True support only came from mutual need.
EIGHT
The Embustero: 2710:02:01 Standard
Attendance at breakfast the next morning was back to normal. Terson joined the chow line staring straight ahead, his mood hovering somewhere between grumpy and foul since leaving the brig. His shift-mates took the hint and spared him their small talk as the queue moved forward; he began to think he might make it to bedtime without flattening anyone until he reached Michelle Lytle’s serving station.
“I’m guessing you don’t want coffee?” she asked.
The question set off a snicker somewhere behind him, but he checked the impulse to track down the offender and pull his tongue out through his sinuses. “You guess correctly,” he snapped instead.
“Would you like, um, something else, then?”
“Yes, but sure as hell not from you.” Her face clouded up as he took a juice pack from the dispenser and stalked away. He thought he heard a sniffle, but didn’t care to verify it. He ignored Jerrell Mackey’s hail and gesture to join him and O’Brien and made instead for the nearly unoccupied corner table.
He’d only taken one bite when the two spacers joined him instead.
“You aren’t talking to us now, Joey?” O’Brien asked with a hint of accusation.
“You know what happened to me last shift?” Terson asked. “What really happened?”
“A couple of versions,” she replied. “It sucks, what the captain pulled, but we didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“You, maybe not,” he told O’Brien, “but you,” he turned to Mackey, “said I just had to have another mug of coffee!”
The spacer’s eyes widened at the accusation. “Hey, I drank it, too!” he sputtered. His ears failed to blush, but Terson was not yet convinced.
“What about the creamer you handed me?”
“Are you kidding? That stuff is factory sealed!”
“A needle wouldn’t make an obvious hole in the packaging,” Terson pointed out. “All you had to do was hand it to me with the rest! Is that what you did? Tell me I’m wrong!”
“No!” Mackey exclaimed, but thought better of it as the implication sank in. “I mean ‘yes’ it could have happened that way, but I didn’t do it!” His ears still didn’t change color.
“So you had no idea?” Terson demanded.
“No!”
“So, if Colvard, or Markland, or Shadrack handed you a packet of creamer and told you to make sure I put it in my coffee, you wouldn’t have done it—is that what you’re saying?”
“Absolutely,” the spacer declared. “Swear to God!” His ears blazed pink, but at least Terson knew the man’s tell still functioned.
“Okay, then you’re off the hook,” Terson shrugged, turning back to his meal. “That leaves Lytle, and I’ll deal with her when the chance comes.”
“Um, that’s good to know—being off the hook,” Mackey tendered, “but I don’t think Michelle’s got it in her to do something like that.”
“She’s the only one it could have been.”
Mackey turned to O’Brien for backup, but it came instead from Liz, sitting a seat away on the other side of her. “It was me.”
She continued eating as all three turned to look at her. “Say again?” O’Brien asked.
“It was me,” Liz reiterated.
“But nobody else fainted,” Mackey reasoned. “How’d you do it?”
“That’s for me to know and you to wonder,” she replied tonelessly, picked up her tray and walked away.
“I didn’t see that coming,” O’Brien said.
“Yeah, and I owe somebody an apology,” Terson said, looking around for Lytle, but Lewis now occupied her place in the serving line.
Just then Colvard approached. “Pelletier—Neuchterlien needs someone to clean the fouling out of a burn-tube while we’re in transit. Check out a hazmat suit from Stores after chow and report to him.”
Terson felt bad about Lytle, but Colvard represented a legitimate, and timely, target. “I don’t think so.”
The second mate stopped in his tracks and turned back, a mix of concern and disbelief evident in his expression. “What did you say?”
“No—and not only no but hell no, shit no, and fuck no.” Terson turned to Mackey and O’Brien’s shocked faces with a tight-lipped smile while the officer’s disbelief spun up to fury. “Promise you’ll visit.”
Joseph Pelletier sat in the captain’s office, expression bland, apparently immune to Shadrack’s displeasure. “I thought we had an understanding,” Shadrack said at last.
“So did I.”
“Yet you flatly refused to carry out your assigned detail.”
“I’m not doing your shit work anymore,” Pelletier stated matter-of-factly.
“We entered into a verbal contract when you came aboard,” Shadrack reminded him.
“Which you broke,” Pelletier emphasized, “rendering it null and void.”
Just what I need: a goddamned barracks lawyer. “The intent remains,” Shadrack said, willing himself to patience. “I understand that the work seems menial, but everyone aboard put in their time when they signed on; seniority has its privileges, and right now you don’t have any seniority.”
“I also don’t have a contract,” Pelletier pointed out, “which makes seniority irrelevant and you know it.”
Shadrack jabbed a finger at him angrily. “You said you’d do your share of work as long as you’re aboard!” he snapped. “I offered to let you out of the brig if you’d give this a try and you chose to give it a try! Performing the details you’re assigned is part of that!”
“You never said it meant every shit job on the boat.”
“I shouldn’t have to!”
“If I can’t take you at your word for what you say,” he replied, “how the hell do you expect me to guess at what you don’t say?”
