“Aye, aye, sir.”
“Very well. Pursuant to that order, you and Chief Turner are on twenty-four hour stand-down once we are through the asteroid belt. It is a well-deserved rest that you’ve both earned. You will relay my orders to the chief, please.” Captain Hill sighed. “Commander your dedication is commendable, but you are no good to me, or the crew, if you faint from hunger. You’ve done a good job of laying to rest my fears about your appointment to this post. Please do not return to relying on your father’s influence to bail you out of every situation.” She sat, staring at him with a stony expression that was not quite insubordinate. “Very well, Commander, that is all. Dismissed.”
O’Connell just barely resisted slamming the hatch covering on her way out. Brett Hill shook his head with a frown marring his mouth. “Stubborn woman.” He returned his attention to the documents on his tablet and made a slight notation next to O’Connell’s name. Her file was saved, and he moved to the next task on his list.
***
O’ Connell pulled up from her steady jog, panting heavily. Running helped work out the stress and frustration that had been building since her talk with the captain. She leaned over, resting her hands on her knees. Sweat dripped off her neck and onto the metal plate floor below her. The storage bay was quiet and empty of people—only the emergency lighting lit the way through the stacks of crates. The bay was one hundred meters by one hundred fifty meters and filled to capacity. The winding maze created by the cargo was a perfect environment for a private run.
The captain’s comment about her father rankled. Used to fighting the impression that she gained every promotion and appointment due to her father’s status as a fleet admiral and important political figure, O’Connell had let herself believe the captain recognized her hard work and skills for what they were. That he chose to remind her that her father could not bail her out of any immediate disciplinary situation crushed her hopes. Apparently, she’d have to work even harder and travel even further from Earth to escape the Admiral’s shadow.
She flipped her hand palm–up and checked the time on the chip implanted at her wrist. 1015. She still had time to shower before her shift started. Arching her back, she stretched and walked briskly toward the vacuum tube. If she had more time she would have climbed the tube ladders located within the same cylinders as the vacuum mechanism. Intended as an emergency measure in case the tubes were not functioning, the ladders were a perfect upper body workout.
In the bay, behind the door she’d just closed, a quiet figure moved from its hiding place. The commander never suspected she was being watched.
Showered and in fresh flight suit, O’Connell arrived on the bridge. She was startled to see the captain sitting in his chair; he hadn’t mentioned wanting to be present for the run through the asteroid belt. They’d performed the maneuver twice during their shake-down cruise with no adverse effects. His supervision was not needed or appreciated given the commander’s current mood. He inclined his head and said “Commander.”
Lieutenant Guttmann drew her attention. “Ma’am, as officer of the watch I report all systems functioning within parameters. Engines are idling, and all personnel are ready for the break from Mars orbit.”
Neck craned back to accommodate the lieutenant’s height, the commander nodded to him. “Very well, Lieutenant. You will maintain watch officer status until 1200 hours. Chief Turner will relieve you at that time.”
She walked past him and sat in the pilot’s chair. A quick glance told her that all was as Swede had reported—online and ready for commands. The ship’s clock clicked over to 1100 hours. O’Connell said, over her shoulder, “Time is 1100 hours, sir. Permission to proceed?”
“Granted, Commander.” His words were clipped and precise.
She expertly moved her fingers over the command keys and adjusted the power levels to the engines. The
Hudson
shuddered only slightly as she pulled away from Mars’ gravity. She switched her view to the 360 degree radar return field around the ship. A separate screen showed the return from the high-strength directional radar in the front of the ship. Her hand flexed on the control stick; the ship banked steadily to port and shot off at the prescribed angle for entry into the asteroid belt that lay between Mars and Jupiter.
Flying through the asteroid belt was not the most difficult bit of flying that Maggie had ever done, but it required concentration and attention to detail. As a young flight student she’d watched one of her fellow trainees die when his small shuttle impacted at high speed with an errant asteroid. Flying instinctively through an asteroid belt was not highly recommended, and the fellow student, Gary, had always relied more on instincts that instruments. O’Connell tried to balance her natural aggressiveness with the caution urged by the sensors.
