Toothless

By David Wiley

Ever wonder what happens after a major breakthrough? It's not always glamorous, often it's plain hard work. After the events covered in Saint Vladnitz, humanity's path to the stars seems clear and the most junior crew member from that voyage is determined to participate. Ernestine Borgia becomes the Imperial Navy's prize recruit. Trouble is, she keeps getting into trouble. Her fellow cadets resent her, the naval officers barely tolerate her, and the retrofitted ship to which she's assigned, the I.S. Ruthless–not so fondly called the Toothless–appears to have a few glitches that the Navy's contractors overlooked. When disaster strikes on their exploratory mission, what they need is a hero, what they've got is Ensign Borgia.

Toothless is the second story in the Borgia Trajectory, a series set in the same universe as the Eichi Testaments.

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Wiley
• Release date: Dec 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370833023

David Wiley

David Wiley is a pseudonym for Dave Felstul. By day I am a scientist who lives in Oregon. I was worried that people would have trouble remembering, spelling, or pronouncing my given name, so I decided to adopt the name of a childhood hero, Wile E. Coyote, for my pen name.I wanted to be a writer from an early age. After being unduly influenced by the first Apollo mission with Armstrong and Aldrin walking on the moon in 1969, there was never any real choice as to my area of writing, science fiction. This was predictably followed by many early stories, lavishly illustrated with spaceships, deathrays, and aliens.Some of us outgrow our dreams, others merely postpone them.I did combine my love of science and writing in several technical journalism jobs—including for a computer magazine where I not so presciently proclaimed that "the new Microsoft Word and Microsoft mouse could do a few interesting things, but were not as good as existing products and would never work well together."After realizing that my options in science journalism were limited, I stuck with the science half of the equation for many years. Only recently am I beginning to realize that deferred dream of spaceships, deathrays, and aliens. Although it is debatable whether the humor has improved since those early efforts, the science has hopefully done so.My science background has certainly pushed me towards the hard science fiction genre, but I have a definite bent towards biology and not just physics. I want to explore what happens when future technology meets real life. How would a far-flung galactic civilization maintain a common culture or genetics? Will a raygun work in a downpour? Will we have holographic assistants like the doctor in Star Trek Voyager or will the holos be used for advertising shills instead? Unfortunately, I know which one my money and those of the corporations will likely be on.I am exploring these ideas in books set in the Eichi Testaments Universe, Make No Martyrs, Message from Gondwana, and others as they make it through the review process.To conclude, my hero, Wile E Coyote had a business card. If you think about it, the card is perfect for a science fiction writer. "Wile E. Coyote, Genius, Have Brain – Will Travel." Who knows where our imaginations can take us? Maybe one day Acme will even sell a rocket ship that works!

Book preview

Toothless

____________

Book 2 of the Borgia Trajectory

Set in the Eichi Testaments Universe

____________

By David Wiley

Toothless

David Wiley

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2016 David Felstul

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

To my sister, who always sees the best in everything and everyone.

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 1

The scanners picked up the barest trace of the other ship's passage. The ship had been devilishly tricky to follow with its two-hour head start and a very clever skipper. Had the Captain not thought of looking at the after effects of its plasma engines on the ice particles of the rings, they would have lost it. Instead, they had tracked it behind a moonlet orbiting around the large blue gas giant.

Still no response to our previous hail? the Captain asked.

No, sir, the comm officer answered.

Sensors? Keep one eye peeled for any other bogeys. I don't want anything else sneaking up on us.

Understood, Captain.

Helm, give me half a G thrust heading two-one-zero, up four-five degrees and then rotate forward as soon as we clear the moon's horizon, the Captain barked.

Aye, sir, helm responded, popping the destroyer up for a look at where the fleeing ship had disappeared to, behind the moonlet, a slightly larger rock among many other rocks.

The Captain chewed her lip. Two previous naval vessels had disappeared in this system without a trace. No way did she want to be the third. Charge laser cannon, she ordered, her voice coming out more high-pitched than she liked.

