First Command (4 page)

Navigating St. Mark’s Street in the morning shook Jonathan from his ruminations of weather, climate, and landladies
.
Like everything else in the Riverfront District the street was tightly packed, but the two-lane road was blessed fortunately with broad sidewalks. Monday morning in the District was an exercise in pure chaos. Everywhere people were starting their day - bars and bordellos were opening their shutters, shopkeepers were turning closed signs to open, street vendors were trying to secure the best spots to peddle their wares. The people who resided in the district were congregating toward Fountain Square and the Metro station while the early morning tourists gawked and pointed. Less annoying than overweight off- worlders on holiday, but at the moment far more numerous were the Spacers emerging from their hostels and boarding houses scuttling north to Tribune Station to take the maglev back to First Landing Space Port. In addition to the tourists, of whom there were many, River Front’s economy revolved around catering to the needs of the hoards of spacers who touched down at First Landing Spaceport to the east of the city. In bygone days, the River Front had been its own settlement and a clearinghouse for cargo brought down the Agora River from First Landing by barge to be off-loaded, warehoused, haggled over by commodity traders, and eventually distributed.  These days the warehouses and trading firms were all north of Tribune St., and a Maglev moved cargo and people to and from the Spaceport far more efficiently than the barges ever did. The River Front now as known as the colorful entertainment district popular with native Solarian’s off-world tourists, and Spacers on leave, also home to a varietal color wheel of people. The noise and the tourists drove down land values as did the limited space and strict building codes which kept all structures in the district under four stories as a result. Many urban professionals who didn’t mind the racket and occasional shouting match, brawl, or shootout between drunken off-worlders made the district their home. Jonathan saw them everyday as he walked the four blocks to Fountain Square Metro and pressed his way through the glass doors to the escalators, which took him and the great teeming mass of humanity down to the trains.

Everyday Jonathan saw people from all walks of life, a miniature slice of the great mass that was humanity condensed into this tiny corner of the universe. Salary men in suits, techies in trendy outfits and all variety of gizmo accessories, civil servants in the olive uniforms, vendors hawking their wares, the red and white uniformed ‘Mets’ of the Singking Metropolitan Police patrolling in pairs, busker’s in designated performance spaces singing, dancing, and playing every variety of instruments available ranging from full brass bands to one solitary man with a flute, bums playing hide and seek with the Met Patrol, lest they be arrested for vagrancy escorted back to shelters or treatment centers and enrolled in a Government make work program, while also accepting donations from passerbys. The enormity of the district occasionally overwhelmed Jonathan. 

Jonathan swiped his sleeve over the fare meter to unlock the turnstile. Many people preferred the retina scanners to the sleeve unit, but Jonathan found the scanners too easy to hack.  He had heard too many stories of accounts drained; personal information stolen and poor souls sucked dry financially in a matter of hours. No, it was better to take the 10 minutes to install the app on your sleeve unit and just add cash at the Metro fare stations. Walking on the escalator up or down was all but impossible during rush hour as every available spare inch of space was spoken for. There was no shoving or shouting only the orderly and unspoken allocation of space.  Friends and colleagues chattered among themselves, the occasional child tugged at their grandparents clothing and the Public School pupils, in neat uniform jackets for the boys and plaid skirts for the girls, talked incessantly in the slag riddled language that was all their own. Despite the noise, it was not an overwhelming torrent and press of people where an individual couldn't hear himself think. Rather, the ambiance was a pleasant and civilized. The volume was loud but not unseemly, because Solarians were by nature a very orderly lot, Singkingers in particular. Jonathan who as a child had witnessed the chaotic humdrum of Centennial City, New Bondo, and New York had always preferred Singking’s highly organized chaos to the insanity that was most of mankind’s other great cities. Stepping off the escalator, Jonathan glanced at the information display and saw the next train would be in 2 min. Not unusual in the least in the morning, because the Singking Metro ran trains every five minutes on the commuter lines and every ten on the spars.

