A ship burned a quick course correction about sixty clicks out. A Mule-class DropShip, from the size of the flare, not a troop ship.
Which was a strange thing for a merchant cadet to worry about.
Even at McKenna, where ship building tied it closely to the Federated Commonwealth, wars and the rumors of wars had seemed distant things. Stations, after all, were neutral territory. Particularly stations as vital to the entire Sphere as McKenna Shipyards.
That sense of isolation had been disturbed a week or so ago when Admiral Kerr, executive officer of the WarShip Robert Davion, had put off the ship’s Captain and over half the crew and taken the vessel out of dock. He’d blasted a DropShip that had challenged him to scrap and two other ships had pounded each other to ruin arguing over his right to take command.
Since then the ships around McKenna, both military and civilian, maintained an uneasy peace. Ostensibly they were all loyal to the Federated Commonwealth, but arguments and debates over who was the rightful ruler choked the comm channels.
Armis caught a glimpse of the WarShip on his next rotation. At this distance it was only a silver spark, of course, moving slowly up from the planet’s south. Its transpolar orbit would fly by a few hundred clicks above their geosynchronous path, ten, maybe twelve, degrees behind the station.
In a position to keep an eye on things.
Some planet-born cadets insisted they couldn’t tell a ship from the starfield beyond it, all the points of light looked the same to them. But none of them had any trouble spotting the eight-hundred-meter WarShip on its thrice daily rounds.
Realizing he needed a course correction of his own, Armis extended his arms again, moving them through less sudden arcs, and allowed the laws of motion to cancel his spin. Satisfied with his new orientation, he blipped his shoulder thrusters through a series of micro burns until he was targeted directly on the palette.
In his own suit he would have made the correction mid-spin, but the standard-issue cadet suit was not as responsive. Or as snug. At sixty-two kilos and one hundred seventy-three centimeters Armis did not consider himself abnormally small, but whoever designed the cadet suits had apparently assumed no one under one ninety was interested in space service. Even with every strap cinched its tightest, he felt swathed in balloons.
Once he was posted to a JumpShip he’d have an issue suit, with much better tech than the Tolan family could ever afford, custom-fitted. Until then, he was resigned to looking like a child playing dress up.
Tucking his knees up, then bending at the waist—reflexively keeping net angular motions at zero—Armis oriented himself for landing. Essentially sitting with his legs extended toward the palette’s upper anchor point.
The palette itself was a hexagonal box, four meters on a side and twenty meters long. This one, according to the manifest, was loaded with grain. Like most containers designed to be muscled in zero-G, it was covered with recessed tie points and hand-holds. This one also had a harpoon, a compressed air cannon that launched a two hundred meter adhesive tow line. A harpoon mounted on a palette made as much sense as a palette drifting free in the first place, but who was he to question the wisdom of the instructors?
Armis flexed his legs slightly at contact, absorbing some of his momentum even as he let the rest carry his upper body forward. Snapping his safety line to a recessed ring as his feet bounced clear, he let his forward motion carry him through a somersault. Stretching his arms akimbo, he brought his total rotation to zero just as his feet once again touched the massive ferrosteel frame. Only then did he engage his magnetic boots, letting the field anchor him firmly to the surface.
“Can’t you ever do anything without showing off, Half Pint?” Demanded a voice over his suit speakers.
It was Brogden. Armis had looked up the term “half pint” the first time the huge Odessian had used it and discovered it meant 240 cubic centimeters of fluid. He had no idea what he had done to earn the nickname, but since Brogden evidently meant no harm by it, he’d accepted it in good spirits.
Turning, Armis found the water cylinder, actually an external tank for the station, a few hundred meters up orbit. Over fifty meters long and perhaps a dozen in diameter, it was bluntly rounded at one end and at the other sported a flared shroud that protected the valve mechanisms. Even with recycling and rationing, a lot of water was lost in a shipyard the size of McKenna.
At this distance the other two cadets appeared perhaps a centimeter tall. The sled, tethered with enough space to give the station’s grappling hooks room to reach the cylinder, was little more than sliver of silver in Kathil’s light.
“If you’d learn to think of yourself as several dynamic systems working together instead of a solid lump,” Armis repeated for perhaps the hundredth time, “You’d waste a lot less energy.”
“I like being a lump.”
Armis shook his head, grinning despite himself. His reply was cut off by another cadet shouting over the all channel.
“They’re shooting!”
“Where away?” asked Jenkins, who salted his speech with every colorful bit of navy jargon he’d learned from trivids. Common wisdom had it he’d need another decade’s practice before he sounded authentic.
“Behind, down orbit!” the same excited voice answered. “The Davion just blasted something!”
Armis pivoted in place, wasting energy shoving against his magnetic boots. Just down orbit were two dissipating clouds of burning gas near a mote that could only be a DropShip. The ship was firing its lasers with apparently random fury. Fighters, he guessed, too small to be seen at this range.
A curse
