The Blunt End of the Service Read online

  He didn’t enjoy his first day in high school and enjoyed the ones that followed progressively less. It didn’t help that his father kept reminding him that Greg flew through high school, Alice sailed through and Beth cruised through. It all sounded so easy; just buy a ticket, sit back and enjoy the ride. On the other hand, Chuck had witnessed their seemingly smooth transit through higher education and knew it involved considerable effort – hours of study, endless weekends and long summer evenings locked away in their rooms when all the time the outside world beckoned.

  Chuck decided upon a different strategy; he would coast along, wherever possible freewheeling, without any unnecessary use of the throttle. Fine in theory but for the most part he waded through his studies as if they were a sea of thick, heavy mud. Flying, sailing and cruising were out; his coefficient of educational friction was obviously greater than that of his siblings.

  Predictably, his report card was littered with comments such as, ‘Continues to disappoint’, ‘Is capable of a much higher standard,’ and his own personal favorite, ‘Has not worked well this term and does not seem willing to try.’ On the plus side, what he did have was a happy knack of doing just enough to scrape through examinations by the skin of his teeth, a knack which was, by graduation day, something that he had refined into an art.

  And there was one shining light, one lush oasis amidst a desert of underachievement – a comment from his IT teacher, Mr. Makins, which read, ‘An excellent set of results. The work appears to come easily to him but he also tries hard.’ Armed with this single glowing recommendation Chuck examined the list of space academies, looking for the ones with the lowest entry requirements. He drew up a short list of three.

  Priam 4 was without doubt the most appealing. ‘A brand new campus boasting the most modern facilities with first class accommodation, all located in pleasant surroundings and within easy reach of Priam Central Spaceport’, ran the blurb on their web site. Not bad at all, he thought as he browsed the photographs. Very nice indeed. In fact, it seemed almost too good to be true. There had to be a catch somewhere, and there it was – the fees. Priam 4 was obviously aiming at the more affluent underachiever. The extremely affluent, in fact. Better think again.

  Next on the list was Hadrianus which seemed OK at first glance, but after a bit of digging it became apparent that all was not quite as it seemed, with a not terribly well covered up history of un-qualified lecturers, falsified records, misappropriation of funds and worthless diplomas. Quite an impressive list, thought Chuck. Best give that one a wide berth too.

  That left Lysander. Several searches later Chuck had still discovered surprisingly little about the place. Not the most prestigious of institutions to be sure, but it had a reasonable academic reputation and looked fairly modern judging by the few photos he could find. It was a bit out of the way and the climate was less than temperate, but it was well within his price range so he sent off an application and a few months later he followed in his elder brother’s footsteps and jetted off to space school.

  Chuck’s first impression of Lysander was that it was cold, which is a relative thing. Where one person might describe the weather as invigorating, another might say it was decidedly nippy. As far as Chuck was concerned, it was bitingly, piercingly cold. His second impression was that it was windy, which wasn’t subjective at all. Whatever tolerance you might have to falling mercury, you can’t help but notice when you have to walk at 60 degrees to the pavement. A gale force wind tore at his clothes and numbed his ears within ten seconds of stepping out of the arrivals terminal. He pulled up his collar, thrust his hands deep into his pockets and stomped off to find the shuttle to the base. By the time he found the shuttle stop, he was quite as cold as he had ever been, and quite as cold as he believed he could ever possibly be. He was right about the first bit but very wrong about the second.

  A shuttle pulled in a few minutes later and Chuck gratefully climbed into the relative warmth of its interior. As it pulled away from the terminal he had his first glimpse of the frozen landscape spreading out into the distance, though the glimpse ended as soon as his breath condensed and immediately froze on the window glass, blocking out the view.

  He wondered what could have possessed anyone to start a colony in such an inhospitable place. As far as he knew there was nothing particularly valuable here. Had they got lost? Run out of fuel? Perhaps they’d come this far and just couldn’t be bothered to go any further. Or maybe the first visitor had just fancied the idea of having a planet named after him. He’d have to look that one up.

  “Space school?” ventured a voice behind him. Chuck turned around to see who had spoken and was confronted by a man clad in more clothes than he had ever seen on one person before. Quite possibly more clothes than Chuck actually owned.

  “Err… yes, that’s right,” said Chuck.

  “Monty, Monty Turk,” said the walking gentleman’s outfitter, holding out a gloved hand. “Glad to meet you.”

  “You too,” said Chuck, shaking the offered hand. “I see you came prepared for the weather.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Monty. “Came to the open campus a few months back. If you think this is bad wait until winter sets in. If you haven’t brought your thermal underwear, get some on order. Winter lasts about ten months of the year here. Spring, summer and autumn divvy up the other two. This your first visit?” Chuck nodded. “Oh well, we signed up for it. Wasn’t my first choice to be honest but I failed the entrance exams for everywhere else. This was my banker. How about you?”

  “Same here. Seemed the easiest to enter,” said Chuck. “Doesn’t take a lot of working out why, does it?”

