The life if God's Love wasn't even precisely cellular, since the familiar protienatious cell walls barely existed. Life on God's Love could be described as very large single cell organisms, or far easier as colonial viruses. Like Terran coral, they extruded a substrate for stable existence, but the life itself stayed perched precariously on the edge of it's self-made home. The dominant organism on God's Love grew by forming a hard protective protein matrix and colonizing that matrix with millions of simple life forms. Individuals within the colony used these protein rafts as food reserve and shelter, unconsciously excreting or absorbing, as the survival imperative dictated. Individuals they are, though some biologists had heatedly debated where that dividing line should be drawn. Individual organisms, far more abundant than the colonies they create, live three actions. Ingestion, excretion, and division, a uniform process for both the individual life forms and the colonies they create. Colonies reproduce as well, with the occasional cast-away creating its own bit of protein to cling to, and starting its own colony. Because each rice-grain sized colony contains billions of individual organisms, castaways are easy to find.
The strategy was amazingly successful, and had managed to turn almost all of the available organics on God's Love into little pellets of protein. Despite, or because of, the success of what some long dead biologist had labeled irda-plankton, there was no native land-based ecosystem on Gods Love, the land was barren in every sense of the word. With no ground cover, there was no soil; most of the planet's surface was rocks being beaten by weather into mud or dust.
When humans had come to the planet, they had brought the usual collection of plants, animals, and expectations. Most had died when the colonists figured out that the irda-plankton could fulfill their needs. They had allowed the plants to die of malnutrition or lack of water, and let animals follow of their own accord. Some had gone feral, a few survived, living alongside humans, scavenging a living in bitter competition with the irda-plankton which had pushed them into obsolescence.
The senior administrator, Steph, was of average hight and build. He wore the traditional overcoat of high level administrators. The overcoat shone white in the sun of God's Love.
Steph exuded an aura of "I've done this before" boredom no matter what he was doing. To Ellec, his assistant, it seemed affected, but even Ellec had to admit that Steph had been around. Ellec had also been around, as one of the few people on this expedition who had served the FoK before. Ellec had actually had some real-world training, unlike most of the admin staff. Steph, if asked, would have admitted that he had never been involved in anything like what the recon force was doing now. He counted that a good thing.
Ellec looked down at the work area, trying to gain some perspective on what the force was doing. The bulk of the activity below centered around a welded aluminum frame clamped to a work support on a clearing below. The chassis was only a few centimeters high at its tallest, about two meters wide, and six meters long. At one end was a shielded black lump which contained a field navigational computer of local manufacture. On each side, solid fuel chemical rockets were visible, and along the edges the smaller nozzles of directional thrusters could be seen. At the center of balance of the frame was a standard one-CC fusion torus, it's laser exciters extending to either side, protected by the aluminum chassis. The torus was directly feeding a magnetically excited ram jet who's intakes lifted slightly above and below the outer chassis. When construction was finished, the burnished panels visible to one side would be attached to the chassis to make an aerodynamicly sound lifting body supersonic drone. A drone which could, if the navigational computer had so directed, have escaped the bondage of God's Love and entered shallow orbit.
Of course, The ramjet's exciter would cast enough high energy radiation when operating to boil water at half a klick. In normal installations, a one CC fusion torus would require five meters of water between it and anything anyone of value would come within a klick of. The team was installing the plant in an open air configuration. This would have been enough to make Steph reject the concept of the drone's construction out of hand, but management felt differently. For them, the emissions were the reason the drone was being built.
Every once in a while a short blast from a canned air horn would cause a surge away from the drone as one of the tech's chose to test some part of the powerplant's installation. After about a minute, team members would begin filing back towards the drone, and a new tech would pick up the shielded voice recorder and listen to the test's results. The old tech would be dragged away by some unhappy grunt to be added to the protective wall which had been raised between the drone and the main camp.
Steph had been a masterful administrator, and had guided the recon team from its inception eleven days ago. There had been some talk amongst the junior administrators of remedying this, but as the Administrator's assistant, Ellec had discouraged that as much as possible. He was worried that some up and coming admin wannabe would try to skip a grade. Ellec was quite pleased with his decision to maintain the normal chain of command. He was doubly happy now that he realized just how bad the alternatives were going to be.
While Ellec did not have the normal unshakable faith required for truly noble accomplishment, he would have done his duty in the fashion he was trained to. Steph was apparently satisfied to ignore his duty, and therefore lived a great deal longer.
The problem, to Ellec, was that the job should have been performed by Certifieds. It would have been, the management had specified that it should have been, but when the specsheets had been issued, the Certifieds had all taken themselves out of the operation in the least painful way they could. Ellec had been rightly shocked at their presumption in taking that out, but now that he had seen the effects of the Recon's orders, he was beginning to agree with his departed masters. Ellec still thought they should have waited until they were at the site, so they could have been some use after their departure.
"well, assistant, have you profiled the command lists for this new day?", Steph was in a full n-state, as was appropriate given that they were among users.
"Sitemaster, I have given this much though, and I believe in the matter of the drone we have reached our optimax solution.", Ellec's eyes didn't leave the field below, "we have a sufficient product for the market we have chosen, if we continue our development cycle much longer, our userbase will drop below our required margins." Now Ellec's eyes sought out Steph's, "we gain nothing by fertilizing the dry earth, master."
Steph didn't look at his assistant, "then go down and coach them on the new system, Ellec."
The Jr. Assistants would get the upgrade they had wanted after all, Ellec though as he walked towards the berm of techs stacked to provide some radiation shielding for the userbase's camp. The recon would be down to three hundred and ninety three, very soon.
