Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

I feel my face flush with embarrassment, and a moment later, I chide myself for feeling shame at the XO’s accusation.

“That’s a negative, sir. Those are legit. I’m an interservice transfer, from the Territorial Army. Have the Chief check my personnel file.”

Lieutenant Commander Campbell looks at me with a raised eyebrow.

“No shit?”

He pulls his issue PDP out of his pocket, and starts tapping on the screen.

“No need to ask the Chief. I can pull up your file right here and now.”

I wait as he digs through a few layers of menus on his screen. He studies the screen for a few moments, and lets out a low chuckle.

“Well, I’ll be dipped in shit.”

He turns off his PDP and stows it. Then he extends his hand to me.

“I do apologize, Mister Grayson. I’ve been the XO on this boat for two years, and I’ve never had a transfer from TA before.”

“Not a problem, sir,” I say. “No apology required.”

I shake his hand, the discomfort at having put my new XO on the spot mixing with the sense of vindication I feel.

“Grab your gear, and I’ll unlock your new office for you.”

The Neural Network Center is a secured room in the aft section of the ship. It’s located on Foxtrot Deck, near the engineering section, and well away from the CIC and the crew quarters. Lieutenant Commander Campbell unlocks the armored hatch of the NNC, and I step into the room behind him. There’s an admin console and a pair of chairs near the front of the room, and the rest of it is taken up by banks of neural processing units and data storage modules.

“This is all yours now,” the Lieutenant Commander says. “We are supposed to have three Network admins—ideally. You were going to be Number Two, but my Network petty officer came down with something on our last cruise. We’ve been without a Network admin for a few weeks now.”

“I won’t have a petty officer at the top of the department? Who’s going to be my supervisor?”

“You’ll be reporting directly to me,” Lieutenant Commander Campbell says. “I could put you under the Engineering Chief, but he knows about as little about Neural Networks as I do, so we might as well streamline the chain a bit. You’re now your own department head. Don’t get too excited, though—if something breaks, you’re the one who will get the blame.”

“I’ll manage, sir.”

“The good news is that your job is technically an NCO billet. Impress me, and you’ll have a good shot at some petty officer chevrons as soon as you have the time in service.”

“Understood, sir,” I reply.

“Very good. Now let me set up with your access credentials, and then we’ll have the Command Master Chief find you a place to sleep.”

The single cabin I’m assigned is nowhere near as spacious and well-appointed as my room at Network School, but it beats the three-to-a-cabin arrangements most other junior enlisted ratings have to share. I have a cot that folds out of the way, a bathroom nook with a toilet, and a desk and chair that are bolted to the floor, just like the furniture in my room back at the PRC on Earth. Out here, the practice has a different reason, of course—rather than preventing theft, the Navy wants to minimize damage by untethered heavy objects if the ship gets jostled hard. I fill up my new locker with my belongings, and then change from my Class A dress uniform into the far more comfortable black-and-blue working uniform all the enlisted crew members are wearing for everyday duty. Then I sit down at my desk to do what I’ve been itching to do ever since the Lieutenant Commander enabled my network access—I check the ship’s Personnel Movement roster for Ensign HALLEY D.

Halley is assigned to the Versailles’ Combat Aviation section, a grand title for a pair of drop ships and a spare ship in storage. The ship’s personnel movement system tracks everybody on the Versailles through the low-power RF chip embedded in their dog tags, and the computer tells me that Halley is in a briefing room on Foxtrot Deck right now.

By the time I find my way around the ship and down to the right corridor, the briefing in F5103 is over. I pass the room’s open hatch, and try to look casual as I sneak a peek inside, only to see rows of empty chairs. I keep walking, not wanting to stop on the spot to pull out my admin deck and check on Halley’s new whereabouts.

As I walk around a bend in the corridor, I almost collide with a group of pilots in dark green flight suits, standing in front of a bulletin board on the corridor wall right past the bend.

“Whoops. Excuse me,” I say as I stop on my heels, a millisecond before I see that Halley is part of the little group. She stops her conversation with the pilot standing next to her, and looks at me in sudden, wide-eyed surprise. This is not exactly the way I had planned to reveal my presence on the Versailles to her, but she’s only three feet away from me now, and there’s no chance to rehearse and do this over.

For a moment, I am sure that she’ll simply give me a nod and a low-key “hello”, so her fellow officers won’t know that she’s socializing with an enlisted crew member, but Halley quickly disavows me of that notion.

“Huh,” she says, sounding like someone who has just found a lost and forgotten commissary note in their jacket pocket.

Then she crosses the distance between us in one step, grabs me by the front of my shirt, and shoves me back against the corridor wall before kissing me on the lips. Behind her, the other pilots stare and chuckle.

“Holy fuck, Andrew, what are you doing here?” she says when she finally lets go of me. My lips are now pleasantly tingly with the sensation of the unexpected contact.

“I got transferred,” I say. “I’m your new Network admin.”

“Huh,” she says again, and pulls me close for another kiss. I don’t resist.

“I’m off my watch in fifteen minutes,” she says. “Are you free?”

“I’ll be getting settled in the NNC,” I say. “You know where that is?”

She shakes her head in response.

“This deck, Foxtrot 7700.”

“Fifteen minutes,” she says. “Hope you’re rested.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I reply.

Our ship leaves Gateway Station two days after I join the crew. By the time we clear our moorings, I’m tapped into the vitals of the Versailles enough that I don’t have to ask where we’re going, or what we’re going to be doing. The Versailles is tasked with a supply and mail run to the NAC colony on the planet Willoughby. It’s a recently terraformed planet that’s orbiting one of the stars in the Auriga constellation. Its astronomical notation is Capella Ac, but the Marine designation is “dirt speck at the ass end of the known galaxy.” Halley, who got top grades in astronomy and astrophysics back in Fleet School, asserts that this is not quite true, since the Capella system is only forty-two light years from Earth—well past the 30, which is the thirty light year zone around Earth that separates the Inner from the Outer Colonies, but well short of the settled fringe, which is sixty-one light years away. Capella Ac—Willoughby—is not the ass end of settled space, but it’s definitely located well below the neck.

It doesn’t make much of a difference to me, of course. I’m about to leave the solar system for the first time, and even though the Versailles has no windows in its hull, I have a great time sightseeing through the sensors and optical feeds of the ship. As old as the ship is, her network hardware is in great shape, and I have very little to do other than monitoring the shipboard systems and running self-checks on occasion. Traveling on a space ship is not at all like I imagined it. The lack of outside visual references combined with the artificial gravity of the ship itself makes for smooth travel, and if I didn’t know I was on a space-going vessel, it would feel no different from sitting in a classroom on Luna or Earth. The first few days of our journey, I tap into the external feeds from the hull cameras, but after we leave Gateway Station, there’s nothing to see out there other than blackness and the occasional distant star.