COMBAT SALVAGE 2165

by A. D. Bloom

  "I heard that," Devon said. He leaned out from the huddle of cherry-red exosuits a few meters away. They were looking at the carrier, too. "I don’t know how you got this assignment, Tig."

  "I don’t know how that carrier survived this long without me."

  "See," Devon said. "That’s why nobody likes you, Tig."

  "Parker likes me."

  "Nope. Sorry, Tig," she said. "I just got partnered up with you on the first day and I hate quitting things. I can’t stand you either."

  The longboat came in hot. Over the pads, it rotated its nacelles and blasted, but still set down three-times faster than any regulation landing. It practically slid sideways into the airlock docking ring. The shock absorbers took the hit, giving over a meter with the impact.

  "Pilots don’t fly like that around here much," she said.

  "Must be Hardway pilots."

  Once they got through the locks and stepped into the narrow transport, Tig glanced forward to get a gander at who was driving. All he saw were the shoulders of their Staas Company blue exosuits and the backs of their helmets.

  Parker sat next to Tig in the second row of seats. The other six cherries bound for Hardway sat behind them. The senior reds, the Chiefs on-board, took the front row, talking amongst themselves in low tones. He couldn’t hear them, but from where he sat, he had a good view of the brunette.

  She got on just before the longboat launched, wearing street clothes that set off her hips...a tight-fitting top, something plain and long-sleeved made of real wool, maybe...thick, but revealing. She carried her exosuit in a bag over her shoulder, helmet and all, like it was a dead body. The way she shifted her weight made him hear the music from the strip clubs back on Staten Island, or the bass, at least.

  Measured toe to crown, she wasn’t over two meters, but if you cut a piece of line and ran it up over the curvier parts of her body, then stretched it out, that line would have been three meters, probably more. She didn’t take a seat or strap in. She leaned her exosuit up against the bulkhead and stood behind the pilots with her hands on their seat backs. That should have been his first clue. That, and her eyes. They were milky like some kind of synthetic opal, clearly artificial, and not trying to look like anything else.

  Parker said, "You going to tip the lady or just stare at her?"

  "She definitely gets the tip."

  "Check it out," Parker said. "I got our longboat's comms with Sagan. The tower is taking it personal." She held her helmet in her lap and even without putting it on, he could hear the voices.

  "Hardway longboat zero-six, you violated five station protocols."

  "Uh…copy?"

  "I’ve got your number from your IFF and I’m reporting you for that landing. And the flyby. And the near miss. You’ll get 6 points on your CPL for this." She meant his commercial pilot’s license. Tig couldn’t hear any actual laughing on comms, but up in the front of the longboat, both pilot’s shoulders hunched repeatedly like they were either laughing or crying. The brunette thought it was funny.

  "Sagan Tower, Hardway longboat zero-six copies that loud and clear. Anything else before we skip this floating hunk of rear echelon junk and go back to fighting the war?"

  "You have priority clearance for ascent and return vectors."

  "Roger that and thank you, Sagan. Have a nice, safe day."

  The Hardway pilots made sure that their takeoff was as exciting as their landing, but since little boats like that longboat didn’t have powerful inertial negation systems, the acceleration gees pushed Tig into the seat hard.

  The brunette didn’t fall in the inertial gees. She held on to the straps until the boat was clear of the station’s artificial gravity and then floated in zero-gee next to her wrapped-up suit.

  After the pilots pulled the boat up and over and over again, Pardue elbowed him. "Look." She nodded out the porthole. "Breaching ships."

  The wagon-wheel hulls of the interstellar breaching ships held station together five Ks off the docks.

  "Never seen five of them together like that," he said. "You only need one to breach space." He knew Hardway would ship out soon with one of them, maybe two, but what were the others doing here? Those ships were so valuable that when they weren’t going somewhere, they stayed under heavy guard in Earth orbit. Hardway was the only ship scheduled to depart. What the hell did the carrier need five breaching ships for? He thought she was only stopping at Sagan as a matter of routine to pick up supplies and ordnance and personnel like Tig and Parker and the others, replacements for broken machines and dead crewmen.