"Excellent. What is our remaining contingency print on this task?" Steph hadn't even bothered to look the old specsheet when he had drafted the new. Instead, he had ordered a transcript from the last test, and when it was brought to him he had penciled its figures onto the sheet. Despite this optimization, it had still taken two test runs before the engine matched specs. Steph was getting impatient, and more and more worried about making it to a city before he ran out of people to command. At last count, the able members of his troop numbered about three-twenty, and Steph figured on loosing another thirty or so on the launch. Much more and he would have to send a detail out to get some fresh faces into the crew. It was much better to do that as a unit, otherwise somebody else's troop might just pick up your detail and leave you that much shorter. Steph figured he'd need about another thousand to finish this part of his mission.
On most worlds the community of Briggstown would have been considered large. On God's Love, it was a town. After all, there were only about seventy million living there. A city really had to be over a couple hundred million. The capital of God's Love, Covenant, was said to house several billion people. Nobody on God's Love had the equipment to track the population.
The population explosion on God's Love could be directly attributed to the irda-plankton which covered the surface of every body of water on the planet to an average depth of half a meter. The rust colored organisms were considered by humans to be more than edible. They were, in fact, usually served raw and cold, just as they were scooped from whatever water body they grew in. By providing the settlers with bountiful food, the planet had earned it's name among the original colonists, who's vision of colony life had been formed by unfortunate incidents like Fitgiz's Landing and Marry. When the colonists realized that their colonization experience was to be no worse than any other press gang duty, they put their backs into what they considered the important part of being cooped up against their will on a strange world. They fucked. At the time that hadn't bothered the colonization authority, who's sole mandate was to remove Terran squatters to natural soil in compliance with the Humanities & privileges laws. When the Colonization Administration realized that this planet would be able to support a larger than normal population, they began taking all of the squatters to God's Love. By the end of the Terran colonization era, the population had climbed to above two billion, and the colonists still knew how to fuck.
They had no concept of birth control.
In the hundred and sixty years since what the colonists thought of as the end of civilization, much of the technology usually associated with managing such a large population had collapsed. The society itself had fragmented a hundred ways, though there were only three significant groups, each convinced the others were insane. They were all correct.
The urban population had been about sixty billion the last time satellite imagery and computerized estimations had been available to the population of God's Love. People who thought about it generally agreed that the population had grown since then.
Briggstown was considered by Steph's managers to be a source of potential userbase. Not a large one, but worth a brief sortie by non-valued personnel. Steph wondered how accurate the management's evaluation would be once he had completed his recon, but his job was to follow the spec, and despite whatever his former assistant administrator had though, Steph was more than willing to do his job.
Steph had been told to build a fusion powered drone to fly up to about 3000 meters, navigate its way over the town, and circle. It would then slowly descend into the heart of Briggstown. Because the immense power being funneled through the ramjet, the drone would stay supersonic until it was finally low enough to strike one of the buildings in the center of town. The management's theory was that as the people left town to avoid destruction, Steph's team could make a rough count of escapees, and the management could then make a decision about claiming this userbase. From what Steph had seen as he built his rough sitemap for the drone navigate with, there would not be a high percentage of escapees. The roads out of town were not engineered to handle even a small portion of the population which would be leaving.
Steph's job was recon, though. Let the managers make the final call.
"Yes, you will administer the launch, assistant.", Steph looked down at the clearing which had been been prepped to launch the fusion powered drone. The protective berm had been moved closer to form a blast wall to contain the force of the chemical rockets which would get the drone off the ground. They would not shield anything once the fusion motor kicked in. "I will be taking the bulk of our remaining force to Briggstown to recruit replacements for our losses here."
Steph walked close enough to the main body of the recon force that he could issue orders with his voice amplifier. He moved no closer, "OK, people, it's time to move out! Lets do this neat. Ranks two through ten, take heading two-seven-zero and rondevue in ten klicks, the rest of you will be on launch detail. You know the specsheets, people, so follow them!"
Steph wasn't going to be any closer to the launch than he had to be. He certainly wasn't going to be along the drone's flight path.
"HALT! YOU HAVE BEEN CONSCRIPTED BY THE FRONT OF KNOWLEDGE!" The loudspeakers had been shot out during some previous action and never repaired, so the voice rasped as it projected. "IF YOU ATTEMPT TO DESERT, YOU WILL BE EXECUTED.", the assistant administrator also had a tendency to hold the mic too far from her mouth, so the auto-gain amplifier wrapped itself in high frequency static. The assistant hadn't really cared about doing her job right since she had begun coughing up blood and bits of flesh while marching toward the town. She wasn't the only person in the troop to have problems of this sort. She wasn't even the worst off. Fortunately, there had been enough people left when the first conscripts were found, and .though the initial growth had been slow, the troop was now hovering around a thousand men. At the rate things were going, there would only be one of the original recon force left by the end of the week.
Steph watched his assistant working the damaged PA. He was still trying to find administrator class operators in the new people he commanded. He was not pleased with the results. He thumbed the power control of the field educator wired to the woman in front of him. The trainee dropped immediately into the machine-induced coma which proceeded reeducation, but seconds later a red light flashed on the console, next to the words critical downlink error.. Steph removed the harness from the woman's head and tipped the chair forward to dump the corpse so he could pack the chair for storage. He had tried to train fifteen so far,with the same results each time. His assistant thought it clear that the recruits were simply inbred, but Steph thought it far more likely that the radiation had destroyed the trainer. One of the new members of the recon force walked forward to take one of the corpse's hands and drag her towards the waterfront. At least here we can be civilized Steph though to himself.
Another of the people who had been marked as administrator candidates walked forward, and stood looking confused as Steph packed the educator.
"Administrator, I believe there are still trainees.", the girl was young, which was probably what had caught the administrator's eye as he chose candidates. A cursory inspection had proved that she had only the barest traces of pubic hair, but she was cute. Since Steph had been abstaining, feeling most of his crew represented disease vectors more than sexual objects. Steph was now considering bypassing the normal pubes+boobs formula used on God's Love for the more basic "breaths and has three holes" method. Man was not meant to do without.
