by John Ringo
"I can start today," Butch said. "If I don't get an exempt job I gotta report to the draft board in three weeks."
"Very well," she said, tapping some more. "Thank you for your time. You will be informed of our decision by phone or e-mail within two weeks."
"Okay," Butch said.
"Have a nice day."
—|—
"How'd it go?" Mama Allen asked when Butch walked in.
The Allen house was part of a block of two-story "mill" houses built in the 1920s. The mill had closed back in the '50s, but the houses remained. With brick walls and solid construction, they'd been up and down over the years. Currently, the neighborhood was back on the "up" cycle as more and more people moved into Springfield and crowded out the families like the Allens that had been there for decades.
"Don't know," Butch said, picking up Clarissa. She was one of three sisters, all younger. She wriggled for a second in his grip then subsided, sticking her thumb in her mouth. "That's gonna make you get bucktooth, kid. The lady didn't seem to think there was much chance but she asked me a bunch of shop stuff. Said I'd find out in two weeks or less."
"Well," Mama Allen said, wiping her hands. She was preparing meatloaf, heavy on the bread. "You gotta go to the Board in three weeks. I told your father that it's only three weeks." She stopped and wiped at her eyes. "Onions. I told him you should have that much time at least."
"Yes, Mama," Butch said. "Thank you, Mama."
"Go make sure Charlie and Susie are doing their homework," Mama Allen said, sticking the meatloaf in the oven.
"Yes, Mama."
—|—
"Good Lord, thank you for this food that you put on the table..." Papa Allen prayed.
Butch sat between Clarissa and Susie, holding their hands, as his father said grace. Clarissa kept trying to pull away but that was just Clarissa.
At a certain level it all seemed sort of distant. He'd been raised in this house. He didn't know anything other than Springfield, his friends from school and the neighborhood. But in two or three weeks, he was going away. He might be going to the Board and then into the Navy or the Army. The way things were going, they were talking about a big war with the Horvath and some guys named the Rangora.
The people already in the Navy, including some kids from the last class, were in "for the duration of hostilities." If he got drafted, he'd be in "for the duration of hostilities." And nobody knew how long "hostilities" might last. If you went by the Horvath, until their planet was a smoking ball of craters. The Horvath just didn't seem to get what a "truce" meant.
In a few weeks he'd be leaving this house. And he might never be coming back. That was kind of... It wasn't scary so much as confusing.
"Amen," his dad said and reached for the bowl of mashed potatoes.
Butch's cell phone rang and he looked guiltily at his dad.
"No phones at the table," his dad said. "You know the rules."
"It might be something about a job," Butch said.
"Check," his dad said. "If it's one of your girlfriends..."
Butch checked the phone and didn't recognize the number. It was an 800 number, though.
"Hello?"
"Mr... Allen..." a robotic voice said. "This is a recording. You have been accepted by the... Apollo Mining Corporation as a... probationary optical welding technician. The contractual commitment is... five years. Starting salary is... eighteen dollars per hour with off-planet bonuses if the work occurs outside terrestrial atmosphere. If you conditionally accept this position, press one."
Butch carefully pressed one.
"You are required to present yourself at the... Springfield, Missouri... Apollo Mining Employment office where you applied for this position within three days. Your confirmation code is six-one-seven-three-five-two. Thank you. Goodbye."
"What was that?" Maricela asked.
"I've got a job with Apollo," Butch said, blinking in surprise. "A probationary... optical welding technician? I don't even know what it is."
"Laser welding," Papa Allen said, nodding. "It's the new thing. Apollo's pretty much the only people teach it right now. That's a good job. See you don't mess it up."
"Yes, sir," Butch said.
"Now eat your food 'fore it gets cold."