Contrary to popular belief, the asteroid belt was not a constantly moving superhighway of evenly spaced, or persistently colliding, rocks. It was more of a series of traffic jams in set locations with large spaces between the dangerous areas. Or, it had been. Over the previous century, mankind had begun to use the asteroid belt as a junkyard, making the density of the “clouds” that much more dangerous. Decommissioned exploration pods, jettisoned fuel boosters for Mars shuttles, old satellites, and a few thousand containers of nuclear waste gas, bounced around with more mundane bits of rock. The
Hudson
could have altered her course enough to avoid the danger, but it would have added several hours to their journey. Only slightly less important, a run through the belt allowed Guttmann to monitor how the engines behaved under fluctuating speeds and allowed the communications and navigation computers to run real-time diagnostics.
As the
Hudson
slipped past the first few asteroids, Captain Hill focused his attention on the screens that O’Connell watched. He couldn’t really see her; her chair blocked any view of her body. He occasionally got a glimpse of her red-head turning slightly or a slight shift in the movement of the chair. He found himself anticipating what move she would make next. An accomplished pilot himself, the captain missed the feeling of being in control of his fate while flying.
Maggie was piloting in two different frames of mind. Her immediate physical reactions were dominated by the instantaneous stimuli of the closest rocks, but her mind was also calculating future maneuvers two or even three steps ahead. Much as a champion chess player planned his strategy in multiple phases, so O’Connell planned an over-all course while gliding the ship through the immediate dangers. The navigational computers constantly ran new course tracks and projections that updated on the head’s-up display. Her eyes narrowed as a route she had been moving toward was dramatically closed by the collision of two asteroids. She banked the
Hudson
heavily to port, moving toward her planned alternate course. The twisted remains of a Mars exploration module, approximately the size of a small car, whizzed past the nose of the ship with enough closeness to trigger several proximity alerts. Her hand flashed sideways and shut off the proximity sensors. Behind her, Captain Hill raised a brow but chose not to comment.
The pilot flexed her shoulders in a shrug and shifted slightly in her chair. An asteroid moved erratically and swept too close to the outboard engine shafts. She rolled the
Hudson
completely over and gunned the engines to three-quarters power before cutting them back. The ship’s gravity-well always projected “beneath” them, no matter how they were oriented. The
Hudson
could appear upside down to anyone standing on a nearby planet, but feel perfectly up-right to her passengers. A hatch failure alarm for the medical deck sounded. She snapped an order to Turner to have it corrected.
“Aye, aye, ma’am.” Turner glanced at the captain, but Hill seemed completely unfazed by the near miss. In fact, the captain looked almost bored. He was making notes on his tablet and only occasionally glancing at the view screens.
Ensign Robertson arrived on the bridge and took over the navigational station, but he didn’t have much to do while O’Connell was in complete control of the
Hudson
‘s course and direction. He, too, started anticipating the pilot’s next several moves. He found it almost like watching a simulation run, but the simulator had never made him flinch. It had also never made him wish he’d emptied his bladder before taking his station.
And then, quite suddenly, the screens cleared except for the light fuzzy signatures of spatial dust clouds. Maggie rolled her head around in an arc and arched her back. She slid the engines to their highest setting and the ship raced forward. “We’ve entered the first major Kirkwood gap, sir. Our journey should be smooth for the next hour until we clip the edge of the nearest Jupiter Trojan.” The Kirkwood gaps were the traditional name for the spaces in the cloud of asteroids between Mars and Jupiter; the Jupiter Trojan was another cloud of asteroids and debris.
The captain glanced at the time display and suppressed a smile. His plotted course to achieve the quickest route to Neptune orbit had taken them through one of the densely packed debris clouds. He could have waited another few hours and taken the
Hudson
on a safer and more circuitous route, but he trusted O’Connell’s ability to get them safely through this cloud of treacherous objects. She had done it in forty-five minutes less than anticipated.
“Very well, Commander. You have the bridge until Lieutenant Price relieves you at 1900 hours. I wish to be updated on an hourly basis as to our status.” He paused at the door to the vacuum tube. “And, Commander, please turn the proximity sensors back on.”
