He could see Morgan consider it for a moment, her head tilted slightly to her right.
It was only a moment, though, and then she shook her head with a sigh.
“It’ll take too long to go all the way to my quarters just to come back to the mess hall. Besides, if I leave showering till last, I can crawl straight into bed afterward.”
“And get your pillow all damp?” Max asked, genuinely having a hard time imaging doing the same, even with his short hair – not that hers was much longer than his.
Morgan shrugged.
“Never bothered me before. I honestly hadn’t thought about it.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, so Max let the conversation lapse into silence as they made their way back toward the center of the ship and the crew areas.
He’d picked the closest weapon mount on purpose, so it wasn’t a terribly long walk.
The ship kept Zion time, so most of the food he could see laid out for the crew was of the breakfast variety, given it was just passing seven in the morning. Time was when Max would have complained about the odd schedule in which working third shift resulted, but he liked breakfast for dinner just fine, and really, what difference did it make in space anyway? Not much of a sun to miss, after all.
“Go ahead and get a seat, and I’ll grab food for both of us,” Max said, waving in the general direction of the officer’s tables.
Normally he’d not be able to sit there, but it should be fine if he was with Morgan. Besides, it was completely empty at the moment; who was there to get mad at him?
“Just don’t get me anything too weird,” Morgan said. “We didn’t really go in for strange stuff back home.”
No one does, Max thought, her words bringing up an amusing – afterward anyway – incident where he’d been accused of having atrocious taste in food for wanting a sandwich while visiting a planet that ate the local bug equivalents prepared by burying them in sealed cans for six months. Despite the memory, he recognized what she really meant, that her formative diet had been on the bland and repetitive side.
His had too, for that matter.
“Of course. Don’t worry, Cutie, I remember what you ordered the last time we had a meal together.”
Her eyebrows tightened, accompanied by a slight frown.
Hmm, maybe I shouldn’t have admitted I remember such a small detail from more than a month back. Trying to be friendly here, not creepy. Oh well, no point in trying to explain it now, that’d just make things worse. “The basics are plenty tasty anyway,” he said instead, throwing in a chuckle to try and defuse her suspicion. “And plenty of hot chocolate, I promise.”
Having but two hands, he settled for placing three plates on top of each other and heaping food for both of them on top of the stack on his tray, then balancing the hot chocolate and coffee on either end.
Bacon, eggs, sausage, hash browns, and pancakes — it really was hard to go wrong with the basics.
Placing the tray between them, he slid a plate out and placed it in front of her, then went for his own.
“Go ahead, take what you want first. I know you need more food than most people your size, so don’t worry about leaving too little for me.”
“You’re being suspiciously nice,” Morgan said, but didn’t hold back from doing precisely as he’d suggested.
“I always try to be nice. It’s one of my best features.”
“And one of the most grating.”
“Guilty, I suppose. Still, I do like you, and if we’re going to continue to work closely together, we might as well try to get along. Especially since, well,” Max said, shrugging.
“Since what?” Morgan asked. “You aren’t helping yourself with suspicious comments like that.”
Max shrugged again.
“Look around. Rather lonely, being an officer. Split up on different shifts in case something goes wrong, you’re never eating at the same times. The rest of the crew gives you a wide berth, which is understandable if not without its downsides. Do you ever even see your friend, aside from work stuff like the one you have tomorrow? With her on fourth shift and you third?”
“No, no, I don’t,” Morgan answered, grimacing.
“What?” Max asked. “Why the long face?”
“Long face?” Morgan shook her head. “What does that even mean?”
“Hmm, guess that expression doesn’t translate outside my homeworld. Why do you look like something extra nasty died in your bunk?”
“You make it sound like I’m some kind of project for you. Some good deed to do out of obligation.”
“The way you say that, makes me think you’re thinking of someone else,” Max pointed out. “Not that I’m saying you are a charity case, but is it so bad to have someone helping you, even if that is the reason?”
Morgan grunted, stuffing a sausage link into her mouth instead of answering.
“If it makes you feel better, I can assure you my interest is wholly self-serving,” Max said, flashing her another smile. “While there are a decent number of pretty girls on this ship, most aren’t as pretty as you, and most are either too old for my tastes or married.”
“Now I am shocked, a female you don’t want to flirt with?” Morgan’s tone was light, but Max had noticed the way she’d reacted when he’d said she was prettier than most of the girls on the ship. It was subtle, but it reminded him of the mercs who’d gotten paranoid and were constantly looking for the knife hidden in your other hand when you talked with them.
“Who said I won’t flirt with them?” Max answered, “A little harmless fun, that.” He paused to eat a few bites of pancake. “But enough of that. I don’t want to talk about other girls, and I can’t imagine you do either. So, what do you want to talk about?”
“You talk and talk and talk, and say very little about yourself. How about you tell me of home?”
Just what we needed, more dreary things to talk about. Max mentally sighed. Nothing for it, I suppose. “Well, I wouldn’t call it home anymore, but I’m from Itens. It’s out towards Sol, one of the older settled planets. Most of those older planets have their problems, and on Itens it’s the temperature. The planet is in the habitable zone of the star, but only barely, so it gets very cold even at the equator.”
