Hidden Empire (46 page)
W
hen the greenhorn military recruits were faced with a real-time emergency decompression drill, their panic was so palpable
that Tasia Tamblyn had to laugh. Three stern drill sergeants hustled the new EDF trainees into a domed hangar bay in the lunar
military base. Then the doors hissed shut, and a timer appeared on the wall, its numbers ticking inexorably down. Klaxons
and rotating magenta lights heightened the sense of dire emergency.
Tasia was completely at ease with the standard decompression stuff, and she offered to help the wet-behind-the-ears Eddies,
but they distrusted Roamers on general principles. So she stood back and watched their comically earnest efforts to do the
things she had done all her life.
The soldiers, mostly young men, scrambled about, unaccustomed to the low lunar gravity, tripping and racing to the suit lockers.
With the clock running down, they rummaged through the assortment of mismatched gloves, helmets, and silvery bodysuits. Many
panicked recruits spent more time staring at the timer than securing their suit components.
After growing up as a Roamer, Tasia could slip on a space-suit with her eyes closed, though these EDF models were unnecessarily
thick and clunky, lacking the convenient streamlined Roamer modifications. She reminded herself that the Earth Defense Forces
had other priorities beyond the comfort of their soldiers. Still, they should at least have been concerned with efficiency.
Maybe she could modify her own equipment later; she knew a thousand ways to fix the things that bothered her about the design.
Two recruits squabbled over a single helmet that matched the red-colored striping of their suits; Tasia selected a bluemarked
helmet, knowing that with a simple twist of a knob and a collar adjustment, the pieces would all fit together anyway. With
a slow shake of her head, she watched their antics.
Let the kleebs suck vacuum. It might pull some of the disrespect out of their throats
.
She’d had valid reasons for answering the call to enlist, unlike these spoiled show-offs. After the Oncier attack, a few losers
had gotten drunk and talked each other into signing up for a stint with the EDF. They’d probably wet their pants if they ever
came face-to-face with a true enemy, and Tasia would have to figure out a way to clean up the mess. If the alien attack on
the Blue Sky Mine weren’t so vivid in her mind, the situation here would have been funny.
Nevertheless, it looked as if they might all be on an officer’s track, even her. Tasia had no pull, no connection to the Earth
military, but her initial scores had been exemplary, enough to put her into an open category. With King Frederick’s widespread
call for huge numbers of new recruits and with the massive buildup of EDF ships, General Lanyan had realized the sudden need
for officers as well. Apparently, even a skilled Roamer like herself could accidentally slip into the ranks.
Tasia skinned on her suit with ease. She checked the seals, the power supply, test-inflated the separate zones to make sure
the suit would keep its integrity. She had done it so many times that, in spite of the inferior equipment, every movement
was natural and automatic. A Roamer looked at his space environment garment as a mobile home no larger than his own body.
And a home must be well-maintained, or it might cost you your life.
One of the squabbling men had lost the fight and now dove into the locker and grabbed another helmet, which he sealed down,
frantically testing and adjusting until most of the suit systems glowed amber.
Overhead, through transparent sections of the honeycombed hangar dome, she could see the ice-white blazes of distant stars.
Twenty seconds remained on the countdown clock. Tasia locked down the neck clamp on her helmet and pressurized her suit. She
inhaled deeply, checked all her indicator lights, mostly green except for one that ran amber—the boot-heating unit. She tapped
it hard with her gloved fingertip, then shrugged. This drill wouldn’t last long, and she could tolerate cold toes if necessary.
Most of the other recruits were ready, too, some collapsing with relief on the floor of the hangar bay. Tasia wasn’t convinced
the drill sergeants would actually dump the atmosphere and risk injuring these children of fat-cat Earth families. Unfortunately,
pampered soldiers grew complacent and were thoroughly unprepared in an actual emergency. She would have to keep an eye out
for everyone, whether they appreciated it or not. She needed to maintain her priorities and remember that the deep-core aliens
were her enemies, not a few stuffed-suit trainees who couldn’t put on their own gloves.
