Marina Lostetter – Noumenon (страница 12)

We were rowdy and uncouth, elated and hot-tempered.

And until a sharp whistle blew and a loud order was barked, we hadn’t realized that the bridge crews weren’t celebrating with us.

Captain Mahler demanded attention. When he walked into a room, it fell silent. Even at that party, high on life, as soon as we knew he was there, we shut up.

There was Mother and Father.

And then there was the Captain.

“Having fun?” The question was clipped … and rhetorical. He took to a table near the entrance, climbing atop it like a man who’d just conquered Everest. Several members from his command team stood by the doors.

There wasn’t anything malicious in his voice, nor in his stance. But I did feel like I was about to be reprimanded. His sharp, dark eyes projected a smug understanding. He wasn’t disappointed, or angry with us. But the unspoken message was clear: you can’t control yourselves, and that makes me better than you. It was as if our drunken displays were an illustration of the very reason he was in charge of this ship and we were not.

In a sense, Mahler wasn’t one of us. He was an original, not a clone, and one of only a handful aboard. His illustrious military career (if one can have an illustrious military career in a time of global peace) had gotten him a direct invitation. Why on Earth he’d accepted, no one was sure. He had to leave everything he was born for behind.

But he had. As had a fair few of those in command. I took another look around and realized no one partaking in the festivities was from Mahler’s division. I knew the captain of Bottomless quite well—he wasn’t around.

All of the captains were with their ships, of course. And all of the command crew were at their posts. They had jobs that needed attending to while the rest of us fooled around in the mess.

I looked up at a clock on the wall—five hours had flown by since the party began. Captain Mahler had to have known about it long before his appearance. He let us have our good time, indulged us. But now he was here to remind us it was time to face responsibility.

“I want this place spotless in an hour, and everyone in bed no more than fifteen minutes after that,” he said. “All who participated in the merriment must participate in the cleanup. If anyone does not contribute, there will be consequences. I expect everyone to report for duty at 0700 tomorrow. You’ve all heard of hangovers, and by tomorrow many of you will be intimately familiar with one. This does not excuse you from duty.”

He scanned the room, laying his eyes on each of us. “There’s a time and place for everything. Today was a momentous day, one we’ll all remember—the first half of, anyway.”

Uncomfortable laughter cropped up here and there around the room, but dropped off almost immediately.

“It was a day worth celebrating—and we have. Now, though, we must focus on business. The business of setting up our society, engraining it in ourselves. You led different lives on Earth—sheltered and formal lives. I understand the desire to break from those constraints. But there was a reason for your well-regulated upbringing. The training wheels have come off, but that does not excuse you from duty, or dedication, to your positions aboard these ships. We must take pride in our stations, in our commitment to each other. In responsibility.” He looked at his watch—an antique piece, perhaps an heirloom. “All right, your hour starts now.”

I lunged at the pile of soiled cake-plates nearest me, and dropped them into the compost chute on my way to Nika’s room. I hadn’t a clue what the punishment for not cleaning might be, but Nika would never forgive me if I let her endure it.

Besides—I sure as hell wasn’t doing this by myself.

Days later, it was time to compose my first message home.

I.C.C. sent automated messages back all the time. Short snippets of information about functionality and position, but that was it. I had to tell Earth about us—our societal status, our functionality, any major events, and any major problems. I had to keep mission support abreast of all that was happening.

There were three main communications rooms on Mira. One was part of the bridge and was used for ship-to-ship. The second was on deck six, and was a mirror image of the comms centers on all the other ships. That was where most of the “reporters” worked out of, gathering the data that I would then compile. The last sat on the lowest deck opposite the shuttle hangar—more of a closet than a room, what with all of the equipment stashed inside. It was well guarded, and only I and my cycle partner—the person who would take over when I retired, and in turn train a new clone of myself—had clearance to enter. It was where all Earth-to-convoy messages came in and went out. Inside stood a small desk, a small chair, and a good-sized server bank which extended beyond my sight and back into a long access tunnel beyond.

I called the servers my Enigma Machine, because all of their computing power was focused on sending and receiving coded messages. The messages came via a time subdimension we had yet to figure out how to physically move through. But even if we didn’t fully understand it, we could send information through it just fine—better than fine. It was the fastest communication method known, and would ensure us practical mission-to-mission support communications for a long time.

While the system was fast, it was also limited. For one thing, my Enigma Machine needed a mate back on Earth in order for my messages to actually make it to a set of human eyeballs.

For another, SD communication was comparable to SD travel, which meant is was equally as problematic, with a few exceptions. An SD drive made a pocket of “normal” space around itself and nearby matter, protecting it in a bubble. And the drive could independently move that pocket in and out of normal space; in other words, it could dive and surface. But SD communications couldn’t work that way—there was no physical engine I could attach to an encoded electromagnetic signal. Instead, there was a part of my Enigma Machine that created a bubble of its own and forced a dive, and a twin Enigma Machine on Earth that pulled the communiqué to the surface and coaxed the bubble to pop.

And the two machines had to be synced. The odds of randomly intercepting an SD packet were astronomical—pun intended. The Enigma Machine on the receiving end had to know which subdimension the information was traveling through, what trajectory it took through space, and how to unravel the “skin” that maintained the bubble once the packet was intercepted.

“Not exactly a ham radio, is it?” I’d joked the first time a teacher had introduced me to the concept. Unamused, she’d gone into further detail about how difficult SD communication was, and how I should be honored to be one of only a handful of people trained to use the methodology.

So, honored I was.

The system was fast, yes, and complicated, yes, and a huge energy suck, sure. But despite its advanced nature, it could still only handle so much data at a time. And by so much, I mean not a lot. So once the message was transferred to my implants or a holoflex-sheet, it needed further decoding, and that’s where my job could truly get tricky.

I smoothed the front of my clothes, making sure nothing bunched uncomfortably. My official on-duty uniform was a well-tailored, denim-blue jumpsuit. Not the most stylish of work-wear, but it distinguished me from the black of security officers, the vermillion of the engineers, the Italian-yellow of the emergency medical teams, the purple of the educational division—and everyone else who wasn’t in communications.

The color coding had been Mother’s idea, though I heard Father was against it. Thought it was too much like gang paraphernalia or something.

Well, if the botanists and the microbiologists ever start calling themselves the Sharks and the Jets, and go snapping in unison through the halls, we’ll know he was right.

In the days previous I’d gathered my notes, made my summaries, and translated them into the special shorthand. Of course, five days in, there wasn’t much to report.

People were working, doing their jobs well. Though, to me, the convoy still felt more like a clubhouse than a well-oiled machine. We were free, after all. This was our house—it was only fair we should make our own rules, rather than be confined to whatever our parents had set up.

If it hadn’t been for Captain Mahler, I’m sure entropy would have taken over and pulled our presently functional feet out from under us. We wanted time off when we wanted it. We wanted to switch shifts whenever we felt like it. We wanted to set up bowling pins in the halls and use inappropriate items to knock them down.

We just wanted to have a little fun. And despite the lesson we had learned the morning after our first party, our sense of responsibility was shaky at best. We didn’t know how to balance work and play—not yet. If the captain hadn’t had such a watchful eye the convoy might have ended up dead in the proverbial water.