—|—
"Good afternoon and welcome to the Probationary Optical Welding Technician course," the instructor said. He was a big guy with fair hair and a beer gut. Butch figured he probably carried Johannsen's. He also had a really raspy voice. "My name is Mr. Joseph Monaghan. I am one of the instructors of the space based OWT course here at the Apollo Melbourne Facility and, as such, I was chosen to welcome this new class. You will refer to me as Mr. Monaghan, not Joe or Joseph, just as you will address all of your instructors as Mr. or Ms. and their last name.
"Some people wonder why Apollo based its training course in a place like Melbourne, Florida," Mr. Monaghan continued. "Since the Mercury program in the 1950s, Melbourne has been the primary support city for the Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Center. Other smaller local cities include Palm Bay, Cocoa, Cocoa Beach and Titusville. From experience I know that some of you will become more enamored of Cocoa Beach than will be good for you.
"Brevard Community College is one of the few community colleges in the world to offer a vo-tech course in space technology. Apollo based its training here shortly after the launch of its first SAPL mirror. Over the last ten years we have graduated thousands of young men and women to fill the burgeoning space industry, where they work in thousands of fields from robotic management technician to food services. Yes, we train people on space-based food services because everyone who goes into space has to know, at a minimum, how to survive if the worst happens and you find yourself trying to suck vacuum.
"Some people have also asked why I have a voice like a fifty-year smoker when I don't smoke. The answer, boys and girls, is that I tried to breathe vacuum. I am one of, at this point, four people who have been exposed to full death pressure and survived. I only survived because of quick action on the part of a co-worker, who was trained in this facility, a nearby air lock and good doctors, also trained here.
"So you understand that I have a personal interest in ensuring that the training here at Melbourne remains top-notch. I may, hope to some day, go back to space. In that case, should I again be, God forbid, in the position of sucking on nothing, it may be up to one of you to save my life. God, again, forbid.
"This course is very, very expensive. Were you to find another such school, the course would cost in excess of half a million dollars. There are still very few qualified instructors and we don't work cheap. It requires, of course, high-power lasers, which are also not cheap. At least in breathable. That, for those who are wondering, is the slang for atmosphere with breathable air.
"There is, rarely, a second chance in space. Space is an absolutely unforgiving bitch. The Company only wants very good people in space. They want people who are going to make them money, not cost them money by paying for medical and death benefits. Therefore, figure that about half of you are going to wash out. Some, most, will wash out in the first few weeks. Others, despite the pre-tests, will not be able to handle the conditions in space. Boost has gotten relatively cheap but it still costs money to move people around. There's also the cost of your suits and implants. Again, at least a half a million dollars for the course, another half a million for the equipment. We are going to do our level best to find the weak links and eliminate them on the ground before they become a danger to themselves and others in space.
"So be prepared to work harder than you ever have in your miserable lives."
—|—
"Hey," Butch said, hitching up his backpack and looking around his dorm room.
The dormitory building looked sort of like a three-story hotel but he'd noticed it was different. There weren't any windows except on the ground floor. And it had looked bunched up.
The reason became obvious when he saw his room. It was about half the size of most bedrooms
with a low ceiling and no windows. It had a set of bunk beds that had about half the normal head room. There weren't any lockers or anything, just a sort of box welded to the base of the bed. He was going to have a hard time fitting. For that matter, there wasn't much space in the room, period. He could barely get into the room for the bunks, the desk and the guy sitting at it. They had managed to squeeze in a little fridge, though.
"Hey," the guy sitting at the desk said, not bothering to look up. He was hunched over a book, reading by the single light, and had papers scattered all over the desk.
"Uh, I think I'm your roommate," Butch said.
"Frack," the guy said, finally looking around. "I knew it was too good to last. Well, you get top bunk."
"Okay," Butch said, tossing his bag on the bunk. Part of the briefing before he got his tickets to Melbourne was that he was only supposed to carry one bag capable of being used as a carry-on for all his gear. "I'm James Allen. Call me Butch."
"I'm Nathan Papke," the guy said, spinning the chair around and standing up.
