I stopped outside the hab-ring and pulled my handy out of my left sleeve pocket. Two things had to happen if I was gonna have a chance of meeting the captain’s departure schedule. Venus Station was much too large for me to search even just the rings by myself. I texted a quick order to First Sargent Bryans and Sargent Castanza, “Marine Teams 1 and 2 report to docking port ASAP for search and recovery.” Both sargents confirmed receipt immediately, so I had about a minute to do the second thing that needed doing.

Beside me in the corridor was the hatch to the number six head. I popped it open and pulled myself inside. I could feel my body shaking from the adrenaline crash that I had known would follow being a part of events like what-all had just happened on the bridge – the rescue mission, the recall order, and now being sent to recover missing crewmen.

I needed my head clear of the mix of terror and excitement and numb disbelief, and it had to happen in the next thirty seconds. What I wouldn’t give for a presstab or a full night’s sleep. Right. I looked around the head, and saw that the polished chrome mirror caught my reflection face-on, showing my hands in the periphery of my vision. My knuckles were a milky brown from the strain of holding onto the wash basin. It was the only way I could keep them from shaking.

I stared myself dead in the eyes, and took a moment to examine the nebulous interplay between dark brown and an almost amber highlight in each iris. I followed the anatomical contours around my dark, furrowed brow, and down the strong arch of my nose, the… who was I kidding? The deformed skin on my left cheek and the pitting from a long, adolescent war with acne defined my face.

It wasn’t self-pity. I was an officer aboard the newest ship in the system. I was about to lead two teams of marines in a boarding party onto a space station orbiting over the planet Venus on the far side of the sun from Earth. So what if my visage wasn’t one of godlike beauty like Colonel Kelly, or a mature authority like Doc Godderson? I’d just have to make up for the lack of automatic authority someway else.

I looked down at my hands, now released from the wash basin’s death grip, and I saw that they were no longer shaking. My handy chimed that the marines were waiting for me at the air lock. It was game time.

Space stations have taken many forms over the nearly two centuries that humans have lived in space. The earliest were little more than pressure chambers cobbled together to make tiny habitats that rode on the very edges of Earth’s atmosphere. Modern stations are much more complex and variable, both in form and function.

On the small end of the scale are the dozens of solar weather observatories with their spartan living quarters tethered behind gargantuan radiation shields. At the other end of the scale are the ongoing projects to hollow out asteroids of various sizes in the Main Belt, built as alternatives to the more conservatively constructed outposts on Vesta and Ceres.

In between the two extremes are hundreds of orbital hotels around earth, military depots around Mercury, Venus, and Mars, and so many academic research posts that only the computers could really account for them all. Oh, and there’s the Abandonist colony orbiting the sun at about one AU opposite of Earth. Like their population, the Abandonist facilities are a jumble of ad hoc habitats made out of abandoned and retired vessels, conjoined in collective rejection of the laws and politics of the rest of humanity.

Venus Orbital Station, operated primarily by private contractors under the auspices of NATO Space Command, is one of the multiple middling-sized military depots. Imagine a grain silo with five rings stacked around it, blown up more than a hundred times in size, and spun around like a top. It’s fairly standard, so if you’ve ever been to an orbital hotel you’ve probably seen some variation of the design. Most of the station is dedicated to warehousing stores for military vessels, but there is so much space in the habitat rings that sections are often rented out for non-military purposes. At any given time, there might be as many as two hundred people living and working aboard Venus Station.

It’s size made emergency recall of Kitty Hawk personnel an exercise in controlled chaos. Lieutenant Colonel Kelly had been quick to return aboard with Marine Team Two because they were running calisthenic drills in the cargo hold just adjacent to our docking berth. Godderson and her medics were asleep in their bunks when the alert went out, and had reported from quarters within moments. It was better than ten minutes from the recall before Captain Wright stormed up the ladder and onto the bridge – a not inconsiderable feat given his mass and the acrobatics involved, null-g and magnetics or not.

“Report!” he bellowed. Kelly was the only one else on the bridge, and her gentile stoicism from halfway across the arch was all I needed to know that I was on the hook.

I stood and stepped forward, straining my neck from the awkward angle required to address the captain from where I stood. “Sir, orders from Admiral Thompson came through marked urgent.” I hesitated.

“Spit it out, lieutenant. You ordered an emergency recall, so they’d better have been end of the fucking world orders!” He was being loud, but I suddenly felt certain that his demeanor was little more than an affectation. Was he-?