Next to her, she saw one of the nicer young men of the group, Robb Brindle, sitting with a relieved look on his dark brown
face. Behind the curved helmet plate, he had smooth, handsome features, honey-brown eyes, and a soft tenor voice that sounded
as if it were made for singing. During down times in the cadet quarters, though, when Tasia had played EA’s recordings of
a few old Roamer ballads, Robb had always been too shy to sing along.
Unlike many recruits who had hazed her, Robb had accepted her as a comrade in arms. He had even been friendly, joining her
at mess, unconcerned with the looks of annoyance from the other trainees.
Now, as time ran out, Tasia saw that his suit powerpack had been linked up incorrectly, the plugs inserted with reverse polarity.
She grabbed the control unit on his suit and yanked at the cables. Robb turned in alarm, sending a question through the suit
radio.
“Come on, trust me.” Tasia slapped his gloved hands away, working like a surgeon, linking the systems properly. “I know what
I’m doing.”
She withdrew just as the dome overhead cracked open. Magenta lights shifted to red danger beacons, and the armored ceiling
split apart like the beak of a hungry baby bird. Air gushed out, forming frost crystals in a faint fog that was sucked upward
in a whirlwind cascade.
Must be nice to have so much air to spare
, she thought.
Tasia looked over at Robb, giving him a relieved explanation on the suit channel. “Your powerpack wasn’t connected right.
Your suit wouldn’t have pressurized.”
The other recruit looked alarmed, then deeply grateful. “Hey, thanks—”
“Don’t mention it,” she said. “And don’t you dare get all blubbery on me. Shizz, if you popped from explosive decompression,
the sarge would probably assign me the job of scrubbing all the goop out of your suit.”
From across the hangar bay, one of the recruits began howling over the open crew channel, his words indecipherable. Air and
mist sprayed from a breach around his wrist, and he flailed his hand, as if that might help. The idiot hadn’t sealed his left
glove properly. Three recruits pressed around him, trying to help, telling him to calm down—which would do no good, because
with a loss of suit integrity like that, he’d lose all his air and body heat within seconds.
Tasia remembered him as one of the spoiled rich kids from Earth, Patrick Fitzpatrick III. He had been rude to her, but she
couldn’t let him die, even from his own cluelessness. “Tasia to the rescue,” she said, mostly to herself.
Pushing off against the floor in the low gravity, she arrived at the scene in seconds and shouldered the others aside. She
grabbed the young man’s arm and wrestled the glove into place. Fitzpatrick swatted at her, and if his helmet hadn’t been in
the way, Tasia would have slugged him hard in the jaw just to stun him for a minute. His hand was already swollen purple from
the decompression, and the cold vacuum had probably damaged the tissues. Well, he’d be too sore to write postcards to his
mommy for a while.
She twisted the gauntlet, snapped the wrist collar into place, and clamped down the seal. The hissing noise stopped and his
suit began to reinflate. “There, step one, two, then three. It only works if you follow the procedures.” She didn’t think
Fitzpatrick would lose his hand, but he might have an awful lot of pain for a few months. Maybe he’d even be mail-dropped
home with a full disability discharge … and some equally obnoxious kleeb would take his place. Better to keep the problem
she already knew about.
Tasia could see in Fitzpatrick’s eyes that he was utterly terrified, more stunned than in physical agony. For now. The real
pain would hit him later, back in the infirmary.
“You fixed it,” Robb Brindle said, drifting up beside her as the drill continued.
“He’ll need to get to the medics as soon as the bay is repressurized.”
She didn’t really expect any acknowledgment or thanks, but maybe they would lighten up a bit. In the barracks, a lot of the
trainees had criticized her because of EA, who had accompanied her into the service. Although keeping the talented compy was
permitted—designated as “personal property”—having a special servant around gave the other recruits plenty of excuses to give
Tasia grief.
But she could hardly put EA back in the Tamblyn family spacecraft and send her back to Plumas alone. Her furious father would
probably dismantle the compy in a fit of pique just to get back at his impulsive daughter. Instead, Tasia had enhanced EA’s
programming to let her perform chores around the barracks and help with necessary tasks on the moon base.
