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Eclipse

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by K. A. Bedford

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Eclipse A Novel by K. A. Bedford Chapter 1 My name is James Robert Dunne. I joined Eclipse when I was twenty-one years old, a fresh graduate from the Royal Interstellar Service Academy in Winter City, Ganymede, and I was ready to join the crew of Her Majesty’s Starship Eclipse for my first three-year hitch of active space duty. The trip up the Ganymede Stalk from the Academy took forever, or so it felt. I couldn’t sleep, even with my headware doing its best to tweak my alpha waves. I sat fidgeting, uncomfortable in my shuttle seat for the whole 35,000-­kilometer trip, trying not to think about where I was heading, and what I was leaving behind. This time tomorrow, I kept thinking, I’ll be an officer serving aboard a starship, charting un­explored space! Which, it strikes me now, says a lot about me. You’d think, after all the crap I had been through at the ­Academy, I wouldn’t still be quite this naïve or idealistic about it. But I was. Some diamond-hard core of belief in “The Dream” ­remained, even as part of me dreaded the prospect. As bad as the Academy had been, it ­had occurred to the more rational part of my mind that active space duty could be like Academy life to the nth power. All the same, my naïve, dreamy side was in charge during that long trip upStalk, filling my mind with lofty ideas about being out there in the dark, beyond the lights of ­human civilization, away from everything. I even, and I hesitate to record this, considered that this might be an ­opportunity for me to find myself. Maybe. It might also, I thought, be a chance to get away from my past. My stomach was fluttery all the long way up to geosynch. A lot of the time I fought my seat, trying to get comfortable, and thought about what was left of my family. Some family! Dad too busy on Europa, and Trish back on Mars. She at least was good to her word. She had said she wasn’t going to watch me do this, after everything that had happened. She wasn’t going to stand there and watch me march off into the worst decision I ever made, and she didn’t. Didn’t even send a note. Some sister, I thought. And I certainly didn’t expect to hear from Mom. I’m not sure if she even thinks of herself as my mother these days, or if she even knew I was in training. I remember having fantasies about how one day I’d take some Service leave and head over to New Jerusalem and see what the hell Mom’s doing there. This was one of those plans you have that the realistic part of you knows you’ll never carry out. Mom left when I was eight, when things were “dif­ficult,” the euphemism we use to describe those days. Would she ­remember me? What if she told me to turn around and leave? Dad once mentioned something about how she even had a new name now and a good ­Muslim husband, a new family. A new life. It was hard and painful to think about so I tried not to. During the ride up, the other passengers passed the time the usual ways: lost in virtuum, chatting, playing games, or reading. A woman next to me was crocheting a tablecloth from real cotton thread. She said the thread had been produced on a genuine antique spinning wheel, not nanofabricated. Even I knew it must have been worth a small fortune. I tried to relax and not bother her. When she asked, indicating my spanking new uniform, if I was heading for a space deployment, I said, “That’s right, yes. I’m kinda nervous. First time.” I remember grinning and that my smile felt like a wince of pain. She told me about her own time in the Service, working shore duty, clerical stuff mostly, and how she had met her late husband. The closer we got to the geosynch spaceport, the more nervous I got; time seemed to crawl; I felt like I was ­being hauled up towards my future, but I could also feel the tug of my past, a gravity of grief. We pulled in at the geosynch station on time, with little fuss and less fanfare. Once I had my kit bag, I moved through the crowded station to level nine of the shuttle terminal ­complex and found the Service kiosk where I went through pre-boarding processing with disposable officials, checking orders, verifying identity, crisp salutes, stern smiles, and wishes of good luck. After that came the long wait for my boarding call. I drank a lot of bad coffee. I was early, even more than standard security checks ­required. Tension gripped my gut; the sea-cheese sandwiches I had eaten on the Stalk-shuttle might have been a bad idea, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to throw up. Pacing back and forth, fidgeting, I listened to the clock in my headware ­reporting every five minutes, and dodged airborne security bots. With all my heart I wanted to be gone, away from here — the familiar world. I wanted my new life to start. I spent a lot of time among the gawking tourists at the big windows of the upstairs observation deck, away from the aromatic clamor of the shops below. My sweaty palms pressed against the fiber-diamond window surfaces as I stared out — a nauseatingly moony, love struck kid — at the object of my desire: the splendid enormity of the deep-space cruiser HMS Eclipse, moored outside, taking on fuel, supplies, and a few crewmen. She filled the visible sky, her dazzling whiteness blotting out the dark curve of Jupiter’s night side. Eclipse was a grand old lady of the stars, one of the first wholly nanofactured ships in the Service. Unlike her blocky, chunky predecessors, Eclipse was long and sleek through the core to the engine module, the whole ship shaped like an elongated teardrop. She was eight hundred meters from nose to the radiator array that surrounded the shrouded power plant exhaust vents like a vast chrome spider web. The distant sun caught the curves and sleek lines of Eclipse’s outer hull, gleaming off the centimeter-thick layer of