Cannon charged, her tactical officer confirmed after a minute or two.

As the ship cleared the moonlet, the sensors picked up the target ship and alarms sounded as they detected a projectile launched towards the Ruthless.

Fire! the Captain commanded. The twin Dempsey laser cannon mounted on the bow lashed out, hitting the target just behind its bow. The ship's skin ruptured, spilling atmosphere and debris.

Bogey one destroyed! the tactical officer crowed.

The projectile was still coming at them, although slower than expected. Hard to port, the Captain shouted. Good shooting, guns.

And end simulation, a voice commanded. The lights came up on the bridge of the Ruthless, revealing the hawk-like features of Lieutenant Singh facing his Midshipman trainees. He shook his head. Congratulations, Midshipman Borgia. You just successfully evaded a jettisoned cargo container of strellix weed. While not approved of by Earth authorities, it is not considered illegal in most of the Solar Empire. So, Miss Bogey, you just blew up a Llama-class freighter and killed a family of innocent traders. Really pissing wonderful, everyone, just pissing wonderful!

Singh's acid tones were still burning in Midshipman Borgia's ears an hour later, back in the Midshipman's quarters.

"Nice going, Miss Bogey, Marzanna's voice dripped with sarcasm. Now all of us have to do extra work on friend or foe identification."

Midshipman Marzanna Bathory was blonde, beautiful, and cultured, everything that Midshipman Ernestine Borgia knew she never would be and Bathory used her advantages to devastating effect. That included using her sharp tongue to bestow unwanted nicknames. Miss Bogey just had to go in with guns blazing, didn't you? Typical wildcatter. Trump it anyway! she swore, conveying the distaste she had for talking with one of her social inferiors. After all, her ancestry was royalty, going back nearly a thousand years, as she had made sure to point out every chance she got, beginning at the Naval Academy–and as far back as nursery school, for all Borgia knew.

Oh, don't be so hard on her, Marzanna, Midshipman Stephen Gates pointed out. His family was one of the wealthiest in history. Even if the Bathorys were no longer rich, Gates considered Marzanna his social equal and close ally. She has not had the advantages we've had—or really any advantages for that matter.

Obviously, but you would think some others would know better, Bathory looked pointedly at Midshipman Daniel Hewitt, who had served as the tac officer during the simulation. Isn't that right, Asper?

Hewitt who must be a certifiable genius, was also painfully shy, which had gotten him tagged with Asper, short for Asperger's Syndrome, by the Countess Bathory of Cruel. Borgia did not think he was actually autistic, but he was probably darn close, and as for feeling awkward around people, she knew how that felt.

I, uh, I just, I have to follow orders, Hewitt mumbled.

Yeah, you do, don't you? Bathory snorted.

Borgia opened her mouth, but Midshipman Kathryn Miyamoto's lazy drawl beat her to the punch. Yeah, wel-l-l-l, at least Borgia found the ship. None of the rest of us even managed that much. And Hewitt trumpin' nailed it. With that comment, Miyamoto glided out of the Snotty's common room, her brief interest over.

Ernestine Borgia rolled her eyes. She had put up with worse at the Academy. However, not for the first time she seriously questioned her own sanity for joining the Navy and now she seemed to have acquired yet another unfortunate nickname.

CHAPTER 2

Midshipman Borgia slaved away at cleaning the galley. It was part of the scutwork that Midshipmen had to do on their shakedown cruise. She ran the scrubber across the floor. The powered scrubber sported some impressive-looking hoses and valves to create suction, so dirty water would not go floating off if the ship lost gravity. Still, the scrubber was basically a glorified mop, something that a midshipman on an old-fashioned sailing vessel would have no trouble using. It was mindless work, so who could blame her if her mind wandered back to over two years ago?

