by J. L. Doty
A whirring and popping maintenance robot rolled by, cleaning the deck better than York. He’d seen several that watch and had come to realize there was no reason for him to be on his hands and knees other than sheer spite, or perhaps something to do with training, or some strange naval custom. When the robot got to York, it detoured around him.
He’d almost been part of something. Lower-deck pod gunner wasn’t much, but it would have been a lot more than he’d had as a stray kid hanging out on the streets. And now he’d fucked that up, and probably wouldn’t have even that.
“Hey, kid.”
York looked up from the soapy deck, saw Sturpik and Tomlin approaching him. York rose up to his knees as the two men stopped about a pace away. Sturpik looked around furtively, then, satisfied they were alone, he reached into his coveralls and retrieved something wrapped in shimmering plastic. He unwrapped a sandwich and held it out to York. “Brought you something to eat, kid. I know that stuff they’re feeding you tastes like crap.”
York’s mouth began to water. It had been tough choking down the unflavored protein cake. His appetite had disappeared, and he’d forced himself to eat something at each meal. But just before he reached out and took the sandwich, he realized he’d owe Sturpik a debt. He shook his head and said, “No, thanks.”
“Aw come on, kid.”
Sturpik held the sandwich out closer to York, and he got a whiff of real food. York’s mouth watered even more, and he chose his words carefully. “No. I don’t want no favors.”
Both men’s brows furrowed angrily. Sturpik lifted the sandwich to his mouth and took a bite. As he chewed, he spoke around a mouth full of food. “You think he’s gonna be a problem, Tomlin?”
Tomlin nodded his head slowly. “Ya, bet he’s not gonna pay us what he owes us.”
York said, “I don’t owe you nothing.”
Tomlin leaned down close to him and said, “You lost our stash.”
York became conscious of the fact that it was first watch, and that the three of them were alone in that section of deck, and that the two men each outweighed him by twenty or thirty kilos. “I didn’t lose it. They confiscated it.”
Tomlin leaned even closer. “That was prime stuff, and I don’t care how you lost it. You lost it, so you gotta pay for it.”
“I don’t gotta pay for nothing. I didn’t—”
Sturpik’s boot hit York in the gut, sending a shock of pain up into his chest. He fell backward, gasping for air, landed on his back with his legs twisted beneath him. York couldn’t get any air into his lungs as Tomlin lifted him by the front of his coveralls and raised a closed fist to hit him.
“No,” Sturpik said, blocking his hand. “You don’t want bruised knuckles when people start looking around.”
Tomlin dropped York to the deck and they kicked him, no hands involved. York lost count of the kicks and at some point lost consciousness.
He awoke by himself, lying on the deck in a puddle of water. It took him a moment to realize they’d thrown the bucket of water on him before leaving. The water had a pinkish tint to it—blood. He struggled to his hands and knees.
He had a bloody nose, but mostly his ribs and chest and gut hurt. The two men didn’t want him walking around displaying the obvious signs of a beating. That’s the way it would have been handled on the streets.
He cleaned up the mess—Straight would give him hell if he didn’t—rinsed out the bucket, and put it away. Then he cleaned the blood off his face, though he couldn’t get the stains out of his coveralls. He climbed into his coffin, and stim-sleep sent him to some very unpleasant dreams.
York got to sleep in because he was working first watch, but when he climbed out of his coffin and hit the deck in his shorts, Zamekis happened to be in the bunk room, took one look at him, and said, “Holy shit, Ballin. What the hell happened to you?”
York looked down, saw that his chest, ribs, gut, and arms were covered with blueish-yellow bruises. “I fell down,” he said. “Accident.”
The look on her face said she wasn’t buying his story. “What’d you do, fall down ten or fifteen times?”
“Fell down a stairwell.” He wasn’t sure there were any real stairwells on ship, probably just steep ladders and lifts, but it got him out of the bunk room and clear of her scrutiny and questions.
Working graveyard meant he was out of sync with Straight’s crew, so the rest of them didn’t see the bruises when he hit the showers. He noticed members of other gunner crews taking furtive glances his way, and he had to admit the discoloration stood out rather prominently.
Once clean and fully dressed, he sat at a table in the bunk room to study the regs. He learned the captain of a ship had quite a bit of latitude when dealing with drug abuse, especially if the ship was patrolling the front lines. York didn’t understand why he wasn’t still locked in the brig.
Marko sat down opposite him, leaned forward, and looked at the page he had open in the regs. He leaned back and looked at York for a long, silent moment.
It had become obvious that Marko, with all the chevrons cut into his arms, held considerable sway among the pod gunners. He wasn’t an NCO, but York had seen him offer a “polite suggestion” to someone who outranked him, had seen him do it more than once, and they always listened very carefully.
“You know Pallaver was tipped off,” Marko said.
“What do you mean?”
“He got an anonymous tip that one of Straight’s crew was dealing stim-hypes. So they searched all our lockers. Now who do you think would know to tip off Pallaver like that?”
York knew it could only be Sturpik and Tomlin, but also knew he’d pay a brutal price if he told Marko that. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do.”
