken the test. You just don’t know it.”
“Well, alright then,” I said, still a bit worried. Whatever else he said, I was still going to read those materials religiously tonight.
—
The rest of the tour was short. The propulsion systems were familiar, essentially just a smaller version of what I had come to know on the Cairo. The same was true of the slipspace drive and the primary reactor. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference with the secondary reactor, but it was powered down at the moment, and apparently the differences were just in how it was tuned, so it’s not like the difference would be visually detectable anyway. A few of the engineering crew on watch at these stations greeted me in passing, but Miguel hurried me along, assuring me that I would be getting a thorough welcome from the engineering crew at dinner time. He had an excited gleam in his eye, that honestly, had me a bit worried.
After leaving the secondary reactor room, we came upon an airlock. There was a locker next to it, and at the top was the label “Primary Weapons Bay”. Below that in blocky capital letters were the words “WARNING - NO ATMO - NO GRAVITY - TAKE ALL APPROPRIATE PRECAUTIONS BEFORE ENTERING.”
Miguel grinned at me. “You know how to seal up your suit?”, he asked, opening the locker to reveal a rack of O2 tanks.
I nodded, as he handed me one tank, and slung another over his shoulder. I heard a pair of clicks as the tank stuck to his back. I watched him even as I copied his moves, my tank attaching to the clips on my back and I heard a slight beep as my suit notified me that it had a full supply of oxygen. Miguel shrouded his head in his hood, winked at me, then the hood seemed to almost stitch itself together in front of his face, leaving no visible seams.
I copied him, pulling up my own hood, then pinged my implant. For a moment after my suit sealed, there was only darkness. Then, some sort of flexible screen on the inside of the hood came on in front of my eyes. There were readouts on suit integrity, oxygen levels, everything you might need in a vac suit. Miguel’s voice sounded in my ear.
“You alright in there?”, he asked.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling a bit weirded out by the suit.
“It’s a bit disconcerting the first time you seal up, I know,” he reassured me.
“It’s just, what are these things even made of?”, I blurted out. “I did the EVA training like everyone else back during basic training, and the suits they had us wear back then were nothing like this. It was all thick airtight canvas and heavy sealing mechanisms.”
“Honestly Damien, I have no idea,” said Miguel, his face obscured by his suit. “I think it’s actually some classified military secret, what this stuff is. But, come on, it’s cool right?”
“I guess,” I admitted.
“But enough about the suits, that’s not why we’re down here. We’re here for the gun,” he said, opening up the airlock. We entered, and once the airlock cycled, we activated the magnets in our boots and stepped out into the room I had witnessed while walking with Lt Michaels. Now that I was in the room with the thing, I had a better perspective on its dimensions. The rails were perhaps eighty meters long, and seemed to run most of the length of the ship. Massive interlocking struts held them up a few meters into the air. The spikes of the wormhole generators sat level with the rails, and alongside the whole assembly, a hatch sat in the floor, around half the length of the rails. I thought I could see the window I had looked into before, above and to my right.
“Ain’t she a beauty,” sighed Miguel. “We keep the room in a vacuum and without any gravity to remove any avenues for error when we fire. Not that the gravity thing is strictly necessary to ensure the safety of the ship. Interesting quirk of wormholes, no matter what area of the wormhole’s entrance an object goes in, it always exits dead center and perfectly straight.”
I barely heard him. I was still gawking at the thing. I had once seen footage of a pirate fleet getting attacked by an Io-class frigate. One second the fleet was calm, fully intact, and utterly secure in the knowledge that their hundreds of ships could detect any incoming attack. The next, every ship present along a long line that cut across the entire fleet was destroyed, including the flagship and the station they were sitting stationary in front of. Cut in half, sent spinning, punched through or sometimes simply vaporized.
I had stared at the screen as the station fell apart and burned up in the atmosphere of the gas giant they were above. And this, if Lt Michaels was to be believed, was the gun that had done it.
Miguel's voice cut through my thoughts. “Alright then, that was our last stop, and I believe it’s almost dinner time. I’d prepare myself if I were you, because there’s gonna be a mob waiting to meet the new blood.”