“Are you freaking kidding me?!”
“No ma’am, I’m totally serious ma’am.”
The tall thin Scandinavian-looking woman standing in the office with her hands splayed on the desk while she leans menacingly over it, looking like she’s about to have an aneurysm while glaring is lieutenant colonel Alice Redburn. The short broad-shouldered guy with the sweat-slicked buzz-cut, holding his hat in his dark chocolate brown hand while saluting her is me, Staff Sergeant Jackson Greer.
While I would normally be the target of my superior officer’s ire, today is a bit different. I may do a bit more to end up on the receiving end of her famously short temper than a lot of the other men and women serving under her but today I kind of wish that was the case. In this particular instance, I happen to agree with her completely and would be just as mad if I were in her position. But, I’m not and whether either of us agrees with the situation or not is irrelevant.
You are probably wondering what situation brought us to this point. I suppose I should start at the beginning. Mind you, this started several years ago while I was still in basic training so I only saw the parts that ended up on the news. While I might not be cut out for it, my dream was still to join the U.S. Space Force. A lot of people had taken the U.S.S.F. to be something of a joke but it was always a very real branch of the military.
I wanted to join the U.S.S.F. but I didn’t meet their IQ standards and a couple of stunts in high school pretty much guaranteed I wasn’t getting in. I did however get into the marines, Semper Fi! It turns out I was eminently qualified for the marines, short fuse, and all. That didn’t do anything to stifle my desire to be one of the people slated to go into the stars on our nation’s behalf.
Since I couldn’t get into the U.S.S.F., I did the next best thing, I read everything I could about it. It just so happened that there was a lot of news about it right now. With the vetting of the mark 6 ion engine aboard the eternity deep space probe at the end of the last decade, the space force had been gearing up for the likelihood of real space missions in the near future.
What nobody could foresee was a crazy Australian scientist coming out with an instrument to cross the boundary of dimensions. She actually proved that the damn thing was able to jump out of our dimension and back! What’s more, she tested certain properties of the dimension it went to and found that it was a dimension that would exponentially multiply the velocity of an object traveling through it.
Suddenly, there was a lot of hype about us going to the stars in the near future! As a private in training, I didn’t have a lot of time to follow everything that was going on but I read as much about it as I could in our rare time off. At first, everyone was claiming that we were going to be in the stars in a couple of years and while I hoped for it, I knew that wasn’t realistic. The truth was that we weren’t going to see the first satellite testing of the system for another two years!
I remember the hubbub on the day the star-leap space probe was launched. Everybody just knew that it was going to change everything. It was the most anticlimactic failure that had been seen in years. It was a failure compared to the discovery of the warped lens of the Hubble space telescope. The program running the ion engine wouldn’t boot up and it wouldn’t respond to the techs on the ground. It took nearly three months of work at the I.S.S. 2 before the thing was ready to test.
Just when everyone was holding their breaths for the jump into another dimension, the satellite did jack. There was yet another problem in the software or the hardware and the thing had to come back to the space station to be worked on again. After six months of almost non-stop working and reworking the probe, it was finally launched again. Everyone was so ready for it to just disappear and never return that they were surprised when it arrived back in earth orbit a day later. They were even more astounded when the probe uploaded a series of breathtaking clips of a flyby of Europa.
The hype was back on in a big way! There were people from all over the Earth that were clamoring for the data that was brought back about the icy moon of Jupiter. There was a huge push about the possibility of colonizing that one. There was also a huge push to get the military to release the footage from the jump into another dimension. Everyone thought that the military would be keeping that some kind of secret but was stunned when they complied. The joke was on everyone; the footage of the other dimension was pure blackness with only the glow of the ion engine illuminating the antenna of the probe to give any context to what was being seen in the footage. Apparently, the other dimension was full of nothing.
That brings us almost full circle to the reason I’m standing in the Lieutenant Colonel’s office now. The success of the probe was repeated several more times. The longest test had taken only a week. They sent the probe to look at several of the planets and moons of the solar system and everyone oohed-and-aahed about the videos but there was a concerted push from everyone to see other star systems. It didn’t take long before the military’s commercial partner announced that they would be making trips to record the conditions in other star systems.