The yawning dome remained open to vacuum for only a few more seconds, then the jaws clamped shut. Air blasted in great coughs
from ventilation openings, filling the hangar bay again. When the room was repressurized, the drill sergeants marched back
inside, accompanied by a team of medics. They hustled Fitzpatrick away, and one other man whose suit pumps had failed; he
had nearly suffocated before one of his companions noticed his distress and cracked open his faceplate as soon as the air
returned.
“Regroup and change,” called one of the sergeants. “We’ll debrief after mess hall—though in my opinion, half of you don’t
deserve the credits we’re wasting to feed you.”
Tasia took off her helmet and turned away to hide her grin, but Robb Brindle saw it and shared the smile with her. “Thanks
again,” he said, taking the helmet and helping her stow the suit, though Tasia was perfectly capable of doing it herself.
Still, part of her appreciated his attempt at gallantry. She found it amusing.
They sat together in the mess hall. Tasia listened to the rowdy trainees making jokes about the phlegmlike consistency of
the supposed vegetables, but she found them quite tasty. Roamers didn’t have prissy taste buds, and they knew that nutritious
food was more important than flavorful delicacies.
“So what’s your story, Brindle?” she asked, raising her eyes to his open and undeceitful face. “You don’t fit in with the
rest of those kleebs.”
He looked troubled. “I suppose it takes another misfit to notice that but, yeah, I’m different from them. Those guys signed
up on a dare because they heard King Frederick’s call, and now most of them regret doing it. Me, I always knew I was going
to join the EDF, ever since I was a kid.”
“Not one for extravagant ambitions, I see,” Tasia said.
“Hey, I was an Eddie brat. My parents were in the military, and I grew up in army stations on Antarctica, the Gobi. We were
even stationed on Mars for two years. Seemed perfectly natural to me.” Robb quickly ate his rations. “I never really thought
about another alternative. Always knew what I would do.”
He pushed his tray aside and leaned closer. “Turnabout time. What are
you
doing here? Roamers don’t exactly line up to join the military. I’m sorry about how the others treat you, you know. They’ve
got to have someone to haze until they find a real enemy, I suppose.”
She shrugged. “From what I’ve seen, that type of behavior’s often a symptom of particularly small penis size.”
Robb chuckled. After the joke had passed, Tasia found herself spilling the story about Ross and the Blue Sky Mine and how
she had run away to join the Eddies. He looked sympathetic, and then thrilled to hear a direct account of an encounter with
the mysterious enemy aliens. He was also fascinated to hear her sketchy descriptions of Roamer life, which was a mystery to
most people. Robb finished his cup of bitter coffee, saw that hers was empty too, and snagged it on his way to the refill
dispenser. He brought back a full cup for her and set it in front of her hands, though she had not asked for it.
“It must be difficult for you Roamers to live without a home, when the whole galaxy is just waiting to be settled, so many
Hansa worlds up for grabs. I’m surprised you keep living in your ships like gypsies.”
“It’s not like that,” Tasia said. “We prefer to depend on our own resources and abilities and not get too coddled like those
morons in the decompression exercise today. They wouldn’t survive ten minutes of a regular day’s work on a Roamer colony.”
“Neither would I, probably,” Robb said.
Tasia laughed at him. “Unless I was there to lend you a hand, like today. But just because we don’t have settlements on beautiful
planets, don’t imagine that Roamers have no homes. Our ‘home’ is among our people, wherever they may be. It’s not a location
but a… a concept.”
“Like family,” Robb said. She nodded, although his comment brought back thoughts of Jess, then her father… and finally Ross
and how hard he had worked to make a success on Golgen. And with that, her anger toward the faceless alien enemy that had
murdered Ross for no reason rose hotter inside her.
She left her coffee untouched on the table and returned her tray to the recycler. Robb looked after her, probably wondering
what he had done wrong. Tasia just wanted to be alone.