If Butch thought he was going to have a hard time fitting in the bed, Nathan must hate it. The guy was a ten-foot string-bean with a shock of unruly black hair on top. Okay, maybe six-seven. Really fracking tall and just skinny as hell. "I'm mostly called Nate."
"'Kay," Butch said. He'd been given the rest of the afternoon to "get acquainted with the area." Courses started in the morning.
"What are you here for?" Nate asked, shaking his hand.
"Optical welding," Butch said. "You?"
"I'm here for the robotics course," Nate said. "It's not as much EVA and I'm pretty good with computers. I'm not an In the Black kinda guy."
"How long have you been here?" Butch said, sitting on the lower bunk. He had to hunch forward because the top bunk was shorter than he was when sitting down.
"Two weeks," Nate said. "And it's been a ball buster, let me tell you. All it's been is more psych tests and robotic theory. We haven't even seen a schematic of a bot yet, much less what we're going to be working on. And we've already lost about half the class."
"Dang," Butch said. "Why?"
"This," Nate said, waving at the papers on his desk. "The academic portion is absolutely killer. I was a geek in high school and I'm having a hard time keeping up."
"Oh," Butch said, rethinking his decision to take the course.
"It's not as bad as all that," Nate said, seeing the expression on his face. "All you got to do is keep your nose to the grindstone. And clean. We had two people get tossed out for popping on a piss test and one got a DUI. They don't want anybody that's got a substance abuse problem in space. Most of the rest quit 'cause of the academics."
"There any papers we gotta write?" Butch asked.
"No," Nate said. "Not so far. Most of the stuff is fill in the blank and short answer. No essays or anything. They just want to see you're learning the stuff, not how well you can write."
"Math?" Butch asked.
"Lots of math," Nate said, nodding. "At least in my course. I don't know about yours."
"I can do math," Butch said. "What's there to do around here?"
"There's the beach," Nate said, grinning. "Cocoa Beach is pretty nice and the view's pretty good if you get my drift."
"Got it," Butch said, grinning back.
"Lots of beaches," Nate said. "Cocoa Beach is also the party spot. But unless you're a lot smarter than, sorry, you look, don't figure on doing a lot of partying. The homework is killer and they even load you down on the weekends."
"That sucks," Butch said, scratching behind his ear. "But if it's just math, I figure I can handle it."
"Other than that, there's the mall," Nate said, shrugging. "It's just up the road. Some pretty good restaurants if you've got the squeeze. But the food in the cafeteria is good so I've been saving my money."
"Food's good?"
"Food's great," Nathan said. "It's buffet style, but it's got stuff like Mongolian barbeque and crab legs. Big buffet. They feed us right. I guess so we don't keep going out for food and keep up with studying. From what the instructors who have been out say, it's pretty much the same if you're on a big installation like Troy. Not as good on the ships."
"We work on the Troy?" Butch said, confused. "I thought that was a defense station."
"From what I hear, it's a work in progress," Nathan said, grinning. "There are nearly as many Apollo employees on Troy as military. Then there's the Wolf stuff. Most of that is ship based, but there's room for about five hundred people on Granadica."
"The fabber?" The Granadica fabber had been all over the news when it came through the Sol system on the way to Wolf. The mobile factory was the largest and most expensive piece of Glatun technology ever purchased and even though it was nearly a thousand years old, the most high tech. But he'd never heard that people could live on it.
"The fabber," Nathan said, nodding. "There's a research and design team on it and guys who work on the space dock and gas mine Apollo's building. You got your afternoon to get your shit straight?"
"Yeah," Butch said.
"Go buy some pop and stuff," Nate said, gesturing at the fridge. "You're going to want to have something in the room. There's times I don't want to take time to go to the vending machine. And speaking of which... I've got homework to do."
Shit, Butch thought. High school never ends.
—|—
"What you're looking at is the Mark Four Grosson optical welder," Mr. Methvin said, holding up what looked a lot like an oxyacetylene welder head. "And you're all thinking, 'That thing ain't nothin' but a fancy OA rig.' And you're all wrong. If you keep thinkin' that you're gonna be dead wrong."
