Excerpt
UGIS Everguard
Ship Local Date: May 5, 2204
Ship Local Time: 1425
Lieutenant Commander Torrance Black stood on the gunmetal runway that circled Everguard's pod engineering assembly area. The rail was cold against his grip. Machinery ozone seeped through the deck's grate and hung in the open space like acrid memories, unchangeable and vaguely distant.
Everything appeared to be on plan.
Each tube bay stood open, the collection forming a perfectly spaced row of a dozen chambers, their three-meter spans empty, pristinely round, and gleaming with stainless steel beauty. The wormhole pods that went into these tubes were the size of G-class riders—thirty meters tip to tip with rounded cross sections that fit into circular launch tubes. Rugged brown thermal material gave them a stark, utilitarian appearance in the brightly lit assembly area. Each end of the pods was capped with conical black boots of heat-treated alloy, banded with a titanium-steel composite fashioned in the zero-g environment of Aldrin Station.
His staff wore fresh whites. Their voices echoed with professional bearing in the open expanse. A computer reported the status of the automated routine controlling the launch sequence.
"I want these tubes loaded by 1800 hours, folks," he barked with what even he realized was too much vinegar.
"We'll make it, LC," Malloy replied with a quick salute.
Torrance returned the gesture halfheartedly, then stepped into his glass-enclosed office. Malloy was the chief operations officer on this assignment, and trustworthy enough to keep things on track by himself. Torrance settled into his chair, sighed, and stared through a holographic image of the wormhole pod's internal guts.
LC.
Lieutenant commander.
The title echoed in his mind.
That was the thing about rank in the military.
Everyone understood what it meant. Rank labeled a man. It stayed with him. It would not be long before the promotion list was made public—not long before everyone knew where Torrance stood.
He would change the world today. As chief launch engineer, he would release a dozen wormhole pods that would burrow into Alpha Centauri A. Their external shells would burn away inside the star's core, and if at least nine of the twelve systems made it to the target point, they would rend space and create the far end of a wormhole. Raw hydrogen and helium would flow to the other side, where fellow crew members would latch these extradimensional warps to the back end of starships.
Then the universe would be open for the first time.
Faster-than-light travel.
Sirius for breakfast, the Aldebaran double star for dinner.
It would change everything, even the name of the command he worked for. From the moment the pods took hold, Solar Command, the United Government's chief projection of force, would be reborn as Interstellar Command. Everguard—complete with 2,158 crew members and their families, and a soon-to-be obsolete propulsion system—was the first cruiser to carry the United Government Interstellar Ship (UGIS) designation, but it would not be the last.
He supposed he should feel something appropriate.
But Kip Levitt, the ship's propulsion officer, and a man Torrance had gone to school with so many years ago, had been promoted to full commander today.
Torrance had not.
And it didn't take a lifer to know that when a person in the chain of command is passed over for promotion, their career, for all effective purposes, is over.