The discovery of the first wormhole changed everything. Mankind now had a future lit not by the flickering glow of a single sun, but the blaze of millions. At least, that was what all the network newschannels broadcast in breathless tones. Ernie Borgia knew she had played an important role as part of the crew of the Arkhangel. She had been the one to figure out how to spot the anomaly, proved that it really was a wormhole, and even figured out that radiation had killed the crew of the DaLong, but any mention of one Ernestine Borgia seemed to be few and far between. Most of the attention was focused on Captain Boris Vladnitz. Well, Ernie supposed she could not begrudge the Captain that, but the only other crew member noted with any frequency was the pilot, Abasolo Cesar. Now that she could begrudge, the traitorous double-crosser. Solo may have been one hell of a pilot, but he turned out to be an unfortunate choice on her part as a boyfriend. At least the Captain had figured out a way that Solo and the nasty ship's purser, Horst Schroder, did not receive any of the reward money for discovering the wormhole.

The reward money from the Imperial coffers—well the multicorps actually, everyone knew who really ran the Solar Empire—did not make any of the rest of the Arkhangel's crew wealthy beyond belief, in spite of the speculation on the newschannels. It was enough, however, for Captain Vladnitz to repair the Arkhangel and set sail in search of, well, something beyond the wormhole. After a year and a half, Ernie had not heard any news of either the Captain or the Arkhangel. As for the rest of her former crewmates, Sean Franklin, the Arkhangel's deckhand, had used his share of the reward to retire from wildcatting for good. Qing Zhu, who had served as the engineer on the Arkhangel, had also retired, but she used the money to start up the Bilgewater Bar and Grill, now the most popular dive for spacerats in the Kuiper Belt. Ernie's cat, Lucky, turned out to have a well deserved name. She lived with Qing and served as the bar's unofficial mascot. Ernie had heard several months ago that Horst, the Arkhangel's former purser, had died in a bar brawl, fortunately not in the Bilgewater. Not that Qing would have let him into her bar, after all, she had standards. As did Ernie, which is why she allowed herself a drunken night away from the Academy when she heard that Solo had taken his undeniable pilot's skills and left through the wormhole on probably the only ship that would accept him, the former DaLong. The DaLong was the derelict ship that the Arkhangel's crew had discovered filled with corpses killed from radiation exposure. The DaLong had been refurbished and renamed the Huron. Nothing really went to waste in space; Ernie supposed that included Solo.

Ernie paused to refill her scrubber's tank. Except maybe her talents, those currently seemed to be wasted by the Navy. Cleaning a Navy galley was not exactly what she had in mind when she signed up. The Navy had realized that the discovery of the first wormhole meant they now had a perfect excuse to seek dramatically increased funding and dusted off plans to build a new class of Navy vessels focused on exploration. Before they could even start building the new starships, word came that two other wormholes were discovered in the Canaveral system, the system that had been discovered by the Arkhangel. The Imperial Navy promptly doubled the number of keels they had laid down. Finally, some genius in Naval Operations realized they would need to crew all these new ships and the existing Academy program was not up to the task.

Fortunately, there were a lot of spacerats already out there, including the wildcatters, who represented potential Imperial Navy personnel. Unfortunately, many of them were not considered prime Navy material, to put it mildly. The wildcatters did not seem to see the advantage in enlisting and undergoing years of training only to take orders from some prick of an officer when they could just retrofit their own ships and take off tomorrow through the newly discovered wormholes for a chance at immediate riches, like Captain Vladnitz and Abasolo Cesar had done. To entice the reluctant wildcatters, the powers-that-be even reduced the time required at the Academy, depending on experience, to as little as one year of training to learn the Navy Way of doing things.

In addition to the shortened training, a large public relations campaign was started, touting the highly valued skills that wildcatters could contribute to the Navy and the accelerated career paths available after graduation from the Academy on Luna. About that time, a much younger Ernestine Borgia—younger in terms of political savvy, anyway, signed on to bring her valued skills on board to much fanfare from naval press releases.

What a farce that was! Ernie, now Midshipman Borgia, Miss Bogie, or biggest idiot in the galaxy, take your pick, had to relax her grip on the scrubber before her hand started spasming. After six weeks of evaluation, the Navy decided their prize recruit only needed two years of the four year program to knock some rough edges off. That meant she was five years older than most of her Navy classmates. However, although younger, they had already had two years to sort themselves out into social cliques that had zero room for a wildcatter rube like herself. That was made abundently clear in a variety of not particularly creative ways, such as the bleach trick.