cross-linked woven polydiamond ­armor. In the unlikely event of combat, that armor could shift within seconds into a black, sensor-hostile skin; she would effectively disappear. Eclipse probed beyond the edge of human space, looking for worlds with potential for colonization, or that were ripe for resource exploitation. She also did a little science on the side. It was considered gently exciting duty; a good first ­assignment for a starry-eyed young officer in the Service. I wiped my hands on my pressed cotton handkerchief, and folded it back into my white jacket pocket, absently noticing that it was getting hard to keep the folds in the handkerchief. I might need to go and get a new one from one of the vending fabs. “Kinda makes you feel like a little kid, huh?” It was a warm female voice right behind me. I turned and saw a striking young woman, an officer about my age, her dark skin lit by large, amused brown eyes and a warm smile. She sported a vermilion three-millimeter mohawk down the center of her scalp — a ­provocative look for a Service officer. She stood there, arms crossed, looking at the ship. “You pulled Eclipse, too, huh?” she asked, a tone in her voice suggesting she wasn’t ­entirely delighted. I wasn’t sure if her displeasure was aimed at the ship or me, or both. “Yes, yes I did,” I said, stunned that this gorgeous woman was speaking to me. Suddenly I felt foolish and gawky, my arms and legs sticking out all over, my mouth dry. “I’m James—” “Dunne, right? I think I saw you a couple of times around the Academy. You were always out right-dressing flag poles and doing endless push-ups for the provosts.” I remembered the right-dressing-the-flag-pole routine with cold dread. You have to stand next to the pole, right arm ­extended horizontally from your shoulder, your fist clenched so that it just touched the pole, and then stand like that for hours. Frequently in the rain. I felt myself blushing, and then blushing more at the blush. “That was me. Always in trouble. Still, what doesn’t kill you, eh?” “Yeah, I spent a bit of time with that flag pole myself, to be honest!” she said, laughing. She had a dazzling smile; an infectious laugh. “Oh, I’m sorry. Very rude. I’m Sorcha Riley, Spacecraft Services Officer Level 1 Engineering.” We shook moist hands and felt awkward. Sorcha laughed good-naturedly to cover the moment. “I was just thinking,” I said, glancing at the ship, smiling hesitantly, “about when I was a little kid, the first time I saw a starship from the windows of an orbital ferry.” “You have memories like that, too? Oh God, we are gonna get on just fine!” Surprised, I stared, but then remembered to finish the story. “It-it was on a trip from Ganymede to Mars with my family. It was this pre-nano Cunard-class liner, Royal Star, 156,000 tonnes of her empty. Packing a power plant of four clustered Farber-Rheinhart 200-megawatt—” Sorcha interrupted: “Oh, oh!” she said, grinning, touching my forearm, “no, that’s not right. You say it was the Royal Star?” Where she touched my arm felt terribly warm. It was hard to concentrate for a moment. She went on, one of those people who have no idea of the effect they have on others, “The Royal Star’s drives were arranged in a straight in-line four-pack with superfluid reverse-cooling until her plant refit in ’09 under new owners. After the refit, the drives were arranged in a ­diamond-cluster for improved harmonic efficiency with stasis-positive vent cooling for hot-start capability, and uprated the nominal output to 215 megawatts per core.” She laughed, but good-naturedly. “Basically.” “Wow, Queen of the Shipspotters!” I said, laughing as well, but not as easily, trying not to feel embarrassed. She looked accustomed to accolades. “Ah, whatever. I’m a bit of an engine-geek. Sorry.” She looked actually ­concerned for my embarrassment, surprising me. “Just made me think of my brother,” I said, turning to look back at Eclipse. Without realizing it, I was thinking about all the ship’s vital statistics, the way she was written up in Jane’s Starships and Space Vehicles. Thinking, too, about Colin’s room in our house in Hastings, back on Mars, the wall displays dense with starship construction charts, floor plans, holostatic renderings and Service PR images. Colin’s room was a shrine to star travel. “Oh?” she asked, “What’s he like?” I could have sworn she was asking out of genuine interest. She was looking at me, and not at Eclipse, which made her the only person here at the windows who wasn’t. Even I was looking at the ship, trying not to think about this very brainy, very attractive woman chatting with me. In my experience, such women didn’t usually notice the likes of me. All the same, I felt myself smiling a little. “He — Colin, his name was Colin — he was the one who told me all that about the Royal Star, telling me this huge thing out there was a ‘rooly-trooly starship’.” I laughed at this memory of Colin’s hands: one on my shoulder, the other pointing out the ­window at the gleaming, streamlined pale-blue-and-white beauty of Royal Star. Sorcha laughed again, entertained but baffled. “‘Rooly-trooly?’” “Ah. It’s an Australian thing. Sorry. It means ‘really truly’, genuine.” “I thought I recognised that accent!” she said, grinning. I shrugged, bobbed my head. “Anyway,” I went on, I got all this stuff from Colin...” “Maybe he should’ve joined the Service,” Sorcha said, glancing over at Eclipse, then back at me. I looked away from the ship. “I guess so,” I said. She hovered next to me, watching the ship. Her face glowed with station light reflected off Eclipse’s hull. Good grief, I thought, feeling self-conscious and ­stupid, and suddenly very nervous; only now did I realize who this was. Sorcha Riley was someone I knew only by rep­utation: she had been notorious at the Academy, ­graduating in the top three percent overall, despite numerous discipline problems, and hence her own run-ins with the provosts and having to