  It certainly didn’t and three weeks on Lysander was enough for Chuck to decide that space school wasn’t the life for him after all. His days began at 5 a.m. when a deafening bugle call was piped throughout the campus and from then until lights out at 10 p.m. he followed a strict regime which was designed, according to his chief instructor, ‘To acclimatize students to the rigors of a career in the depths of space’. Greg certainly never mentioned any of that in his letters. And all this in a place where the sun never shone and the daytime temperature rarely rose above minus 25 degrees C.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he was assured by one of his seniors. Chuck didn’t think so and wasn’t hanging around to find out. Mind made up, he packed his bags he flew straight back to Atlas where his parents exchanged a few ‘told you so’ looks when he broke the news.

  “Fine,” said his father, “But if you think you’re going to lounge around at home all day you’d better think again. Get out there and find yourself a job.”

  Chuck obliged, securing a job as a Junior Technician at the base of the new space elevator on Atlas. It suited him. True, it lacked the charisma of the Fleet and the Space Corps but had none of the regimentation that went with it. Not only that, he got to play with all the latest kit and kept right up to date with all the newest technology. Just the job.

  A few years later he found himself promoted to the dizzy heights, both literally and figuratively, of Senior Technician at the top end of the space elevator. The view from his office window was something to behold but the job entailed additional responsibility and pressure, two words that he wasn’t very fond of. Fast forward another two years and he was promoted again, this time to Technical Engineer, which added stress and accountability, two words he liked even less.

  One day as Chuck was taking his break in the canteen he watched a huge bulk transport edge its way into a parking orbit adjacent to the elevator. Despite its immense size it moved with surprising grace, pivoting neatly into position before its braking thrusters brought it to a precise halt. As Chuck sipped his coffee a small shuttle exited a hangar aboard the transport and flew briskly over to the elevator platform.

  A few hours later he bumped into an old acquaintance who was serving on the bulk carrier in question.

  “Bit of a mess,” he said. “The third engineer’s come down with chronic tonsillitis and he
was the only one on board qualified on Tekright computer systems. Can’t sail without a replacement. Hey, you’d know about all that kind of stuff, right?”

  “Sure,” said Chuck.

  “Fancy a job? Pay’s not bad and the job’s a doddle.”

  Chuck smiled and started to shake his head but the shake ended almost before it began. He looked over at the bulk carrier and it suddenly looked very appealing. A change was as good as a rest and after two years of chugging up and down that damned elevator Chuck felt in dire need of both. After a chat with the freighter’s captain, Commander Jacobs, his mind was made up and he handed in his notice. Two days later Third Engineer Chuck Poulson took up his post on the bulk transport Ivanhoe. The suit wasn’t silver but job was indeed a doddle.

  Over the next nine years Chuck visited just about every system in the explored universe, flew through nebulas, skirted black holes and even witnessed the birth a of a new star. As Commander Jacobs pointed out, if they could just live another eighty five million years they could visit every star in the galaxy. But it would have to be in a different ship. The Ivanhoe had reached the end of its useful life and was being sent to the breakers yard.

  With the scrapping of the Ivanhoe, Commander Jacobs decided that his space-faring days were over and moved back to Atlas to oversee the decommissioning of Orbital One, an aging space station which sat in stationary orbit above the planet. Meanwhile, Chuck was offered the post of Systems Engineer aboard one of the Ivanhoe’s more modern sisters.

  The Clementine was a first class vessel and if only Commander Jacobs had been in command, Chuck might have been truly happy. The Clementine’s master, Captain Mann, was ex-military, which wasn’t a bad thing in itself, but he was a strict martinet who wasn’t content unless he succeeded in making the lives of those around him an absolute misery – preferably on a daily basis. His favorite pastime – one he’d no doubt picked up at some military establishment or other – was to walk through the ship wearing a pair of white gloves, running his hands across every available surface. It rarely took him long to find an errant blob of grease, at which point he would round on the chief of whatever department he happened to be in. Most of the junior members of the crew lived in constant fear of Captain Mann but a few of the senior officers gave as good as they got.

  “What do you expect?” retorted the first officer one day. “This is a freighter with a limited complement, not some battleship with a crew of thousands, all with bugger all to do except scrub the decks with a bloody toothbrush!”

  Later the same day Chuck caught the end of a similar contretemps between the captain and the chief engineer which ended with, “Tell you what, you stay the hell out of my engine room and I’ll stay off your goddamned bridge!”

  At the end of his first voyage on the Clementine Chuck paid a visit to Commander Jacobs on board Orbital One.

  “How’s it going?” said Jacobs.

  “Thinking about jacking it in, to be honest,” said Chuck.

  “That bad?”

  “Half the crew have put in for transfers and the other half are reading up on ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’. Two of the younger lads didn’t even make it back to Atlas – they jumped ship at Aldebra.”

  “Not a happy ship…”

  “Chance would be a fine thing. I don’t think Captain Mann does ‘happy’.… but enough of that. How are things going here?”

