“Are we there? Have we reached Terraneau?” Ava asked.
“Not even close. We’ve reached the ship that will take us to the ship that will take us to Terraneau.”
“Harris, I need to use the restroom,” she said.
“There’s a tube in your …” I started.
“Um, my plumbing doesn’t exactly match up with the equipment,” she said, sounding irritated.
“Speck, I didn’t think about that.”
“Honey, you seemed pretty interested in my plumbing last night,” she said, sounding more brassy than ever.
“I wasn’t thinking about how you matched up with the armor,” I said. “You’re going to have to hold it.”
“Don’t they put bathrooms on these planes?”
“There’s a head, but everyone’s going to notice if you go in wearing combat armor.” The booth-styled bathrooms they built into these transports were too tight for use in combat armor. I explained this to Ava. She didn’t like it, but she didn’t argue the point.
A few minutes later, I heard the hiss of booster engines and the muffled creak of the landing gear as we touched down. There was a loud clank, and the rear doors of the transport slowly ground apart, revealing the ramp that led out of the ship. I removed my helmet and headed down the ramp.
A team of officers greeted me at the bottom. We traded salutes and formalities—in military circles discipline must always be maintained—and a nameless, faceless, prick of a natural-born asked me to follow him to the bridge.
I told him that some of my men were sick and asked if they could go to the head aboard the cruiser. When he asked why they didn’t just use the facilities on the transport, I explained that they were in combat armor and that settled it. I ordered all of my noncoms to go. Ava was a bright girl; she’d find a way to get herself in and out of the stall without being noticed.
Having arranged for my men to use the head, the officer escorted me off the transport. Before we left the landing dock, I turned back and watched Corporal Rooney bringing up the rear as my noncoms left for the head. I could only imagine what they were saying over the interLink. Most of them would be indignant about being sent to the head.
Across the bay, I saw our four transports lined up in a tight row and neatly stowed for this journey. This was a cruiser, the smallest of capital ships. Our four transports filled the landing area to capacity.
“Captain Pershing wanted me to bring you up to the bridge,” the ensign said, as we left. He was a short, slight man with thinning blond hair. He walked fast, pumping his skinny legs in overdrive but taking short, mincing strides.
“Is this call business or social?” I asked.
“He didn’t say,” the ensign answered without looking at me.
I had never spent any time on a cruiser. The ship had narrow halls and low ceilings. Equipment filled every nook and niche. Squeezing past sailors on my way to the lift, I felt more than a little claustrophobic.
This scow had both a broadcast engine and a nuclear reactor; it only made sense that it would fly hot. The cooling system succeeded only in keeping the temperature to a low bake around the engines, but then they built this ship more than fifty years ago, in an era when Congress feared an imminent attack. The engineers back then sent ships into space the moment they knew they could fly.
“Aren’t you hot?” I asked the ensign.
“I’m warm,” he admitted, still sounding haughty. “You get used to it.”
As we entered the lift to go to the bridge, I saw an engineer, a natural-born seaman first class wearing a greasy smock covered with sweat stains. His face was blood-blister red and damp with perspiration. Normally clones did this kind of work.
When the doors closed behind us, the ensign and I stood in silence, each of us pretending not to notice the other. The lift started a slow climb, and a blessed gush of cold air flowed out from the vents. A moment later, the doors opened, and we stepped on to the bridge.
“Well, Captain Harris, I’m glad you decided to come up,” Captain Pershing said as he met us off the lift.
“I appreciate the invitation, sir,” I lied. There’s a big difference between captains in the Navy and captains in every other branch. A Navy captain is the equivalent of a colonel in the other branches. Even with my promotion to captain, Pershing outranked me.
“Tell me, Captain, have you ever been on a bridge during a broadcast?”
“Yes, sir. A few times,” I said.
“On a cruiser?”
“On a fighter carrier,” I said.
“So you’re a virgin.” Pershing grinned. “You’ve never seen a broadcast until you’ve seen one from the bridge of a cruiser.”
“I would think it’s all the same once the shields go up,” I said.
“Cruisers don’t have tint shields, Captain,” Pershing said, as one of his men handed me a pair of thick wraparound goggles with black-tinted glass.
The sailor said, “You’ll want to put these on before we broadcast.”
My helmet had tint shields, but I had left it back on the transport. I would have preferred my helmet over goggles. Hesitating for just a moment, I slung the strap behind my head and let the eyepieces rest on my forehead.
“Right, well, Captain Harris, if you could excuse me for a moment, the captain of the cruiser always directs the broadcast himself.”
Pershing turned and drifted back into place in the center of the bridge. On other ships, bridges looked something like business offices with computer stations located around the deck. On this smaller ship, the bridge was more like a tiny movie theater with a window into space instead of a screen.
“Lieutenant Kim, do you have the coordinates logged into the broadcast computer?” Pershing asked.
“Aye, Captain.”
Turning to his intercom, Pershing asked, “Landing bay, have you secured the outer hatch?”
“Hatch secured, aye.”
Pershing said, “Lieutenant Kim, is the broadcast generator charged?”
“Generator charged, aye.”
“Seal the hatch to the bridge,” Pershing ordered.
“Aye, aye. Bridge hatch is sealed, sir.” I guessed this was to prevent anyone from walking in without goggles.
“Goggle up,” Pershing said to no one in particular. He pulled his goggles down over his eyes. I followed his example. The half-inch-thick rubber rim around the goggles formed a tight seal, blocking my peripheral vision, and the bridge vanished from my view.
Pershing must have stepped beside me because when I next heard his voice it sounded close by. He asked me, “Have you ever been in Washington, DC, during a New Year’s Eve celebration, Captain?” Then he barked out, “Initiate broadcast.”
I had been in Washington for New Year’s Eve, but I was on duty, so I missed his meaning. Then the fireworks began, and I understood.
They called the electric fields created by broadcast engines “anomalies.” I had seen traces of anomalies through the heavily tinted windows of fighter carriers and spaceliners. I knew anomalies were bright, but I had never appreciated how bright.
What happened next I could only describe as chaos. Somewhere ahead of me, a pulsing silver-white circle appeared. I hoped it was outside the viewport, but with the dark goggles over my eyes, I could not be sure. The circle spread in an unsteady jolt, then seemed to explode, sending jagged tendrils in every direction.
Only a physicist could grasp the workings of broadcast technology, but I knew enough to understand that there was enough electricity dancing on the outside of the ship to incinerate the entire crew. The lightning would coat the hull with highly charged particles that could be translated into some kind of wave and transferred instantaneously across the galaxy. Judging by the sheer violence of the anomaly, I suspected that the broadcast equipment on this cruiser had been designed for a larger boat.