The first time Butch saw his gay shop teacher in school he'd been bothered by the fact that Mr. Tews was missing about half the fingers on his left hand. But he'd learned that was pretty much where you got shop teachers. If they weren't missing bits, they'd still be working in the field, not teaching shop.
Mr. Methvin had run into the same press or welding rig or jack or whatever that every other shop teacher ran into at one point or another. Except it had taken off half his left hand and he had some sort of funny stubs on that hand for fingers. They looked a hell of a lot like toes.
"Tell you one thing's different right off," Mr. Methvin continued. "You, Allen, what's the maximum distance of an efficient flame on an oxy torch?"
The course had started with fifty-three guys and two chicks. After the first three weeks, it was a six-week course, they were down to thirty-seven guys and both chicks. And it was just getting harder.
Hand laser welding was done almost exclusively in space. There was a good bit of it in robotics on Earth but most of it was in space. So a good bit of the eight hour a day course was about how to work in space. Which, it turned out, meant a good bit of math and a lot of attention to detail.
Then there were the lasers themselves. Optics was a whole branch of physics, one that Butch's high school teacher had barely touched on.
The course was a lot of skull sweat. But fortunately it was the sort of skull sweat that Butch was good at. He'd stuck with it. He'd avoided going to the titty bars and pick-up joints along the Cocoa Strip to do homework. He'd read optical laser manuals until his eyes bled. He'd worked harder than he ever had in school. There were two big reasons. The first was that he really didn't want to join the Navy. The second was that he just didn't want to tell Papa Allen that he'd failed.
There were some little reasons, too. The training he was getting worked just about as well on the robots being used in every part of industry. When he was done with his five year hitch with Apollo, he could just about set his salary. Laser robotic technicians, which was a short course in robotics from what he was learning, earned over a hundred grand a year groundside. More in space.
That was the other part. He was currently being paid twelve bucks an hour and the course had dormitories for "probationary" technician trainees. When he passed the course, that jumped to eighteen bucks an hour
, which wasn't chump change.
The rate for space work was time and a half when you were in atmosphere and double time in EVA. Overtime was time and a half up to forty-eight and double time after that. If he was working EVA on overtime over forty-eight hours, he'd be making seventy-two bucks an hour. As a probationary tech. And there was a bump in pay each year he stayed rated during his first hitch.
Rate for full tech, base, was twenty-four bucks an hour. A fully qualified technician made nearly a hundred bucks an hour on OT in EVA, and they provided room and board so you weren't even out that.
Butch wasn't planning on getting hooked to a wagon any time soon, but like most guys he figured he'd get married someday. Even if his wife had full blown Johannsen's, he'd have an easier time supporting a family on a hundred bucks an hour than his dad did working in the mill.
Then, hell, it was space. Butch had enjoyed the astronomy portion of his physics classes and he'd even gotten into reading science fiction, partially because all the geeks in the class read it and he couldn't get most of their jokes without some basis. There were hardly any new books out but the old guys were still pretty popular. He'd gotten hooked on the vision of space as the next frontier. He wasn't old enough to remember Grandpa Allen, who had been a kid when his parents moved to the Missouri frontier. But he'd heard the stories. There might not be red Indians, but there were Horvath and Glatun and more and more star systems getting opened up all the time. Truth was, space was the place.
And this question was dead easy for once.
"Depending on the system," Butch said, "inch and a half to two and a half inches, Mr. Methvin."
"Right," Mr. Methvin said, walking over to a sheet of steel he had propped up. Butch noted that there was another, much thicker, piece of steel behind it. "Behold," Mr. Methvin said, holding the optical welder about a yard away from the plate. He fiddled with the controls for a second then held it out. "Goggles."
Even with the goggles, Butch could see the beam from the optical welder. And it cut through the steel faster than any oxy rig he'd ever used.
"Whoa," one of the guys in the class said.