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The information that the probe brought back a couple of years later stunned the world. There were worlds in both the Sirius and 61 Cigna B system that had breathable atmospheres and livable conditions, barely. The sensors showed that but the almost inconceivable part was what the videos showed. There almost looked to be life on the one in Sirius, which was tentatively dubbed Gia.
Almost overnight, the entire world seemed to catch the space bug, and applications for the space force shot through the roof! There was a clamor towards getting into NASA and a lot of drive to get into civilian space agencies too but those didn’t really hold my interest. In hindsight, I should have paid more attention to the civilian agencies or at least one of them.
The company that was partnered with U.S.S.F. and NASA on the project started pushing to make more progress. I found that out way after the fact. The company had a lot of shareholders who were pushing to get their returns on these projects. Suddenly there was money on the line and that was as good as the smell of blood in the water to those piranhas.
The sudden change in their partner’s attitude towards the project was oddly taken in stride by the upper echelons of both space agencies. The urge to make a name for their programs and get a bigger budget seemed to drive them almost as hungrily as their civilian counterpart. Suddenly, all three were very gung-ho to get the continuation of the program underway. That is the point where we, my CO, and I, come in.
The news that I had just brought her was that our entire command structure starting at her seems to have been reassigned. How someone so very junior and on the enlisted side would end up embroiled in a conversation with the Lieutenant Colonel about this topic is simply due to her knowledge that I might be indirectly responsible for her branch being picked. I might have gotten a bit of a trend started amongst my peers to apply to transfer to the space force. My CO might have endorsed the idea after talking to me and a few of my squad and things might have escalated, a lot, from that point till now.
All of that is beside the point of the current conversation, however. As I said before, The situation is out of either of our hands but I might be one of the ones at fault now that I think about it. The situation that we are all in shouldn’t have much to do with someone as low in rank as myself but I did apply to transfer. With a total of eighty-five percent of her command requesting transfers to the space force, it was a logical pick for them when it became apparent that they were going to need marines on the mission with the U.S.S.F. personnel.
We are now being transferred as a whole command structure to some undisclosed location. When we get there, we are going to be security for a base where the new mission to explore a new world is being put together. Why did it have to come to this? What did I do to become a glorified security guard?
The latest packet of information on our new orders was just delivered by yours truly to the Lieutenant Colonel and after reading the first couple of lines I knew that I was in for it. As soon as I handed the packet over, I was expecting to be dismissed but something about the way I was called out to deliver the packet didn’t sit right with me. When the Lieutenant Colonel stopped in her reading and looked directly at me, still standing at attention, I could feel a sinking feeling.
“It says here that you applied almost three months ago to transfer to the space force. Is that true Staff sergeant Greer?”
“Sir, yes sir, ma’am.”
After growling in her throat a bit, she quipped back at me. “At ease Staff Sergeant. I think this is going to be a long discussion anyway so you might as well. Now, Can you tell me just what might have prompted you to try transferring out of the marines to a completely different branch of the military?”
After adopting my parade rest posture I ventured a reply, as much as I didn’t want to. “Ma’am, I have always wanted to be a part of the space force but didn’t qualify before. I thought that, with me already being in the military, I might have a better chance of applying this way. Ma’am.”
With one of her eyes twitching slightly in obvious anger, she pressed farther. “Be that as it may, why then did you decide it would be a good idea to try rallying all of your fellow marines to ALSO apply to join the space force? Was that some kind of direct sleight against my command, Staff Sergeant?”
Yep, she’s pissed at me. I almost had to wince at the icy tone of her words but I had to reply. “No ma’am. I simply talked to other members of the platoon about how exciting it would be to be exploring an alien world and told them that they might want to apply before somebody beat them to it. Ma’am”
Slamming her hands on the desk, she shot to her feet and I was almost afraid she would lunge over the desk at me. “Are you freaking kidding me?!”
I did want to cringe now but I wasn’t allowed to and did my best to maintain a straight face as I answered her. “No ma’am, I’m totally serious ma’am.”
She looked like she wanted to strangle me or her superior or both. “Pack your shit, marine. You just got your wish. Command has informed me that you and a selection of others they reviewed are going to be training for a mission to explore Gia. We have the mission of protecting the eggheads from the space force while they do their thing. Thanks to you, We’re the ones being tossed into uncharted waters. Dismissed.”