Shadrack’s pique deflated like a leaking balloon. He rubbed his temples. “Very well, Mr. Pelletier, what tasks appeal to you?”
“Whatever,” he shrugged, “but I will not spend every hour of every shift scrubbing toilets and greasing gears.”
“That’s all you’re qualified to do!”
“You should have thought of that,” Pelletier shrugged. “You want my cooperation, that’s my price. Take it or leave it.”
“Go to your quarters,” Shadrack said tiredly. “I’ll think about it.” His abrupt acquiescence seemed to catch the boy by surprise.
“Just like that?” Pelletier asked suspiciously.
“Don’t push your luck,” Shadrack rumbled. “Out!”
Markland entered from the adjoining room a moment after Pelletier left. “He shouldn’t get special consideration.”
“No, he shouldn’t,” Shadrack agreed, “but that’s what he’s had up to now. Every other crewman has duties as well as details.”
“We don’t dare involve him in anything important,” Markland reasoned. “Unless and until he signs on he doesn’t have a vested interest in doing it right.”
“Maybe, but I have to give him the opportunity and he has to know I’m giving it to him. Assign him to the armory,” Shadrack ordered.
Markland’s jaw dropped. “Excuse me?”
“It’s nominally prestigious but not vital,” Shadrack said. “He strikes me as the sort who might find it interesting; that might be enough to bring him in line.”
“You’ve never even considered enlisted crew for that assignment before!” Markland exclaimed. “Why are you willing to give him access to the weapons?”
“I didn’t ask for your opinion,” Shadrack said. Markland’s jaws clenched and he turned back toward the doorway through which he’d entered moments before. “I’m not through.”
Markland faced him at parade rest, the old Navy reflex that kicked in when he was angry. “Yessir.”
“Lately you’ve made a habit of questioning my orders,” Shadrack said. “Have you lost faith in my judgment?”
“I have t
he utmost faith in your judgment,” Markland replied, “except where it involves Joseph Pelletier. He’s a serious liability to this ship. I don’t understand why you can’t see that.”
“I don’t see that,” Shadrack said. “He’s no different from others we’ve taken on in the past.”
“He’s a dirtsider,” Markland emphasized, “not a spacer. He doesn’t have the temperament for this kind of life or the respect for authority it takes to develop it.”
“Have you been talking to Druski?”
“No, sir. Any view she’s expressed is independent of mine.”
Not so independent as you might think. Druski and Markland were both ex-military. Their world views were bound to be similar, including their perceptions of a young man who exhibited more independence than would be acceptable in a military unit. Rugged individualism was not a trait that fared well in the harsh conditions of space, where natural selection favored cooperation, conformity and predictability. Many societies evolved strict social controls that no planet dweller could ever hope to adapt to, and Shadrack could tell from the moment he met Pelletier that the boy was short on conformity and predictability even by dirtside standards.
“I’ll take that into consideration,” Shadrack said. “I would appreciate it if you would express yourself less argumentatively in the future.”
“Of course, sir. I apologize.”
“Excellent. That will be all.”
Markland seemed unusually subdued when he collected Terson from his quarters less than an hour after Terson’s confrontation with Shadrack. Frankly, he wouldn’t have been surprised to end up back in the brig, but the first mate told him instead that the captain had assigned him to work with the ship’s armorer.
The Embustero’s armorer was surprisingly familiar: “He’s all yours, Meg,” Markland told the medic at the lift entrance to deck one. “Good luck.”
“Odd pair of specialties, isn’t it?” Terson asked.
The woman snapped to attention and threw a crisp salute. “Major Druski, 141st Combat Medic Platoon, Commonwealth Marine Corps, Spaceborne, Retired,” she announced. “Every Marine a rifleman and the Hippocratic oath doesn’t apply unless I’m practicing medicine.” There was a fine line between a military doctor and a soldier with medical training and the distinction was based more on mentality than knowledge, Terson knew.
“How does the oath square with the stunt you pulled yesterday?”
“I was trying to spare you unnecessary and severe emotional distress.”
“A spin doctor, too, I see.”
“If I was perfect I wouldn’t be here,” she said, “but I agree that it’s a little perverse to practice both the science of inflicting wounds and treating them, but I’ve done it—and in that order.” Her expression conveyed as much a warning as statement of fact and, recalling her calm reaction to his breakout at the infirmary, gave him pause to wonder exactly what might have happened had he made a move on her.
With that she motioned him to enter the lift.
The Embustero, like many older spaceframes, had been designed with the likelihood of mutiny in mind. The weapons were isolated from the rest of the ship in a vault on deck one aft of the officers’ quarters. The only means of entry were a shaft between the bridge and the armory and a corridor connected to officer country just meters from the captain’s quarters. The blast-resistant hatches opened outward from the corridor at both ends. The access in officer country was secured by an electronic cypher lock.
Druski blocked Terson’s view of the keypad with her body while she tapped in the combination. “This is a standard mantrap,” Druski explained as they walked through. “Neither end will open unless the opposite end is closed. The connecting corridor we’re in now can be vented directly to space. If that happens air pressure holds the hatches at both ends shut even if you have the combination.”
