An Officer’s Duty (25 page)

“You will be tested on finding your way around a standard TUPSF starship without arm units, headsets, or cheat sheets, before you are allowed to graduate from this Academy,”
Spada added. Humor colored his voice.
“Mind you, most cadets find the concept of a scavenger hunt a lot of fun…except that most of these scavenger hunts will be conducted under combat conditions.

“Once a week, at some point in that week, we will be placing five vouchers for three-hour-long Leave passes around this ship, usable either Saturday or Sunday evening. That’s just enough time to go into town and have a nice meal for supper, and maybe even catch a show. At the end of this hour’s lesson, you will have precisely fifteen minutes to decipher the clues we will give you in order to find those tickets and return them to me at a location I will specify.

“Only one ticket is allowed per cadet, and if you tear the edge of the vouchers even by a tiny bit, nobody gets to use that pass. So you’d better pay attention right now to what you are about to learn…and decide who you think should win the voucher, if several of you should find it at once. You are future officers, and will conduct yourselves with the appropriate level of dignity at all times.”

“I’ve heard about this,” the young woman in front of Ia whispered. “My cousin went through this same Academy, also
on the fast-track program, and she said they did this at least once a week. That’s plenty of chances for each of us to get an evening’s Leave.”

The cadet behind Ia nudged her. “I suppose you’ll get to the tickets first, since you know the layouts of these ships?”

Ia shook her head. “There are similarities, but while the bones are the same, the muscles and organs vary from beast to beast, so to speak—the actual layout of the rooms on a particular deck in a particular section will often vary from ship to ship within a particular class, even if the major features and main layouts are the same.”

Spada started speaking again, telling them more about what they were expected to see and do in the next hour. Ia and the others fell silent, listening to the words transmitted by their earpieces. A corner of her brain idly picked at the timestreams, wondering if she should grab one of the tickets now, or wait until next week.
This week, I think. It’ll spur the others to learn faster, especially when I point out that the layout really isn’t that hard to learn, if even a Marine grunt like me could learn it.
Hm.
But if I wait a week, then point out they’ve
had
a week to learn the ship that might be better…but would that be mean of me?

Well, I could point out this week that I didn’t grab the voucher because I wanted to be fair to everyone who had never been on board a starship before. And then warn them in advance I’ll be going for the ticket next week.
That’ll
work,
she decided.
I can use the opportunity next week to print out and mail off my prophecies as well as my blood beads…

Once everyone was on board, the order was given to split up into their various tours. Ia had been sorted into the lifesupport group. She knew more or less how it worked, but hadn’t had much reason or opportunity to visit that particular part of a ship before now. At least, not when she wasn’t being given a punishment detail.

Like most vital systems, lifesupport was broken up into several parts, the largest of which were buried in the heart of the ship. In the event of a hull breach, each ship section could be sealed off and sustain itself with small hydrogenerators, reoxygenators, and backup water filtration systems. Gravity might go offline, the air might stink, and the water taste bad,
but life could be sustained hopefully long enough to wait it out until rescue could arrive.

When not sealed off from damage, however, the majority of lifesupport needs came from the pair of brightly lit core chambers on Deck 6. The setup was ingenious. It started with the sanitation system, which flushed biological waste into a system of alternating tanks and beds. The first ones contained algae and bacteria in removable, moss-like filters, with both air and water bubbling through the material, exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide along with air and waterborne pollutants.

The filters had to be carefully scrubbed every once in a while, mainly so that the larger chunks were broken down. It was a messy, necessary job, one which didn’t always look or smell pleasant. That made them perfect for punishment details. The watered-down slurry then passed through stack after stack of vegetation, first feeding the leafy oxygenators, then filtering down to the vegetable beds. From there, the water ran through tanks of fish and the aquatic plants which fed them, followed by yet more beds of vegetation and herbs to remove the ammonia and other wastes produced by the fish, and more tanks of fish after that.

