The Princess of Caldris Read Online Free PDF

waters.
    The sun was rising before
the Hammerhead was fully prepped. Hammerstein fumed, walking around
the service bay like a caged Ripjackle from some primitive outworld
one sees in the holo-dramas. He kept thinking of how back in the
Navy, if such delays were taking place he would have had the joy of
dressing down the techs at the top of his lungs calling
them, “Pin-head-dung-birds-pencil-necked-booty-grabbin-clowns-without-a-pair ”,
but this was the Royal Police and their protocols were different
than the Navy, so he merely whispered it under his breath as he
walked around and around the service bay, eyeing them with murder
in his eyes.
    Finally one of the techs
gathered the courage to stand their ground and face the leering
Detective, “Sir,” he said, “It’s a modified troop shuttle. The in
system hyper-jumps she’ll be making are the stuff of stunt pilots
and professional racers. I don’t know what you’re emergency is,
because it’s above my pay grade, but whatever it is, it will get a
whole lot worse if you start popping in and out of normal space
deep in the complex gravity wells of a star system and one of the
field manipulators fails. Even a little failure, and g-forces will
turn you, the lovely police lady, and the kid over there into a
crushed pulp in a micro second. This bird isn’t going up until
she’s five-five-five, good-to-go and secured. Okay?”
    Hammerstein made a low
growl at the tech but I felt a grudging respect forming. He just
raised his hands in defeat and found a place on a stainless steel
bench where Tokushima and I had been half sleeping, half
watching.
    At length my rest restored me enough to
grasp the excitement and strangeness of what I was experiencing
again. This was no pleasure cruise with oversized cushions, buffets
and family chattering. The plexisteel and astercrete world of the
police base mimicked the military Spartan furnishings from which
most of these police actually came up through in their careers.
    Comfort was for civies;
contemptible. We were headed to Fort Oort, and already I could feel
the sensibilities of the space Navy. As had often been the case
through Human kind’s long and twisted histories, the military’s
main source of recruitment was from men and women in the worker-bee
classes; farm boys no longer needed on the farm, daughters of fork
lift operators from corners of the worlds where economies
dragged- children from situations and
scenarios proper society moved away from .
    Through the ages they had
come, to the brutal and uncompromising training bases. Mastering
the arts of war, ready to give that last full measure of devotion
–their very lives, everything they had and would ever have, for the
very nations and peoples who more often than not watched the wars
comfortably from home, sometimes even profiting, and
morosely, fashionably, protesting
indignation .
    Through the ages the
soldiers had come, duty, honor, sacrifice. To stand in the horror
for their fellows. No matter what world or before the worlds’
nations; their uniforms earned in struggle and often deprivation
spoke the same words: “I will die that you may live.”
    So when the pilot arrived I
wasn’t surprised he was Navy. Justin “Coco-butter” Parsons. Son of
an avocado farmer from the Southern archipelagoes, he assumed any
number of pilot clichés easily; devil-may-care daring do, live for today because tomorrow
your hyperdrives must miss a cog, find all the pretty ladies and
give ‘em a big wet kiss before you fly away .
    Funny thing about clichés,
I realized then. Clichés or no, the pretty ladies are still
beautiful when they’re getting a big wet kiss, and the flight is
still dangerous as you order the engage command. Beauty and danger. They
are what they are, and those that have the mettle to pursue them,
well, they are what they are too.
    Even swaggering, live for
today, Coco-butter Parsons got a big fat dose of “Uh-oh” when he
walked in to the service hangar and