York tried to pay attention to the regs, but couldn’t escape the older man’s stare.
Marko asked, “You know why they let you out?”
“No.”
“Well, let’s see.” He lifted a hand, raised one finger, and said, “You’re dealing, but you didn’t have anything close to a salable quantity.”
He raised another finger. “You weren’t using, but dealers always use.”
He raised another finger. “You haven’t been on the ship long enough to make any connections, not that kind. And you were searched before coming aboard, so you didn’t bring it with you.”
He raised another finger. “And the stuff wasn’t very good quality. Almost like someone knew they were going to lose it and decided to lose something they could afford to.”
Marko stood and leaned on the table. “You were set up, kid.”
He turned and walked out of the bunk room.
Chapter 6:
The Lash
Predators didn’t like witnesses—that was true on the streets and in the navy—so York did everything possible to never be alone. He studied the regs in the bunk room only if others were present, and if they got up and left, he followed them out. Once the bruises healed, he showered only at the busiest time of day, and he tried to spend as much time as possible in the more public sections of the Lower Pod Deck. If a crew member was busy repairing some piece of apparatus, he’d sit down at an empty command console nearby to study the gunner’s manual.
Even when his watch rotation put him on first watch, if he wasn’t scrubbing decks, he could usually find a place to sit down and do his homework within sight of someone. He knew he was “the kid,” so no one really took much notice of him, and that was okay with him. But when scrubbing decks, he was stuck with the section of deck he’d been assigned, and if there was no one about, he couldn’t just choose a different section of deck to scrub. For a while, he’d been lucky, but one night his luck finally ran out.
He was on his hands and knees scrubbing away, thankful that two spacers were running some sort of maintenance check on a command console nearby. But with about an
hour left on first watch, they finished, packed up their gear, and left. York stood, picked up his bucket and the small duffel with cleaning solvents, moved to a section of deck near a large bulkhead, got down, and continued scrubbing there. If anything happened, he could put the bulkhead at his back so no one could come at him from behind. As he worked, he constantly scanned the deck and listened for the sound of boot steps, and only a few minutes after the two spacers had left, he heard someone coming.
When Sturpik and Tomlin came into view, he thought it suspicious that they showed up so soon after the others had left. He stood long before they got to him, reached into the duffel, and pulled out a heavy wrench he’d hidden there. He put his back to the bulkhead and held the wrench casually at his side.
“Hey, kid,” Sturpik said as they approached. “What’s with the wrench?” They stopped a couple of paces away.
York said, “I need it to do my job.”
Tomlin’s eyes narrowed angrily while Sturpik made an elaborate show of looking up and down the deck. “I don’t see any reason for a wrench when all you’re doing is scrubbing decks.”
York shrugged. “I like to be prepared.”
Tomlin lifted a foot to step forward. York stepped back half a pace and drew the wrench back, determined he’d go down fighting this time. He didn’t say anything, just shook his head slowly from side to side. Sturpik put out a hand, halting Tomlin. He looked at the wrench, then into York’s eyes. “Seems to me you got the wrong idea about us, kid.”
York didn’t relax, remained ready and poised to swing the wrench. He’d picked the largest one he could handle. “Seems to me I got the crap beat out of me last time we met, or did I just imagine that?”
“Kid, we were just helping you, just teaching you a lesson.”
York shook the wrench just a little, and Tomlin twitched. “I learned my lesson, and I don’t intend to learn it again.”
“You can’t take both of us,” Tomlin said.
“No,” York said, “I can’t. But I can hurt one of you really bad, and maybe do some damage to the other as well. And this time, you’re gonna have to kill me.”
Sturpik squinted at York, his head nodding up and down just a bit as he eyed him. “I don’t think you learned the right lesson, kid.”
“Maybe not the lesson you wanted me to learn,” York said. “But I learned the lesson I needed to. And I don’t intend to unlearn it.”
Sturpik shook his head sadly. “You know, kid, it ain’t us you gotta stand up to, it’s Straight.”
York knew that at some point he’d have to stand up to Straight—the law of the streets—but he also knew he needed to stand up to Sturpik too, even if it meant he got the crap kicked out of him. He didn’t say anything.
Sturpik stared at him for a long moment, still squinting as if York were standing at a long distance. Then he took a step back and said, “Come on, Tomlin. Let’s go get some breakfast.”
Tomlin looked like he was itching for a fight, but he obeyed. He turned and the two of them walked away.
York decided it might be wise to carry the wrench at all times.
Even after York finished his tenday of unflavored protein cake and water, Straight still had him on his hands and knees scrubbing decks. And apparently, she’d decided his name was now Fuck-Up.
Come here, Fuck-Up. Do this, Fuck-Up. Do that, Fuck-Up.
Such orders were usually accompanied by a slap to the back of the head for emphasis.
Straight put him to work scrubbing the inside of the zero-G tubes. Water didn’t stay in the bucket under zero-G, but they showed him how to override the gravity field in each tube before he climbed into it. He learned that adjusting the gravity to half a G made it easier to work in the tube and keep the water where it was supposed to be. He was in one of the tubes when the alert klaxon started screaming.