"They will need to be trained without the use of this machine.", the administrator looked down at the girl, suddenly speculative, "Go to my tent and I will begin your education." Steph decided as he watched the girl walk away there were worse things that being young. She may not have much in the way of breasts, but she also didn't have the characteristic sagging which the women of God's Love were subject to. Stretch marks and dangling tits could detract from the natural glory of womanhood at least as easily as the lack of body hair. Probably more.
Sara believed, as most children do, that she loved her parents. She also shared the youthful certainty that they didn't understand her. Both beliefs were true. Sara's parents had recently taken to trying to explain to Sara the advantages of a conventional education, and how she should, now that she was in her majority, study to become something respectable like a doctor or accountant. Sara had had enough of it.
The recruiting office was nestled between a convenience store and a dingy restaurant; Sara had passed it on her way to school every day since she was seven. It was run down and dirty, and the sign in the crackled front window flickered and buzzed, yet for some reason Sara had always been drawn to the facade. Sara stood under the awning of a snack shop across the pedway, trying to rationalize the actions she knew were forthcoming. Her slight frame leaned against the wall of the shop, her long black hair falling in a wave to the small of her back. Her face showed the Asian heritage which had given her naturally dark skin.
She knew that joining the OSP would ruin her family's dreams for her. She also knew that she didn't share those dreams. It was one of the problems with growing up in a middle class suburb. Everyone expects you to be boring. They demand it. You are expected to spend your time doing useless things and waiting for people to tell you how good you are. Sara's parents had wanted her to play a musical instrument. They hadn't wanted her to be a musician, but they thought being able to play an instrument would be good. Sara had been great. She had already began receiving scholarship offers from various art schools, including one off planet school. Sara's parents were shocked, and told her she wouldn't be using any of those scholarships. Sara didn't mind, She had other plans.
Sara walked across the pedway and entered the recruiting station.
From the inside, the recruiting station looked both nothing and everything like Sara expected. The small room was glimmeringly clean, and the man behind the full-surface view-screen desk looked like you could bounce coins off his nose. Sara walked towards the desk, and asked, "Excuse me, sir. I would like information on joining the OSP"
The man looked up at Sara briefly, reached under his desk and retrieved a sheaf of papers, which he set on his desk. He then said, "please, sit down." he waived his hand at the black metal chair in front of his desk. "I must start by saying that the minimum age for recruits is fifteen standard years. Do you meet that standard?"
"Today is my birthday.", Sara was nervous. She tried to look at the contents of the desk display, but the unit was designed to be used only from the other side.
"Excellent. This package contains information on the standard duties and benefits of OSP service." The man held up the stack of papers. "Please note that the information contained in this package represents typical OSP service. The exact service you will be required to perform is dependent upon your skills and abilities. I suggest you look over this package carefully. If you would like, you can use one of our reading rooms, or you make take the package with you."
Sara took the package and said, "I'd like to use one of your rooms."
"Very good, please follow me.", the man stood an led Sara back to a neat and comfortable room. The room was white, and it's only furnishings were a glass-topped metal table and two comfortable chairs. There were two doors, the one Sara had entered, and one on the far side of the room. Sara sat down and began reading. After the second page, she got up, went back outside, and asked for a pen so she could make notes on the package.
"Sir, I think I understand what I need to. How do I proceed?", Sara wasn't sure she did understand, but she knew she wouldn't gain a better grasp doing nothing. The package had said almost nothing. It had explained in detail that it was in no way a promise, commitment, or even truthful. It hadn't really explained anything else.
"Just go back in and sit down, and a counselor will be with you shortly."
Sara went and sat. She looked idly about the room, but there were no features to grab your attention. Sara though they should have had at least one painting, or something. After less than five minutes, another neatly dressed and attractive person came and sat down at the chair opposite Sara's. This person was female, blond, about 190 CM tall, and built like a center fold. She made Sara feel like a midget. "Want to join up, huh?" the woman's tone was friendly and familiar. "Well, my name is Lyn, and I'm sort of your guide in the OSP." Lyn looked at Sara, "If you don't mind my asking, what is it that makes you want to join?"
"It is hard to describe. The best answer I can give is that I have always been better than people wanted me to be. All my life I have been told to be a nice girl and don't do anything that will make people look at me too hard." Sara realized that she hadn't made a lot of sense. She took a deep breath and tried again, "It's like music. My parents wanted me to learn a musical instrument, so I did. I learned it well enough that I am getting scholarship offers based on my musical abilities, but now they say that being a musician is not respectable, and they don't want me to take any of the scholarships." she inhaled, trying to relax, "I can't be good at anything, and I certainly can't be good at what I want to be."
Lyn gave a half smile and said, "well, it sounds like you've got some issues there. The problem I see is that there is nothing in what you've said that indicates that you want to go into OSP service. It sounds like you want to rebel against your parents, and to be frank, the OSP will probably be more choosy and judgemental than your parents. If it is freedom you want, just take one of the scholarships and go to college."
"It isn't that way. I have though a lot about the things I want to do, and the only common thread I have been able to find is that I want to be allowed to live, and to see as much as possible." Sara's hadn't really expected to need to defend her choice, and it suddenly dawned on her how silly she sounded. She paused and took a breath, rethinking her strategy, looking at it less emotionally, she realized that she was being drawn into saying things she didn't want or need to say, "I guess I fell into that argument a little too easily, didn't I?", she smiled.
"Yes, you did.", Lyn gave her first full smile of the interview, and said, "don't worry about it, though. I'd like to look at your school records, and I'll need your authorization for that." She touched a button on the edge of the table and section of the clear glass tabletop in front of Sara turned into an authorization form. There was no information filled our, and Lyn passed Sara a stylus so she could enter her name and personal information. When Sara was done and had told the computer to release the information, the table top displayed a time-line from Sara's birth on. Each of the year markers displayed a summary block of data, each had a row of hotzones labeled school, medical, financial, and legal. To Sara, the display was oriented correctly, yet the counselor didn't seem to be having any trouble reading the chart. Sara moved her head slightly, and realized that the image moved to maintain it's proper orientation. Lyn proceeded to go through Sara's recent history, reading in detail all of Sara's teachers remarks about her. After a few minutes of study, Lyn said, "You are a very well respected young woman, aren't you?"
