Vanguard Word Update

2k words

***

“I’d better not, cause if I see you at the bottom of that board again…” He let that bit hang in the air, turning his gaze to Samiha. “Not even the Kith’sla’s words will save you. Take my advice and can whatever issues you two have, for your own sakes.”

Marek left without another word, leaving Samiha and Cadell with wide eyes but thoughts of relief.

Chapter 4: Radio Silence

Ears open, eyes closed, Petty Officer Eleanor thought over and over, leaning back in her chair, adjusting the cups of her headset as she settled in for hour number twelve. Her station was a mess of discarded granola wrappers empty coffee cups that left ring stains on the terminals, the dashboards overwhelmed by dials and sliders and switches.  The electronics formed a short arc from left to right, leaving her with about four feet of space between the dashes and the door, which wasn’t quiet long enough for her to put her feet up (a discovery she’d made on day one, hour three).

She flicked her ponytail from her shoulder, her eyes shifting left and staring boredly at the computer screen there.  Projected onto the display was a three-dimensional map of the Cordon, represented as a couple hundred small blips. The blips were stretched across three solar systems of space, curving in a gentle arch and forming a bulge in the middle, not unlike the workspace Eleanor sat behind.

The blips at the top of the Cordon (top being relative only in this context) were pulled back slightly from those in the middle. Same went for those at the bottom, giving the Cordon a shape like that of a hammock on its side. The bulge was aimed towards the Galactic West, bordering the territory of the Inner Reaches. Being one of the few systems in which the Inner and Outer Reaches touched, it was the most obvious place the Alliance had seen to keep a constant monitor over.

Eleanor had studied the Cordon down to a t, and knew the most useless facts about its structure. Like how blip number one-ninety was skewed slightly towards its neighbour one-ninety-one, leaving a small but compromising gap of unmonitored space that a starship could slip through if they got their vectors right. The Cordon acted like one giant net of sensory equipment, and every tracked conversation and detected object that crossed its influence was filtered from the net and back to workstations like hers, where other Eleanor’s with just as thrilling jobs relayed that information back to the Outer Reaches.

At least I’m not actually on the Cordon, she thought, using a hand gesture to spin the representation on the Z-axis. Beyond the window that spanned the wall behind her equipment, the jutting crane-like sections of the shipyard continued to sit ever still in the dark canvas of the void, and she thought that maybe being out here wasn’t that much glamorous in comparison.

The occasional ship that stopped for repairs provided at least something worthy of engagement, but being in her crumby, secondary station with her single comms dish meant that Eleanor’s duties only went so far as transferring ships to the actual broadcast tower on the other side of the yard.

She would never claim to want excitement to find her - in the current political nightmare of humanity, excitement meant war – but if one dug deep enough, they would find a shred of craving nestling in the back of her head.

So of course, when she would later find herself cowering in the ventilation system, a part of her would always blame herself for what had transpired.

It all began with a warning ping, the blaring note coming from the righthand terminal and pricking her right ear. Eleanor bristled, pushing off her terminal with her hands, the wheels on her chair squeaking as she rolled herself to that side.

Swiping at the air, she pulled up the warning onto the main terminal, Eleanor scratching her chin as he read off the message.

Warning, connection lost with Post-299. Check satellite alignment. Warning, connection lost with Post-299. Check satellite alignment.

She frowned, biting down on her lower lip. Some of the posts had to go years without maintenance in order to keep their location’s a secret, so this did not surprise Eleanor. Besides, this wasn’t the first time a post had gone dark on her end. Any moment now and their blip would reappear on the map.

Eleanor wasn’t concerned, but she wasn’t neglectful either. The lost connection had brought her out of the bored state that hour twelve had put her in, the least she could do was follow protocol.

She rolled over to her external equipment readouts. Yep, satellite hadn’t been touched, unless some sort of micrometre had skimmed the top of the dish, which was a nightmare Eleanor had suffered ever since day one of becoming a radio operator. Of course, if that happened, then the system would have detected damage, and so far it hadn’t. Everything was in order.

If the problem was on post two-ninety-nine’s end, she needed to narrow it down. The only way to do that was to make contact, but before she could do that, she hesitated. Sending messages to the Cordon was a risk her superiors had warned her of time and again, strict radio-silence with the cordon had to be maintained at all times. Nobody was sure, but the UEC probably had their own version of a cordon on their side of the border, with their own operators scanning the radio waves for activity. It was a giant game of cat and mouse, and the first to break cover would lose all control over the system.

She had to call this in, radio-silence didn’t extend to the shipyard – they were far behind the front lines. She switched bands to the local channel, then sent out a ping.

It didn’t take long to receive a reply from control, a man’s voice crackling into her headset. “This is main. What you got for me, Elen?”

“Steven,” she greeted. They were familiar enough with each other to be on first name basis. “Got something urgent. One of the Cordon’s post’s went down, two-nine-nine, and I can’t raise them.”

“Fuck me, again?” he replied. “I swear those guys are just doing it for the attention.”

Eleanor fought back a grin. Usually Steven’s sudden outbursts of profanity were funny, something about the way his voice reached a high pitch whenever he swore, but that nagging part of her that was troubled demanded professionalism. “Should we call it in?” she asked.