The second influx point included composting soils from the galleys. At the end of each vegetation bed was an extraction point for the water, which passed through secondary filtration systems consisting of biomat filters and aquatic grasses. Air bubbled through these filters as well, scrubbing out additional carbon dioxide and replacing it with oxygen through photosynthesis.

Each ship larger than a courier shuttle, which was twice to three times the size of an orbital shuttle, was guaranteed a supply of fresh food via the plants and the fish, plus fresh water and extra oxygen beyond that supplied as a waste by-product of the hydrogenerators. Smaller vessels had to make do with scaled down versions where the only filtration came from the supplemental algae and bacterial filters, while large ships could eat almost entirely fresh meals on a daily basis. Some even had enough to spare. Battle Platforms and space stations usually grew enough to sell off the excess to passing vessels, and many incorporated other animals, such as chickens and V’Dan water hens.

Frigate Class ships were just large enough to permit the inclusion of four sets of fish tanks and two coops of water hens, divided evenly between the two bays. The clucking and cooing and splashing of the blue-and-brown birds as they waddled and swam in their enclosure could be heard over the trickling of the water and the bubbling of the filters. Fish swam in the plexi-sided tanks, occasionally drifting close enough to peer out at the students before darting back in among the water weeds. The air was rich with moisture and the scents of green growing things, from the bitter of lettuce greens to the prickle of tomato plants, the sweetness of strawberries to the tang of lemongrass.

Compared to the more sterile environments elsewhere on the ship, this section almost always smelled like home to the people these ships carried. The only thing it was missing in Ia’s estimation was the spark-like scent of ozone, though she knew the others wouldn’t have agreed on that point. She paid polite attention as the instructor in charge of lifesupport gave the cadets in her group an overview of the importance of the various symbiotic cycles, and the vital importance of monitoring, adjusting, and repairing every step along the way.

“For those of you who have lived your lives in an M-class, Human-compatible habitat, such as here on Earth, do not be afraid to drink this water. It has undergone a scaled down version of the exact same kinds of natural filtration you will find here on the Motherworld,” their tour instructor, Lieutenant Danvers, stated. “The air you will be breathing, the food you will be eating, and the waste you will be excreting will all become a part of the
da Gama
’s lifesupport system. It must therefore be embraced, not shied away from. Lifesupport is exactly that: the systems, plural, which support life.

“This chamber is the core of that system, which is why it is buried in the heart of all Navy vessels, hopefully deep enough inside that it won’t sustain catastrophic damage during a starfight. Speaking of which, you will notice the excessive number of interior safety field nodes, and the excessively strong support structures involved. Any one of these systems, broken free, would cause a catastrophic mess in here, and a potentially lethal one at that,” Lieutenant Danvers warned them. “As you can see, every care is taken to adhere to the Lock and Web Law of space travel.

“Plants and filtration bedding materials are held in place with reinforced biomeshes. Most of the tanks are enclosed systems, though they can be opened for maintenance. The floor is perforated to recapture sloshed or spilled liquids. And the hen coop, while open to the air, is wrapped in mesh wire and bears extra suppression fields to cover the water and keep the hens safe in the advent of unexpected maneuvers or impacts—Cadet Phong, those strawberries are
not
for your consumption.”

“Sorry, sir.” He quickly lowered his hand to his side, swallowing quickly, but the damage had been done.

“Congratulations, Cadet,” Danvers told him, twisting her mouth up in wry humor. “You’ve just earned yourself five demerits, and the right to be the very first person put on biofiltration detail. Of course,
all
of you will learn how to clean the filters and do basic lifesupport monitoring and repair work. This is probably one of the easiest ship systems to maintain and repair, for all that it does require some definite knowledge of aquaponics to maintain perfectly. However, it is also one of the systems that can cause the most trouble. If it gets out of balance, you can poison the water or the food, kill off the fish, wither the crops, starve or dehydrate your fellow sentients, and even cause problems with the breathability of the ship’s air.

