The Command

by David Poyer

  He slicked his hair back, feeling the sweat and grit that coated it. He didn’t think of himself as above that. But he’d decided a long time ago that if he couldn’t do what struck him as right, he didn’t need to stay in. Probably not an attitude that would get him to flag rank, but it let him keep some sort of relationship going with Dan Lenson.

  He was thinking about that when the 1MC clicked into life. “General quarters. General quarters. Set condition Zebra throughout the ship. Class Bravo fire in main engine room number one. This is not a drill. Class Bravo fire, main space fire in main engine room number one. Repair Five provide.”

  16

  COBIE was squatting on her boots beside the PLCC, working on her quals for the local control monitor, when she heard the explosion. It was the loudest thing she’d ever heard in her life. So deafening it paralyzed her for a second. She had no idea what had happened, only that her ears were ringing so loud all she could hear was a noise from the generator flat that sounded like a Tyrannosaurus sicking up a bad dinner. A hoarse, deafening ROWF, followed by a steadily decreasing RRRRrrrrrrrr. She didn’t know what it was, only that sparks were flying through the gratings, and she tucked and rolled instinctively, balling herself tight under the heavy steel counter.

  Suddenly the air was full of coffee-colored smoke and the stink of burning plastic. The lights went black, succeeded by faraway glows as the relays popped on the battle lanterns.

  Sanders tore past, hauling ass up the ladder like a monkey in the zoo, somebody threw a firecracker in their cage. Somebody else rattled after him. Maybe Akhmeed but she wasn’t sure. She started to follow, then hesitated, coughing as acrid smoke bit her throat. Shouldn’t they try to do something? Pull out the little SEEDs, the emergency air canisters they had to carry in the space, and check things out?

  To hell with it. She spun and ran after them, dropping her qualification book, boots ringing the deck plates. The smoke was getting thicker by the second. Now it burned like acid in her throat. She went to port and aft and up the vertical ladder. But at the top she caught something sharp with her head. Stars shot though her brain, and she staggered back, gripping her skull. But forced herself up again, coughing hard now, and turned around twice before she got her bearings and forced her numb legs to push her up the ladder to the IR flat.

  This was it, the top of Main One. Only where was the door? Smoke and darkness, and somewhere outside the echoing bong of the general quarters alarm. She felt around and got her hands on the dogging bar. Closed tight. She almost screamed, but when she heaved the quick-acting lever whanged up and there were faces glowing in the emergency lighting and she stumbled through into Helm’s arms, coughing and mopping blood off her forehead with the sleeve of her coveralls.

  THEY stayed in the passageway for a while. Helm tried to make her go to sick bay to get her head taken care of, but she wouldn’t. She let Akhmeed put on a dressing to stop the blood running down her forehead, though. She felt sick. Helm made her sit down with her head between her legs.

  The lights were out in the p-way, probably all over the ship. It was hard to make out what people were saying, and she only gradually realized it wasn’t them, it was her hearing. The petty officers were isolating the space, snapping off breakers and closing valves from the emergency control panel. The Porn King said he’d been back by the feedwater tank in the lower level when the big bang went off. It sounded like it was above him. Cobie said it was above her, too, from the PLCC. Helm said it smelled like an electrical fire, and whatever it was had dragged all the gens off line when it went.

  “We don’t have any power?” she yelled at him. “Anywhere?”

  “You don’t have to scream, I can hear you. Feel how we’re rollin’? We’re dead in the water. They’re probably trying to start number three back aft. They can do an emergency start with HP air from the Epsy”

  She wasn’t sure what the Epsy was although she’d heard it mentioned. It was in Main Control, she knew that.

  “Whassup?” The investigator, bulky in oxygen breathing apparatus and mask and red hard hat. The rest of Repair Five lurched and stumbled behind him. Helm told him quickly—explosion, smoke—and pointed him down the ladder. The guy looked at her. “She hurt? You need to evacuate her.”

  “She’s okay. I need her to isolate the space.”

  The investigator shrugged and pulled the tab off his canister. He seated it, sealed his mask, and sucked. Smoke curled behind the eyepieces. The oxygen candle lighting off. The number-two man paid out line, and he disappeared into the darkness.

