The Star Carrier Series Books 1-3: Earth Strike, Centre of Gravity, Singularity

“Well, good morning, Lieutenant,” Fifer said, looking up from his workstation. “Not out watching the docking? I think everyone else on the ship is.”

“No room, sir,” Gray replied, seating himself in the link-equipped recliner opposite the desk. “The ship’s lounges and rec areas are all still off-limits.” That had been necessary to provide the large number of Mufrid women on board with an acceptable degree of privacy. He shook his head. “Damn, I thought the Mufrids would be happy to be here. If they’d stayed on Eta Boötis, they’d all be dead now.”

“Oh, I imagine they’ll be grateful enough once they get out of these confining circumstances. Right now they feel trapped, stifled. And they resent us and what they perceive as our ungodly attitudes. I understand a couple of large transports are here to take them the rest of the way to Earth.”

“And good riddance to them.”

“You don’t like them?”

Gray frowned. Commander Leonard Fifer had a way of turning everything into a discussion of what you felt, what you liked or disliked, what you thought. “I don’t mind them. I’m glad we were able to help them. But I’ll be glad to have our ship back when they’re gone.”

“As will we all, Lieutenant.” He chuckled. “I was wondering, though, if you didn’t sympathize with our Mufrid guests on some level?”

“Why? I’m not Muslim.”

“Religion has nothing to do with the question. But it occurs to me that they feel like outsiders on the America. Marginalized. Out of place. Like you.”

Gray had been coming here for sessions with Dr. Fifer every few shipboard days since he’d returned to the America at Eta Boötis. He would have preferred to keep working with Dr. George, but she was assigned to the Marines, not the carrier. He’d heard she was working over in the research labs now, in any case, trying to make sense of the two aliens captured on Eta Boötis IV.

Fifer tended to make him uncomfortable. Of course, he knew that these sessions were supposed to make him uncomfortable. They had to be so, if they were going to help him dig down through the crap and find the roots of what George had called PTED—post-traumatic embitterment disorder.

And fixing that was a prerequisite to his going back on flight status.

Since yesterday, though, he’d been toying with the idea of never going back to flying, of resigning his commission. He’d swung by the Personnel Office yesterday afternoon to see what his options might be.

Unfortunately, he couldn’t just turn in his uniform and walk away. Part of the agreement he’d signed obligated him to ten years of active Confederation military service, if only to pay the government back for the creds they’d invested in his training and his implants. He’d joined the Navy in 2401, but two years had been spent in recruit training, OCS, and flight school. Back in the old days, all of his schooling download time and training would have counted as active duty, but according to the Personnel Office he’d only entered active duty early last year—just in time for Arcturus Station and Everdawn—and he still had more than eight years to serve.

Whether that was as an officer or an enlisted man was up to him. He could resign his commission and become a fleet sailor … though he might have to sign on for more active duty time. Sailors weren’t as valuable in terms of creds and training as were pilots.

The news had put a definite bump in Gray’s career path. Flight officers had status, and a certain amount of privilege. They even had respect, assuming they weren’t a poor squattie kid from the Manhattan Ruins.

He hadn’t made up his mind yet. That was part of what he wanted to talk to the therapist about today. But if he had to stay in the Navy, being a pilot was definitely the way to go. At least when he strapped on a Starhawk, he could boost for cold, hard vacuum and be free, at least for a few hours, free from the constraints of shipboard life, the prejudice of his squadron mates, the rigidity of the rules and regs. Oh, he still faced prejudice and regulations when he was on a mission, sure, but it was different “Outside,” surrounded by stars and a beckoning cosmos. You had your orders, your mission to complete … but you also got to make decisions, even at times to interpret how best to carry out the mission, a singular freedom and feeling of power that he missed as a relatively junior officer on board a large warship with five thousand other officers and men crowded into its habs.

He realized Fifer was still waiting for a response to his statement about Gray’s feeling marginalized, something the two of them had discussed a number of times during the past three weeks.

“I don’t know if I would call it feeling marginalized, sir,” he said. “It is good when I feel like I’m a part of something bigger, something important. Like being a member of the TriBeCa Family back home.”

“And how often do you feel that way, Lieutenant?”

He thought about this. “Not all that often, I guess. The other people in the squadron tend not to let me forget who I am … where I came from.”

“Understandable,” Fifer said. “Navy pilots tend to form a tight little circle, like a fraternity. Anyone not in the circle is an outsider, an unknown quantity. You get in only when you prove yourself.”

“I’ve been proving myself,” Gray insisted. “For a year now!”

“It can take longer than that, Lieutenant. And sometimes it can take forever.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”

Fifer gave a gentle shrug. “You have several paths open to you, as we’ve discussed already. You can resign your commission and become an enlisted man. You can simply turn in your wings, become a non-flight officer. Or you can fold yourself in, hunker down, and ride it out where you are.”

Or I can go back to the Ruins, Gray thought. The hell with the Navy, with the government, with all of it. …

“That is certainly one option,” Fifer told him, “but I can’t recommend it. You would be found. You would be brought back. You would face a court martial for desertion, and you would either serve time in a military prison or you would be reconditioned.”

Gray started. He hadn’t spoken out loud about deserting. “You’re reading my thoughts!”

“Your personal daemon is linked in with the AI coordinating this session,” Fifer told him. “It can pick up surface thoughts, at least, yes. How else do you think I monitor your free-form regressions?”

Gray was trembling, though whether from fear, anger, or some other long-repressed emotion, he couldn’t tell. He was beginning to realize that what he resented most about the Navy was the constant high-tech monitoring, the fact that even when he wasn’t linked in, there were machines and AIs in the Net-Cloud that could follow where he was going, watch where he went, listen in on his conversations, even hear what he was thinking.

“I noticed a peculiar, extremely sharp spike in the intensity of your emotions just now,” Fifer told him. “Can you tell me about what you’re feeling?”

“There’s a lot of stuff,” Gray admitted. “I don’t like the constant snooping, the feeling that AIs and Authority monitors are always looking over my shoulder, watching what I do. And …”

“And what?”

“I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what? The monitoring?”

“No. I don’t like it, but I’m not afraid of it.”

“What then?”

Gray was trying to put it into words, but found he could not.

“I’m … not sure.”

“That’s okay. I’ll tell you what. I’m going to say some words and phrases, list them. Things I mentioned a moment ago, when you had that emotional spike. Just listen to each phrase, think about it. Tell me what you feel.”

Gray was sweating now. “Okay …”

“‘One option.’”

Gray felt nothing, and shrugged.

“‘You would be found.’”

He felt a quiver of emotional discomfort, but he shook his head.

“‘You would be brought back.’”

“No.”

“‘You would face a court martial.’”

Again, he shook his head, but his heart was pounding now. Damn, he hated this kind of probing.