52 Stories In 2023 - Volume Three: 52 Stories In 2023, #3

By Michael Kingswood

Action. Adventure. Horror. Romance. And just plain fun.

All of those and more await in this collection of ten works of fiction, written as part of a great challenge to complete 52 stories in 2023.

Come join the adventure of the year, and sink into engrossing stories set in imaginative worlds.  You'll be glad you did.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SSN Storytelling
• Release date: Oct 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223206729

Michael Kingswood

Michael Kingswood has written numerous science fiction and fantasy stories, including The Pericles Conspiracy, The Glimmer Vale Chronicles, and the Dawn of Enlightenment series. His interest in scifi/fantasy came at an early age: he first saw Star Wars in the theater when he was three and grew up on Star Trek in syndication. The Hobbit was among the first books he recalls reading. Recognizing with sadness that the odds of his making it into outer space were relatively slim, after completing his bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from Boston University, he did the next best thing - he entered the US Navy as a submarine officer. Almost seventeen years later, he continues to serve on active duty and has earned graduation degrees in Engineering Management and Business Administration. Fitting with his service onboard Fast Attack submarines (SSNs), he does his writing on Saturdays, Sundays, and at Night. He is married to a lovely lady from Maine. They have four children, and live wherever the Navy deems to send them. Sign up to receive email announcements of Michael's new releases and other exclusive deals for newsletter subscribers here: http://eepurl.com/eND22 .

Book preview

WHITLEY’s Havoc Makers

When people think about Naval engagements, they focus on the Captain and the people manning the tactical stations, who can see and know what the heck is going on in the battle. But those area a small minority of the people onboard the ship.

---

Most man battlestations and then wait, with no idea what’s going on unless something bad happens.

---

This is true even in a futuristic starfleet like the Icaran Confederation Navy, as this story shows.

---

Enjoy!

M an battle stations. Set Condition Zebra throughout the ship.

The announcement carried over the 1MC speakers in the space, and echoed through the implants in Travis’ ears. There was a microsecond or so delay between the two transmissions, or so the techies said. Shouldn’t have been enough to be noticeable, they said.

But every time the announcing circuits onboard ICS THOMAS WHITLEY said anything, Travis felt like he was hearing echoes in a little cave.

At first it had been disconcerting, but after his first few weeks onboard he’d gotten used to it…except for the alarms. Even now, the alarms still made him cringe.

And sure enough as the thirteen pulsating tones of the ship’s General Alarm sounded immediately after the Chief of the Watch’s voice, he felt like his head was inside a bell being rung.

All around him in the Crew’s Mess, people were rising from their tables and hastening to deposit their trays and the remnants of their interrupted meals into the reclamation receptacles at the end of the food line. Travis waited the twenty seconds or so for the alarm to finish sounding before he rose to do the same, taking an extra couple swallows of scrambled eggs, washed down with maple syrup, as he did so.

He didn’t trust himself not to trip over his own feet while the alarm was sounding.

The alarm ended, and Travis rose from the knurled plastic of the seat he had been occupying. As he reached his feet, the Chief of the Watch repeated, Man battle stations. Set Condition Zebra throughout the ship.

Half of his fellow crewmen who had been taking their breakfast had already left the Mess. The remainder were filing out the two exits from the space, located on the port and starboard bulkheads respectively.

Moving quickly, but orderly. Good military precision, not the flight of a mob.

He moved past the dozen or so tables covered by black naugahyde that was embossed with the ship’s emblem in the center of each 10-person seating that separated his former spot from the reclamation bins, and ducked, by force of habit, beneath one white-painted bit of piping that protruded down farther than the others that routed around the overhead in this space.

Pipes and cable-runs were everywhere on the ship, and Travis’ shipmates most of the time paid them no mind. He didn’t have that luxury. He was the tallest man on the ship, and he had learned to stoop and duck even before he learned how to ignore the subtle echoes of the voice transmissions over the announcing circuits.

The food line was made of brushed chrome, like probably every serving area on every ship or cheap diner for the last 700 years or more. The crewmen behind the line were dressed in white smocks overtop their regulation navy-blue coveralls that also served as pressure suits should the hull be breached.

As Travis came to the bins at the end of the line, he saw the cooks moving rapidly to stow their gear and throw the leftovers into the mass reclamation bins behind the line. They moved in a symphony of practiced grace, each one seeing to his assigned duties—just as Travis knew others were doing all over the ship in their individual workspaces. Each one adding to the defense of the whole.

But on a couple faces, he saw worry, bordering on fear.

Travis glanced to the collar of each man who quailed, seeking out his rank device. And as he expected, none of them bore the chevron of a Petty Officer; none had been on space duty more than a year or two.

They probably had only ever seen battle stations during a drill, and drills never happened during mealtime. Everyone knew that.

Travis mouthed silent prayers for each of the fearful men he saw on his way to the bins at the end of the line, but his prayers failed beneath the scent of the first of the bins.

Bacon. So much bacon.

He looked down at it, and all thought of piety, and asking God to help his shipmates, fled beneath pangs in his belly over the tragic waste of it all.

So much gone, and to so little enjoyment…

A lurching in his belly shoved his reverie aside and he turned to look toward the nearest exit.

He shouldn’t have felt that change in the ship’s acceleration. Normally the gravplates in the decks were more than enough to counteract whatever maneuvers the officers saw fit to inflict onto her.

But he’d felt that one…

Travis swallowed, and stopped lollygagging. He dumped the remains of his meal into the first bin, then his tray in the second, then he hurried to the port-side exit, now clear of any traffic.

He hurried to port after exiting, following the 01 Level forward athwartships passage past the ship’s library to forward, where he had spent many an off-watch hour studying to get ahead on the classes he would be taking once he left the service in two years, then turned left when he reached the port-side passageway.