  Power came back, lights lit, the slam of breakers echoed along the passageway. The ventilation whirred up the scale, and the smoke started to clear, at least out here. “Are we gonna go back down?” she asked Akhmeed.

  “Sure. Unless it’s actually on fire down there.”

  They hung there for fifteen minutes, listening to the repair party shouting and passing word. It was still dark in there. You didn’t deiso-late the space until you knew what went wrong. Then they started backing out, and she heard the 1MC announce the fire was out and the reflash watch set, and desmoking commenced by method A. The guys got up and she did, too, getting ready to go back in.

  Only she didn’t want to. Her lungs still hurt. The black oval of the door was a nightmare she didn’t want to go back into. She told Akhmeed she had to pee, she’d be right back.

  She sat hunched in the stall, shivering, wiping her eyes with toilet paper. What if she didn’t go back down? They’d put her on mess cranking till forever. Talk about her like she couldn’t take it. And they’d be right. Sure, you’re scared, she told herself. You just fucking got to go back down, that’s all. She thought about Kaitlyn. She had to do this. For her.

  “Hey, Kasson! You in there?” Helm, cracking the door.

  She screamed back to fucking close it. “I said I had to pee.”

  “Sorry. Just checking, in case you passed out or something.”

  When she got back, the Red Devils were roaring. The supply ventilators were on in Aux 1 and they were blowing the last of the smoke out of the escape scuttle. “Okay, let’s get in there and see what we got,” Helm announced. “Take it easy and watch where you walk. It’s still isolated, but don’t fucking touch anything looks like it might be hot. You stay with me, Sugar Mama.”

  “Don’t fucking call me Sugar Mama, jackoff.” The guys from the repair party sniggered, and she snapped her flashlight on and stalked past them into the dark.

  THE IR flat looked OK, but the boiler level was a mess. Stuff was tracked all over. Helm told them to get rubber gloves and foxtails and get it cleaned up, then they’d see what to do next. He and the captain and the exec and the chief engineer, “the whole fucking food chain,” as Ricochet put it, were gathered around number-one GTG.

  The first bad thing Cobie saw was the number-one switchboard. Still smoking, with a big hole down at shin level where the lower breaker panel had blown out. Bubbling chunks of brown plastic, blown-out wires. The disconnect bars, copper contacts big around as her thumb, were melted into shapeless globs of red metal. They were still sizzling as they burned their way into the deck matting. They picked everything up that was too big to sweep and carried it out in buckets. She tried to pull what was left of the breaker carrier out. It didn’t move. Akhmeed couldn’t get it out either. He said they’d have to get one of the hull techs to cut it out with a torch. She went down to tell Helm but, when she got to the gaggle around the generator, stopped to listen.

  Lieutenant Porter, the chief engineer, was explaining to Captain Lenson that the labyrinth seal had blown on the generator. Not the turbine, but the part that made electricity. It had mineral oil in it to lubricate the bearings. When the seal blew, it sprayed the oil on the rotor. “That sent a high voltage, high amperage charge, just like a bolt of lightning, up the bus to the switchboard. That’d blow the 1SG breaker, the switchboard generator breaker. So that’s what happened up there.”

  “Why’d the seal blow?” the s
kipper wanted to know.

  “No reason I can tell you now, Captain. Could have been a manufacturing defect. Unfortunately, they’re not a replaceable item.”

  “How about the LP compressor? What happened there?”

  “Downstream effect. The breaker blew out of the switchboard and right through the 1SA section. It sheared the bus tiebreakers out of the board and shorted out all the power and tripped all the generators off the line.”

  Cobie thought, And we were just lucky none of us was standing in front of the switchboard. But Porter was saying that since the rotor was connected to the generator shaft it had made the shaft jump, and one of the blades inside the turbine had brushed the inside of the casing. Since it was going at thirteen thousand RPM, as soon as metal hit metal the blades came off.

  Porter rounded suddenly on Cobie. “You were in the space when it went, right? Kasson?”

  “Yessir. I mean, yes, ma’am.”

  “What’d it sound like?”

