KETTY'S SUBDIVISION Wattys2017

Chapter 6-Part II

The last three years had been hell, but her childhood was a different story growing up near the Fault-line. On her old home planet, thousands of passenger ships streaked through the system every day. The Fault-line didn't touch the planet in her home system, rather it bent clear of the sun's mass and intersected space above the orbital plane. She recalled watching the commotion from her father's small space skiff as a ship arrived to off load people and goods. A thousand shuttles would streak from the planet's surface in a mad rush to complete the task at hand. It was synchronized chaos getting everything done in time and she marveled how no one got killed in the process.

The Fault-lines had been uncovered long ago, stripped from another dimension like gold from a mine, they were found to permeate the known galaxy. Galactic North and South, East and West, they followed hidden lines of force in another dimension. The mining process was a complex operation that would uncover a small portion akin to a subway station, leaving the rest of the line hidden. She remembered her heart pounding in her chest as the space skiff orbited the busy station, not quite old enough to pilot herself, she was still close enough to be dwarfed by the massive structures that surrounded the openings. The Fault-line tubes were wide enough for any number of ships to travel through unhindered by other traffic.

Each ship was a double ended affair, the same at both ends, a mirror image coming and going. It was time locked into the dimensional Fault-lines, never able to deviate from its course. You could never tell if a ship was coming or going when it was sitting at the station. It would take the smallest difference in electrical pressure to catapult a Fault-line ship along the Birkeland current, so complex drive motors were not an issue.

One thing was on Georgiana's mind now, freedom. But that freedom wouldn't bring satisfaction, just as revenge held no cure. Her luck had changed. She was able to skip through customs unhindered. Nothing stood in her way as she escaped the domain of the Gort.

She found herself on the streets of Padgett, a backwater world in the rough territory known as the human recruiting grounds. It was dismal, but some of Subdivisional Space Command's best recruits came out of here. It was easy for her to gain a new identity, pleasing the local scum was a small price to move on from her past.

But getting the implant removed was a different story. She had shacked up with the surgeon for a week before he performed the delicate operation. After that, she left him.

She could live on the street, or join the military. It was an easy decision when she saw the poster for the mysterious Quantum Boat.

"Fat chance you'll ever wind up on one of those," a grizzled old man said as she gazed at the billboard.

"It's worth a try, don't you think?"

"Takes a special breed. You got what it takes?" She left him there with his question unanswered, confident she had. The night was dark and the galaxy was big, but the image of the holographic poster was stuck in her head. She was mesmerized by the captions.

"We can't keep silent about this."

The whole Subdivision should know about the deployment of a Black Hat Quantum Boat, but it didn't. The poster alluded to a promising career on distant shores she would later find was far from the truth. Prestigious and secret to be sure, but not glamorous. What kind of men and women really worked on the boat?

That was an answer she intended to find out.

Boot camp passed in a blur of pain. There was no gender segregation and she got beat, but it was child's play compared to the Gort. Thriving in the harsh environment, she got fast tracked to fill the desperate void of recruits needed for immediate deployment. There wasn't a war, but something secret was going on and she would be on the front lines. The graduation ceremony was an emotional time for all but her. She stood at attention as fathers cried with family pride, yet she was unmoved. By its very nature, the quantum ship was bathed in anonymity and for her it was a relief to be hidden in obscurity. Not that she had done anything wrong, but healing came with solitude.

Two hours after graduation, when all the emotions had settled, the true journey began. She was used to close quarters, but this was ridiculous. Three thousand recruits took a large shuttle from Camp Konstancy out to a Fault-line station. There was one view port.

"Holy crap!" Private Jerome bellowed. "I've never seen anything like this." The rest of them strained at their imagination, depending on his eyes only. "It looks like a Fault-line station. But it's small, one tube, and one ship." Their brains grappled at the notion. They only knew massive stations servicing millions. Everything about a Fault-line was text book big.

"Where are we?"

"How big is it?"

"What the heck do you see?" The shuttle nosed into a healthy docking port, still they had to exit weightless one at a time through the small hatch.

A buff Sergeant yelled at them. "You ladies get used to single file, this is your life from here on out." The hatch was tight, but with precise coordination Georgiana slipped through feet first without touching. She could tell by cursing others weren't as adept.

There before them was the double ended ship nestled into the bristling energy of the fault. Their hair stood on end as they walked to the loading portals, three thousand cramming into a single cylinder with rows of seats, now all empty. By the time she reached the other end, artificial gravity gained control and she took a seat on the hard bench. Now quarters were really tight, allowing them to feel the true confines of what they would soon endure. Her lungs grasped at the sparse molecules of air and her body screamed, let me out.

There was a lot of yelling and infighting. One recruit gagged as his senses were inundated by the tight smell of sweat. Adam's nose cast a shadow on his down turned lips which were etched in a constant frown that wrinkled his chin into a shriveled ball. With the proper hat, his bushy eyebrows and square cut shoulders would have pegged him as Russian if the human genome hadn't been watered down by time. Even now, he felt a transformation. There was no escape, no turning back, no one weak enough to take out his anger. Every nerve fiber struggled under the claustrophobia.

"Maker help us!" a bleary eyed red head across from Adam moaned.

Adam hated creator talk. Why should he believe in something that made him so ugly? He had killed a man, and the memory haunted him. The grey blanket of shame was suffocating, leaving a stagnant smell he could taste in his mouth. No! If there was a creator, he wouldn't be this way, so it was logical, there was no creator. Those memories were like flashes of lightning, rare and far between. There was no rain in his life now, just a constant ringing he had learned to ignore. He had no remorse.

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