Sara didn't know what to say to that. She was learning that she was better liked than she had understood.
Lyn finished reading what she considered to be the important parts of Sara's life history. She tapped out a pattern on what was to Sara a clear section of the glass tabletop, glanced down at the table just above where she had been tapping, and leaned back in her chair. She looked up at the ceiling briefly, and then back at Sara, "Sara, you are the type of person that OSP wants and needs. Your school records clearly indicate your high intelligence, dedication, and ability. You meet or exceed OSP medical requirements across the board, and there is no reason why would not make a very valuable addition to our family, but you must remember, that's what it is. We are a large, bureaucrat, and in many ways very poorly run family. If you sign up you will have to deal with all of the well intentioned decisions made on your behalf and without your permission, all of the people thinking they know what is best for you." She had to inhale, "you will also be given the opportunity to succeed. With your natural abilities, you may be able to achieve a high level of success, but you must realize that you have the potential of being just as successful outside of OSP." at this point, Lyn touched a clear part of the table. A contract appeared on the tabletop in front of Sara, and Lyn said, "if you sign your name to this contract, you will be in the hands of strangers for the next four years of your life. You will be compensated as they see fit, you will be sent where they want to send you, and you will do what they tell you. Do you have any questions?"
Sara was a bit dumbfounded by the speech, and it took her a minute to recover. "I guess I do have some questions... Are you glad you joined?"
"I don't think it matters what makes other people happy. If it is your thing, you join. Otherwise, don't." Lyn looked somewhat disgusted by the question.
"Of course the decision is mine to make, but I would like to know that somebody who made a similar decision though it was a good one." Sara had decided that assertiveness would get her farther than manners, "you've got a brochure that is so full of double speak that it might as well not say anything. You tell me that I won't be able to choose when I go to the bathroom for the next four years, and I'm supposed to believe that somehow we will both get what we want out of this deal?"
"Actually, the deal is very one sided. You sign away your life and after that, all bets are off.", Lyn looked at Sara, trying to hold the girl's eyes with hers. "The rewards are there, but they don't just jump onto your plate, girl. If you earn something in the OSP, YOU earned it. It is something that Nobody will take away, except with a bullet, but you've got to earn it first."
Sara read through the contract, picked up the stylus, and signed herself away.
"To your station, ensign"
The bridge of the OSP starship Faeen Child was small to the point of being cramped. The ship was designed for fast transit and fast maneuvering, and though she crewed over one hundred, she barley had headroom for most of the crew. Sara once again thanked her Asian heritage for her slight build as she walked upright to the systems console which would be her responsibility. She sat in the body-embracing chair, pulled the webbing restraint down over her chest and between her legs, hooking the sides behind her kidneys. She touched the sign-on key, and waited while the computer performed its biometric analysis. In emergency conditions all security functions would turned off to prevent an injury from disabling the console, but the designers had felt that being able to track activity on the ship would lead to more responsible behavior. A voice brought itself to her awareness, saying, "Ensign Lant signed on. Unable to find preferences record for this interface type, should I adapt the closest match?"
"No, display all options", Sara had gotten a reputation at the academy for never using the same terminal interface twice. When she explained that the feature sets could vary dramatically, and you would never be able to tell what somebody else would use if you had to take over in an emergency, so flexibility was essential, her fellow students had always laughed. The net result was that Sara could set up most terminal types to display the maximum information and functionality in a few brief seconds, whereas most of the students developed special programs which took hours to get right, and couldn't be changed easily as demands shifted. Sara had in the last quarter of her schooling been asked to help R&D design new terminal systems, and while to her knowledge none had yet been installed in starships, most agreed that her help had improved the designs considerably.
As Sara finished her configuration, the PA system clicked, and a voice began, "all stations make ready and prepare to get under way."
Sara went through her preflight, catching only one minor glitch in a waste disposal system on the crew decks. She marked it for repair and entered her preflight report to the ship's logs. She then opened a view from the transom cameras onto her display area as the environment. Her icons floated in space, some of them riding though sections of the hangar as the ship moved under its own power away from the space station. Because of the massive stereo separation enabled by the width of the ship, Sara felt as though she could take the station in her hands and rip it open. Sara superimposed a view of the ship's internal sensors, pushing the perspective back until she was looking through a ghost image of the ship at the space-station they were leaving. The waste disposal mark she had entered had not been voted by either of the other two officers who paralleled Sara as a failsafe, so she touched its icon and raised the priority. Loose shit sinks ships.
"And how are our new additions performing, Anna?", The Capitan looked across the surface of the immersion tank he was cohabitating with his first officer. The water parted to make way for Anna's breasts as she inhaled.
"Only one real stand-out on this trip... and she's a stand-out, one of the new officers, Ensign Lant...", Anna pushed her torso lower in the water. It hid her shoulders, but the tips of her nipples met the surface, standing up like tiny volcanic islands.
"The shit girl?", the Capitan could feel his crotch tighten. He slid his hand along the inside of his executive officer's leg until he felt the soft tickle of hair suspended in the water.
"Yeah, that's what they're calling her in the officer's section, but any crew member who's worth their volume of vacuum is glad she's on board", Anna Swiveled her hip to pull her groin out of the Capitan's reach.
"Was it really that significant?", Anna's groin was out of reach, but in turning she had brought her knees toward the Capitan. He slid his hand from her upper leg down, pulling her knee over his lap.
"One of the primary waste disposal masticators was malfunctioning, and if somebody had used the head or we had performed any hard maneuvering, the entire crew quarters would have been sprayed with atomized feces. With the environmental systems of this ship, we could very well have lost people." Anna slipped her foot along the Capitan's stomach, and she slipped her hand down between her legs to rub his.