“The air itself is an important factor. The ventilation system does circulate this air throughout the whole of the ship, passing through various computer-controlled airlock shafts. Under the bulkhead lockdown of combat conditions, it takes an estimated twenty-five minutes for air to circulate from here to the bow and back, and thirty minutes from here through the extremities of the stern,” the instructor stated. “However, in the event of a catastrophic breach, it may not be possible to oxygenate a particular ship segment.

“With gravity, your own body heat will continue to circulate all the air in a particular cabin, allowing the heavier carbon dioxide to settle down to the decking. Without it, you can literally suffocate in a matter of minutes as your own exhalations cause the carbon dioxide to build up around your head and torso, clinging to your vicinity. Of course, it only takes a slight movement to stir the air, but it is still a concern. This is why we have miniature, and somewhat more mechanical, versions
of reoxygenation systems redundantly scattered throughout the ship, along with emergency hydrogenerator engines in every sector to provide backup power.

“Once we have finished with this segment of our tour,” Lieutenant Danvers told the blue-clad cadets standing between the stacks of plant beds and tanks in the long, narrow chamber, “we will go to classroom 6-Beta, which is in the next ship section forward of this. There, you will get to see a series of reoxygenators in various states of assembly and repair. For this week’s training sessions, you will learn basic maintenance and repair for lifesupport, hydrogeneration, and communications. These are the three most vital aspects of survival on board any starship. Whatever your specialty may end up being, you
will
learn how to manage and maintain these three parts, just as you will learn how to direct others in their management and maintenance.

“We will, however, start you on the mechanical backup systems for Lifesupport…because if you break one part on those, you just order another part. Kill off the fish tanks with a simple, stupid mistake, and the whole system can crash,” Danvers warned them dryly. “This is also why most battleships carry two lifesupport cabins, so that in the event of a breakdown in one, the other can be used to reseed the damaged systems. In space, redundancy saves lives. The goal of the modern military, contrary to popular belief, is more about saving lives than in killing them off.

“Do try to keep these top three needs of your ship in mind at all times, since as future officers, you
will
be responsible for the use, or abuse, of the lives under your command.”

Aye, aye, sir,
Ia silently agreed.

NOVEMBER 7, 2492 T.S.

Sighing, Meyun Harper leaned back in his desk chair and stretched. His blue T-shirt rode up on his stomach with the movement, exposing a stretch of tan abdomen. Ia, curled up on her bed with pillows propping up her back, tried not to look up from her writing station. She failed. There weren’t that many men who had that many muscles outside of a heavyworlder or a weight lifter, and her newly rediscovered feminine side was
insisting upon noticing each and every one, whenever they were bared in her presence.

Ostensibly she was doing homework. In actuality, she was composing prophecies, with her homework already electrokinetically completed and stored, awaiting printout. Harper was working on actual homework, typing in the essay-style answers needed to indicate he understood the course material at hand. Except he seemed to be taking a break. Stretching a second time, he scratched his stomach, then tilted his head back and over the edge of his chair so that he could glance her way.

“Ten weeks of this, and I
think
I’m getting used to the pace…except they keep increasing it incrementally. If I didn’t have an eidetic memory for visual information, I don’t know how I’d be able to keep up. Hell, I don’t know how anyone who
doesn’t
have a picture-perfect memory can keep up—and just because I can remember it doesn’t mean I can automatically
comprehend
it.”

“Wait until Hell Week,” Ia quipped back. “It won’t be quite as physically demanding in the Navy as it was in the Marine Corps—and only five days instead of seven—but everything I’ve heard about the Academy version says it’ll still be a brutal slice of mental hell.”

He gave her a lopsided, sardonic smile. “That’s what I like about you, Ia. You’re always so
cheerful
and uplifting!” Scrubbing his face, he sighed. “
Ehhh
…enough of this. I need to get my brain off of insystem thrusters, or it’ll explode.”

Closing the lid of his writing station, he scrubbed his hands through his collar-length hair, then stood and stretched a third time. This time, his shirt rode well above his navel. Ia found her gaze drawn to the exposed skin for a few fascinated seconds before she caught herself and dragged it firmly back down to the screen of her writing pad.