Morgan shivered.
“The opposite of my homeworld, then. We were close enough to the star that the only thing keeping temperatures low enough for survival was the thick cloud cover.”
“As in constant cloud cover?” Max asked. When Morgan nodded he added, “That’s some impressive work on your tan, then.”
“I don’t follow,” Morgan said, drawing out the first word.
“Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just imaging a world with no sunlight, and part of that is assuming most of the people would be rather pale.”
“Right,” Morgan said quietly. “Most of the people in the town were…” she trailed off, clearly upset by this, though he couldn’t tell why.
Must just be like anywhere else, different from the locals makes you stand out.
Max cleared his throat, covering the awkwardness by pausing further to take a swig of coffee.
“Anyway, Itens is cold, and that made growing enough food hard as well. Domed greenhouses that can be heated work great, but of course that also drives costs up.”
“Were you often hungry?”
“No,” Max shook his head, being quite used to that as an obvious follow-up question. “No, there was always enough to eat. Didn’t taste particularly good, what the government provided for ‘free,’ but it kept you alive. The problem was that so much of the planet’s energy and time went into providing food and basic shelter, we had little time left for anything else, especially with the high taxes to pay for all that food and shelter.”
“An all-corn diet or something?” Morgan asked.
Max chuckled.
“Yeah, that’s not far off, really. Anyway, this meant there was a brisk black market for anything fancier, which caused the
government to crack down, and around it circled until the police forces cracking down on the mobsters ate up even more of the planet’s time and energy. Not much of a life at that point, you know? Most everyone was working for the government or the mob, with little time for anything fun.
“On top of all of that, the violence between the two groups meant a lot of orphans, and gradually the government ended up raising more and more of the kids.”
“We can talk about something else if you’d prefer,” Morgan said quietly.
“No, no, it’s quite all right,” Max said.
“Is it?” Morgan asked. She was frowning slightly, looking just a little sad.
“What? Is it something on my face?” he replied quickly, giving her an over-the-top smile.
“Knowing you better now, at least a little, it isn’t hard to tell when your smile is real or not,” Morgan said, even more quietly. She looked down at her plate, seeming to just then realize that it was empty. “I’d better get off to bed. Tomorrow is going to be another long day. Goodnight, Eck.” Before he had a chance to say anything else, she was up, off the bench, and headed toward the slot for her used silverware and plates.
“Goodnight, Cutie,” he called out after a few seconds, but not loud enough that she’d be able to hear him. Such fun, such fun. What did she see in my expression, anyway?
He was still seated, chewing slowly and pondering nothing and everything when Lt. Marigold sat down in the spot Morgan had vacated.
“Aren’t you a little young for this ride?” she asked him, her tone more amused than annoyed.
When he’d first joined up, Max would have been just as confused by the expression as Morgan had by his earlier reference to long faces, but he’d long since gotten used to the amalgamation of sayings, shorthand, and in-jokes the mercs shared as a sort of composite culture. In this case, she was simply commenting on him sitting at the officer’s table.
“Was just keeping the new LT company as she ate, LT,” he said, shrugging. That said, he did follow up his statement by speeding up his eating.
“Really? Keeping her company, is that what you’re calling it now?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied. He didn’t have the best grasp on Marigold’s sense of humor, and even if he had, joking around with an officer – at least one in his own chain of command – wasn’t the best idea.
“Just be sure you don’t do anything stupid. I have enough trouble with the privates thinking with everything besides what’s between their ears.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered smartly. Hell, I even agree with you on that one.
“A bit of advice, Sergeant,” Marigold continued, “Not that you asked. You’re constantly on the lookout for a girl, and sure, I get that. Perhaps what you need – what she needs right now – isn’t a lover, but a friend. Don’t be so focused on one outcome, especially an unlikely one, that you miss other good things.”
“Hey, I have plenty of friends,” Max responded with another of his trademark smiles, but even as he did, Morgan’s words about how obvious the differences in his smiles were replayed themselves in his mind. “Am I dismissed, LT?” he asked, pushing the thought away.
“Yes, Sergeant. You’d best find your rack. I may be just starting my day, but yours should be ending.”
Max stood, saluted, and then quickly gathered his things.
I do have friends, you know.
Chapter 09
Maintenance. It’s almost a dirty word, both for military and civilian spacers. On the one hand these machines are literally the difference between life and death for you and the whole crew, on the other even routine work can and will be tedious, back-breaking, and exhausting. And that doesn’t even take into consideration the problems of running maintenance on systems that keep you alive while they’re keeping you alive. Sure, we all try to get as much done as possible while in port, but that will only get you so far. The military tries to fix this problem by having redundancies, and that’s not a bad solution, but it also introduces its own problem. Great, fantastic, you have two sets of a random vital system in case one of them breaks. You also have double the maintenance work to do because both sets need to be checked just as often as they would if you only had the one.
- Chief Engineer Aart Langtry, Zion Military Shipyards.
