Faint static swirled through the line. “That will be Captain Forbee, sir. One moment.” I waited, my tension growing.
The ordeal I faced wouldn’t be pleasant.
“Forbee.”
“Captain Nicholas Seafort reporting, sir. U.N.S. Hiber-nia.”“Justin Haag was scheduled for this run, sir.”
“Captain Haag died interstellar, sir. I’m senior officer.”
“Can you come to Admiralty House or shall I come up?”
Odd, coming from a groundside commander. An Admiral and his staff didn’t go visiting, they summoned.
“I’ll be down as soon as the station gives me a shuttle, sir.
I’ll bring the Log.”
“Very good, Captain.” We broke the connection.
I went back to my cabin. I debated dress whites and decided against them; they would impress no one. I rummaged in my duffel for my unused wallet, checked to see that it still held money. As I’d be going shoreside I pinned my length of service medals to my uniform front, made sure my shoes were well shined.
On Level 2, passengers milled about the aft airlock for a look at the station, though they wouldn’t begin to disembark for hours. I went to the forward lock, where crews were already off-loading our cargo. Holovid in hand, I straightened my uniform and clambered through the lock.
“This way, Captain Seafort.” An enlisted man led me through the unfamiliar wide gleaming corridors and hatches of Orbit Station to the Commandant’s office. The design of the station was much like our disk, though larger in all respects. Higher ceilings, wider corridors, larger compartments.
Hundreds of people worked and lived in this busy shipping center. Cargo for Detour, Miningcamp, and Earth was transshipped through Orbit Station. Passengers disembarked here, before boarding other vessels to travel onward. Small shuttles journeyed back and forth daily to the planet’s surface. A typical orbiting facility for our interstellar Naval liners.
“I’m General Tho.” A small man, with a neat mustache above thin lips, and a receding hairline emphasized by wavy black hair. He eyed me dubiously. “You command Hiber-nal”“Yes.” I matched his abruptness with my own.
“Your shuttle will be ready in a few minutes.” After a moment he unbent perceptibly. “What happened to your officers?”
I sighed. I’d have to repeat the tale often enough. I explained.
When I was finished he shook his head. “Good Lord, man.”
“Yes. That’s why I want to report to the Admiral right off.”
His reply was cut short by the corporal who appeared in the doorway. “Shuttle is ready, sir.”
He shrugged. “Better go, Captain. I put you ahead of the passenger buses.”
“Thank you.” I followed the corporal down three levels, to a shuttle launch berth. It was similar in layout to Hibernia’slaunch berth, though on a far larger scale. It was designed to receive the great airbuses that shuttled passengers to and from the surface.
I grinned to myself; if I’d required Vax to polish this berth, he’d have marched right out the airlock. My grin faded; I recalled another man leaving an airlock, by my act. Sickened, I closed my eyes.
The shuttle was a sporty little six-seater with retractable wings, its jet and vacuum engines sharing the available bow space. I ducked and climbed aboard.
“Buckle up, Captain.” The pilot wore a casual jumpsuit and a removable helmet. He strapped himself in securely, more concerned with atmospheric turbulence than decompression. I followed his example. He flipped switches and checked instruments with the ease of long familiarity, waiting for the launch berth to depressurize.
“Lots of traffic these days?” I asked, mostly to make conversation.
“Some. More before the sickness.” He keyed his caller.
“Departure control, Alpha Fox 309 ready to launch.”
“Just a moment.” In a few moments the voice returned.
“Cleared to launch, 309.” The shuttle bay’s huge hatches slid open. Hope Nation glistened through the abyss, green and inviting.
Our propellant drummed against the berth’s protective shields as the shuttle glided out of the bay. Once clear of the dock the pilot throttled our engines to full. We shot ever faster from the station, approaching Hope Nation at an oblique angle until we encountered the outer wisps of atmosphere. The pilot hummed a tune I couldn’t recognize as he flipped levers, eyed his radars, swung the ship around with short bursts of his positioning jets to be ready to fire the retro rockets.
I asked loudly, “What did you mean, before the sickness?”
The first buffets of atmospheric turbulence rumbled the hull.
The pilot spared me a glance. “Didn’t you hear? We had an epidemic a while back, but it’s under control now.” He set the automatic counter, his hand poised to fire the engines manually if the puter didn’t turn them on.
“What kind of--”
“Not now. Wait!” The pilot’s full attention was on the puter’s readout. The retro engines caught with a roar at the exact moment the counter hit zero. His hand relaxed. “You never know about these little shipboard jobs!” He had to shout over the increasing din. “Not reliable like the mainframes you joes travel with!”
As we descended, Hope Nation lost its spherical shape.
Ground features emerged through scattered layers of clouds.
Here and there I could spot a checkerboard of cultivated fields, though most of the planet seemed lush and verdant.
Though I’d expected something of the sort, still I marveled at the sight of a planet so many light-years from home, whose ecology was carbon-based like our own. Hope Nation’s trees and plants supplied no proteins or carbohydrates we could digest, but they grew side by side with our imported stock.
No native animals, of course. No nonterrestrial animals had ever been found, other than the primitive boneless fish of Zeta Psi.
“Sorry,” the pilot shouted over the engine noise. “What were you saying?”
“What kind of epidemic did you have?”
“Some sort of mutated virus. It killed a lot of people before we found a vaccine. I don’t know much about it, except everyone gets a shot when they put down at Centraltown.”
“Is that where we’re landing?”
“Of course. All arrivals from the station go there. Customs, quarantine, everything’s at Centraltown.”
“Right. Of course.” I’d looked it up, but it was hard to digest a whole culture in an hour of holovid.
“Say, how’d you get to be a Captain, anyway?”
I sighed. It was going to be a long shore leave.
A few minutes later he deftly flipped the shuttle into glide mode and rode her above the flat plain toward the seacoast skirting the sparkling waters ahead. The jet engines kicked in a moment after the flipabout, making us a jet-powered aircraft.
Naturally, the pilot spotted the runway long before I did.
After all it was his home turf. The shuttle’s stubby wings shifted into VTOL mode as we bled off speed. The pilot timed our arrival over the runway perfectly; we were almost stationary as he dropped us gently onto the tarmac, the shuttle’s underbelly jets cushioning our fall.
“Welcome to Hope Nation, Navy!” He gave me a smile as he killed the engines. “And good luck.”
“I’ll need it.” I opened the hatch and climbed down, straightening to take my first breath of air in another solar system. It smelled clean and fragrant, with a scent I couldn’t quite place, like fresh herbs in some exotic dish. The sun, a G2 type, shone brightly, perhaps a bit more yellow than our own.I gawked like a groundsider on his first Lunapolis vacation.
My step was light and springy, a result of Hope Nation’s point nine two Earth gravity. The planet was actually twelve percent larger than Earth but considerably less dense.
My Naval ID took me through customs with no fuss. The quarantine shed was a ramshackle structure just off the runway, between the ships and a cluster of buildings. The nurse was friendly and efficient; I bared my arm; he touched the inoculation gun to my forearm and it was done.