by J. L. Doty
Sturpik said, “We seen her hit you. I told you Straight’s a mean bitch.”
“She didn’t really hit me,” York said. “She just slapped me up the back of the head. My foster mother used to do that all the time.”
Sturpik ignored him and glanced around in a way York had seen too many times on the streets, the way one of the older boys looked to see if there were any police near. Tomlin did the same, then held out his hand, palm up. On it rested a clear, cylindrical, plast container about the size of the tip of his thumb. Again, he glanced from side to side and said, “Need a favor, kid. Hold on to this, will you?”
Inside the clear plast, York saw some sort of greenish-black tarry substance. He shook his head and said, “I don’t think I should.”
Sturpik confirmed York’s suspicions when he said, “Get that out of sight or you’ll get us all in trouble.”
Tomlin closed his hand around the container and shoved it in a pocket in his coveralls.
Sturpik glanced around again and said, “We need you to hang on to that for us. Just hold on to it for a bit for safekeeping.”
York didn’t know exactly what the tarry stuff might be, but he knew he didn’t want anything to do with it. “I don’t think I should—”
“Hold on, kid.” Sturpik leaned close to him and spoke softly. “You got to do favors for people. Otherwise, they don’t do favors for you.”
That was one of the rules of the streets York knew well.
Sturpik looked at Tomlin. “Give me a moment alone with the kid.”
Tomlin nodded, turned, and walked away.
Sturpik lowered his voice to a whisper. “You gotta do favors, kid. You don’t do favors, it makes people unhappy. They start thinking you’re maybe not willing to help out a friend. You see, I’m gonna do you a favor right now. I’m gonna give you some real valuable advice.”
“Okay,” York said, realizing he didn’t have much choice in the matter.
“Straight’s making you look weak, kid. You look weak, and everybody’s gonna take a piece of you. You gotta stand up to her—just once will do, show her you ain’t one of the weak ones.”
That’s the way it had been on the streets: There were predator and prey, and no in-betweens. If you didn’t establish that you were one, then you were automatically classified as the other. York thought the navy would be different from the streets, but he was learning otherwise.
Without waiting to hear agreement from York, Sturpik turned around and walked away. York knew he hadn’t heard the last of this.
“Tri …” York said, struggling with the word on the reader.
Seated at the console next to him, Zamekis said, “Tribunal.”
Before York had come along, Spacer Third Class Meleen Zamekis had been the low rating on Straight’s crew. Zamekis was a fair-haired girl in her late teens, and it would have come as no surprise if she decided to make York’s life difficult. He’d seen that on the streets a few times, where the shit always flowed downhill. But Straight didn’t tolerate any excessive hazing on her crew, so Zamekis didn’t have a backlog of petty mistreatment that she needed to pass along. Straight had ordered Zamekis to help York with his reading, and she was quite nice about it, had confessed that it was easier duty than many of the alternatives.
York got through several sentences without struggling too much, and just as he came to a word he didn’t know, Marko approached the two of them saying, “Zamekis, Ballin, come with me.”
Zamekis looked up from the reader and said, “What’s up?”
Marko smiled at York. “Ballin here is gonna get his first gunnery lesson.”
Marko led them to Straight, who waited with the rest of her crew at one of the round hatches set in the inner hull. Straight scowled at York and asked Zamekis, “How’s his reading coming?”
The girl nodded. “Not bad.”
As York stopped in front of Straight, her crew gathered around behind him. She asked, “Marko tell you what’s up?”
“He said I get my first gunnery lesson.”
She grinned and looked at the hatch next to her. It was round with a large valve wheel in the middle of it. “This is a pod hatch. It’s powered and can be controlled from here, the bridge, or engineering.”
She slapped a switch just above the hatch. The valve wheel in the center of it spun and the hatch popped open, swinging out on heavy plast hinges. “It defaults to manual, so if you hit the switch and it doesn’t work—like if this section has lost power or something—you turn that wheel, then you can pull it open.”
