Task Force Mars - Kevin Dockery [8]
He didn’t see any visual change, but he felt it immediately. Whereas at first his straps had been holding him in the chair, he now felt the cushions against his butt and his back. Settling into the seat like he was flopping down to watch a Redskins game back home in Alexandria, he leaned back and watched the world fall away.
“This,” Jackson said to Captain Carstairs, “is traveling in style, sir.”
“Yes, Lieutenant,” the CO said with an easy grin. “It sure is.”
Sanders, awestruck, for once had nothing to say.
Six decks below, Chief Ruiz was settled in a more spartan but still comfortable chair in the goat locker—the nearly sacred domain belonging to the chief of the boat. The COB, Master Chief Curt Swanson, had invited Ruiz to join him for the start of the trip. After seeing that his Teammates were securely set up in their quarters just below on H Deck, Ruiz had cheerfully agreed.
The cabin was the most spacious on H Deck, which also contained quarters for the other NCOs as well as large lockers for rocket storage. The best thing about the goat locker was that Swanson got a window—two of them, actually. The small round portholes revealed a view of space just beyond the hull of the frigate. The COB also had enough space for several storage cabinets and a table large enough to seat four for a game of cards.
If the captain embodied the brain of a warship, it was the chief of the boat who most closely personified its heart and soul. Swanson had impressed Ruiz as bringing a very good heart to the Pegasus. He’d been in the navy for twenty years, with most of that time spent in subs.
“As soon as they announced the space frigate program, I volunteered,” Chief Swanson explained as the two men shared cups of lemonade, the tart liquid slightly enhanced for purely medicinal purposes, albeit in violation of U.S. Navy regulations. “I was sick of living underwater for half the year and figured they could use someone with a good head on his shoulders.”
“Better view than you can get out of a sub,” Ruiz noted, nodding at the nearest porthole. His eyes were drawn continually to the black void beyond, the dazzling array of stars that looked so much closer, so much brighter, than they did from the surface of Earth.
“Plus, with these Shamani running and flying all over the place, I figured this was where the action would be,” Swanson continued.
Ruiz nodded. “So you don’t trust them?” he asked.
“What the hell. I don’t know. Who knows?” the COB observed. “I get the creeps from those red eyes, though, I’ll tell you that. And I’ve just seen ’em in pictures and on the vidscreens.”
“I hear you. I haven’t met one, either,” Ruiz replied, sipping from his cup. He craned his neck and saw that the space station had disappeared behind them almost in a blink and the moon and the Earth were shrinking behind them. He knew they were going faster than any human-built ship had ever traveled, yet the massive gravitational force and powerful engines were not causing so much as a ripple in his cup.
“Splendid libation,” he added courteously, hoisting an informal toast.
“Thanks, Chief. I’m from Kentucky, you know, and there are some things we’ve been doing right down there for quite a few centuries now.”
“Hear, hear.”
They passed a few companionable hours. A glance through the porthole proved that by now, Earth was only a little bit brighter than some of the other bright lights of the galaxy. Ruiz stopped trying to think about how fast they were going; it made his head hurt. There was no sense of day and night on a spaceship, but when his watch showed 1830 hours, the master chief gave his thanks, said farewell, and went down to check on the Team.
The goat locker and the other cabins and lockers on G Deck all surrounded the central axis, a cylindrical tube of hatches and ladders that gave access to the upper and lower decks all the way from the bow to the stern. Ruiz opened the lower hatch with a push of a button and dropped down the ladder into the middle of H Deck.
This was one of the most