Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

Halley spends her watches with briefings, simulator training, and other pilot business. I spend my watches in the NNC, ready to take complaints and fix things in case the galley dispensers fail to communicate their need for resupply to the ship’s supply clerk. That leaves seven and three-quarters of an eight-hour watch to poke around in the ship’s databanks, or see if I can get a glimpse of my girlfriend through one of the security vid feeds.

Halley seems to be flattered rather than offended when I tell her that I’ve been stalking her through the ship’s security system.

“You must be bored as hell in this office, you poor thing,” she says. “Too bad we don’t have security cameras in the officer showers on Deck Three, or I’d give you something better to look at than me walking the corridors with my ass looking all unflattering in that green flight suit.”

“Nothing wrong with the way it looks in that flight suit,” I say. We’re in the NNC, where Halley has started to seek refuge whenever she needs a quiet place to do paperwork, or talk about something other than drop ships, approach vectors, and docking procedures.

“Oh, you think so? Lieutenant Foster agrees with you, I think. He’s been a bit grabby lately.”

“Any of your officer buddies say anything about the fact that you’re poaching among the enlisted crew?”

“Fuck, yeah,” she says. “But it’s not like they have a leg to stand on. Foster and Rickman are both doing the same. Foster’s screwing some petty officer from Propulsion, and Rickman has the hots for one of the purple shirts from the flight deck.”

“Purple—what’s that, refueling?”

“Yeah, gas monkey. Red is ordnance, yellow is wrench spinners.”

“How elitist. What do you fancy pilots call the Network admins?”

“No idea what they call the other ones, but you’re ‘that lucky fucker’, according to Lieutenant Rickman.”

“Well, good to know I get to best him at one thing, at least,” I say.

Halley’s PDP vibrates on the tabletop in front of her, and she picks it up with a sigh to read the message on the screen.

“Speak of the devil. I’m being summoned to the pilot briefing room. I’ll see you tonight after your watch?”

“You bet,” I say. We can’t do dinner together because we eat in different galleys—they’d kick me out of the officer galley, and give her strange looks for eating in the enlisted mess—but I have a private cabin, a rare luxury on a warship, and we spend a lot of our free time in there.

“Later, computer jock,” she says, and gives me a quick kiss.

“Later, pilot babe,” I reply.

I watch as she walks through the hatch and into the hallway beyond. There’s definitely nothing wrong with the way her backside looks in a flight suit.

I’m on the way to the enlisted galley when I hear my job title on an overheard 1MC announcement.

“ Neural Network admin, report to XO in CIC. Neural Network admin, report to XO in CIC. ”

I reverse course and head to the staircase that leads down to Deck Five.

The CIC is busier than it was when I set foot into it for the first time. The XO is once again standing by the holotable, looking over a stack of printouts. I walk up to the table and render a salute.

“NN2 Grayson reporting as ordered, sir.”

The Lieutenant Commander looks up from his printout.

“Ah, Mister Grayson.”

He puts the stack of paper aside and waves me closer.

“At ease. Mister Grayson, how far away is this ship from the nearest communications relay at present?”

“Three and a half light minutes, sir—the orbital relay above Mars.”

“Very good,” he says. I’m pretty sure that he knew the answer to his question already, and that he just wants to check whether his new Network admin is on the ball.

“We’ll be entering the Alcubierre chute to Capella shortly,” he says. “Please make sure you check your pre-FTL procedures, and that all the databanks are fully synchronized with the main network before we go FTL.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. “I’ll get right on it.”

“Very good. Report network readiness to be directly by eighteen hundred hours, please.”

“Aye-aye, sir.”

I don’t know much about our drive systems for interstellar travel. I do know they’re called Alcubierre drives, and that a ship traveling in an Alcubierre bubble can’t send or receive any messages, because it outruns even the near-lightspeed data traffic. Before an Alcubierre trip, every Navy ship synchronizes all its onboard data with the in-system network. I learned to run the process in Network school, and it’s just a matter of telling the computer to do it, but Navy regs still require the results of the sync to be double-checked twice by the Network admin on duty, and verified by the next senior department head up the command chain. I find that most of my daily duties consist of babysitting an automated process, and standing ready to get my head bitten off if I fail to catch any errors.

Back in the NNC, I open my admin deck, tap into the system, and start the automated protocol for pre-Alcubierre preparation. While the databanks synchronize with the nearest Navy communications relay to make sure we’re not going to deliver last month’s mail by accident, I go through the manual to make sure everything is going right. I suppose I should feel a little intimidated or overwhelmed by the fact that I’m running a department that should be staffed by two enlisted admins and a petty officer, but the truth is that everything is so automated that anyone with the ability to read a few checklists could run the NNC from their rack. Still, I don’t want to give the XO a reason to start disliking me, so I go by the book and hand-check every databank replication time stamp when the computer indicates that the process is finished. Then I hit the communications switch on the console next to the desk.

“CIC, Networks.”

“Networks, CIC. Go ahead,” comes the reply.

“Networks reporting ready for Alcubierre transition. All databanks synchronized and verified.”

“CIC copies Networks ready for Alcubierre transition.”

With the level of computer integration on the ship, I have no doubt that CIC was aware of the network status the moment the update finished, but this is the military, and everything has to have its proper procedure and ritual, like a kabuki theater with uniforms. There are the right gestures, phrases, and movements to be observed, and everybody plays along because that’s just the way it’s done.

I tell the admin deck to locate the RFID signature belonging to the dog tags of Ensign HALLEY D. The system finds her RF chip in the officer’s mess, and I tap into the camera feed to see her at a table with her officer pilot friends, eating sandwiches and discussing something. I take out my PDP and dash off a message to her.

>Mind sitting on the other side of that table, so I can get a better view of your ass? This camera angle is kind of crummy.

I send the message and watch the camera feed with a grin. Halley sits up slightly and removes her PDP from the leg pocket of her flight suit without interrupting the conversation with the lieutenant sitting next to her. I watch as she reads the message on her screen. Then she looks up, searches for the lens of the camera on the ceiling, and scratches her nose with her middle finger.

I smile and send another message her way.

>You’ll have to wait until my watch ends, I’m afraid.

I don’t like the transition to Alcubierre. When the ship enters the chute and turns on its Alcubierre drive, every bone and muscle in my body suddenly develops a low-level discomfort—not exactly an ache, but a disjointed feeling, as if some gentle, yet irresistible force is trying to pull every molecule in my body into all directions at once. My joints and teeth feel loose in their sockets, and my skin prickles with an unpleasant sensitivity. A few hours of discomfort are probably much easier to suffer than the boredom of spending a few years on an interstellar journey, but I can already tell that Alcubierre transitions are going to be my least favorite part of traveling on a starship.