She stepped aside and said, “Take a look.”
York peered through the hatch and saw a round plast tube large enough to crawl through, about three meters long with plast hand grips running its entire length.
“We call it a zero-G tube. Why do you think we call it that?”
York shrugged and guessed, “There’s no gravity in the tube?”
“Sort of,” she said. “The whole ship’s under several thousand G’s* right now, so if we didn’t have compensation everywhere, we’d just be red stains on the deck. Deck gravity is compensated so we feel one G. Out in the tube, it’s compensated so you feel zero-G; it’s easier and faster to crawl through the tube that way. There’s a gravity shear at the hatch, so don’t let it scare you. And whatever you do, when you pass through it, don’t blow lunch, cause you’ll be the one has to clean it up.”
She leaned down and looked into the tube with him. At the far end, he saw what looked like another hatch. “That’s the outer hatch that lets you into the pod itself. Normally, once you’re past the inner hatch, you seal it before crawling to the pod. But this time, I’m gonna be right behind you, so we’ll leave it open.”
Following Straight’s orders, York crawled up into the hatch and through the gravity shear. It felt strange but didn’t bother him. As he floated toward the pod, using the handgrips to propel himself along, he heard Straight crawl into the tube behind him. When he reached the pod’s hatch, she said, “Just hit the switch to the side.”
The switch was a large red button on the inner edge of the hatch. He pressed it and the hatch popped open toward him.
Straight said, “There are fail-safes built in so it won’t open if there’s a serious pressure differential on either side. Go on and strap yourself in.”
The inside of the pod was a cramped maze of instrument clusters and screens surrounding an acceleration couch. York had to twist around, then get his butt aimed at the couch and pull himself into it. By that time, Straight had crawled halfway into the pod, and in the tight confines, the very short distance separating them was almost intimate. For the first time, it hit York that Straight was a girl—woman—with all sorts of curves and bumps, and quite attractive at that. She wore her brown hair shoulder-length, and always tied back in a ponytail.
After she showed him how to buckle into the couch’s harness, she helped him pull on a headset and adjust a wire-thin pickup just to one side of his mouth. “We don’t fit you with implants until you make spacer first class—if you survive that long.”
She showed him how to boot the pod’s system and bring it online, gave him a rundown on the controls he’d need to operate, then closed the hatch and left him there alone. A few minutes later, he heard her voice in his headset. “Okay, Ballin, we’re going to start with basic operational procedures. We can see the inside of the pod, so if you have any questions, just point and ask.”
York spent the next three hours going through the pod’s boot sequence, learning to read debug dumps and diagnostic data. Then Straight had him shut the pod down, open the hatch, and crawl back down the zero-G tube. So far, it had been a lesson in computer science, and he had yet to see what pod gunning had to do with gunning.
“Now we’re going to see how fast you can be on-station from a dead sleep,” Straight said. “Get in your coffin, and when I wake yo
u, you run like hell to get into that pod and have it booted and online.”
York climbed into his coffin and cycled it into storage. He never felt anything when they turned on the stim-sleep, he just simply began dreaming. Then he awoke to the sound of the alert klaxon and Straight’s voice.
When his coffin cycled out of storage, he hit the deck running. As he sprinted toward the pod hatch on the inner hull, he noticed that most of the occupants of the Lower Pod Deck had paused to watch him. He dove through the first hatch, sealed it, climbed up the zero-G tube, through the pod hatch, and when his pod had finished its boot sequence, he was online.
“Just over two minutes,” Straight said in his headset. “Not real good. We’re going to have to improve on that. Come on back out.”
Back on the Pod Deck, Marko said, “Here’s the drill. You get in your coffin, and when we wake you, you get to your pod and get it online as fast as you can. And as soon as it’s online, you shut it down and get back into your coffin as fast as you can. Then we’re going to repeat the whole thing, and see how many times you can do that in one hour.”