The throng of fellow shipmates making their way to their battle stations was less now, since he had waited, but still a half dozen hurried down the passage ahead of him, moving aft.

They passed the rubbish stores room, then the rubbish processing room, and then the hindmost guy ahead of Travis stopped as he stepped over a raised coaming in the passageway. There were similar coamings every three or four meters along every passageway on the ship, housing airtight doors.

Travis knew immediately what the fellow was about to do, and called out for him to wait. But he either didn’t hear or it didn’t register, and he slapped the bulkhead to his right as he passed through the coaming.

The airtight door slid shut with a solid-sounding hiss and then a thunk, and Travis slowed to a halt in front of it.

All of the passageways on the WHITLEY were painted white on the bulkheads, and the floors were tiled in black, in keeping with the ship’s colors. The overheads were all a mass of white-painted cable bundles and ventilation ducting. The only break from the white and black was the red non-skid patches on the deck beneath Emergency Atmosphere System manifolds in the overhead, the red crosses of first aid kits located periodically along the corridors, and the markings for various damage control gear—hull patch kits, fire extinguishers, fire hoses, or other bits of ship-saving gear located seemingly everywhere onboard—which were also painted in red.

And this airtight door. It was grey while the rest of the bulkhead was white, and fitted with a small, transparent window at eye-height for an average crew member, for folks to see and perhaps communicate with people on the other side of the door before just opening it willy-nilly.

If the other side were decompressed, that would potentially be very bad.

The other marking on the door was a red Z enclosed in a red circle. That same Z was on the outboard bulkhead adjacent to the door’s control panel, signifying that this door was to be shut when the ship went to Condition Zebra, the condition of highest airtight integrity possible, in preparation for battle.

If the 1MC and the alarm in the middle of breakfast had hinted that this was no drill before, actually setting Zebra solidified it now.

Not that the ship hadn’t gone to Zebra many times before since he’d checked aboard. It had. But always for drills—only once for a real operation, and that hadn’t been a combat circumstance.

Travis pursed his lips as he came to a halt in front of the door, breathing in quick, short breaths in time with his accelerated heart rate, and pretended that the ever-present semi-sour boat smell in the air that came from the atmosphere processors really had faded into the background like it usually did after a couple days underway.

It did, except when the stress level onboard began to mount. Then he smelled it plainly, as plain as his former girlfriend had the time he brought a seabag full of his dirty boat clothes over the day after a two-month underway.

She claimed that wasn’t why she was now his ex. Travis wasn’t so sure.

Regardless, just because the door was to be closed in condition Zebra didn’t mean he couldn’t pass through. It just made the passage annoying, and take longer than it should have.

Maybe don’t wait so long before heading to battle stations, the back part of his mind said; the part that didn’t like eggs, apparently.

He told that part to shut the hell up and tapped the door’s control panel, then waited.

In Condition Zebra, the Chief of the Watch had to approve opening of any airtight doors. Normally this wasn’t an issue. Just wave at the camera above the door coaming and wait a few seconds, and the Chief would give permission to open it.

But now, with everyone moving around the ship and the various airtight doors being shut piecemeal as folks got to station and set Zebra, it took a while.

Not all that long, really. Maybe fifteen or twenty seconds. But it felt like forever.

Travis could picture Chief Amador—that was the Chief of the Watch at the moment, assuming he hadn’t yet been relieved by Senior Chief Davidson, the battlestations CoW—rolling his eyes as he saw Travis waiting to pass through.

Chief Amador had wagged his finger in Travis’s face a number of times about getting to his action station faster. He was the Weapons Department Leading Chief, so he kind of had to. But it always struck Travis as a bit funny, though he never told the Chief that.

The airtight door whisked upward in front of him, and Travis spared a grin and a half-salute to the overhead camera and Chief Amador, then he hurried through and to the ladder well leading down just beyond, on the inboard side of the passageway.

Two flights later put him on the 2 nd Deck, the lowest accessible portion of the ship, and he turned forward.

All the airtight doors leading in that direction were closed, and he had to wait at four separate junctions until he passed the port-side boat deck, and the midships athwartships passageway until he finally turned to starboard and stopped before the airtight hatch to his destination: the Torpedo Room.

Unlike the airtight doors in the passageway, this hatch was completely manually-operated, with a large hand wheel mounted in the middle of the hatch. A differential pressure gauge off to the right showed that the torpedo room and the passageway were equalized, so Travis wasted no time in spinning the wheel until it stopped with the hatch’s securing lugs well off their seating surfaces, then he lifted the hatch’s handle actuator and pushed it open.

It swung freely, making the softest of squeaks against its hinges. But even hearing that made Travis wince inwardly. Someone from Deck Division was going to have a lot of fun greasing those hinges after TMC Bradly noted it down in the material discrepancy log…

That thought came to a halt when he rose on the far side of the hatch and saw Bradly’s red-bearded face scowling at him from the starboard rear side of the room, where the Weapons Handling Supervisor’s station was located.

Like Travis, Bradly had the silver crossed sabers over a starburst that marked a fully-qualified enlisted stellar warfare operator above his left breast, and the triple bombs overtop an explosion of a torpedo man’s mate on his left sleeve. However, Bradly had the golden twined anchors of a Chief Petty Officer on his collars, whereas Travis just had two chevrons of a 2 nd class Petty Officer.

So he couldn’t just smile and joke at the Chief when he said, Nice of you to join us, Compton, as Travis closed the hatch behind himself and spun the hand wheel to dog the lugs.

Instead, Travis just shrugged and said, Sorry Chief, then headed forward to his station.

The Torpedo Room