Carrington's Squad
Millet artwork prompt, Down Pad side story
For information on my Millet artwork prompt: Millet Peasants
For information on my published novella, Down Pad: Down Pad information
Shrike launch was at 1000, so everyone in Carrington’s squad was out of the office and at the jeeps by 0900. They all wore helmets, with embedded short-range comm.
The Space Force Launch Delta at Boca Chica, Texas, was responsible for Shrike operations. The Shrike was a military version of the SpaceX Falcon 9, with mods to allow for recovery of the second stage as well.
Carrington got into the jeep that Correa was driving, with Garcia and Thomas. Budd drove the other jeep, with Johnson and Salinas. “Time to go,” he said, over the comm.
The first Shrike of the day had just launched, but three-year-old Al still complained. “I can’t see the down fire!” That’s what he called the rocket fire that maneuvered the first stage down to its down pad, where his father’s squad would check it, and click it into the transporter that would take it to the hangar.
“We can’t see both the launch and the first stage touch down from this park,” said his sister, seven-year-old Shelly, looking up from her Notepad. The other kids were outside the park shelter, but she was sitting on one of the picnic tables under the shelter’s roof, which was the closest she could get to being “inside” while at the park.
Al was suspicious, and trying to figure out whether he should start whining, when his four-year-old brother distracted him by hitting him with a partially deflated size 2 soccer ball. Al, taken off guard, fell on his bottom on the grass and started to cry.
“Augustine Otis Jerome Carrington!” said his mother, Jenna. “Apologize to your brother, right now!”
“He’s not hurt, Mom,” said Shelly. “He’s just being a baby.”
“I said ‘heads up’,” said Gus. “He wasn’t paying ’tention.” Not paying attention was a cardinal sin in the Carrington family.
“You apologize for hitting him, even if he isn’t hurt and even if he wasn’t paying attention.”
“Sorry, baby,” said Gus.
Jenna frowned but decided to let it pass. “And Al, you do have to pay attention. Situational awareness.”
Al couldn’t quite say all those syllables, but like “paying attention,” it was another phrase drilled into the Carrington kids and he knew what it meant. It meant ‘not paying attention’ that you could lose a toy for.
“Mom,” said ten-year-old Twan, their first-born. “I’m going to the Thomas’s house. We’re going to try to add a sail to a surf board.” Sandy Thomas’s husband had a repair shop at their house, and was semi-retired. He was a favorite locus for a lot of the kids in their subdivision.
“Stop by the house, first?” Jenna asked. “I promised Mike some sourdough starter.”
“’Kay,” he said.
Jenna watched him ride off on his bike. Then she turned back to Shelly. “There’s not another launch this morning,” she said. “Either set that Notepad for an exercise routine or put it down and take a lap. We’re at the park to get sun and exercise.”
“Mom!” the girl complained, but put it down, and went to run around the softball field right next to the park shelter.
Her two oldest occupied, Jenna turned to Gus and Al, fighting over the soccer ball. Well, no one was crying. Gus knew as long as Al wasn’t crying, he wasn’t going too far.
Then Nicky started making noises from the car seat / baby carrier at her feet. Yes, he was rooting. Hungry again already. Must be a growth spurt. Jenna picked him up and positioned him under the modesty cover, and he started to nurse.
And here they came. Gus and Al were mostly happy about the new baby, but he took a lot of Jenna’s attention. “Read this, Mommy?” asked Gus.
Jenna opened the book, and started reading it for the fiftieth time. “Ned sat by the window and looked out at the night sky. ‘I’m going to go to the moon one day,’ he said….”
TSgt Antoine Ambrose Carrington of the Shrike Operations Squadron was assigned to Retrieval Operations. Currently, his squad was in charge of first stage transport from down pad BC-1 to the check-out hangar, where they decided whether to send it on to the refurbishment facility or the operational hangar.
Spec4 Andy Correa and Specialist Jarvis Budd were the drivers: Shrike stage transport, hi-rail trucks. Heck, even garden variety jeeps if necessary. Correa was the biggest and oldest on their team, and underneath his down pad helmet, bald. He’d just made the age cut-off to enlist in the Space Force. Budd was the youngest, a black Texan with red freckles, not quite as dark as Carrington, who just liked to drive. He’d just passed six months in the Space Force and made Spec2.
Spec3 Garcia and Specialist Thomas ran the cranes, free-standing or overhead. Miguel Garcia was almost as old as Correa with years working in construction before he joined up, and had the muscles to show it. Sandy Thomas was pretty new to the Space Force, with only a few months as a Spec2. She was the shortest at five foot eight, and had several years in a factory, running forklifts and heavy equipment before she joined.