York got into his coffin and the stim-sleep took over. Then he awoke to the sound of the alert klaxon, jumped out of his coffin when it opened, scrambled across the deck to his pod, and brought it online. “A minute and a half,” Straight said as he shut the pod down. He climbed down the zero-G tube, across the deck, and back into his coffin.
He got his time down to a little more than a minute on the fourth scramble, but on the fifth he was feeling winded and his time went back to a minute and a half. By the tenth, he staggered like a drunk across the deck, gulping for air, and then, at some point, he lost count. By that time, he was stumbling over his own feet, his coveralls soaked in sweat, and he had trouble with the straps on the acceleration couch in the pod. When he climbed out of the zero-G tube, he fell out of the hatch on the inner hull into a heap on the deck. He struggled to his feet and heard Marko shout, “Time.”
He stumbled across the deck toward the bunk room.
“Hold on there, Ballin,” Straight said. “That’s enough.”
York stopped in the middle of the deck, bent over, and put his hands on his knees. He gulped for air, couldn’t get enough into his lungs.
Marko pushed him into a seat at the command console, and as he took deep, heaving breaths, he realized the deck was crowded with gunners, all watching him. Marko handed him a glass of water and slapped him on the back. “Twenty-six scrambles, kid. Twenty-six in one hour. You broke the ship record by two. We’ll make a gunner out of you yet.”
Zamekis let out a cheer. Several others joined her. Some gunners shook York’s hand, while others patted him on the back, and a strange feeling washed over him. He’d never felt this way before, and realized that for the first time in his life he’d done something he could take pride in.
* See Appendix: Some Notes on Time, Gravity, and the Imperial Naval Academy
Chapter 4:
Illicit Favors
York was in the mess hall with Zamekis and Marko when the alert klaxon blared and allship called them to battle stations. The three of them sprinted out of the mess together, but when they hit one of the steep ladders between decks, the two more experienced spacers just grabbed the rails, threw their feet out, and slid down to the next deck. York had seen others do that, had tried it a couple of times himself, but he was still a bit awkward and fell behind as they raced deeper into the bowels of the ship. When he got to the Lower Pod Deck, Marko and Straight were already seated at their command console, and as he shot past them, Straight gave him a nasty look. He dropped into the empty console seat—his battle station—and strapped in.
In York’s only previous experience at battle stations, as he’d waited for something to happen, he’d thought the ship had been silent. But he realized now it was only the silence of anxiety and fear, beneath which he heard a faint, low-pitched rumble, possibly the ship’s engines. If he listened closely, he could just make out Marko and Straight subvocalizing commands into their implants. He closed his eyes and heard the whine of some sort of mechanism. The bass drums—the main batteries—started up, and the rumble of the ship’s engines changed pitch. Then Straight said something about incoming, said it loudly and excitedly, and the hull echoed with a cacophony of sharp pops.
He’d been warned about that, knew that he was hearing the sound of the pod gunners firing at incoming ordnance. When he’d asked Zamekis what it would sound like if the ship took damage, she’d said, “Can’t really describe it, Ballin, but you’ll know it when you hear it.” She’d also warned him that acoustic baffling in the ship’s hull meant he’d only hear damage if it was close by, or catastrophically major. “In that case,” she’d said, “just bend over and kiss your ass good-bye.”
The main batteries went quiet for a while, then started up again; the whine of the ship’s engines changed pitch; and the pops of the pod guns ebbed and flowed. The main batteries never fired more than three or four rounds before going silent for a bit. About an hour after York had strapped down at the console, while waiting for them to start up again, he realized they’d been silent for some time. And the number of rounds fired by the pod gunners had dwindled to just a pop here and there. Then they stopped completely, and the pitch of the ship’s engines dropped an octave or two. As he’d noticed earlier, the ship didn’t go completely silent, but the noise level had dropped to that low-level background that required him to concentrate if he wanted to hear it.
“All hands, Watch Condition Yellow. Stand down, but remain on-station until further notice.”
York fired up one of the screens on his console and pulled up a copy of the regs to practice his reading. He was struggling over a difficult word when something smacked him in the back of the head. He looked up to find Straight standing over him.