  “We’ll finish decommissioning in a couple of weeks,” said Jacobs. “After that, who knows? The problem is that no-one’s entirely sure what to do with the old girl. The simple solution would be to dismantle the station and sell it off as scrap, but when they worked the numbers through it turned out to be economic lunacy. Then someone came up with the idea of converting the station into a high security prison, a latter day Alcatraz in the sky. That didn’t go down well with the locals, and neither did the idea of the military taking over. There’s always been a nominal military presence here, but turning Orbital One into a boot camp or weapons facility was an idea that the locals liked even less. Having a bunch of psychopathic criminals locked up a few hundred miles above their heads was one thing, but having a battalion of over sexed, drunken jar-heads let loose planet-side at regular intervals wasn’t something the locals were prepared to put up with, especially those with daughters, good looking or otherwise. Apparently, the aldermen on the planet below lobbied for a more agreeable solution, and one that they are still searching for. You know, I’d offer you a job here but I can’t guarantee how long it will last. In all probability we’ll end up strapping a few boosters to the old girl and pointing her in the general direction of the sun.”

  “Well I damned if I’m going back to the Clementine while Mann’s in charge,” said Chuck. “So why don’t you tell me about my new job?”

  A few days later Chuck sent a hand written letter of resignation along with a pair of black gloves to Captain Mann aboard the Clementine. Then he packed his bags and took the shuttle up to Orbital One to begin his new assignment as an operations officer.

  Six months on, the future of Orbital One remained uncertain as her owners continued negotiations with various third parties. Meanwhile, life aboard the station settled down to a regular pattern with a small caretaker crew who kept everything shipshape and Bristol fashion. Well, sort of.

  At seventy years of age, Orbital One – or just plain O1 – was positively geriatric for a space station, and like many senior citizens she creaked at the joints, wheezed a little and tended to spring leaks at inopportune moments. That said, she still was in decent shape for her age and moreover, thanks to the installation of an experimental computer core a few years previously, she had an unusually bright and agile mind. So there was life in the old girl yet.

  Half a million tons of exotic metal floating in stationary orbit above the planet far below, O1 had been built to provide docking and maintenance facilities for vessels visiting or transiting the Atlas system, mankind’s first interstellar colony. Shaped like a great wheel, ninety percent of her mass was in the outer rim, the upper floors of which held the administration complex and habitat zones. The spaces below housed the dockyard facilities – the cargo bays, fuel depots, hangars and workshops with all the necessary to fix the broken, upgrade the obsolete, wipe the windows and top up the tanks.

  Six slender spokes connected the rim to the central hub which housed the station’s vitals – the command and control centre, the reactors and the computer core.

  When O1 was built they’d said it was the marvel of the modern world. Certainly, at the time of its commissioning it had been largest and most modern facility ever constructed, hovering proudly in space. Smashing a bottle of vintage bubbly on the hull, some long forgotten dignitary had described the station as a testament to man’s resourcefulness, a monument to his ingenuity and a bold statement of intent for a future into which mankind would courageously stride. Pausing only to shake a few hands and kiss a few babies, the VIP had jumped aboard a luxury hyper-liner specially chartered at the taxpayer’s expense and quickly zoomed back to the comforts of Earth, leaving the station’s occupants to courageously stride all on their own.

  In its heyday, O1 had been home to five thousand people. The regular station personnel and also the private citizens who operated the hotels, bars, restaurants, shops and other services – some less reputable than others – which bustled with activity twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. O1 became a thriving community, receiving a never ending stream of vessels large and small, servicing their needs and turning them around, all for a healthy profit. And along with every ship came a crew with money in their pockets, looking forward to that box of delights that was shore leave. The older hands would take their time to weigh up their options, which were many and varied, while their younger colleagues would generally blow away their hard earned cash in a riot of uncontrolled self indulgence. The irony was that in many ways each group tended to envy the other.

  Many left the station with heavy hearts, most with empty pockets, and
the inevitable, unlucky few with a nasty little rash. A few departed somewhat the wiser for their experiences, but it was the kind of wisdom that would only last until their next port of call, whence the happy traveler would begin his or her education all over again.

  But those days were gone. By the time Chuck arrived on O1 the shiny new ‘Orbital Two’ had been christened ‘Phoenix Station’, and compared to O1 was bigger, smarter and an altogether better prospect for anyone looking for a career off world. The bulk of O1’s crew packed their bags and headed off to better pay, better working conditions and better everything else. Only the most sentimental chanced a backwards glance at their old billet.

  Commander Jacobs advised Chuck to join the exodus but he hadn’t relished the idea. He would admit to himself that he’d never have gotten a decent post on Phoenix anyway – at least, not one that would have suited him, which ruled out anything that involved too much responsibility, or worse still, anything that might require him to conform to some over-zealous establishment. Even after ten years in space Chuck just wasn’t much of a conformer. He didn’t mind doing a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay, just so long as it didn’t include being part of some feudal like institution.

  That didn’t mean to say that he didn’t take his duties on O1 seriously. He did. He’d found a comfortable little niche and he was quite determined to hang on to it. So he always turned up for his shift on time, shoes shined and neatly attired in the regulation fashion. He never missed a log and ran all the simulations by the book. He was courteous to his superiors and amicable with his colleagues. That was the easiest part for Chuck was affable and good natured almost to a fault. He almost never lost his temper, mostly because it was too much trouble, and on a personal level he rarely came across someone that he couldn’t get along with – apart from Captain Mann, of course.