Spec4 Arlo Johnson and Specialist Jose Salinas considered themselves hackers. They did computer and microcontroller diagnostics and data monitoring. Plus anything else that didn’t fall into the top two categories. Like cleaning out soot from rocket engines. Salinas had the lightest skin in the squad. Which didn’t tan, like Johnson’s, but burned. He wore sunscreen.
“Screens off,” said Kassim. “Unplug.”
They were running a trade-off test of command and control between bunker and pad using carrier pigeons vs human runners. It was nicknamed “birds vs boys.”
“We’ll be trying smoke signals next,” said Lo, holding a pigeon with the note tied to its foot.
“Not so loud,” said Stewart. “You’ll give them ideas.”
“We’re doing motocross next time,” said Lo. “I already volunteered.”
“Bikes. Plain old analog, no motors, bicycles. Don’t even need gas,” said Stewart. “Foolproof. Best way to go.”
Kassim stood with an old fashioned analog stop watch. “Three, two, one, go!”
Lo released her pigeon, and Stewart set off at a jog.
Budd stood around with the six other bikers outside Base Support. It was the first time his down pad schedule had him off at the same time the people from the online base motorcycle group were meeting up for lunch. He’d never seen that many of them together in real life.
“So you’re DirtDevil?” he asked Lo, who was one of the two women in their little group, recognizing who she must be by her bike. “Isn’t that a vacuum cleaner?”
“Better than moto12345,” she said. “Did you just keep adding digits until you got a name that wasn’t taken?”
“Yep,” he said grinning. “At least I’m not a vacuum cleaner.”
The last member of the group rode up on his bike. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s head out.”
Budd swung his leg over his Harley. “Finally,” he said.
Antoine’s team had finished their last Shrike first stage transport, inspect and route for the day.
“Okay, everyone, finish your paperwork and we’re done.”
It wasn’t really done on paper, but the old terms still hung on in the Space Force. The members of the transport team logged their hours and notes into the knowledge base and accounting systems from their roach pads.
Everything was running on schedule at the base.
Antoine had a regular nine to five job now – well, seven to four, really, with half an hour for lunch and two fifteen minute breaks. And with everyone in base housing, just twenty minutes tops to get home, usually just fifteen. Much better than his last assignment, when he’d still been plain Air Force.
Instead of going straight back to the bachelor enlisted’s barracks, Budd decided to head to the sports bar. When he got there, he found the screen that was showing the Southwick Motocross National race. Lo saw him and waved him over. She wasn’t alone, of course, but it was hard to tell if she was with any of the men or women watching the race with her.
“Hey Lo,” he said after he’d made his way over, “you got a first name? And don’t tell me it’s specialist.” A stupid line, because of course he’d gotten her name from the base directory.
“Jordan,” she answered, as if the question had made sense, and made room for him next to her. “The Aussie still keeps winning.”
He smiled big. So far so good.
“No kidding,” he returned sitting down. “Which one? And I’m Jarvis, but everyone still calls me Budd.”
When Antoine walked in the door, it wasn’t even 4:30 yet. Jenna was getting dinner ready, wearing Nicky in the sling, with Twan helping. Shelly was in charge of the two little ones, Gus and Al. Al was out of the every third year sequence – their “celebration” baby, from when he’d got the Space Force assignment. They’d known it was likely.
“Twan,” he said, “take the little kids outside. I’ll take over here.” Twan grinned at him. He hated kitchen work.
“Come on guys,” Twan said, and opened the screen door to the back yard. Gus followed eagerly. He’d been getting tired of having yet another book read to him. Al was a bit more cautious but trailed behind. Both his big brothers tended to do things with balls that ended up with Al falling down.
“Okay, Shel,” said Antoine. “You’re off duty. Take ten, then check in for KP.”
“Thanks, Dad,” she said. “But can I have twenty?”
Always bargaining, always pushing the boundaries, that one. Antoine looked over at Jenna. She nodded.
“Twenty it is,” he said. “But only because Mom authorized it.”
“Thanks, Mom,” she said, and headed to her room and shut the door.
Antoine finally got over to Jenna and gave her a kiss, then took Nicky. “No one hugs me anymore when I come home,” he complained to the baby, as if he were a confidante. “I don’t expect it from Twan or Gus, but it’s not even Shelly or Al anymore.”