She snapped, “Next time, get here faster.”
Standing behind her, Marko frowned. “The kid tried like hell.”
She turned on Marko angrily, gave him an unhappy look, then walked away.
York was about to cycle into his coffin for the night when Zamekis interrupted him. “Hold on, York. We’re not done yet. We still got important duty.”
“What’s that?” he asked.
She gave him a furtive grin and said, “You’ll see. Follow me.”
They met up with Marko, Durlling, and Stark, all of whom were wearing khaki coveralls with no rank insignia. The sleeves of their coveralls ended just above the elbows in ragged, frayed cloth, as if they’d been torn away, rather than cut cleanly. York figured he’d learn what was up by keeping his mouth shut and following orders.
Marko slapped Zamekis on the back and said, “Tonight’s your night, girl.”
Durlling and Stark shook her hand and congratulated her for something. At the look on York’s face, Marko said, “She got her first confirmed kill today.”
York followed them as they went aft. They climbed up three decks, went farther aft, then back down two. York was thoroughly lost by the time they stopped at a closed hatch. It was a large hatch, door-size, and York had learned enough to know it should be open when not under an elevated watch condition.
Marko knocked on it, which was odd. A few seconds later, the valve wheel spun and the hatch popped open just a sliver. York saw the glint of someone’s eyes as they looked out at them, then the hatch swung fully open. York followed his companions through the hatch. The lights were dim, and there were quite a number of spacers present.
Just inside the hatch, Marko, Durlling, and Stark paused and rolled up the chopped-off sleeves of their coveralls. Marko had a dozen scars on his upper arm just below the shoulder, odd chevrons of scar tissue that ran in a line down his arm. Durlling and Stark had similar scars, though Durlling had fewer than Marko, but more than Stark.
The chief who’d admitted them announced loudly, “Gunner Thaddeus Marko. Thirteen and a half chevro
ns.”
That number matched the number of scars on Marko’s arms. The chief made similar announcements for Durlling and Stark, but when he announced Zamekis, he finished with “No chevrons, but she’s drawing blood tonight.”
That brought a raucous round of cheers. He introduced York simply as “Gunner Apprentice York Ballin.” He finished by shouting, “Someone get ’em some beer.”
Someone handed York a cup of dark-brown liquid with tan foam on top of it. He took a sip, tasted strong beer. He hadn’t had any alcohol since his arrest on Dumark, and thought he might enjoy himself.
Marko, Durlling, and Stark were greeted warmly as they moved among the spacers, while Zamekis was jostled about in a friendly way, with lots of crude jokes and swearing. Everyone about him spoke with excessive profanity, and he realized it was some sort of tradition. York was halfway through his beer when the ranking chief shouted, “Listen up. I want the following front ’n’ center.” He read off a list of names, no rank, and each young spacer called shot forward accompanied by loud jeers and crude epithets, along with a steady stream of accusations concerning their ancestry and their sexual preferences—usually something to do with certain exotic animals. Each had full-length sleeves on their coveralls.
Zamekis was one of the names. Marko sat down on the deck next to York as she jumped up and ran forward.
Marko said, “This is called gunner’s blood, York. Every gunner gets a half-chevron for each confirmed kill. It’s the only rank that counts among us gunners. Straight’s got no chevrons, and since she’s not riding a pod no more, she’ll probably never get one.”
One by one, each candidate was escorted to the center of the room, their station chief recounted the particular kill that had earned the scar, usually with some flair and a certain amount of embellishment, and of course accompanied by a lot of crude cheers and shouts. Then they cut away the candidate’s sleeves with an old, steel knife—York now understood why the sleeves ended in ragged cloth. The chief then used the knife to make a half-chevron cut in the skin high up on the arm. They let the wound bleed nicely, let blood stream down the arm all the way to the fingertips and drip onto the deck. Then they washed the blood into the deck with a splash of the black beer, and the next candidate stepped forward.