Taking a place on the platform where red painted marks indicated where the train’s door would be, Jonathan called up the news on his sleeve display and flipped through the morning headlines. The micro holo-projector in his sleeve displayed the interactive stories he’d downloaded earlier in an easy-to-read 9 by 7 inch format. With his palm up, a passerby unfamiliar with holograms would have thought he was holding an incredibly thin piece of paper as if it were a tablet or book. Jonathan flipped rapidly through the stories, mostly glancing at the headlines. Newssheets in Singking could carry stories from any of the over 500 accredited news organizations in the city. Jonathan subscribed to just four: The
Singking Tribune
,
The Morning Herald
,
Armed Forces News Service,
and
Solarian National News Service
. Putting aside the sports section articles on the Singking Jayhawks 2-0 win over the New Angles Tornados, and the no hitter the Singking Dragons Steven Zanzid had pitched against the Elysium Spartans, Jonathan skimmed the
Armed Forces
section until he found what he was looking for. But of course by then the train had arrived.

In New York on Earth, they had a maglev system that was silent and floated along the tracks. Singking made due with the tried and tested wheeled version, which though noisy, and on occasion smelly due to the mildew caused by their hydrogen engines if there exhaust vents weren’t properly maintained, worked well enough. Allowing a pensioner with a cane and a red ribbon on his coat, denoting being wounded in his time of national service to take the seat inside the door, Jonathan moved to the center of the car. He grabbed one of the ceiling straps to secure himself against the possibility of flying into other passengers when the train made stops along the line. As other passengers crowded in around him, Jonathan shrank the holo-projection to palm size so he would be able to read it without elbowing other passengers. As the car lurched with the train pulling out of the station, Jonathan returned to the article. The headline read;
Officer Cabal Pleads Guilty to Conspiracy
.  Briefly rolling his eyes at the sensationalism of the news media especially what was supposed to be the politically neutral and zero sensationalism
Armed Forces News Service
, Jonathan read on. The article was one in a series that Jonathan had been following the last couple weeks, as had a good portion of the Solarian Military and a good chunk of the general public. The
Hydra
conspiracy, as it was being called, had broken about four months ago when the Office of Military Intelligence, Solaria’s catch-all foreign and domestic intelligence service, had announced it had turned over evidence to the National Police Bureau of Investigations that a group of military officers were involved in an ongoing criminal conspiracy. The announcement itself wasn’t that surprising. Since the end of Military rule two centuries ago, the OMI had been forbidden from exercising police powers against Solarian citizens, or subjects. Any time OMI uncovered activity that would require a trial at a later date they turned the case over to the NPBI; the Solarian central government’s primary civilian law enforcement agency. What had made this case so sensational was less than a week later, NPBI arrested seven people, all Navy personnel, including four of command rank, and one squadron commander.

Corruption and malfeasance weren’t unheard of in the Solarian military, but to have a Commodore, a Captain, two Lieutenant Captains, and three Warrant Officers brought up on charges was a black eye to the whole service. The article outlined an overview of the whole sordid scheme. Apparently, a rather shady fellow had approached Commodore Kun commander of Task Force-A09, who was by all accounts an exceptional officer.  The paper named him as Arthur Spurlick, who was one of the local magnates who bid on supply service contracts for the Task Force, while it was on deployment in the Tri-border region. Spurlick had offered to cut Kun in on a kickback scheme if Kun, as the local senior officer, exercised his prerogative and gave the resupply contracts to ships and companies owned by Spurlick. Kun, who was by all accounts heavily under water on gambling debts, agreed, and more importantly pressured his flag captain to go along, since the ships captain ultimately held final say over who could tend their ships. Spurlick, ever the conman, had found two other officers in the squadron with financial vulnerabilities and offered them the same deal for when they were on detached duty. The scheme spiraled out of control when the Quartermasters for the three ships involved, Kun flagship
Hydra
, destroyer’s
Titan
, and
Pandora
were brought on board and began doctoring up fake supply and service requests to steal money from the Navy fund, which was supposed to pay for local contracting work. According to the article, the whole thing unraveled less than week after NPBI had formerly began investigating. TF-A09 was disbanded and the ships involved put into dock at
Macran
until new officers and crews could be assigned. According to this latest article, all parties involved were pleading guilty to
conspiracy to defraud the government
, and
conspiracy to commit fraud
in order to avoid the noose, which was where they were headed if the
severe misuse of military resources
charges had stood. Apparently, all seven were looking at ten years hard labor, and the officers pled guilty to the additional charge of
conduct unbecoming of an officer
and were each receiving the additional punishment of twenty lashes. This was a sad sorry affair for the whole navy, but for the brotherhood of officers in particular. Jonathan closed out the article and changed trains at Senate Circle, to the Redline, which would take him up to the government quarter. This time he managed to secure himself a window seat, a rare commodity on the red line trains.

