Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Marko Kloos - Terms of Enlistment» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2013, Издательство: Frostbite Publishing, Жанр: Боевая фантастика, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

Terms of Enlistment: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «Terms of Enlistment»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

The year is 2108, and the North American Commonwealth is bursting at the seams. For welfare rats like Andrew Grayson, there are only two ways out of the crime-ridden and filthy welfare tenements, where you’re restricted to 2,000 calories of badly flavored soy every day. You can hope to win the lottery and draw a ticket on a colony ship settling off-world, or you can join the service.
Andrew chooses to enlist in the armed forces of the North American Commonwealth, for a shot at real food, a retirement bonus, and maybe a ticket off Earth. But as he starts a career of supposed privilege, he soon learns that the good food and decent health care come at a steep price… and that the settled galaxy holds far greater dangers than military bureaucrats or angry welfare rats with guns.

Terms of Enlistment — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «Terms of Enlistment», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Navy ships are at Combat Stations when they go in and out of Alcubierre chutes because their entry and exit points are fixed in space. The location of the Navy’s transit points is a secret, of course, lest the Sino-Russians simply mine our exit points to ambush our ships when they finish their Alcubierre trips, but every military has its intelligence service, so there’s always a chance of a welcome committee of SRA destroyers waiting for us as we transition back into normal space. Thirty minutes before the end of our Alcubierre run, the Versailles goes to Combat Stations once again.

“Stand by for transition,” the all-hands announcement comes from the CIC. “Transition in ten…nine…eight…seven…

We transition back into normal space a mere twenty light minutes from Capella A, and forty-two light years away from Terra. There’s no welcoming committee of SRA warships waiting to blow us out of space. I feel the moment the Alcubierre drive shuts down bcause the low-level discomfort I’ve been feeling for the last twelve hours is suddenly gone. The screen of the admin deck in front of me shows that the ship’s neural network has already started its battery of post-transition integrity checks. I divert a tiny bit of system time to show me the feed from the ship’s optical arrays on the outside of the hull, but there’s not much to see out there. Capella A looks a lot like our own sun, a tiny, washed-out yellow orb in the distance, and I can’t make out any other celestial bodies at all. The Capella A system doesn’t look very different from our home system—vast stretches of nothing, punctuated by the glimmer of distant stars.

Out of curiosity, I check the navigational plot. The exit point of the Alcubierre chute into Capella A is much closer to our destination than the chute’s entry point from Earth. We are just fifteen light minutes from Capella Ac—Willoughby—and we will be in orbit in just a few hours. The ship’s long-range sensor grid shows a whole lot of nothing between us and Willoughby. It looks like we’re the only starship around, NAC or otherwise.

“All hands, secure from Combat Stations. The watch schedule will now resume,” the XO announces overhead. “Welcome to the Capella system.”

We start our orbital approach to Willoughby right at the end of my watch. I’m tired and hungry, but I decide to stay in the NNC for a few more minutes to witness our approach to the first extrasolar planet I’ve ever seen.

I’m looking at the feed from the dorsal array when the hatch buzzer sounds. I walk over to the hatch and peek through the viewport to see Halley’s face.

“Hey, you,” she says as I unlock the hatch for her. “Mind if I duck in for a few minutes? I want to fill out this flight log without Lieutenant Rickman chewing my ear off.”

“Sure thing,” I say, and wave her in. She steps through the hatch and lets herself drop onto one of the chairs in front of the admin console.

“Isn’t your watch over?” she asks. “It’s 2230.”

“Yeah, I’m off. I just wanted to hang around to watch us go into orbit. Here, check it out.”

I point to the screen of my admin deck. She leans forward to look at it, and puts her flight log aside.

“Wow. That’s Willoughby? I didn’t realize we were already this close.”

“We’ll be in orbit soon. Aren’t you supposed to play taxi with those drop ships of yours?”

“Yeah, but not until 0600 tomorrow morning. I guess they’re not set up for nighttime deliveries down there.”

We look at the globe of azure and brown that’s slowly shifting around underneath the ship. It looks a lot like Earth, but there’s also something profoundly different about Willoughby. I’ve seen the familiar picture of Terra from orbit often enough that looking at a planet with completely different continent shapes feels a bit disorienting.

“Look at that,” Halley says. “Continents, and oceans, and everything. Looks a lot like Earth, doesn’t it? Do you think they have wildlife down there?”

“I have no idea,” I reply. “I don’t know how that terraforming thing works. Did they get to bring livestock from Earth when they set up the colony?”

“Maybe in a tube, as genetic samples or embryos. I doubt they would have wasted the cargo space on that colony ship for a herd of live cattle. Do you have any idea how much it would cost to transport a whole cow forty-two light years across the galaxy?”

The ship lurches to the side so hard that I lose my footing and stumble against one of the databank racks. Halley lets out a surprised shout.

“What the fuck was that?” I ask when I regain my balance.

The overhead lights flicker, and switch to the red-orange combat lighting scheme. The overhead starts to announce Combat Stations, but whoever’s doing the announcement in CIC only makes it halfway through “Combat…” before the audio cuts out with a squelch. Then there’s the sound of explosive decompression coming from the deck below us. The ship lurches again, much more violently than before, and the sudden jolt throws me into another rack of equipment. The side of my head collides with the unyielding edge of a data storage cabinet, and then I’m prone on the rubberized deck and rapidly slipping into unconsciousness. I hear Halley screaming, and I register the thumping of the emergency locks on the NNC hatch, and then my brain turns off the lights.

Chapter 19

I wake up to the sensation of cool air hitting my face. The right side of my head feels wet and sticky, and when I touch my fingers to my forehead, I feel a deep, bloody gash over my right eyebrow. It’s dark, and eerily quiet. All I can hear is the familiar soft humming of the data storage racks. I look up to see Halley standing above me.

“On your feet, sailor. We’re in deep shit.”

She looks at the gash on the side of my face and winces sympathetically.

“That looks awful. You okay?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’ll live.”

My admin deck is on the floor over by the rear bulkhead. I walk over to it and pick it up to find that the deck is still running, none worse for the wear. I put it back onto the desk in front of the admin console. Then I lean over to press the button on the priority voice link to CIC.

“CIC, Networks.”

There is no reply, and Halley shakes her head.

“Already tried that. The circuit’s fried. I haven’t heard shit over the 1MC, either. Place is quiet as a tomb.”

I tap into the system with the admin deck, and it doesn’t take long for me to realize that the Versailles is profoundly broken. Virtually every vital subsystem shows a long string of emergency alerts and error messages.

“Holy shit,” I say. Halley steps next to me to look at my admin deck’s screen.

“What is it?”

“Power circuits are out—everything down to the tertiary. That’s not supposed to happen, ever. We’re running off our backup power cells.”

“What about the reactor?” she asks. I check the engineering section, and an unwelcome feeling of dread gives my stomach a little twist.

“It’s out. We’re dead in space. This is not good.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured we’re in deep shit.”

I scroll down the list of priority system messages, and my feeling of dread turns into borderline panic.

“The Abandon Ship order came twenty fucking minutes ago.”

“Holy shit,” Halley says again. “How long were we out?”

“Almost an hour, it looks like.”

Halley walks over to the hatch and pounds on the control box with her fist.

“We got a red light,” she says. “Not enough breathable air on the other side. It won’t let us open.”

“Well, how the fuck are we going to get out of here? I’d rather not suffocate on this can, you know?”

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «Terms of Enlistment»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «Terms of Enlistment» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «Terms of Enlistment»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «Terms of Enlistment» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x