"Then the next person who uses that term around me will be working waste disposal for the rest of the expedition.", the Capitan hand slid back up Anna's leg, and reaching her hip, he turned her body as he pulled her toward him.
"That's why I love you, Larry"
The ship began to accelerate, not as smoothly as she should have, but with determined urgency. Sara's seat, designed primarily for use in a gravity-controlled environment, was mounted sideways relative to the ship. The webbing was all that kept Sara from falling from her seat. Sara's console didn't show any movement. She tried to initiate diagnostics, but the unit would simply sound its acknowledgement code and go about its business.
Faeen Child had made land-fall on Guint's Hide, a planet better described as an asteroid with delusions. The landside authorities had requested emergency assistance, reporting that they had been subject to a major raid. The crew of Faeen Child had made its survey, and the Capitan had determined pursuit of the raiders was in order. That was just the first of the mistakes.
The raiders had left an ion trail spiraling away from the star of Guint's Hide, but solar radiation and the speed of light had washed that trail into oblivion. The only evidence left was the name and ID code of the raiding ship, which was registered as a medium cargo out of Terra herself. The ship had been reported stolen about forty years ago, and the theft had occurred only one jump from Guint's Hide.
Faeen Child had set out with justice it's goal, but she was blinded to the reality that any raider which could smash the defenses of a planet, however small, was not going to be an easy target. She had dropped transit in the ort cloud of a system identified only by catalog number, hoping to slide through the raider's sensor matrix identified by their computers as an astronomical object. Unfortunately, she had dropped onto a lump of stellar detrius, causing a flash of tell-tail radiation any sensor computer built in the last two hundred years could identify. The Capitan had made his second mistake then, deciding to stay put, only to catch the hell of a near-C fletchette barrage. Each weighed only a few ounces, but traveling close to the speed of light they held the energy of an atomic explosion, and applied it to a surface millimeters wide. The one fletchette which struck Faeen Child had turned a cone of the ship into charged plasma, which in turn had blown through the ship, bursting bulkheads and venting crew areas. The command crew had survived, and in a state of shock had attempted to reply to the salvo. A surprising amount of the ship was still functional, but the battle had lasted less than two minutes. Two minutes, by the standards space conflict, was perhaps a record as the shortest battle ever. It was useless, but they were going to die anyway, they might as well try to soften up the enemy for the ships which were now guaranteed to follow....
Sara became aware of her surroundings, realizing that she was sealed into her command console, the automatic hatch had closed when a pressure difference was detected and had glued itself in place with a soft gel which would stay pliable in a vacuum, but still hold the door tightly closed. The environmental system wheezed softly, running only when the computer decided that the air was outside of tolerances. Sara tried to force her brain to think about what had happened, but it was a blur. She knew they had lost.
The time passed. It didn't pass well, but it did pass. Sara sat locked in her coffin, listening to the sounds of hell. The screaming had started a lifetime ago, and constant pounding, groaning and shuddering had joined it as the universe collapsed. She had started coughing at some point, and tiny red lenses dotted the surface of the display screen in front of her. The screen still showed an image of the ship, an old, useless picture. Sara didn't care.
At some point, the command chair had been opened, by someone aware enough to avoid venting the contents of the tiny capsule, and Sara had been removed. She was stretched out on some semi-soft surface, and she could feel the tiny teeth on IV's biting into her arms. She tried to open her eyes, but that only changed the dark smear of reality light. It offered no comfort, it offered no explanation.
Steph was counting on a good forecast. His numbers had been below the irda for the last three quarters, and the veeps weren't going to accept excuses much longer. It was difficult to convince some of them that having most of your product blown into plant-food by lobbed fusion core's rigged to overload would effect your numbers. In fact, Steph had ordered the population of one small city conscripted into a "civic guard" and had been running them around the borders of his zone recruiting. A two hundred million person force could do a lot, but they couldn't find half a billion pregnant women. they couldn't even be relied upon to produce much more than a hundred million expectants. Steph was going to miss his quota, and Steph didn't think he could survive missing his quota.
As the woman stood against the wall of his office, Steph was again taken by her appearance. He wondered idly if he had caused her gravid state. "Do you have any sisters, helper?"
"None that aren't pregnant or too young to be.", she looked at him, trying to judge his meaning. She finally came to the conclusion that a strong stance should be taken, "we are doing our part for the war."
"How old are the youngsters?", Steph wasn't sure he trusted her judgment on what could be impregnated, or at least what was worth trying.
"That aren't pregnant? Three, seven, and twelve, sir."
"Bring the two older girls in tomorrow so their suitability can be evaluated.", Steph though about the board meeting he had in the afternoon, "make sure they arrive first thing in the morning."
Steph began reading the reports. Actually, the numbers weren't all that bad. By recruiting heavily, Steph had managed to keep his overall production numbers high, and not loose production ability. The problem was age.
Most of Steph's product was budgeted for gun emplacements, smart bombs, etc., and the target age for those applications was at oldest five. Much older and the equipment was hard to handle. Younger than two and the training wouldn't be retained and the devices would be essentially computerless. Steph didn't personally like the transition that had occurred from people as people to people as parts of a machine, but he had to admit that the machines worked remarkably well in the field, and therefore saved lives in the end. They were also as cheap as dirt.
Steph thought back a moment to the first time he had been issued smart ordinance.
His first reaction to the oversized explosive shells had been that field deployment would be impossible. Just keeping the shells fed was a constant problem, half of the shells had fired without working guidance systems. The other half had targeted the enemy with vicious effectiveness. The missile's normally primitive projectiles had used rockets to direct them towards the choicest targets in the enemy city. Steph had used over thirty thousand intelligent shells in the first operation. They had been a major factor in the string of successes which had given him his current job. But his current job was in danger, and there was nobody he could pass the job on to.