“So I’m no one?” Jenna teased, giving him just a half hug, since he was holding Nicky.
“Maybe,” he said grinning. “What’s for dinner?”
“Just burgers and salad,” she answered. “And what do you mean, ‘maybe’? Could you cut up the carrots and cucumbers for the salad? Twan already scraped them.”
Somehow, he managed to start chopping up the vegetables one-handed while keeping Nicky on the side of his body away from the knife.
“Shel needs more alone time,” said Jenna. “She doesn’t like watching the little ones, and they get restless with her.”
“Everyone needs to pitch in,” he said. “We can’t carry dead weight.”
“Don’t put it like that,” she said, upset. “And of course I’m not suggesting Shel shouldn’t do her part. I’m just thinking her part might not be watching the little ones. At least not as much as it is right now.”
“Sorry, Jenna,” he said. “Someone at work. Who’s a little older than seven and should know better.”
When Shelly peeked out from her bedroom door twenty minutes later, Antoine just waved her back in her room. “I got this,” he said.
After dinner, he put Twan on cleanup, and when he looked like he was going to complain, just shook his head. Twan thought better of it and headed over without grousing.
Jenna was nursing the baby again and had a steam train video up for the little ones. Antoine headed over to Shel’s room and knocked on the door.
Shelly opened it.
“Your place or mine?” he asked. Shelly had become very conscious of her status as the only girl and had declared her room off limits to all boys. Including Dad. The master bedroom had a sitting area, so private parent child talks tended to happen there a lot.
“You can come in,” she said, surprising him. The half of her twin bed next to the wall was covered with pillows, which apparently turned it into a daybed. She sat there, and he turned her desk chair around and sat across from her.
“Dad,” she said, “I don’t want to be like Mom. And I don’t want to be like you, either. I want to be an engineer.”
This was not the talk he had thought they were going to be having. And he felt a stab of pain at her engineer comment. It was something he had hoped for once.
“What made you think you had to be like Mom or me?” he asked.
“Then why do I always have to watch the little kids? And why do you always order me around like I’m in your squad?”
“The little kids is actually why I wanted to talk to you. We think we’re expecting too much of you there, but if you don’t help out there, we have to come up with something else. Mom has a lot of work to do.”
“Mom told you to do this, didn’t she?”
“She told me you were having trouble. So yes, I’m squad leader and you’re in my squad. My job is to make things right so everything gets done.”
Sandy and Mike sat on their back porch and watched the sun set. The smell of baking bread came through the open, screened window.
The back lit trees showed the detail of branch and foilage. A utility service pole stuck out above them, and the power line stretched from it over the white ball of the sun, thinly haloed in fuzzy orange red. A straight lavender cloud, like an eyebrow, extended from close to one side of the pole, above the sun and angling shallowly down from the wire. Above it the yellow gray sky stretched clear and cloudless to dark gray.
When the light was gone, they went back inside.
After chores were done and the family rosary, Gus and Al were put to bed. Twan went out in the neighborhood and Shelly went to her room. Antoine sat with Jenna on the sofa in the living room and they talked about Shel. Then Jenna pulled up a cooking show on the big screen and Antoine put on his headphones and got out an engineering manual from work to study.
Finally, Twan was back and the two oldest had lights out, too. Antoine and Jenna headed back to their own bedroom.
“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary,” said Antoine, from their evening Angelus. Traditionally, the third recitation of the prayer was at the ringing of the church bells at 6 in the evening. The Carringtons modified that to just before bed.
“And she conceived of the Holy Spirit,” answered Jenna.
They said a Hail Mary, then Antoine continued, “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”
“Be it done unto me according to thy word,” answered Jenna.
Another Hail Mary, then Antoine started the third responsorial, “And the Word became flesh.”
“And dwelt among us.” They said the final prayers together, and then got into bed.
Jenna set Nicky in the crib next to her side of the bed. It had the railing put down next to the bed so she could reach him to nurse in the middle of the night.
They were back on the every third year schedule again and the fertility calendar showed no go for several days yet. They snuggled a bit before they turned the lights out, and she fell asleep almost immediately.
Antoine looked over at her with some concern. She’d been acting more tired than usual lately. Was it more than the baby and the housework and the kids? He said a quick prayer and then nodded off himself.
For information my Millet artwork prompt: Millet Peasants
For information on my published novella, Down Pad: Down Pad information
Loved it, Ms. Mary. Only hard part was the lack of visible scene breaks. ❤️
You're right. I have to work more on my transitions.