The crowd changed significantly. No longer as diverse it was now almost exclusively civil servants, military personnel, and people in smart suits that were without a doubt political aides dotting the cabin. Jonathan recalled about four months back when he had seen a Quorum Delegate, easy to spot because of the ceremonial red and white sash he wore, riding the train. Some of the Quorum of the People delegates Solaria’s lower house made every effort to demonstrate that they were in fact true representatives of the people, living where they lived, eating where they ate and taking the train to work. From Jonathan’s observations it was usually more for show than anything else. Though, to the credit of the delegate, Jonathan hadn’t spied one news cam or reporter followed him, so maybe the fellow really had just been going to work. One stop after Senate Circle, which was Republic Street, the train emerged from underground into the bright light of day. Jonathan always enjoyed having the window seat when he could get it for this leg of the commute. The Singking Metro, as efficient and extensive as it was, hadn’t been constructed in one go, but rather in sections over the 400-year history of the city. This section, which followed First Street to the base of Parliament Hill, had been one of the first constructed and had been built above ground. First Street had acquired its name by being the first street built in Singking proper. Back then it had been a dirt road with a cluster of wooden buildings along it, and nowadays it was an eight lane road which ran almost 5 miles, straight from the Premier’s residence, on Parliament Hill to the Capitol building at Senate Circle. For four and a half of those miles, the metro line ran above ground through the heart of Singking.

Jonathan had snagged a seat on the right side of the car and was looking northeast in the direction of Riverfront and First Landing. That section of the city was a neat grid of narrow streets with low rises, which the aesthetic building codes maxed out at 15 stories. Most structures were designed with the flair and smooth lines of Neo-Art Deco, or alternatively were built Neo Classical style, smooth lines and round corners with ornate, but far from gaudy decorations. They ran the gambit from mixed apartment retail buildings to a wide assortment of offices.  Halfway between Senate Circle and Parliament Hill was the sprawling complex of neo-classical buildings that housed the Solarian National Museum. The most eye-catching buildings were the older and more regal structures to line the street. These were the family mansions of the Landed’s. Many of these buildings were more than 300 years old, dating back to when Singking had first been declared the planetary capital. The mansions built to befit the dignity of the descendants who without Solaria would not exist, usually included elegant gardens and beautifully designed out buildings, some of which were open to the public as museums. The Mansion quarter, as the area on either side of the National Museum was called, was a pleasant piece of greenery in the middle of the city.

Had Jonathan sat on the opposite side of the train he would have seen a much different view. As far as the Serentine River, the city would have also been low-rise stone, marble, and glass structures. The area along the Serentine also included the old Cathedral and the diplomatic quarter. Over the river, in Founder's Hills the aesthetic building codes were deemed unnecessary and Singking’s neat low-rise buildings gave way to skyscrapers and high-rises. By most standards, the Founders Hill district was still extremely elegant. Absent were the mega towers of Earth and the core worlds. Each skyscraper seemed as if it were a beautifully made sculpture, glass and steel interwoven to seem graceful yet home to the ever- present bustle of millions of people. Jonathon much preferred the low rises and stone buildings of the old town, yet Singking in its entirety, held endless visual wonders. The ride up First Street took only fifteen minutes with three stops until the train slid back under ground and pulled to a halt at Government Center Station. Jonathan closed up his holo-projector and the sports section article he’d been pursuing, annoyed at himself for not taking his brother’s bet on the Dragon-Spartans game. Jaroed had favored the Spartans and had offered to bet Jonathan five Solars. Had Jonathan taken it he’d be five Solars richer. Jonathan had little time to be gloomy though. Government Center Station was the busiest Metro Station in the city. It was the convergent point for all five major commuter lines and had three of its own spar lines as well. Built directly under the Mile Stone the stations exit was less than five hundred feet from the Premier’s residence, which was also the Old Parliament building.