  “A bang, superloud. Then a kind of rowfing sound… then a whirring, like everything was dying.”

  Mr. Osmani said, “That growl was the turbine eating itself. After the lightning bolt blew the generators off the line. Without power to the electronics the engines power down. They’ve got five minutes of fuel on the gravity tanks, but they shut down without the auto run signal.”

  Cobie kept looking at Porter. She sounded like she knew exactly what had happened and what to do. She didn’t seem to be in awe of the captain or the exec. The captain wanted to know if they could fix the turbine. Porter said they weren’t allowed to and they didn’t have parts kits. They’d have to remove and replace. Captain Lenson said to report the casualty, then, and asked how long would it take to put a new one in once they got it. She said maybe a day. Then he asked about the air compressor, if they could fix it. The chief engineer said they’d try, but they could run the plant, the pneumatic valves, and the rest of the system with the remaining compressor. If that failed, they could bleed air down to operating pressure from the high pressure system, or run the plant in manual if they had to, although they’d have to go to two watch sections to do it. The skipper nodded. He told Helm to tell the watch section they’d done the right things. He was glad they’d all got out safe. Then he told Porter to get on the repairs and ducked out the escape scuttle.

  THAT afternoon everybody from the other sections, Punchy and Drone and Ina and one of the hull techs they called Mr. Blonde, after the Michael Madsen character in Reservoir Dogs, came down. They stripped the switchboard and cleaned it, and Mr. Blonde burned out the disconnect links with the torch. After a while Patryce came down with root beers, beaded cool cans they sucked gratefully, and the scuttlebutt was they were headed for Jubail to meet their new engine. She said she was off watch, she could stay and help Cobie out. Cobie wasn’t too sure about that, but what the hell. They stripped the wiring out and got both switchboards disassembled and the electricians started putting it back together, but that would take longer than taking it apart. Then Chief Bendt put them on stripping down the low-pressure compressor, but it was more fucked than it looked. Some of the heads and blocks had to be replaced. Helm wanted her to help him get the covers off the generator rotor. When they did, black water and shit came pouring out of the casing, with chunks of burnt insulation. It stank, big-time.

  She asked him, “Is this gonna be a big job, Mick? Replacing the GTG?”

  “You’re gonna see it, Cober.”

  Cober? Well, it was better than Sugar Mama. “Ever done it before?”

  “In Barcelona, in the yard. I don’t think anybody’s done it out here before.”

  Osmani came by as they were putting beam clamps in the overhead, setting up the chain falls. He asked how much the rotor weighed. Helm told him twelve tons.

  “Twelve tons?”

  “You’ll see. This is a solid piece of copper wiring and stainless shaft as big as your desk in the log room.”

  Cobie was looking at Osmani, kind of admiring his eyebrows and his skin. He wasn’t hairy, like a lot of the guys. He gave her a smile, and she switched her eyes away.

  And found herself looking at Patryce. She’d come back down from the compressor where she’d been talking to the guys.

  Maybe it was seeing Cobie looking at him. She didn’t want to think that was it. But Patryce started to try for Osmani’s attention. Cobie didn’t notice at first. She just thought Wilson was acting silly. Then suddenly she realized what was going on.

  Patryce was coming on to the Wiz. And, true, he was OK-looking, with that smooth brown skin and dark eyebrows and kind of twisted smile. But he was an O. Not only an O, but in their chain of command. But there Wilson was coiling herself around a stanchion like some hot-tie at the Full Moon A Go-Go. Asking him where he was from and how he got to be an officer. Then, God help her, she lay down on the deck and gazed up at him. Cobie couldn’t believe her eyes. Even Helm was staring. “Wilson,” he said, “don’t you have something to do back in the Aux spaces?”

  “I’m off watch. This is how you learn, working on the gear. Isn’t that right, sir?”

  “Definitely,” Osmani said. Smiling down at her, like he didn’t know what was going on. Or else did, and didn’t mind. “You have to cross-train to get the big picture.”

  Cobie gritted her teeth, watching her play coy.