“JSS Himeji is missing and presumed lost in Ceres sector, sir.” I watched Captain Wright’s face for another clue of what I’d just glimpsed beneath his surface expression, but all I saw was calculation while he shuffled to the command station.

He started reading from his console as soon as he sat down, and only looked up long enough to see that I was still waiting for more questions from him. “Is there something else, lieutenant?”

I glanced back at my station’s display to confirm, and said, “Miss Lowell and PFC Smith haven’t reported in yet. The rest of the board is full, sir.”

The captain waved his hand vaguely and continued studying his display. Kelly, as if on cue from her tactical station, coughed mildly. “Perhaps you should go make certain that they return to the ship in a timely manner, Miss Nocona.”

Something seemed contrived about the order, as though the grown-ups wanted to wait for me to leave so they could have a conversation without kids around, but didn’t want me to know it. I couldn’t help but feel flustered by the dismissal.

“Quickly, lieutenant.” The captain said without looking up. “We’ll be departing at 0600 with or without any tardy crewmen.”

A glance at the chronometer showed it was 0543. I scrambled over my magnetics to the ladder, and managed half of a “right away sir” before running into Estevez, the pilot, as he came up. He looked crosswise at me, and I mumbled an apology as I ducked down the ladder-way towards the docking port.

Third Shift on the Bridge rotation was dull work. With Kitty Hawk moored to Venus Orbital Station and most of her crew on short leave, it was pretty dead. So imagine my surprise when twenty minutes into watch the command display lit up with an ‘URGENT ACTION’ alert from engineering.

“Kitty,” I addressed the ship’s computer and cleared the alert from the display. “Call down to the Engine room, please?”

“Of course, sir.” The computer’s voice was vaguely feminine, and carried an undertone one might expect from a teener. There was a click, and a very pale but very shaggy face appeared on my console.

“Engineering, this is Welsch.” His eyes shifted as though he was making space on his display for our conversation. I tried not to react at his subtle wince when he saw my face. “Yes, can I help you Lieutenant Nocona?”

It took considerable effort not to roll my eyes at his feigned formality. “There was an alert, Mister Welsch.” I emphasized the honorific and saw him wince again, this time not so subtly. I softened my tone a touch, and asked, “How’s everything going down there?”

“Oh, nothing big.” He was suddenly distracted by something off to his right, and held up his hand, “just a…”

He left the display’s field of vision, and there were several seconds of loud clanging picked up by his audio feed before he returned somewhat more disheveled than before. “Just a minor coolant leak, sir. I’ve got flow routed around the damaged primary until the Chief can take a look at it in the…”

He disappeared from the display again, and there was a single very loud metallic thud. He sprang back into view, but it took him a moment to remember what he had been saying. “Yeah, no big deal. The reactor’s fine. Everything’s within tolerance.”

I nodded. “Sure thing, Mister Welsch.”

“Look, Cynthia,” he interjected, looking- what, sad? confused?

“Not now, Roger.” I cut him off before he could dig any further. “Be sure to send me a damage report asap.”

It looked for a second like he was going to argue, but all he said was, “yes sir.”

“I’ll leave you to it.” I cleared out the screen, and felt content that the night’s drama was done.

“Captain,” the computer spoke over the bridge comset. “We are being relayed a communication form NATO command on Earth.”
“It’s just me, Kitty.” I blushed at the title. It was a technicality of regulations held over from the days of the great ocean-faring navies, that the highest ranking officer in the chain of command aboard a ship be called ‘Captain,’ even if it was only for a short time. “Captain Wright is off duty aboard Venus Station. I’m just keeping his seat warm”
“Well, you are Captain while he is away, Miss Nocona. So you want me to show you the message or what?” Kitty was the ship’s computer. Apparently when they wrote her personality, they thought “childishly obnoxious” would let the crew interact more naturally with her or something.

“Go ahead. Put it up on the main display?” It was the biggest screen on the ship, and I always enjoyed seeing things blown up to the size of an entire wall panel.

For a moment I thought Kitty hadn’t heard me, then there was a burst of screen snow—EM distortion across the video feed—followed quickly by a haggard looking older man in a Japanese fleet uniform, sitting in his command couch and looking much the worse for wear. He was saying something very quickly in what must have been Japanese, while the lights of a battle-stations alert intermittently bathed him in red then white light.

