“The Harley Simpson, the Margaret Thatcher, the George Washington, the Enterprise, each was debated in turn. But at each point we Adar argued that the name should be a name of wonder and power. For this ship is the hope of both our worlds, the sword that will carry our anger and righteous fury against the enemy that still plagues us.
“This is also an excellent time to make an announcement. Yesterday, a mutual defense treaty was signed by the Adar Unitary Council, the President of the United States and the prime minister of England. Once this treaty is ratified by the United States Senate and the Parliament of England, it will initiate the first Space Alliance in our two planets’ history.
“In keeping with this, and the naming of the Glasses that you humans brought from your depths of understanding, this ship, this hope for all humans and Adar, is named:
“The Alliance Space Ship Vorpal Blade.”
“Oh, Holy Maulk,” Weaver muttered. From the science section came one loud braying laugh, quickly cut off. “Oh, grapp.”
“Like an ASS, dude,” Miller whispered. “Like an ASS.”
7
“They couldn’t have named it the Alliance Warp Ship, could they?” Captain Steven “Spectre” Blankemeier said, shaking his head. “Oh, no… Cast off lines aft…” The short-coupled former carrier commander was clearly nonplussed over the chosen name for his boat.
“Could have been worse, sir,” Commander Clay White said. The XO of the ASS Vorpal Blade was the senior submarine officer on the boat. There had been a real tussle over which portion of the service was going to control the probable future space navy. The submarine admirals had made the convincing point that spaceships would be more similar to subs than carriers. The carrier admirals, though, had a much better lobby. So Spectre had been put through an accelerated course in submarine warfare and management while White, who had been in line to command his own sub, was seconded as an “experienced XO.” “At least we’re so totally covert that hardly anyone will ever see our name. Cast off lines aft!”
Despite the political infighting above their heads, the two officers had meshed well. Spectre was the epitome of a fighter pilot and the crew loved him, but he hadn’t studied ship handling skills until he’d assumed a carrier command and despite a tour as a sub officer, which had confused the hell out of his commander, he still wanted to fight the boat like a plane. White, on the other hand, had started as an engineer and really comprehended the details of the boat. He was methodical where Spectre was daring. It was a good combination if for no other reason than White could sometimes keep his headstrong commander from totally losing it.
“Cast off lines forward…” Spectre continued. “Sure as maulk it’s going to get out. Guarantee it.”
“Cast off forward!” White repeated. “We’re so black you couldn’t find us with a really good sonar system, sir. All lines cast off.”
“We just motor straight out, right?” Spectre replied. “Seriously, it had to be the Adar springing that on the President. Surely he’d have caught it?”
“Probably,” White said. “Yes, sir, no tug this time for security reasons. Suggest turns for three knots.”
“Make it so,” Spectre said. “I can’t wait to get out of this damned gravity well.”
“Soon,” Clay replied. “Astro, what’s our course on launch?”
“Two choices, sir,” Weaver said. “We can head straight for the heliopause in the direction of Alpha Cent or we can do a fly-by of Saturn. It’s only about two minutes out of our way and I think the planetology department would appreciate the readings. And on that course we can get a fly-by of the bow shock.”
“Make it so, Astro,” Spectre replied. “I’d like to see Saturn up close again. Spectacular. Plan on at least one orbit. Got to give Planetology plenty of time to survey, right?”
One reason that Captain Blankemeier had been chosen was that he was an amateur astronomer. There had not been a single submarine commander with that skill. A born tourist, he was always willing to do a quick check of a planet if it didn’t interfere with the overall mission.
“Can not wait.”
“Agree with you wholeheartedly, sir,” Weaver said, trying to figure out the wet part of the navigation. Put him in space, he was fine. It was currents and shoals that gave him fits.
“Oh, holy grapp,” Hattelstad muttered as they made their way down the ladder to the Marine bunks.
“You know, I love the Adar and I hate ’em,” Jaenisch responded. “I can just start with the jokes now.”
“ ‘I’m sorry, Gunny, I must have had my head in my ASS,’ ” Crowley said. “ ‘Let me stick my head in my ASS and see if I can think of anything.’ ‘Time to go back to the ASS.’ It even makes my head hurt.”
“Hey, Two-Gun, you play Dreen Strike?” Sergeant Lovelace said. Terry was the Bravo Team leader in the platoon, Crowley’s direct boss.
“I’ve played it,” Berg admitted. “But I prefer WoW or Orion.”
“Figures,” Crowley said. “We could use a fourth for Dreen. We keep getting creamed by Alpha First. They’ve got Gunga-Din as their heavy gunner and that Hindu is wicked.”
“I’ve got some new WoW packs with me,” Berg said. “I think I’ll stay on those for a while. If the system will let me uplink.”
“As long as they’re valid copies,” Jaenisch said, pausing at the corridor to their bunks. Everybody had followed courtesy protocol and was diving into their racks, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a crowd. “There’s a chip slit on the side of the screen.”
“Thanks,” Berg said. “You guys have been doing this for a while, haven’t you?”
“We’ve only done two short cruises,” Jaenisch said as they got to their bunks. He slid into his and then stuck his head out. “This is the first long cruise. Hopefully, nobody’s gonna freak out. You might want to store all your stuff away by the time we dive.”
“Because the CO drives this thing like a fighter?” Berg said.
“You have no idea.”
“Good news,” Julia Robertson said as she entered the mission specialist mess. “Fly-by of Saturn on the way out.”
Robertson was a forty-seven-year-old skinny black woman. “People of color” were unusual enough in hard sciences but Julia was particularly unusual. A former waitress, she had gone back to school after her last child left the house. An undiagnosed sufferer from Attention Deficit Disorder, she’d found college a breeze with the right medication. Her social workers had expected her to return to the bosom of the government with a sociology degree. She’d shocked the hell out of everyone she knew when she switched to biology. She’d shocked even more people when she got her doctorate and went back to school to pick up two more.
“That would be me,” Dr. Paul Dean said. The planetologist was a tall man who fit into the bunks on the converted sub poorly. He had long brown hair, going gray and pulled into a ponytail, and a gray-shot beard that hung nearly to the middle of his chest. A former professor at the University of Colorado, he’d always resented the Top Secret clearance the military-industrial complex forced on him ten years before. That is, right up until the MIC offered the “hippie,” with doctorates in planetology, astronomy, physics, geology and astrophysics, a chance to go into space.