“I’ll try using the emergency band from here,” Steven said. “Maybe they’ll… Ah-ha.”

“What?”

“Very funny, Elen. I get it. You know if you just wanted to call, just have to ask. I’m as bored up here as you are.”

“Steven just what are you on about?”

“Two-nine-nine’s prime and active. Check your scopes again.”

She was about to ask what the point of that was, but her eyes fflicked to the left before her mouth could work, and she held her tongue. The cordon was whole again, no gap in the upper left corner, no warning box telling her to check the alignment of her satellite.

“I’ll take your silence as an admission of guilt?” Steven teased.

“I’m telling you, they were cut off for over ten minutes,” Eleanor insisted, wheeling herself across the dash, her fingers dancing over a keyboard. The warning she’d received would have been logged in the system, she couldn’t have dreamed the whole thing up. She’d swear by that.

There it was, the alignment error that had startled her over eleven minutes ago. “I’m sending you a data packet now,” she said into her mic. “Look it over and tell me I’m messing with you.”

His reply came back after a couple seconds. “It’s probably your equipment, Elen, something’s given up the ghost.”

“But what, exactly?” she pressed. “What happened that I only lost contact with one post, and not anything else?”

“Why don’t you go for a walk on the hull and find out?” Steven replied.

“I’m raising them,” Eleanor said.

“Elen, do not break radio silence. They probably just had a brown out.”

“It’s protocol,” she insisted.

“It’s suicide. The Confederates have just as many ears on the cordon as we do. You send a signal, they’ll zero the station and hit em’ with a missile.”

“We have to do something.”

“No, we don’t. Every post sends out a status update every thirty-one days, we just have to sit tight, then we’ll know what happened.”

“When was their last check-in?”

“About… six days ago.”

“You want me to sit on this for twenty-five days?”

“That’s protocol,” Steven said. “And you know it. Look, I know it sucks sitting in there for so long, sometimes your head starts to do weird things…” He spoke in the kind of tone one uses when talking to a child conjuring up monsters.

“They went dark,” she insisted. “I saw it. Check my logs, you’ll see I’m right.”

“I believe you, Elen,” Steven said, but she didn’t hear much conviction behind the words. “Look,” he added. “I’ll put in a request with maintenance, get a tech to come take a look at your equipment. If nothing’s wrong, we’ll raise the Hub and tell them. Meantime, monitor the situation. Ears open, eyes closed. And hey, don’t forget, we’re all meeting up on deck six for poker tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there,” she said, her mouth barely moving. She was too focused on that little blip, the one that had disappeared for over ten minutes. Or had it?

Steven must have picked up on this. “I’m telling you, Elen. Do not contact the cordon, under any circumstances. You’ll bring the war right down on our heads.”

“I get it, I get it,” Eleanor sighed, cutting the channel.

The backrest creaked as she lazed back, her eyes flicking toward the window. Of course, she did not see the cordon with her naked eyes, all she saw was the sparkling canvas of the Milky Way, but it was a hard habit to break.

Eleanor was conflicted. Sure, maybe she’d seen the post go offline, but it had come back, hadn’t it? A glitch in the system, that was a perfectly logical conclusion, and yet she couldn’t shake that bad feeling that was broiling in her stomach like a bad broth.

No, no poker night for her, If Steven wasn’t going to take this seriously, then she would.

Eleanor leaned across her station, flipping switches and adjusting dials, feeling the walls of the metal room creak as the equipment on the ceiling outside began to move. She directed everything she could spare towards post two-nine-nine, adjusting her dishes until their sensitive antenna were lined up with its direct vector. If so much as a dracon flew near that part of the cordon, then she’d know about it.

A system glitch on her end, a black out on theirs. Either way she had seen something, and there was only one way to find out what. Ears open, eyes closed.

-xXx-

Lieutenant Marek had given Cadell and Samiha the chance they needed to set things right, but that was about where his generosity ended. The squad was put through one rigorous training drill after the other, and out of all the other members of the platoon, it was their squad that had to do another extra lap off the quadrant, their squad doing one more set of pushups in the yard, their squad taking one more hour in the range while everyone else got some free time off.

It brought Cadell straight back to bootcamp, down on his hands and knees while instructors yelled in his ear. All that was missing with the dirt and mud. It was hard to deny the feeling that he and his squad was being singled out, but if they wanted another crack at the simulation, if they wanted to succeed, this was what it took to do it.

It wasn’t all gruelling drills, however. Becoming a trooper was as much about developing your physical capabilities as well as your mental ones, and studies about squad tactics and warfare theory were common subjects. Historical studies on alien races was the newest form of study, which was tutored by a Balokarid with bright orange feathers, one Cadell had never seen before. They even touched on the elusive Suvelian race, whom humanity had made contact with long before they knew about Balokar, and yet knew very little about in comparison.

In the weeks following Cadell’s night out with Samiha, he noticed changes in her demeanour. They were subtle things, like how she’d actually sit with them in the mess hall, or how her exchanges with Hunter and Kurtis went for longer than a few curt words.

These were nothing much to make note of, but in that month leading up to their rerun of the sim (weeks now, time was flying by), there was one particular exchange that sat above the rest.