Cadet Flight Methuselah

015

Nim made it to the bridge in record time, walking across the relatively clear aft section of the stretched-out trapezoid which looked out over the battered front half of the Heinlein. Most of the fractured clearsteel had been patched up enough so that the blast shields could be kept lowered, but the view of the bow of the ship was one that was scarred with wide burns and littered with embedded wreckage from the alien dreadnought. It looked like a cold and silent graveyard with the debris tossed about like misshapen tombstones driven into the ground by a hurricane.

The cluster of screens and controls that comprised the telemetry center, what everyone just called the crow's nest, was being gutted by specialist technicians they had taken on when they docked with the Sally Ride to transfer their wounded. They were methodically extracting and copying every bit of sensor information they could coax out of the systems that hadn't been rendered completely useless by the EMP blast. From what she gathered from Calli, half of the computers had never come back up, and by the end of the fight they were running on severely gimped intelligence that couldn't see more than a few hundred thousand kilometers in any given direction. It was lucky they had already calculated and plotted the jump vectors or else the Heinlein would have never been able to clear out.

On the opposite side of the bridge weapons control was in a similar state of disrepair, but huddled shoulder-to-shoulder around the targeting computers were a bunch of military intelligence types whose squinting faces gave her the creeps when she looked at them. They were being overseen by a very closed-faced Colonel Redloader, who had been emergency-recalled from leave and spent most of his time back making death notifications for the marines that had been under his command. One of the military intelligence guys shot her a nasty glare when he noticed she was staring and the man immediately found himself on the receiving end of one of Redloader's trademark gray-eyed death stares. She used to dread being on the receiving end of one of those—everyone swore the antipathy behind his eyes could bore holes through a neutron star. The intelligence officer crumpled like a tin can pitched into a gravity compactor and the Colonel gave her a nod that said she should keep moving. When she raised a hand to salute him he cut her off with a wave and pointed at the door to the captain's office, then went back to keeping an eye on the squirrely men bickering over whatever data they had just pulled out of the railgun array's targeting computer.

She stood at attention outside the door of the captain's office until he opened it to allow her inside. Saluting him, he pointed to a floor-anchored chair and proceeded to ignore her while he took stock of a half-dozen small windows spread out across his table. Behind him flickered three large holographic screens, two dedicated to showing the fore and aft cameras watching the space around the Heinlein. The third was a feed from the port-side hangar deck and she could see Connor was still down there, standing near the coffins that contained his cadet crewmen as he spoke at length with the recently arrived chaplain. With a stifled grin she noticed Sparrow slapping another reflective rectangular sticker to Zen's coffin that read “LEGENDARY” behind the chaplain's back, winking at Connor as he snuck off before he garnering the attention and suspected wrath of the priest.

She noticed a few things missing from the Headmaster Captain's office. He usually had a shelf along the port side wall opposite his small cot that was lined with models of historical navy ships. It was like a small timeline of maritime evolution, a chronological display of vessels that traveled by oar and sail up to those that cruised under the power of nuclear reactors and made the first manned flights to the Jovian moons. That shelf had collapsed with every other one in the attack, and all his models lay broken and scattered on the deck, swept to the side by his feet and ignored in favor of taking care of whatever he was saddled with as the first ship captain to make contact with sentient alien life.

Sitting down and resting her cap on her lap, she sat at attention and waited to see if she was getting court marshaled or simply executed under wartime protocols for assaulting a senior officer. His gray-blue eyes shifted from screen to screen, staring down each one with varying amounts of irritation and anger on his face. Every now and again he would get the familiar expression she and Seig called the “why the fuck am I doing this” face, a pursed-lipped brow-furrowing scowl they had seen quite a bit of during his early days of tenure. Before he had saddled them with the “mentoring” of Keiji and Calli to keep them from having “idle hands” they had spent a lot of time being yelled at in the Headmaster Captain's office.