Fatal Boarding by E. R. Mason Page B

this
jovial crowd of first shifters celebrating around you rather than
being at their posts."
    "Absolutely unbelievable."
    "The nav engineer who allowed Brandon into
the host computer is believing it, all right. He's suspended from
duty until a hearing can be scheduled."
    "And Maureen Brandon? What about her?"
    "Well, the fact that I've heard nothing at
all leads me to believe it's as bad as it gets. There hasn't been
any notice of a temporary replacement for her or anything, but I do
know she spent most of the remainder of third shift in the
conference room with a few department heads and security officers
who had been awakened during their sleep shift. You would have been
in on it except that you were on the EVA, and they thought you
needed your rest. Little did they know..."
    "R.J..."
    "I was lucky. They kept me up all night
using the job-continuity clause. I was updating documentation on my
laptop when Brandon took off without saying a thing. Otherwise, I'd
probably be getting my own special hearing for allowing procedures
to be broken. So now they are saying that we won't be ready to go
light until sometime around the beginning of second shift. 17:00 is
what's being advertised right now. Because of everything that's
happened, we haven't even pulled away from that alien piece of
crap. It gives me the creeps. And, we have one extremely
disgruntled CO on board right now. Nobody else better screw
up."
    "Jesus..."
    "He had no part in it. He will not be at the
hearing."
    I sat back, sipped the hot, black coffee,
and felt a pang of sympathy for Maureen Brandon, probably now the
former head of the Analysis group. In her overzealous desire to
advance her cause, she had taken too big a risk and ended up
temporarily stranding us. It is one thing to jeopardize ones self
in the quest for knowledge, and quite another to endanger an entire
ship's complement. Brandon had not only put us aground, but her own
career, as well. I looked around the room at the laughing faces and
ongoing debates. At the table nearest us, an attractive red head
who I did not know, was complaining to her friend, a short haired
brunet with very red lipstick, about her mother's ongoing
involvement with "The People's Committee to Reform Population
Controls". She kept referring to it acrimoniously as the "PCRPC".
Her friend kept taking in coffee and nodding, and was given no
opportunity whatsoever to contribute to the one-sided debate.
    Opposite us, three men I knew pretty well
were dressed in the dark green-black flight suits that the coops
always wore. They were the ‘forever-standingbys’. The flyers
designated to pilot the small scout ships carried in the belly of
the Electra, vehicles almost never used on star charting tours. The
three were in a heated debate.
    "That's bullshit, Mick. The word
'Disclosure' don't even exist in the history books. It was the
Tach-drives. That's when first contact happened. Right at the turn
of the century. Ain't no magic about it. Once you got an AmpLight-E
engine to get you up to the speed of light, and a compatible
Tachyon drive to kick in and collapse you through it, all of a
sudden you’re a hazard to the whole damned universe. A planet of
bureaucrats that don't know what the hell they're doin'. They had
to make contact then.”
    The two men sitting across the table from
him seemed to disagree.
    "Come on, Raul. You really think the
government didn't know there was loads of intelligent life out here
until some bald guy with slanty eyes showed up to mention it? What
about the ruins on the dark side of the moon? And all the other
stuff? You really think that went unnoticed. The government was
leaking shit for years before first contact. They were scared
shitless about what was gonna happen when word got out. Look what
did happen! Fuckin' clergy jumpin' out a' windows. Whole religious
sects committin' suicide. Loonies runnin' around everywhere. Sure
the word 'Disclosure' isn't in the history books. Disclosure was a
long series