The Naval Academy, located near the lunar North Pole, issued two uniforms to its cadets. Barely given time during the week to eat and sleep with all of the intense coursework and training, most of them washed their uniforms on Sunday, their day off. On this particular Sunday, Cadet Gates had arrived in the laundry room at the rear of the barracks and announced that the barracks monitor wanted to see Cadet Bathory. Bathory had left and come back fifteen minutes later, looking shaken, and announced that the monitor now wanted to see Cadet Borgia. Worried over having committed some unknown infraction, Ernie hurried to the monitor's office at the front of the barracks only to have the monitor deny sending for her. Now worried for a different reason, Ernie hurried back to the laundry room to find it deserted.

Only when she pulled her laundry out of the washer did she realize someone had spiked the load with a generous dose of bleach. She was pulling out her damaged clothing, eyes filled with furious tears, when Cadet Liimatainen walked in with his own laundry. He whistled, Someone really did a number on you, no?

Yes, she agreed, angrily stuffing the streaked clothing into the drier. I'll give you one guess who.

Bathory? The Ice Queen? I don't know how you got on her shit list, but I doubt this is the end of it. He shook his head. Sorry I can't help, but I doubt my backup uniform would help you. Plus, it seems to have acquired a grease spot on the right trouser leg. I don't know how that could have happened...

Ernie shook her head, smiling in spite of herself. Midshipman Erik Liimatainen was already legendary for finding it impossible to stay clean for any length of time. It did not help that he was irresistably attracted to anything mechanical. He was also one of the few real friends she had made since coming to the Academy.

Liimatainen had grown up in a small mining colony in the asteroids that apparently had been settled entirely by Finlanders. He seemed to understand Ernie better than any of the other midshipmen did. She had been at the Academy for less than a month when he had invited her to his weekly poker game. She refused. Cards were one of the many vices that had been forbidden by the Reverend Jim on the Orbital that Ernie grew up on. She had always been too embarassed to admit she did not know how to play, but Liimatainen somehow wangled the truth out of her. He refused to take 'no' for an answer and patiently tutored her on how to play. After she had sat in on several games, she realized that it was not the playing that was the important part, or the stakes. (Academy rules forbid gambling, so they played for peanuts–literally, as well as almonds, cashews, and walnuts, since nuts were scarce on Luna with all the deforestation that had occurred on Earth.) Instead, it was the socializing that was important. She could never thank Liimatainen enough for that insight.

But, friend or not, he was right, his uniform would not fit her. In addition to his predilection for grease spots, Liimatainen was broader and taller at just under two meters in height. So, she would have to wait to get replacement uniforms until after she filled out the paperwork. What made matters even lousier was that since it was Sunday, she could not submit the requisition until after standing formation tomorrow morning. Which she had, in all her spotted glory, trying to ignore the snickers of the other cadets, while earning a generous number of demerits for her unkempt uniform.

Ernie caught herself furiously scrubbing as she remembered the humiliation. She forced herself to slow down, she still had a long way to go in cleaning the galley. But that was the problem, too much time for thinking.

She fingered the coin-sized tag hung around her neck. There was too much time for thinking that she would just like to rip the MIDtag off and give up on ever fitting into the prim and proper Navy. The MIDtag looked similar to the one she had worn while on the Arkhangel and like that tag it contained her medical identification information. However, unlike that previous tag, the Navy version could supposedly stand up to anything short of the plasma ejected from a spaceship engine or a nuclear blast. Either way, Ernie had no intention of testing whether her MIDtag met Navy specs.

No, the survivability of her MIDtag was not something she held against the Navy. The thousand and one humiliations were. The bleached uniforms were not the worst thing, not by a long shot. There had been hazing, but everyone had to go through that, like the forced run in their underwear or having to spit shine all of the