  The longboat turned to fly out past the shipyards and put Hardway directly ahead. He watched it grow larger in the pilots’ canopy. Closer now, he could make out not only the F-151 exo-atmospheric fighters and a few QF-111 Dingoes in the open bays along with the mining junks, but also tiny figures there, smaller than ants, so small he couldn’t give them a color, but he knew they were redsuits. So were the drivers of the knuckledragger mechs puffing around the ship, spot welding and hosting teams working the exterior of the kilometer-long carrier. Those were redsuits, too.

  "Isn’t that?"

  "Holy hell," Tig said when he saw them. Their arrival hadn’t been on any schedule and the reach of Sagan’s towers had blocked them from Tig and Parker’s view until the longboat got a few Ks out, but Hardway wasn’t the only carrier at Sagan today. Her sister ships, the attack carriers Araby and Pont Neuf had arrived sometime in the last half hour and now held station off the starboard bow.

  "If you like that, you’re going to love this." Her finger stabbed the porthole as the longboat turned for Hardway and when he looked, he saw an armored mountain hanging against the starry black. Crowded railguns rose off her steep sides like copses of trees densely packed around the launch tubes. It was the most massive ship he'd ever laid eyes on.

  "UNS Tamerlane." It was the last ship he expected to see. Past a cluster of accompanying, 500m cruisers, the newest capital ship of the UN fleet steamed a few Ks back, dwarfing every gunboat holding station in sight of her.

  "UNS Bull Run... UNS Highland…" Devon said two rows back, "I can’t see the others well enough to say."

  "Who the hell cares about the UNS gun-buckets. Look at that beast." Tamerlane was 600 meters across 500 deep and 900 meters long. "That armor is five meters thick. She can actually fire all those railguns at once. Must have a hell of a reactor cluster."

  "The cruisers have 3-stacks."

  Tig said, "You would know about piss-ass UN cruiser specs, Devon. I bet you secretly wanted to join the UN Navy swabbies and wear a sailor outfit instead of an exosuit."

  The brunette up in the front of the longboat heard that and she laughed. It wasn’t loud, but he glanced her way before it was over and saw her floating breasts shake with humor.

  Hardway was beginning to fill the canopy in front of the pilots and Tig decided time was running out. "Excuse me," he said to Parker as he unstrapped, pushed off the seat, and made controlled contact with the bulkhead over him.

  "Tig. No. Come back," she whispered, but he’d already pushed off. He flew over the Chiefs in front of him and managed to catch a rung near the brunette with one hand and stop himself like a pro.

  "I'm Tig Meester."

  She looked him up and down. "And you’re going to Hardway." It wasn’t a question.

  "Yeah. So are you." He leaned in and held the eye contact. Tig was feeling pretty good about himself today. Why shouldn’t she feel the same way? He raised his eyebrows just a little after he asked himself that question. The girls back in Freshkills would always get the idea when he did that.

  She must have got the idea just like they had because she looked at Tig in what he took for wide-eyed amusement. That must be a bite on the line, he thought. Sort of. Probably just surprised because she’s a few years older and this doesn’t happen as often. She suddenly scowled, and Tig decided that was encouragement to sell himself harder. "I’m a redsuit now, but I’ve always had the touch. I can fix anything. I�
��ve got magic hands." He smiled.

  The brunette actually looked like she felt sorry for him for a second. "No." That was all she said, and she shook her head slowly when she said it, leaving no room for error just in case he was deaf and couldn’t read the word on her lips.

  Tig tried hard not to glance back into all the sets of eyes looking his way when he pushed off and made for the second row and his empty seat next to Parker. The Chiefs in the front row didn’t eyeball him, but they shook their heads as he flew over.

  "Longboat 3-2, this is Hardway AT, be advised the Bay 17 LB docking ring is still fully jaxed and non-op. If you ain’t got a suit and helmet, then you’re out of luck for a few minutes until we can clear another bay for you. You want to wait?"

  "Negative, AT. This flight is all redsuits. We live in full gear and helmets. We’ll be fine without a docking ring."

  The brunette set her fists on her hips and aimed herself at the Chiefs in front of Tig and Parker. She spoke to them like they were cherries. "Is Chief Bradley yours?" One nodded. "Why the hell hasn't he fixed that docking ring yet? That’s his bay. He begged me for it. Now, he’s got it and it’s falling apart."

  The most charred redsuit Chief up front said, "I’ll find out." Then he put his helmet on and he must have got on comms because Tig couldn’t hear him, but he could see his jaw moving inside that helmet and that Chief was chewing someone’s ass.

