A Sword Into Darkness Read Online Free PDF

scene sailors had only regarded in nightmares since the end of the Second World War.  Pitifully few of the Rivero ’s bright orange inflatable life rafts floated around her rolling, sinking wreckage.  It was another twenty minutes before USS Chafee herself arrived, with Halsey and Port Royal showing up to render aid soon thereafter.
    LT Nathaniel Robert Kelley, Weapons Officer of the former USS Rivero , kept his haunted eyes upon her grave long after she slipped beneath the waves.
     
     

3:  “ZINGER”
    June 15, 2034; Lee Estate; Santa Cruz, California
    Looking up at the redwood shrouded main house, Nathan Kelley realized this had to go down as the weirdest damned job interview in history.  If he had known the process would be quite this … complicated, he doubted he would have ever responded to Windward Technologies’ invitation to that first meeting.
    That initial interview had been almost painfully normal.  The Windward representative had come out to Boston as part of a larger science and technology job fair along with a score of other companies like Lockheed, Raytheon, and Orbital Sciences.  Nathan—like a few hundred other prospective candidates—was finishing up his Master’s degree at MIT, ready to begin the next chapter of his life.  Having come from a now aborted career in the Navy, he had been older than his competition and not a perpetual student.
    His Windward meet-and-greet had been utterly typical interview fodder, blending in with his dozen or so other attempts to sell himself to corporate America that day:
    “What are your goals, Mr. Kelley?”
    “What are your best and worst qualities, Mr. Kelley?”
    “Why should Windward hire you, Mr. Kelley?”
    Nathan had left the job fair less than hopeful about the possibility of Windward calling him back, so he had gone back to school and finished the final draft of his thesis.  There were no nibbles from Windward Technologies, so he had moved on to other applications, other prospects, targeting résumés to every tech-firm that might remotely be hiring.
    It was so different from the Navy, where your career path was often laid out in stone.  That regimented military existence had proved his undoing, however, a discordant note of calm in the white noise of life following the sinking.  He had simply been unable to go back to the routine of service stateside, and the war would not keep him as damaged goods.  The reason they gave for medically discharging him was post traumatic stress disorder, but Nathan knew there were other reasons as well.  They were the reasons that went unsaid, the reasons related to the furtive, accusatory stares of doubt other officers gave him when they thought he could not see them, stares that would continue for the rest of his career, cleared by a board of inquiry or not.
    So he had given it all up, and after a brief respite in his Pennsylvania hometown, he had sought a new existence as a student and engineer, essentially rebooting his life at the not insignificant age of 30 years old.  Leaving was a big change, an unanticipated change, but a welcome one.  It did necessitate some adjustment.  Life in the civilian sector could be so much more uncertain, precarious even.
    But in the civilian world, no one shattered your whole world in a single act of cold anger and your ambiguous split-second decisions did not lead to the deaths of 103 subordinates, shipmates, and friends.  In the civilian world, perhaps he would no longer wake up in a clammy sweat, shaking from half-remembered dreams of rending steel and screaming, faceless men.
    Precarious.  He was fine with precarious.
    On the day after graduation, while packing up his small office at the university, a welcome—though unexpected—call had come, starting him upon an extremely odd journey into the world of corporate job-seeking:  “Mr. Kelley, would you mind traveling to Windward’s New York office for a second interview?”
    That interview, like his first, had