He had used up most of his "assistants" in his climb, each time giving them his old job just as shit was about to hit the fan. This time, unfortunately, his assistants had been taken out in the hit. Now the shit was going to hit Steph.
And now, the demand for smart ordinance was going to kill him. what I need, Steph thought to himself, is a way to get out of this department. bigger and better, but how?
Steph began to pace. How indeed?
"OK, Chally, I'll get you some younger cunt.", he looked over the whore he had tried to pass off. She was slightly oriental, and not ugly, just worn. Well, after ten years on their backs, most of them were that way. As they walked away, the shopkeep beckoned one of the bar maids over and said tersely, "Get that piece of shit off the floor and cleaned up, dammit!"
It was about time to sell that one off, anyway. She had come to him from a surplus auction about ten years ago, and while she had been young and full of energy back then, she had never developed the willingness to please that was required for the older girls to make money. Of course, early on she had earned her keep handily, getting premium rates from men (and a few dykes) wanting the novelty of screwing a OSP officer. Just dressed her up as a Capitan, and she had pulled in the money like all of the girls should have.
Some merchant shipper would buy her to service his crew, or maybe one of the biotech corporations out of Vorkal would pick her up for whatever reasons they bought people.
The storekeep took Chally into the back room, where the younger lineup was kept.
"She'll do, dick, she'll do.", Chally said, pointing to a girl sitting in the corner holding a rag to her crotch. The shopkeep unhooked her ankle restraint, took her rag away, and walked her towards one of the bedchaimbers.
A thin trickle of blood ran down her leg, and Chally smiled.
The auction went smoothly, with Libby's WhoreHouses Inc. Getting over two hundred interstellars for the merchandise sold... An amount which would almost cover purchasing one or two new whores... Not bad for old tail that had been worked for so many years.
Oddly enough, he didn't go to a ship, as Sara had expected. Instead she was led to an unadorned doorway in a generic corridor, where the buyer reached into his pocket, pulled out a communicator, dialed, and a after a few seconds said, "OK, We're here. Where is my money?"
The door opened, and a young woman stepped out with a bag. She handed the bag to the buyer and led Sara through the door, into a world which was strangely familiar. The medical examination equipment was obviously temporary, but looked clean and modern. The room was small, and would have looked seedy except that everything was in its place and clean. Sara was guided wordlessly to the exam chair. Sitting down, the chair seemed to come alive, with hundreds of arms, extending over Sara, poking and probing at her. After several minutes of constant activity, the chair stopped and a single data module popped from a slot in the back of the chair. The module was a standard OSP dog tag.
"Sara Lant, welcome back to the OSP, and I am sorry it took so long to find you."
Sara struggled out of the chair, paused for a breath, and launched herself at the woman, getting in one strong hit to her face before darkness overtook her.
Which meant that at least that part had been real, that she had been sold, and there was at least some chance that the purchaser had been the OSP. It was not how Sara had envisioned "the family" responding to her distress. Early on she had been filled with visions of fleets of OSP ships charging in to rescue her and kill her enemies. Later she had just let the drugs ease the pain of each days work, and left her dreams to die.
It was morning, and Sara's head was clearer than it had seemed in, well, clearer than Sara could remember it ever being. She half completed a reach towards what would normally have been the drawer containing her pills, and stopped realizing they wouldn't be there. Bemused, she lay on her bed and thought, wondering what would happen next.
A bell tone sounded indicating that somebody was at the door, and after a brief pause the door opened to reveal the same young woman who had inspected Sara before. As she walked in, the lights slowly came up to normal levels, and the medtech looked Sara up and down carefully before she said, "Hello, Sara. Do you know where you are?"
There was a purple bruise across the girls left cheek.
"I am in a temporary OSP safe-house on Rotham's.", Sara thought for a second more, "I am sorry about your face."
"Well, it wasn't your fault.", the medtech looked down at Sara, "I should be more careful where I'm walking is all.
"Now, how are you feeling? Your system was full of all sorts of narcotics, including some which are permanently addictive. We've got you on a broad-based anti-seizure med, as well as some more specific meds to prevent side effects from our changing your drug use patterns. They shouldn't have psycotropic effects, but because of the nature of the drugs in question, you probably won't be able to get a supply of them off of Rotham's. Starting on a dependency reversal treatment program seemed wise.
"As soon as you are ready, we have a councillor to meet with you and discuss your options. In the mean time, there are fresh clothes in the closet, and you can eat while you talk to the councillor."
The medtech looked around the room, started towards the door, stopped and turned back to Sara, "My name is Tranne Sheab, by the way."
And she walked out the door.
Sara walked to the closet, opened it, and saw it held one standard OSP officer's undress uniform, with no rank or other insignia markings on it. She changed into the uniform, feeling a bit dazed as she did so. A full length mirror on the inside of the closet door showed her reflection, and she looked at herself carefully, for the first time in years.
Her face had developed small lines around her mouth and next to her eyes, and had lost it's fullness. For a brief moment, she thought to herself that her color was better than she had expected, but then she remembered the semi-perm coloration which had been the last gift of Libby's.
I look hollow, she thought to herself as she stared into her own eyes. She turned and walked into the other room to get some food.
"Ms. Lant, My name is Jens, and it is my job to let you know what your current position is relative to the OSP, and give you some advice on what options you have available.", The man was large, almost huge, and amazingly soft spoken for somebody who looked like they had been chiseled from steel. The voice was low, but not gravelly, and had very pleasant overtones. It continued, "To start, I guess I should let you know that the OSP has, since your CO filed his plans to pursue the raiders, considered you to be in a hazard situation, and since you are still alive, you have been accumulating hazard pay for an ensign ranking for the last eleven years and several months. Hazard pay is two and a half times the base, so you now have about a half million interstellars in back wages owed to you. Additionally, as a ten year veteran, you qualify for a retirement at one fourth pay, medical, and several other benefits.