  But eventually Osmani drifted out, like the Os did when you were working and obviously didn’t want to talk to them, and after that Patryce didn’t want to help out as much, and finally left. Then the word came over the 1MC, early meal for watch reliefs. She asked if she could eat. Helm said yeah. She went back to the berthing space. Wilson wasn’t in her rack, but she found her at the table in back reading an old People. She pulled out a chair. “Patryce, what were you doing with Osmani?”

  She looked up, startled. “Me?”

  “Coming on to him like that? Jeez.”

  “ ’Zat a problem? If he’s yours, I’ll get off the bus.”

  “He’s not mine. He’s not anybody’s. You can’t fuck every guy on the ship!”

  Her face set. Sounds like fun to me. What’s the fucking problem, Kasson? Can’t you stay in your rate?”

  She scratched her forehead, trying to think. But her fingers hit the bandage and her mind slid off whatever it was she was trying to put together. Then she had it again. “Look. We’re going places we never could before. Like on this ship. Like, someday my daughter’s going to be grown-up. When guys look at her, what are they going to see? Just another piece of ass? Or somebody who can do a job, too?”

  “You are so weird,” Wilson said, examining her like she’d grown horns and a tail. “Do you have any idea what you’re talking about?”

  “I’m talking about—Never mind. Look, you just can’t hook up with everybody aboard who wants a quick lay. The whole ship’s talking about it.”

  “I don’t ‘hook up with everybody’ Where the hell are you getting this shit?”

  “All right, I’ll tell you. You know, like in the helo with the helo crew? And the weight room, the guys you give massages to? Bartlett, from the ship’s store? I saw that. At the Daiquiri Palace. You can’t tell me I didn’t see that.”

  “So I made some guy’s day, so what.”

  “Guys don’t keep secrets, Patryce.”

  “So what? Let them talk.”

  The woman couldn’t be serious. Cobie wondered for a second if she’d have to turn her in. Then knew she couldn’t. But she was ruining it for all the girls. Once they got into port, the guys would talk to the other crews, too. She knew how this worked. She tried again. “Look, you’re my friend. But you’ve got to exercise some restraint. Keep it off the ship, at least.”

  But Wilson’s face had gone white. “Look, bitch, I’ve been in the navy too long to have some fireman call me a slut.”

  “No, I just—”

  “I like a guy, I show it. What their wives don’t know won’t hurt them. They’re having just as good a time at home. And
I don’t need you telling me what to do. Not the way you and Helm keep mooning at each other.”

  “We don’t—”

  “Just shut the fuck up, all right? You see this?” She flicked her third-class insignia, the eagle above the stripe they called a crow. “I tell you what to do, Fireman Kasson. You don’t tell me. So fuck the fuck off.”

  Cobie said, trying to keep her voice from shaking, “That’s how it is, huh?”

  “That’s how it fucking is. Yeah.”

  Wilson got up and went into the head. Leaving Cobie sitting at the table, looking after her. Wondering what she was going to do now.

  17

  MARTY could not fucking believe it. Now they had to take not just Cassidy along on boardings, but a staff puke, too. An untrained fucking Down Under staff puke, to keep the rogue outlaw Gold Team from ass-raping the poor sonofabitching smugglers. He could not believe it.

  But that’s how it was.

  A piss-ass little Australian butterbars they called Booger. Actually his name was Berger, but they called him Booger when they were out of hearing of the other officers. It made him swell up like a toad, which meant it was the right nickname. Yeah. Booger fit.

  Marchetti stood suited up by the stern, watching the ocher tint of boiling sand gradually turn the sun the color of dried blood. Waiting to go over on yet another boarding. He wasn’t sure why, but things were getting tense aboard the old Blade Runner. Over sausage and grits in the chiefs’ mess the quartermaster said the skipper and the commodore didn’t talk anymore. They stayed at opposite ends of the bridge and sent notes back and forth. The fire in the engine room had blown the shit out of the plant, so they had to cut down on the electrical load. Which meant the forward half of the ship had to go without air-conditioning. In hundred-and-twenty-degree heat this did not make for happy campers. Bendt said they should be heading for Rota or Sigonella, to get a new generator. The chief radioman set them straight as to why they weren’t: The new president was getting set to kick ass, and they had to stay on station till the word came down to shit or get off the pot.