Much later, he learned that he should have put the tube on maintenance status in the ship’s system, though no one had thought to tell him that beforehand. Without that flag, when the ship went to an elevated watch condition, its combat systems automatically reset the tube’s gravity to default combat status: zero-G.
York floated up off the handgrips, the water floated up out of the bucket, a giant, transparent globule, rippling along its edges. It broke up into smaller blobs that stuck to everything, his clothes, his face. He got a lung full of it, broke into a fit of coughing, struggled the length of the tube, tumbled out of the hatch on the inner hull, and landed in a heap on the deck spitting and choking.
“What the fuck are you doing, Fuck-Up?”
Straight stood over him, shouting. He climbed to his feet, still coughing solvent-laced water out of his lungs, as Straight bent to look through the hatch into the tube. “Holy shit, Fuck-Up, this tube’s completely inoperable.”
She looked at the hatch designation and spoke into her implants, “Marko, flag G-Sixteen as inoperable and take it off-line.”
York had just gotten the coughing under control when she said, “You idiot,” and slapped him in the back of the head.
He staggered, and all his frustration welled up. He turned to her, shouted “Leave me alone,” and shoved her hard.
She stumbled backward, her leg caught the edge of a console seat, and she tumbled to the deck. She laid there, eyes wide, mouth open, saying nothing. In fact, everyone within eyesight had paused and was staring at them, and York realized then that he’d violated some rule, some regulation.
“Atteeuun’shuuuuun.”
The shout startled York and he tried to assume the correct posture, but the manacles on his wrists and ankles prevented him from standing properly rigid with his hands at his sides. There was some sort of commotion near the front of the crowd, but the forest of tall uniformed strangers surrounding him blocked his view. He glanced at the female marine standing guard over him and, as if she sensed his gaze, she looked down at him, her face devoid of expression, her eyes cold and unsympathetic. “As you were,” he heard someone say, and everyone relaxed.
“Spacer Apprentice York Ballin,” someone barked. “Front ’n’ center.”
The female marine nudged York unkindly.
Edging forward among the elbows, he stepped out into the only clear space on Hangar Deck.
Behind a table sat three officers. York recognized only the woman in the middle. She’d been standing to one side in that small room when his lawyer had made him sign his enlistment papers. He now knew she commanded Dauntless. He threw his shoulders back, did his best to stand very proper and rigid.
The captain took no interest in him. Her hair was neatly trimmed, and she wore a freshly pressed uniform open at the collar. She glanced at a comp tablet on the table before her, leaned to her right for a moment to consult privately with the sharp-eyed male officer seated next to her, then turned her attention to York. She had soft, pleasant eyes, and York hoped he might have better luck with her than with the marine. “At ease, Spacer Ballin.”
York pretended to relax.
“I am Captain Jarwith, and this is captain’s mast. Do you know what that means?”
York shook his head. “I’m sorry, ma’am, no.”
She nodded. “Then I’ll explain. Captain’s mast is an informal proceeding convened for the purpose of disciplining enlisted personnel. It allows me to correct certain deficiencies in my crew without resorting to a trial or court-martial. Do you understand?”
“Yes, ma’am,” York said. No trial; it appeared the old broad would be an easy touch after all.
“Good,” she said tersely. Again she looked down at the comp tablet. “Now, it’s customary that a crew member’s civilian past is not held against him, but I’m free to consider it if I choose. Four months ago, while stealing an old woman’s purse, you struck her on the head with a blunt object, causing her death. I don’t mind telling you, if you were to commit such a crime while under my comman
d, I’d keelhaul you out to an appropriate set of coordinates then vent you.”
York didn’t like the way her voice hardened as she spoke. “I’m not the one who hit her. And what’s keelhauling?” he asked. “And what’s venting?”
Her voice cracked angrily. “Pray you never learn.” She sighed and continued, “Because of your age, the civilian courts chose not to execute you, even though you had previously been arrested God knows how many times. And for reasons I still don’t understand, they pressed you into the navy instead of sentencing you properly, most unusual since the press gangs don’t ordinarily take capital offenders. But be that as it may, you joined this ship on the planet Dumark and since that time have been a continuing disciplinary problem for my subordinate officers. You’re conniving, deceitful, and disobedient.”
“But I—”
“Don’t say anything,” she barked angrily. “Your civilian rearing has taught you if you can get beyond the moment, then you can repeat any offense you wish as often as you wish, and probably get away with it. But here, that will not be the case. You committed an act of gross insubordination while this ship was on alert status. You disobeyed a direct order and struck the NCO in charge of your station.”
“But she hit me first.”
Captain Jarwith’s eyes turned the color of steel. “I meant it when I told you not to speak.”
She paused, looked at him carefully for a moment, then barked out orders in a sequence of staccato commands. “I sentence you to thirty days unflavored protein cake and water, and thirty days suspension of pay. During that time, you will be given the dirtiest, filthiest, most dangerous jobs on this ship, and when not on duty, you will be confined in the brig. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
York stifled a sigh of relief. The punishment was a harsh one, but it evidently could have been worse. “No, ma’am,” he said.