"On the other hand, Ms. Lant, the OSP would like very much to keep you in the family, as it were. You were and still are a very promising ensign, and we think that you should consider, well..." he looked down for a second, two, and then his eyes swiveled to catch hers, "consider the fact that while your first active duty posting was perhaps uniquely bad. If all duty postings were as bad, there could not be an OSP."
Jens flashed a small smile as he finished and inhaled to continue, but Sara couldn't help but interrupt, "You are saying you want me to ignore eleven years of rape, losing everything I valued, everything about myself, and come back to be an ensign again?"
"Yes.", the big man looked at Sara, eyes suddenly flat, "that is exactly what I am saying.
"You are a gifted young woman who has through unfortunate circumstances been put through hell. You look now and say that everything good was stolen from you, but I say that you've been tested in the fire, and you know yourself. You know what the worst can be, and you know how to fight it."
"With drugs?"
"When necessary, yes -- you got torn up badly, and now you have the option of getting out. You'll get out alive, but will you be able to live? More than the shell of a life? Will you reach even a fragment of your potential? I... We doubt it, and that loss would be criminal. Criminal, for us to just let you walk away, when we could help."
Jens looked away again, a calculated gesture learned through years of video coaching, "...each other.
"We want to put you in a sort of re-boot camp, let you get your physical strength back, and hopefully your emotional strength will follow. You can leave at any time, with nobody but yourself to answer to, and it will not in any way effect your back pay.", with this, Jens reached into an upper pocket and pulled out a money voucher with a very large number printed on it.
"This is yours, no mater what. I would advise that you invest it, because that sort of money can grow quite nicely given a few years."
Sara took the voucher, and said, "I will need to think about all of this."
"Of course. We are still a long way from home, and you don't need to make any commitments until we get to central administration. I will be available to talk whenever you need."
She though about not signing, about walking away. She would have, but they were too smart to let her get away easily. They respected her, yes, but they set her up in a closet of a room with a meal card and no money, and told her that, if she wanted to leave, she would need to come into the office to get her termination draft endorsed. So Sara stayed in her room for three days, thinking about what to do, and when she finally got up the courage to break away, she started walking towards the admin offices.
"Sara Lant! Over Here!" the voice was familiar, and as Sara swiveled her head, she caught sight of Jens waving to her. With a small wave of dread, she stopped and allowed Jens to catch up with her.
"So, not going to walk to meet me, Sara? I'm hurt... But I have something I want you to see." He looked at her with what she had learned was his professional-mischevious glance, and ended with, "But it will require that you walk a little bit out of your way."
Sara thought about how silly it was to feel fragile, and gestured with her hands that Jens should lead the way. He smiled again, and started walking across the greenbelt towards the pale wall that formed the far perimeter of the clearing. As Jens walked he noticed a small utility cart pulling to a stop along the wall, and he started jogging towards it. Sara, slightly confused, jogged along for a few hundred paces, but a pain forming in her side slowed her down, and she contented herself with watching as Jens stopped the worker who had been climbing from his cart, and then turned and waited impatiently for her to catch up.
The wall was a place that Sara had always avoided when she had passed through the administrative complex. For some reason, the place had made her uncomfortable.
The critics dismissed this place as yet one more copy of a monument built thousands of years earlier on Terra. They said that the first monument may have had a power over its visitors, but that new monuments should be built in new ways. But over the thousands of years, that concept, which on the surface seemed so dehumanizing, had become the standard monument to humans lost to an undefinable cause. The first such monument, still preserved on Terra, its letters softening but still readable, still drew people, who knew nothing of why it had been erected, but it could also be found on a thousand other worlds, in different colors, languages, and materials, pounding into the viewer a sense of scale with its monotonous insistence.
The monument wall attached to the Administrative complex of the OSP was different, in some ways, and any critic who actually visited this monument would understand that difference, if he spent more time, watching.
This monument was a living monument. Every day workers rode their carts out to the wall, and added names, changed details, even moved parts of the wall. Every day, this monument changed, because unlike that first monument, built many years after its little war was over, this monument celebrated, or cursed, a living, dying, and changing organization.
The section of wall that Jens stood by was white, with a tinge of blue. It looked cold to Sara, and for a moment she pitied the people trapped, at least in name, on that expanse of ceramic. Jens was no longer facing Sara, no longer watching her approach. Instead he faced the wall, and as Sara stopped next to him, her eyes also were drawn to the crazy pattern of names, numbers, and dates in front of her. Her eyes unconsciously, almost unwillingly traveled down the list of names, and stopped when, from the back of her brain, she felt a flash of familiarity. LARRY MACHENTI HOLD, Capt. OSP, dec: B2H4V3D2 3 p.h.... The list had gone from an abstract to something horribly real for Sara, as her eyes followed the list down through the the crew of the Faeen Child.
SARA LANT, Ensg. OSP, dec: B1H1V1 3 p.h.... she looked at that blue white carved name, barely 3 inches wide, with her ears ringing, her head light, and her name filling her vision. It seemed like hours before she was in control of her body again, even enough to breath. She unsteadily began to turn away, back towards the Administrative Center and her endorsed voucher, but Jens held her back with a hand on her shoulder.
"You will want to be here for this, Sara." Jens said, as he nodded to the wall tender, a man who looked to be approaching ninety years old, but who was dressed in a crisply clean OSP dress uniform.
The man stepped up to the wall, and with a deft hand passed a sonic cutter around Sara's name, his tool held to precisely bevel the edges of the small gap he was forming. In seconds the ceramic with Sara's name quietly ping'd and was caught as it began to fall from the wall. He held it with an almost reverence, and he turned to Sara and, placing the fragment in a small case he produced from a pocket, he presented Sara, very formally, with her name, saying only, "Sara Lant, it is a great honor to be able to give you this, and I hope that when next it is time to place your name on this wall, it is far from this location."