THE ENVIRONMENTAL plant was far larger than any Morgan had worked on before. In mechanism and function, it wasn’t all that different from the machines they’d used in the mines back home to pump cool fresh air into the shafts and to scrub what came out for toxins. In fact, based on the markings on the outer casing (the only part of the installation that looked like it hadn’t been replaced piecemeal several times over the intervening centuries) it had been designed by the same company back on Earth.
Guess I shouldn’t be surprised by that. That was why they hired me in the first place, my familiarity with old tech. Never would have thought that experience working in those death trap mines would actually be useful.
“Okay, people,” Gertrude called out, drawing Morgan’s thoughts away from the past, “B-Team has the forward plant up and running, and everything checks out green. We can start the teardown in earnest now.”
As they started, the process was at once familiar and not for Morgan. On the one hand, she’d helped with a few complete dismantles of machinery while on her last ship, though less than she’d have liked, given that captain’s obvious dislike for her had manifested in giving her the dirtiest and least important jobs. On the other hand, this kind of machinery she’d stripped many a time, but never with a group.
Still, overall it was rather enjoyable, both because she’d been stuck doing nothing but desk work and training for weeks, and because it was something she’d grown up doing and was good at.
She’d worn her coveralls for the job, of course, and it was a good thing, too. Within ten or fifteen minutes of starting, she’d already gotten grease on both sleeves and knelt in a small puddle of oil. Morgan was helping a few of the techs dismantle the fans that led to the various ducts, while Gertrude’s group worked on the main machine section.
Slowly the meticulous piles of parts grew around them, each labeled as to purpose, position, and priority for replacement. Morgan was shocked at the condition of more than a few of the parts, while others looked sturdy enough — until she checked the logs for when they were installed, only to discover that they were far, far older than she herself was.
That was useful, but even after they’d torn apart more than half the plant, they still hadn’t figured out why the air conditioning wasn’t working as efficiently as it should have been.
With so much of the ship not in active use and consequently cut off from the air conditioning and circulation systems, it should have been trivial for a system as large and powerful as STEVE’s to maintain a comfortable atmosphere, but slowly the temperature had been creeping up since they’d left the station.
Two hours in, they took a break.
“What do you think the problem is, G?” Morgan asked as they leaned against one of the bulkheads, three empty bottles of water on the floor between them.
“Blast if I know at this point,” she replied. “I thought – I hoped – it would be in the fans somewhere, simply a matter of not getting enough pressure to properly circulate the air, but clearly that isn’t it. It acts like it’s a leak in the coolant system, but if that was it, why didn’t it trigger any of the sensors? That stuff gets leaking, we really should have seen evidence of it well before now.” Gertrude shook her head. “It also doesn’t help that so much of these systems are spread out. I get that it’s to protect the system from a single hit taking out everything, but it also makes everything else harder.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Morgan responded. “Stuff like that, even a small leak would have caused some of the crew to get sick by now.”
“Shall we get back to it then?” Gertrude said, pushing herself upright off the bulkhead.
“I’d definitely prefer to finish
with enough time left for some actual sleep.”
“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Gertrude said, waving her hand dismissively.
“Oh?” Morgan asked, then gestured about them. “Going to be a lot of work getting this back together.”
Gertrude shrugged.
“Captain made me promise to send you off to bed if we went long.”
Morgan was able to suppress the flash of anger the simple statement caused, but she did still feel it first.
“What am I, Haruhi, now? Off to bed with you, no cookie for dessert?”
“Of course not, M. But this isn’t officially your job either, and you’re not supposed to let it interfere with what is your job now.”
Morgan sighed.
“Can I admit to wondering why they made me a lieutenant instead of an engineering officer?”
“Of course. I wondered it a bit myself. Certainly, you have the skills to make a great engineer, and I think you’ve shown you have what it takes to lead, as well.”
“So then why?”
Gertrude shrugged.
“Might be something as simple as the company doesn’t need more chief engineers in training, but it does need more captains. Could be the captain thinks as good of an engineer as you’d make, you’d make an even better captain someday. Could be a lot of things.”
“I hate guesswork,” Morgan said.
“Well, good thing this,” Gertrude gestured at the disassembled environmental plant before them, “is most certainly not guesswork.”
Morgan chuckled.
“All right, you got me there. Let’s get back to it, then. As good as your techs are, I think we have enough time to finish a complete teardown and reassembly before I get shooed off to bed.”
“That’s the spirit,” Gertrude said, slapping Morgan on the back. “What do you want to handle next, the CO2 scrubbers, or the microbe filters?”
“Oh, scrubbers, definitely.”
***
They did in fact finish with time to spare, if not much. Morgan was so tired by the end, she didn’t even have the energy to get some food into her before crawling back to her quarters. Leaving her boots next to the hatch, she peeled off her now-filthy coveralls and tossed them at the hamper set aside for the harder-to-clean things like the coveralls. She missed, almost crying when she realized she couldn’t just leave it on the floor. or it might sully the uniform that had missed its proper hamper the day before.
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