  Tig already had creeping suspicions about who the brunette was, but when she freed the exosuit she’d carried onto the longboat from its bag, the first thing he noticed was that it wasn’t new. It was a deep, dirty red.

  One of the Chiefs asked her, "You have enough time at Sagan for ‘em to tweak your suit like you wanted?"

  "Yup."

  Tig got a look at the hash marks and patches on that suit and cringed. The rank insignia said she was a Senior Chief. That was enough to put the pucker in him. But when she began to strip off her street clothes to put on her liner and suit, he got another surprise. After he’d been gawking at her ass for a few seconds, he realized the skin below it, on her thighs, looked different. The color didn’t quite match what he saw of her buttocks. The texture on her legs was smoother, but it was too perfect somehow. He knew why right away. Her legs were artificial. Her arms were artificial, too. There was more under the surface. The way the overhead light hit her, whatever new parts were under the skin there like a second ribcage drew a shadow across her back and shoulders, from one to the other, connecting them. She probably had a second spine connected to reinforced hips, too. She’d need it to support all the power in those limbs.

  Parker said to Tig, "Since your mouth is hanging open and you’re all pale and sweaty, I’m going to assume you now fully understand who’s leg you just humped." This was the Chief Parker told him about - the one that loved cherries.

  The brunette didn’t announce her name until once they’d landed and were in the airlocks, cycling through. "I’m Chief Horcheese," she said. "You call me Chief or you call me Horcheese." Once they’d passed through the lock from the bays and taken off their helmets again, she stomped her foot three times on the belt-iron steel deck hard so it rang. She said, "Welcome aboard the attack carrier Hardway. 96 fighters, 36 junks, and a small pack of good ‘ol QF-111 Dingoes make up the air wing. We keep ‘em all fueled, loaded with ordnance, and running smooth along with this entire ship. The greensuit, glow-pecker, reactor tenders stay aft, locked up in a section called engineering, but the redsuits are the real engineers on any ship. If it breaks, a redsuit fixes it, usually while it’s still on fire."

  "Cherry, cherry, cher-RI!" Whoever said it behind them said it like a farm hand calling a hog.

  "Just look at ‘em… Fresh for the roastin’." As they passed with their flight helmets under their arms, Tig saw it was a pair of Bitzer interceptor pilots.

  Horcheese ignored them so he did, too. "Hardway is Harry Cozen’s ship. Chief Lee is the Master Chief and the red in charge. But I’m Operations Chief. I’m the red in charge of getting shit done, from damage control to ordnance loading, to making sure the hatches on the 151s don’t squeak and upset our primadonna pilots. That’s what I do. But you... You are cherries. Your job, for today, is to get squared, watch closely, and stay the fuck out of the way."

  The red that stepped next to her just then stretched his suit some around the belly. Close-cropped gray hair fringed his round face. His pink mug popped out the top of his exosuit like it was being squeezed out. "Don’t let Chief Piatrow’s proportions fool you," she said. "He can’t fit inside the six-way junction port of a Bitzer anymore, but in zero-gee, he’s a dangerous bastard. Follow his orders."

  "Listen up, cherries. You're on a Staas Privateer," he said. "You don’t have to call anyone Sir or Ma’am like you would in someone's Navy. But. If you don’t follow orders, then I will put you out the airlock, proceed to the midships mess without a second thought, and fully enjoy eating a plate of burger-filled buns for lunch. Are we clear?"

  3

  Six hours later, Hardway steamed for the outer system with a fifteen ship battlegroup and a convoy of ten haulers. The UN cruisers that had briefly dropped anchor at Sagan now accompanied Hardway and two, sister carriers along with several destroyers and the dreadnaught, UNS Tamerlane. The mountain of armor rode on the port side of the formation. Between her and the carriers, under as much protection as the battlegroup could deliver, no less than five breaching ships flew together like a flock of spoked wheels on long, fire-spitting axles.

  The only destination of note in the direction they headed was the Sol-Procyon transit. There hadn’t been any official announcements, but Tig knew something big was going down on his first day. Parker said Devon said he heard from a turret gunner that they and the whole convoy were going deep into enemy-occupied space.

