Benjamin Gold

Location: Orbit, Earth, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“Snowman One-Seven you’re cleared to enter the queue. Welcome home, but don’t get too comfortable.”

“Roger that, good to be back.” Ben eavesdropped on the Spyder pilot’s coms traffic as he stewed in his simmering rage.

He wasn’t’ the only one on board. People weren’t openly complaining about it because of his golden stripe, but he’d seen more than one hushed conversation abruptly stop as he looked up. Then there was the body language. Everyone onboard looked coiled, tense, with a few still fighting off the effects of intense inebriation.

Ben couldn’t blame them or their feelings. If he wasn’t the senior officer onboard the assault shuttle he might have been bitching right alongside them, but that wasn’t what officers did. They supported the command decisions of the skipper even if they didn’t agree with them. Having been a skipper, Ben knew from firsthand experience how good it was to have subordinates that didn’t bitch and moan at every order. Now that the shoe was on the other foot, he bet the old crew of the Argo did plenty of complaining in private.

he mentally shouted at the universe for the tenth time this flight.

He’d had his whole engagement week planned out with Jacobi. They’d gotten through the hard part with his family, and the rest of the time was supposed to be spent between seeing the sights and the bedroom. His fiancé had never been to Earth before, and the megacities of the human race’s home world were unmatched anywhere else in human space. Now, all of that had been cut short by an immediate recall to Jack Frost.

What was even worse was that the whole crew had been granted a leave window because they just come off a grueling multi-month retrofit of the new technology. Ben’s eyes swept the Spyder’s bay and noticed the men and women with engineering insignia who still looked haggard and exhausted. They’d been on twelve hour shifts to get the new equipment integrated with Jack Frost. From what he’d heard for them engineering officers, it could have been a lot worse.

Jack Frost, more commonly known as Snowman to its crew, and the rest of the Poet Class battleships, were fairly new to the fleet. They’d been commissioned fifteen years ago, and were less crew intensive than previous ships. They only needed 2200 instead of 3000 spacers to conduct combat operations, which freed up room for a full five companies of marines. It was heavier on the energy cannon side with thirty-eight tubes, which then reflected in its loss of missile tubes down to one hundred and seventy eight. Its five and a half meter thick armor and heavy point defense would come in handy considering the data on the Windsor’s newly adopted strategies of closer quarter’s warfare. The way the enemy behaved greatly influenced which ships the Commonwealth decided to upgrade.

That upgrade gave Ben, and the rest of Snowman’s crew, a perpetual headache that they were supposed to get a break from. Now that break was over. He felt the sudden pull of gravity as the Spyder passed into the flight deck of the kilometer and a half long behemoth. A petty officer and sergeant snapped to their feet and started to corral the other forty-plus passengers, but they left Ben alone, and let him be the first one off the boat.

Another petty officer came jogging over just as the ramp touched down and the avalanche of an overworked flight deck assaulted their ears.

“What the hell is going on?” Ben looked around as cargo shuttled flew in an out of the newly-shielded area.

It was still a little freaky to look over his shoulder and see open space with nothing but a thin layer of energy between all these spacers and the void, but he quickly shook off the shock. A closer look told him that they shuttles were dropping off food and ammo, which auto-loaders controlled by the ship’s new AI took immediately and transported to their designated locations. It was more efficient than any man-run operations, which only meant the skipper thought it was ok to do it faster. That led to its own issues, which Ben witnessed as one of the cargo shuttles nearly collided with a new shuttle coming through the shield. Thrusters whined and made everyone on the deck wince. The shuttle shot to the side, barely squeaking through a hole between a parked Spyder and the inbound shuttle.

“What the hell is going on?” Ben yelled louder as the petty officer skidded to a stop in front of him with a PAD.

The PAD was integrated to work with IORs, even though the petty officer obviously hadn’t undergone the procedure, but Ben’s automatically acknowledged the ping.

“Welcome back, Lieutenant Commander, you’re to report directly to the CIC, and I have no idea what the hell is going on. I’m just here giving directions.” The man gave Ben a pleading look, so he moved on. The line of personnel needing assignments was already backed up into the ship.

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He turned his attention to his own assignment. Normally, as the assistant tactical officer, his place was on the bridge with his department head and the captain. The only time he was in CIC was during… A lump formed in his throat and he took off running.

The Combat Information Center was buried deep in the ship, but separate from the bridge, which was where the captain spent all his time. When the ship went into battle all the primary department heads were on the bridge with the skipper executing the battle plan. The CIC, on top of handling a lot of data and information critical to fighting the battle, also served as a secondary bridge. If the main bridge took a hit, then control was designed to seamlessly pass to the CIC where the XO and secondary staff were located.