“What’s he saying? Is there more to the message than just the video file?”
“Hold on a second or three, and I’ll have it in English for you. That’s Captain Nakahito from Himeji! Their computer Tsuru was really nice to me when we met before the shakedown.” Kitty liked to babble while she focused on a task. Yet another programmer’s attempt to make her more personable, no doubt. “Here we go. I’ll restart the file.”
The screen burst with static again, but this time when Nakahito spoke it was in standard English.

“…is significant anomalous radiation, and there appear to be significant amounts of debris in the area, though none of our sensing equipment is making any sense. We will continue to search the region for evidence of the–”

There was another burst of static, then the display went dark before the face of an elderly woman with an admiral’s insignia on her uniform appeared.

“Captain Wright, at 2039 Zulu last night, Port Ceres lost contact with Himeji and was unable to regain it. This morning, several observation ports throughout the system were tasked to search for her, and found only trace evidence. The Japanese have asked for help on this, and we’ve agreed. Your orders are to make haste to Ceres, and use all necessary caution in ascertaining the fate of Captain Nakahito and his crew. Tensions are high right now, and nobody wants to point fingers and end up with a second Belt War. But if the Chinese are behind this, we need to know the why and how. Further information is attached, including what we know about Himeji’s mission. Godspeed, Jemarcus. Thompson out.”
“Well, fuck,” I said with characteristic eloquence. “Can you raise the Captain, Kitty?”
“I’m sorry, sir, but the station’s computer is a real blockhead. He won’t let me access anything over there.”
I sighed and shook my head in mild frustration. “Did it occur to you to page the station’s comm officer on the standard frequency? Make sure you tag it highest priority.”
“Oh, I guess I could do that too, Captain. I promise I will try that first, next time. On your screen, sir.”

There was a burst of comm noise, then the swarthy face of Venus Station’s communications second snapped into focus on my command display. What was his name? Rafe? Ralph?

“Rawlins, it’s Nocona on Kitty Hawk.” I tried not to smile over the link. That rarely went well.

He grimaced, of course.

“What do you want, Kitty Hawk?”
I could feel the sudden burn of adrenaline in my chest as I built up the importance of what I was about to say.

“We have a Priority One over here. I need a Return Call for Captain Wright and all Kitty Hawk crew aboard Venus Station.”

Rawlins’ eyes glazed over for a moment, and I realized I was holding my own breath. For a second time in fifteen minutes, I felt my face flush. Only for a moment, though.

“Roger that, Kitty Hawk. I’ll past it along.”

* * *

Lieutenant Colonel Kelly climbed up the ladder onto the bridge, and I quickly evacuated from the command station. I had a moment to stare at the riveted decking beneath my boots, and reminded myself that Kitty Hawk’s executive officer was just another mortal like the rest of us—not a goddess chiseled from living marble. She, of course, spent the entire time staring me right in the face, silently judging my demeanor.

“Report, Lieutenant?” The gentleness of the command did nothing to belie the self-assured physicality behind it.

“Orders from Admiral Thompson, sir. The Japanese lost Himeji in the Ceres sector of the Belt.” I paused to breathe, and felt my ears turn red. Addressing instructors at the academy was one thing,but even two weeks into service aboard Kitty Hawk hadn’t cured me of getting the jitters when addressing senior officers.

The Lieutenant Colonel waited through my pause, presumably to let me put my thoughts in order, then interjected right before I opened my mouth to continue.

“So what does she want us to do about it? Fly out to the Belt and rescue the poor fucks?” She stalked from the ladderway and stood over me, her iron gaze somehow daring me to admit I was joking—then she snorted and let out a half-hearted chuckle. “Relax, kid. You made the right call, waking us up. Queue up the vid for the Captain, and move over to the Communications station to monitor check-ins.”

My face got tight with an uncontrolled grimace. I turned away to hide my reluctance, and said a quick “Aye, sir,” hoping she hadn’t seen.

Kitty greeted me at the Comm station and switched the display on before I got settled in my seat.

“The medical team is reporting. Doctor Godderson says that both her medics are at their stations.” A graphic of the crew manifest popped up over Kitty’s olden LoLCats background of the day. “And Marine Team Two reports all members are at their posts.” The medics and the three marines from Team Two switched from red to black on the manifest.

“Go ahead and list me and the XO as checked in too, Kitty.”

“Of course, Lieutenant.” Quick as she was with calculations, sometimes Kitty missed obvious details of procedure. I guess that’s why they still have us flesh-and-blood people flying around in space instead of just leaving it up to the machines.