And he set the case in her numb hands, turned back to the wall, and began fitting a small patch in the place where her name had been. He added material carefully, by hand, mixing the colors as he worked to get a precise match. Sara turned away.
The name was an allusion to a legendary tramp Capitan who had, the stories said, carried the cure to a now long forgotten disease to a hundred worlds, sacrificing herself in the process.
The name was actually the title of a pop song which had come out about twenty years later, but few knew that now, and artistic license, if taken, can have far reaching consequences.
Meg's Loss was a ship of state, meant to form the peace, not to keep it, and it was considered an honor to serve as one of her officers, but Sara couldn't seem to develop the enthusiasm she knew she once would have. She had figured out a lot about herself in the last few months, and had come to the firm conclusion that her time away hadn't helped her personality at all.
The ship was scheduled to run a five year trip through as many colonies as it could reach, staying a week or so at each. There were a few re-contacts planned, for worlds which had been forgotten by the bulk of humanity and were only now being rediscovered. Many of these 'lost colonies' had worked hard to make themselves lost, and so to a certain extent their privacy would be honored. If upon initial contact nobody seemed to be friendly, Meg's Loss would just go away.
It would be a perfect chance for Sara to get back into the habit of being an OSP officer, her superiors had agreed. Sara wasn't quite sure how, and since she had come onto the ship, she had been growing increasingly dissatisfied. The ship was a luxury ship, with crystal knives and silver plates, and Sara had the distinct impression that she had got her position because somebody thought Meg's Loss needed a ship's whore.
But Sara did her job, or tried to, and even as the jokes about her past became more and more obvious among the crew, her confidence that she could again be an OSP officer grew. On good days, she didn't even have time for that clawing thought that, if the chemists hadn't been so good at their jobs, she might have gotten some benefit from the pills she took each morning to prevent her body from displaying its displeasure at the loss of certain molecular structures.
So Sara greeted new passengers, and smiled while politely taking a few bites of dinner with those not important enough for the captain's table, but whom decorum demanded be seated with officers. And occasionally, as Meg drifted into a star system, or a mass tug pulled some slow moving lump of ice or rock to within her reach, she did the job that she had been trained for, so long ago.
And every once in a while she would do other things that she had been trained, more recently, to do. For some passenger or another, a VIP or a lone scholar too old to attract one of the other passengers and too human, too male, to wait for the next port, she would help them all, for a small exchange. She didn't consider it a loss to herself, she simply considered it an easy, harmless, way to gain a little bit more than her base pay. It never occurred to her that she had all the money she needed collecting interest in an investment portfolio on some far away world... It was just another way to get by, though she wouldn't have been able to say what she needed the money for.
As a month turned into a year, and a year turned into two, then three, Sara's coworkers, her fellow officers and crew, came to understand and accept what Sara was, even to respect her. After her first year on Meg, she was promoted, and again after her second year. Even while she was receiving more responsibility, and more respect from the people both above and below her, her career was anything but stable.
From bridge crew to systems to engineering to hospitality to... the list went on, once every three to six months Lieutenant Lant got a transfer to another part of the ship. She spent two months directing the kitchen crew, and had passed in and out of the science offices so fast that she had never even had a desk, only a sheet of paper authorizing her presence.
Two months ago, Sara had thought they were finally satisfied with her performance as the senior officer running the shuttle bay, directing maintenance and flight operations for the small fleet of atmospheric craft which clung to a semi-enclosed bell at the stern of the ship, and then she had received her latest orders, only hours after Meg had settled into a wide orbit around Mac, a loosely settled colony which existed mainly as support for the OSP hub which circled her.
The crew exchange shuttle had returned, after only three hours on the surface, and Sara had known something was happening.
When the shuttle had settled in its cradle, Sara had issued the standard orders for post-flight and safety checks which shuttles were subject before the passengers disembarked. She watched, bemused, as the board changed, her orders disappearing one by one, leaving only the minimum needed to unload passengers, and then those had changed from the green of standard priority to the washed out red that signified high, but not wartime urgency.
And so she had quietly issued new orders, and changed personnel, to expedite the disembarkation of that shuttle. She wanted to know what was going to change.
It was a new experience for him, he admitted to himself. He had grown up with people, lived with people all of his life, had always lead or been lead, and now he was alone, a command of one. He closed his eyes and tried to return to sleep, but the empty sound of the wind dominated his awareness.
Unable to sleep, he allowed his mind to drift backwards through the last week, dwelling only briefly on each of the triumphs, and disasters, that had left him with nothing but a carry sack full of Irda, walking inland to what even he knew was probably a certain death. Thinking back on it, he was amazed that he had been able to sustain the thread of lies, half truth, and substitution for so many years. He had, when he realized that there was no way to make his quota, suffered many sleepless nights before he had come upon his scheme, and playing the books for three years had taken all of his energy, or so he had thought. But this last week had been a triumph of sort. Recognizing that he would no longer be able to maintain the illusion of success, he had spent his time preparing, and two nights ago he had walked out of the city and followed the stars away from his old life.
As he drifted back into sleep, Steph saw, in a half-dream, a meteor cross the sky, transforming from a thin blue streak to a yellow fringed fireball before it left his view. The half awake part of him processed that, and wondered if it was auspicious that the fireball had been going in the same direction he was.
So Steph saved his energy for the descent towards the vast lake that was ahead of him... or at least that sometimes seemed to be ahead of him. Steph had planned carefully, going back to the old maps made when the colony still had access to the void around the planet. He had chosen the area marked on the map as El Mirage Lake, which had been one of the first outposts of humanity, but which the people on Steph's side of the planet had lost touch with. The lake was elusive, sometimes clearly visible, looking so close Steph was barely able to restrain himself from running toward it, and other times looking brown and barren. Steph marched towards it, feeling light headed from the sun, and aching from a lack of water and food. He had tried walking at night to save energy, but after the second fall had left him bloody and bruised, he had begun to travel in the morning and evening while the sun was lowest.