When Ben reached the heavy metal door guarded by a pair of armed and armored marines he slowed down to make sure his uniform was decent. The XO was a bit of a hardass. His IOR connected to the CIC’s data node and it flashed green and unlocked the door as he stepped up to it. The marines did their own scan, because the skipper was on the paranoid side, before he was allowed to enter. While the bridge of a battleship might be expansive with room for the primary staff to move around, the CIC was not. It was a cramped little space filled with computer cores, which wasn’t conducive to someone Ben’s size.

Thankfully, the tactical section was the largest in the room, even if only one harried petty officer was currently manning it.

“Thank god, sir,” the woman pulled some loose, sweaty hairs out of her eyes.

“Gold!” The XO snapped when he caught sight of him. “We’ve got encrypted data coming in over QE from Second Fleet. Coms is deciphering it and passing it to you. I want a tactical threat assessment for the skipper in fifteen minutes. Get to it.”

Ben hadn’t even reached the holo-tank at the center of the work stations before information started to flood across it. “Yes, sir,” he dutifully replied as all thoughts of his lost week with Jacobi vanished. That concentration was quickly replaced by confusion and a frown.

“I know, sir,” the PO1 walked up beside him with her hands on her hip. “I can’t make heads or tails of it either.”

All Ben could see was a lot of static. He ran a diagnostic on the holo-tank just in case, but it popped back all green. This was the information coming in from Second Fleet on a bubble of space advancing from Jupiter toward the asteroid belt. The only thing that wasn’t garbled was the countdown clock at the top right of the bubble. Just under fifteen hours before that bubble reached the outer perimeter of defenses around Mars.

his IOR reminded him on his much more demanding deadline.

He got to work, unsure if he’d be able to tell Snowman’s captain anything at all about what was heading there way.

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: Toronto-Buffalo-Cleveland-Detroit Metropolis, Earth, United Commonwealth of Colonies

Coop caught himself against the wall as the CRACK from Haley’s slap echoed through the station.

“What the shit!” he yelled as his face throbbed. He was so focused on the red hand-shaped imprint forming on his face he missed the blur of motion behind him.

He was still cupping his cheek when he suddenly found a snub-nosed pistol only a few inches from his face. Eve had drawn it in a flash when Haley hit him, and she had it pointed directly at the forehead of his ex-lover.

Coop recognized the model. It was a powerful, but short-range weapon. But at under a meter between the barrel and Haley’s face there was no way Eve would miss.

“Ok now,” he held up his hands peacefully and focused on Haley. “How about we all…”

He stopped when he saw his Ex had also pulled a weapon. A sleek pistol designed to be easily concealed had magically appeared in her hand and was pointed over Coop’s shoulder at Eve.

Coop took a deep breath and stepped directly in the line of the two weapons. It might have been one of the dumbest things he’d ever done, but he wasn’t going to let his childhood fuckbuddy and his baby momma poke each other full of holes.

“Easy,” he gestured or both women to lower their weapons. Of course, neither did, so he tried a different tactic. “I probably deserved that, but just remind me what I did this time.”

Coop’s situational awareness caught up with him and he noticed at least three other people securing a perimeter around him. They looked like civilians, so they had to be with Hailey, and if they were with Hailey that meant they were members of PFH. What one of the galaxy’s largest criminal syndicates wanted with him, he had no idea.

“Remind you,” Hailey hissed like a snake ready to strike. “We made a deal back on New Savannah, Coop. We were going to work together. I was going to give you intel and you were going to keep the authorities off my back. I roped my bosses into that plan. They made deals and promises, and then you just vanished and never came back.” Her breathing was even but her teeth were bared like she wanted to take a bite out of him. “I literally got fucked in the ass because of you. My organization doesn’t take failure well, and you fucked us. You fucked me, and now my employers want answers.”

“Cry me a fucking river,” Eve replied before Coop could answer. “Put on your big girl panties and figure shit out. If you didn’t want a career where you have to take it up the poop chute when you screw up than maybe you should have thought about that before spreading your legs.” Eve’s pistol never wavered.

“Who it this cum bucket?” Hailey’s eyes flickered to Eve, “and what makes her think she knows fuck-all about our history, how we grew up, or what we went through. Her big ass probably had three-square meals a day, a nice bed to sleep on, and some burbanite’s tiny dick to suck whenever she wanted to get off. How about you tell her to shut the fuck up or I’ll put a bullet through her dome.”

“Ok…enough!” As much as Coop liked a cat fight, especially in a mud-pit during half-price beer night, this wasn’t the time or place.

“Hailey, Eve. Eve, Hailey. Now that we’re all introduced how about we put down the guns before the nice soldiers over there wonder what his going on. My guess is they’ve got itchy trigger fingers.” A few of the soldiers setting up the portable barriers and machine gun position were glancing in their direction.

Both Hailey and Eve held their weapons steady and then slowly lowered them in tandem until they were parallel with their sides.

“Great,” Coop gave everyone his best smile. “Now let’s figure this out.”