  The comms chatter of the Combat Air Patrols played in Tig’s helmet along with local comms, over which Raleigh narrated the proper reassembly and priming procedure for a maneuvering thruster plasma shunt on a QF-111 Dingo. Tig stood under the curving, pilotless hull of the autonomous combat drone in Launch Bay 47 and wondered if its AI felt anything with Raleigh pokin’ around up there. AMTS Raleigh’s whole torso was up inside the junction M-port and Tig could distinctly see movement in the AI’s spider-like eyes, at least the ones that faced out the open bay doors where UNS Bull Run and SCS Araby were visible cruising a few Ks off Hardway’s keel along with a pair of jumbo haulers.

  "Here," Raleigh said.

  "What." Tig said it without looking. Like the drone, he watched the ships outside. Shadowing someone else doing basic maintenance he could do in his sleep was already killing him with ennui.

  "Stupid cherry!" Raleigh blindly waved the burnt-out tri-joint shunt assembly under the lip of the maintenance port where Tig now noticed it. "Take it!"

  He took it from Raleigh’s gloved hands and stepped back and looked inside the pipes. This piece was meant to help shunt the Dingo’s engine plasma where it needed to go, but the superheated gases had vaporized holes clean through the walls of the pipes separating the thrust channels "Feed split’s melted out," Tig said. "Ceramics must have had a defect and failed."

  "No shit, cherry." Raleigh dropped himself down out of the MSys junction port and stood on the deck next to him. "Why you think I removed it?" Tig liked Raleigh less when he could see his face. The man had beady little eyes that caught the lights inside his helmet like a rat’s eyes. "We don’t have any more of these units up here. Have to go down to B6 and get another."

  "The 56-ACB shunt assemblies they use on the longboats are almost identical. Same fittings and everything. Good ceramics, too. I saw a heap of those in MB2. They had more than Hardway’s longboats could use up in a year. There’s even some on the cart right over there." He nodded his chin at the SC-66 longboat service kit, sitting just a few meters away. "We can use one of those."

  "The day I cherry-rig a plane with a bullshit fix like that is the day I vent my suit. And if I want to hear your opinion�
� no… forget it. I won’t. I’m going to get the part. You stay here and don’t touch anything." Raleigh made for the lock and left him standing under the drone.

  He heard a double beep in his helmet...Parker opening a private, line-of-sight comms line. "I think Raleigh is sweet on you," she said as she appeared from under the drone. "We’re all done with the ESys back there, Rampone is sealing the EIA panel. How much longer are you grease-eater, MSys, boneheads going to take on one thruster junction?"

  Tig glanced at the airlock. Raleigh would be gone for a good fifteen or twenty. "About sixty seconds," he said. He was already moving for the longboat’s service cart. He knew the 56-ACB shunt assembly in there would do the job. He’d have that Dingo fixed up before Raleigh even got back.

  "The hell are you doing?"

  "I can fix this thing without Raleigh."

  "Raleigh’s not going to like it."

  "It’ll work just as well. It’ll work better."

  "I’m not saying it won’t. I’m just saying..."

  "Nobody's giving me a chance to show ‘em what I can really do, Parker. I can do more than…" He tried to find a way of saying it nicely. He couldn’t. "I can do more than this bullshit." He had to crouch and then bend and then rise up inside the Dingo’s thruster assembly to mount the 56-ACB in place. It fit perfectly of course. These fittings had been standardized for decades. "I can do a lot more around here than anyone’s letting me."

  She said, "Yeah, I know what you can do…" Now that he was inside the assembly and she was outside it, he couldn’t see her face anymore, just hear her voice in his helmet, and from the hesitation he wasn’t sure if she did really know. How could she, really? She’d never even seen one of his custom jobs. Only smugglers, blockade runners, and a select few criminal denizens of SI City had seen those. "I ever tell you about the first hot rod I built?"

  "About 16 times."

  He crouched and bent again to extricate himself from the thruster assembly and rose next to Parker. "Made it from three anti-grav whizzers I stole from some polo-sissies at SI Prep when I was 12." The next part they said together. She mocked him, but he said it with pride. "That baby did 400kph." Parker rolled her eyes. "All decked out in Vanta Black. Made runs over the border at will for a month and then traded it for a used Intercontinental Hopper. If it flies, Parker, then I’ve ripped it, stripped it, and made it into something faster. I should be doing more than swapping parts on a Dingo 111."