right-dress the flag pole. The received wisdom of cadet gossip said these troubles — she was particularly noteworthy for pursuing activist causes — would be sure to hold her back. She was ambitious, ­determined, and too cool to live, they said. But she got through and with style. By contrast, I graduated 145th in a field of 400 and was considered a plodder. Where I thought this posting to Eclipse a fantastic piece of luck, Sorcha must have been a little disappointed. Thinking as fast as I could to cover the embarrassment gap, I asked, voice perhaps too loud, “You want to get some coffee or something while we wait?” She grinned, “Sure,” and pushed off, heading for the nearby fabs. Sorcha said, “So, James, what did you wind up getting?” I liked that she sounded actually interested; she wasn’t just asking out of politeness. After life at the Academy, and learning to read the subtext in the subtext in everything people said to you, it was surprising. I’d always heard about Sorcha that she was difficult and hard to get on with. In fact, she seemed like the most natural person I’d ever met. “SSO1, like you; Helm.” Level 1 posts were the lowest form of life in the Service, somewhere below tubeworms and lichen, and traditionally given the worst jobs. We found a Huang coffee vending fab next to a few that would make cheap luggage and budget-quality generic brand clothing. In the absence of a live disposable to take our orders, we grappled with the machine’s verbal interface, and in time coaxed the thing into producing two cups of coffee that came close to what we wanted. Sorcha pronounced the coffee’s flavor and heat “within acceptable tolerances” but swore she could build a better fab from the contents of the back pocket of her pants. I believed her. In fact, even then I was probably in that precarious spot where you secretly know you’re falling for someone, while knowing you are absolutely not her type, not suited in any intellectual way, and certain to be blown away by the first handsome, brainy engineering geek she encountered. I was used to this sort of scenario. I had a history of finding myself infatuated with unattainable women. Fortunately, Academy life had kept me far too busy — to say nothing of all the time I spent in the ­Infirmary following disciplinary sessions — to pursue those hopeless causes. Not that it stopped me thinking about such matters, of course. For a few minutes we stood around bitching about the quality of food from different brands of fab machines, and swapping tales of how we lived at the Academy on fabbed noodles and soy sauce from what we called “BlandBrand” machines, sometimes for weeks on end, because we were so broke and desperate for food. I didn’t mention how I had made it harder on myself in the later years by ­de­liberately not keeping a junior cadet to look after my needs — Trish had ­already given me grief about this. ­Academy living was damned expensive by the time you paid rent, bought access time at the library for all your classes, contributed to the ­tutors’ pay, paid for access to simulators, paid for flight time and purchased study ­materials. A lot of cadets had to either get big loans or work a couple of part-time crap jobs on the side — disposable-level work — just to get by with all the other ­obligations. Sleep was a luxury you earned on graduation, and faked in the meantime with dodgy headware patches. “And,” Sorcha added, “getting the damned provosts to leave you the hell alone. That cost a fortune in itself!” She swallowed a big mouthful, grimacing and looking into the bottom of the cup. I nodded, knowing all about the way the provosts — senior cadets appointed to make sure cadets stuck to the regs — made life wretched for everyone else. Any and all punishments short of execution seemed within their ­purview to hand out, but they seemed to like giving out some more than others. We figured those guys couldn’t get laid any other way but through force so it was always worse for the female cadets. There were old folk tales from way back — before Earth’s ­destruction — that things for most women had been pretty good. These stories were laughed at, of course, particularly by women these days. The general consensus was that if such stories were true, then when Earth died, so did a lot of other things. Women were welcome in the Service now, no questions asked, but only as long as they didn’t get in the way. The few senior women in the Service treated female ­cadets just as badly as senior men treated their juniors. Power, it seems, knew no gender bias, and wouldn’t easily be challenged. Sorcha and I sipped a while in stranger-silence, ­staring around, wondering what to say to each other, but also glad to have someone else there, feeling the same nerves. Sometimes we tossed around stupid cadet jokes, bitched about tutors we hated. Eclipse was attracting a lot of ­attention from tourists and business drones in transit. The observation deck ­windows were almost completely ­obscured by clumps of gawking civilians. It was strange to think, while looking at that ship, about all the grief and misery I had endured to get here. I had come so close to quitting the whole damn Service several times. I had even seriously contemplated killing a couple of people, especially Phil Dewey, the senior cadet who had “kept” me, and for the things he and his pals did to me in the name of fun, but that was nothing revolutionary. Most years at the Academy there was at least one case of a junior cadet murdering his senior. Despite all this, I felt I had somehow survived the worst the Service had to offer and I was still here, and about to board that beautiful ship. To tell the embarrassing truth, I felt smug. However, what I didn’t know was that the Service, despite everything I experienced at the Academy, was not nearly done with me — and I was not nearly done with it. CONTINUED Read the author biography

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