The mechanism integrated into the hatch at the other end was significantly more sophisticated than the first. Druski put her eye to a scanner and pressed her right hand against a palm plate. The device could not only recognize individuals by their retina, iris and handprint, but also determine whether or not the individual was alive by detecting the involuntary adjustment of the pupil, body temperature and the electronic impulses in the nerves of the hand. The computer decided that Druski was both alive and authorized to enter and changed the light bar over the hatch from red to green. Druski pushed the door open and motioned Terson to follow.
The walls inside were covered with pistol and rifle racks. Though most were empty, the collection of weaponry at hand was diverse. “We store personal weapons here, too,” Druski said. “You know how to shoot?”
“Passably,” Terson replied.
“Uh-huh. Ever been in a firefight?”
Terson nodded. He wasn’t eager to tell her whom he’d fought against, though he doubted that she had known any Marines deployed to Algran Asta. She didn’t ask.
“There are certain weapons you don’t want to fire in a ship or station unless you’re bent on suicide,” she said. “A bullet has no choice but to hit something it shouldn’t. It might be an innocent bystander; it might be the circuitry inside a wall that controls any number of vital systems. It might even be a viewport or a soft seal that will blow out and kill everyone aboard.”
Terson’s instructors had taken pains to drive home a similar lesson. Any construct intended to sustain human life in a vacuum was inherently fragile. The margin for error in all things, including human behavior, was infinitesimal and the result of error most often resulted in death, though not necessarily the death of the person who made the error. Multiple safeguards attempted to prevent or mitigate human error, but statistically all any safeguard could do was delay the application of Murphy’s Law and some schools of thought held that sophistication actually hastened it.
“The shootouts you see on vids simply don’t happen,” Druski continued. “Aside from the threat to the shooter’s own life, close quarters make a firearm no more effective than one of these.” A slender metallic rod a good fifteen centimeters long appeared in her hand; an instant later it doubled in length with an audible snick as the blade erupted from within. Terson now knew the reason for her preternatural calm earlier in the infirmary. “A blade is the weapon of choice in most habitats; you brandish a gun on a station the bystanders will cut you to ribbons out of basic self-preservation. I’m led to believe that you’re not squeamish about knives,” she said. “Was what you did to Grogan back on Nivia a product of luck, or do you really know how to use one?”
Terson’s hand darted out driven by reflexes developed under gravity nearly twice Standard; he plucked the switchblade from Druski’s fingers, reversed it as his opposite hand spun her by the shoulder before catching her chin in the crook of his elbow, and pressed the blunt end against the base of her skull.
“What’s that tell you?”
“Very impressive,” the woman drawled, “but I carry two.” He felt a prod and looked down to find an identical weapon in her other hand, pressed against his left kidney, her finger resting lightly on the trigger stud.
“I guess I’m lucky you’re the trusting sort.”
“I’m a good judge of character,” she corrected, turning to accept the switchblade from him. Both knives vanished again, presumably back up her sleeves whence they’d come. “Shall we stop showing off and call it a draw?”
Terson agreed, having discovered that the medic was a formidable woman in more than mere personality. He gestured to the firearms: “I see more than hunting rifles here,” he commented. “You must think they’re good for something or you wouldn’t keep them.”
“True enough. Spacers generally don’t like guns, but blades become obsolete the moment your feet hit dirt. These things are primarily for show, but we’ve run into a few hairy situations and the typical baddies won’t risk messing with folks who demonstrate that they have the means to defend themselves.”
Druski led him into a second room dominated by a
wall-to-wall projection screen. “This is the firing range,” she said. “For practice and qualification we use only light-targeting simulators.” She pressed a button and the screen rose revealing a two-meter square chamber about thirty meters deep. “This is for functional checks and sighting. The walls are armored and baffled to contain ricochets. We don’t use it much.” She lowered the screen again. “How familiar are you with energy weapons?”
“Familiar enough to know I don’t like them,” Terson replied.
“You’ll have to get over that,” Druski said. “Let me set one up for you.”
The standard civilian beam pistol, or beamer, was a light anti-personnel weapon well suited to space. It fired a high-power burst of focused microwave energy that caused fatal internal tissue damage at maximum effective range and catastrophic vaporization point blank. Certain soft body armor prevented fatal wounds, but the result was still an incapacitating second- to third-degree burn.
A beamer could damage sensitive electronics but generally did not affect inanimate objects. The first Marines to arrive on Algran Asta found them next to useless in the jungle where the moisture-laden plant life absorbed most of the energy before it could reach its target and came to rely almost exclusively on plasma guns, or blasters, of which Terson saw only a handful in the Embustero’s arsenal.
Another disadvantage of a beamer was the size of the battery pack. Easily concealed models like the ones Markland and Colvard carried could only fire three to five times before exhausting their charge. The model Druski brought out was more robust, fired much like a pistol-gripped shotgun.
“This has been adjusted down to the infrared,” Druski told him. “Discharging the battery might be enough to heat a cup of coffee.”
Embustero- Pale Boundaries Page 11