O’Connell’s jaw clenched, and she glared at the view screen. The innocent instruction grated on her overly sensitive nerves. Since their conversation of the evening before, each comment from the captain seemed laden with condemnation. She released the control stick and reached over with her right hand to flick the sensors back on. They were a nuisance during an asteroid fly-by, but orders were orders. She sat, relaxed, in her seat glaring at the screens before her for the next hour, trying to calm down and talk herself out of a building rage.
“Ma’am?” O’Connell looked up to see Ensign Robertson standing beside her, looking down.
“Yes, Ensign?”
Nate swallowed audibly, a habit he seemed to have when nervous. He sounded rather like a cow swallowing its cud, though the comparison would have horrified him into an imbecilic state. “Ma’am, I think I’ve plotted a course that will cut another two hours off our passage of Jupiter and bypass the nearest Jupiter Trojan.”
Maggie’s eyes narrowed with interest. Avoidance of the next cluster of asteroids would be ideal, but the last course plots she’d seen would require at least a glancing trip through their peripheries. “Do tell, Ensign.”
He transmitted the latest course projections. The routes he mentioned had just been suggested by the computer two minutes earlier. O’Connell tapped a few buttons on her own systems displays and brought up the latest projected course and their planned route. She spent several minutes comparing the plots. Finally, when Ensign Robertson was on the verge of a nervous fit, she looked up at him and smiled. “Excellent work, Ensign. I will summon the captain to the bridge. You will kindly present him with your recommendations.”
Nate’s dark skin flushed darker and then paled just as quickly. “My recommendations?
I
should present them?”
Maggie resisted rolling her green eyes. “You made them, didn’t you? The captain doesn’t bite, Ensign. He
does
require intellectual honesty of his officers,
all
of his officers. I certainly am not going to present your work as my own, and I most certainly am not going to speak for you.” Her speech was delivered in a soft voice that carried no further than the two of them. She was aware that the rest of the bridge crew, eight people in all, watched them closely.
Robertson stood straighter. “Aye, aye, ma’am.”
“Return to your station.” She turned away from him and hit the communicator signal for the captain. “Captain to the bridge for course correction advisement, please.”
There was a pause before he answered. “Acknowledged.”
Hill arrived on the bridge ten minutes later. He glanced at Turner, the sensor heads-up display, and O’Connell’s chair. “Well, Commander?”
Robertson cleared his throat and brushed at the front of his creased brown uniform slacks. “Pardon me, sir, but Commander O’Connell summoned you at my request.”
“At your request, Ensign?” The captain arched a brow and descended into his chair. “Well then, what can I do for you, Ensign?”
Nate swallowed three times and tried to think pleasant thoughts as he relayed his findings. He didn’t realize it, his back being turned to the heads-up screens, but O’Connell was helping him out by displaying side by side comparisons of his plans with the original course plotting. The captain’s face betrayed no emotions, positive or negative, during the entire conversation. Again, the young ensign had to wait agonizing minutes as his superior mulled over the information and made a decision. Finally the captain nodded in agreement. “Very good, Ensign. You will enter this new course into the plot. Superb work, really superb.” He stood and patted the young man on the shoulder. “Carry on, Ensign.”
Hidden in her chair, Maggie grinned. Her heart swelled with happiness for young Nate. The captain might be an arrogant ass where she was concerned, but at least he’d made that young man’s day.
An hour later Lieutenant Price relieved Maggie, taking over as both officer of the watch and the pilot on duty. She made sure he was aware of the new course before heading back to her quarters. She’d been thinking about what she would do during her captain-mandated vacation. The idea of curling up in her bed and sleeping for twelve hours straight didn’t seem so bad after all.
***
Alone in his quarters after his shift on the bridge, Tony Price took a step back to admire his handiwork. He’d been living in his quarters on the
Hudson
for nearly two months but, until this moment, he hadn’t considered himself “moved in”. The high resolution repeating image field of Holly, even with the scratch on the screen, was his most prized possession. No room was complete, could even come close to being home, without Holly.