Temporary Duty

by Ric Locke

  Peters took the sheet and scanned it. “Says here liberty’s going ahead, just a little late. The boats’ll be loadin’ after the second meal tomorrow for the trip down.”

  “That’s about what we thought we’d made out, but we wanted you to make sure.”

  “Yeah,” Peters nodded. The programmer returned the nod and started to close the door, but Peters interrupted: “Wait.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Everybody got one of these, right?” He picked up the first piece of paper and showed it to the other.

  Vogt inspected it briefly and shrugged. “Far as I know. I know I got one, but I haven’t seen the translation yet.”

  “It says the Grallt are payin’ for our liberty again, except it’s the ship’s crew payin’ this time.”

  Vogt’s eyes lit. “Hey, great! The last couple haven’t been much fun, what with only having our pay to spend.”

  “Well, that ain’t a problem this time. Pass the word if you would.”

  “I sure will! Thanks, Peters.” Vogt left, unceremoniously in the way they’d all adopted.

  Todd was still grinning. “Well, you don’t need for anybody to pay for your liberty,” he pointed out. “I can’t help thinking that a man with a half-million dollars in his pocket can find something interesting to do.”

  Peters grinned thinly. “I reckon you’re right.” He eyed the younger sailor. “If I do, you’re invited. My treat.”

  “Thankee.”

  “Hunh. We been in this together since the beginnin’, wouldn’t seem right otherwise.” Peters regarded the share paper and the number written on it: dash dash two. “Anyhow I reckon it’s better if I go ahead and spend it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You forgot who we are? Couple of enlisted pukes. What do you bet there’s some kind of regulation’ll make us turn this in when we get home?”

  “You think so?”

  “Don’t see how it could happen any other way. The suits’ll be antsy to get all this stuff.” He waved vaguely, indicating Llapaaloapalla and all it contained. “Can’t see ‘em lettin’ a little thing like it belongin’ to me stand in their way.”

  Todd had sobered. “You’re probably right.”

  “Yeah. Oh, they’ll figure out some way to make it all elegant like, probably like they did when we got back from Palestine, we gotta turn it in for American money.”

  “Or they might just call it income and tax it away,” Todd suggested. “You ever had a run-in with the IRS?”

  “Not personally… Hunh. 2055 already, and we ain’t even got our forms, let alone turned ‘em in. ‘Course we been kinda busy and pretty far from a mail drop, but that ain’t no excuse to the Revenue.”

  “You got that right… what do you suppose they’ll say it’s worth?”

  Peters grinned without amusement. “Hell, I don’t know. Dollar a share or somethin’. Whatever it is, it won’t be enough for us to buy any of the shit we’ve been seein’.”

  “You’re probably right,” Todd acknowledged with a nod. “So you figure that paper’s either about two good drunks apiece…”

  “… or a pretty damn nice time the rest of the cruise,” Peters finished. “I know which one I’m gonna pick. Like I say, my treat. Let’s see if we can spend it all before we get home.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t at all clear what a white web belt and a 5.56mm automatic would do to keep the boogers off if the said boogers came calling with spaceships and nukes, but on balance Peters approved of the bow and stern watches in spite of their seeming futility. As the Master Chief had said, they’d been slipping into a sloppy disciplineless state, and having the regular watches was a Navy-like arrangement that tended to keep their minds on business.

  The Master Chief had kept his word: the only ones not on the watch rota were the medics. For some strange reason he and the other Chiefs tended to get the morning and midday watches instead of missing their sleep, but the principle was clear and the example was impressive, if not quite what Peters would have done in the situation.

  Llapaaloapalla was rotating slowly, stars drifting by from lower left to upper right. The Grallt didn’t seem to care about that, or maybe they didn’t have the fineness of control to prevent it; at any rate, whenever they were on orbit the ship seemed to wander… as did his mind in this circumstance.

  Liberty on P’Vip had been a bust, fortune in his pocket or no. The site, a timber lodge in the midst of a vast snowy plain with little copses of scruffy trees, hadn’t been to anyone’s taste. There’d been nothing around it, and no transportation to more salubrious climes available—Peters had asked that first thing, and gotten what amounted to sneers. The only entertainment available had been trekking in the snow, either on foot or using riding animals like skinny cows.

  It had been a relief, really, that the Master Chief insisted on rotating people back up to Llapaaloapalla for the security watches. About all they could do on P’Vip that they couldn’t do on the ship was get stone stinking drunk, and Peters for one didn’t find that terribly entertaining.

  One thing: The food had improved, as promised. The inhabitants of P’Vip, surly and graceless as they were, had a biochemistry closer to human and Grallt than the last few they’d visited, and tasty items were again appearing on the menu. One of them was something like pasta, flat strips of a starchy substance, and another was a spicy preserved meat. Combined with tomatoes and a few spices from the Grallt supply, they made a very acceptable substitute for spaghetti that almost everyone, Grallt or human, liked and took whenever it was available.

  The watch finally dragged to an end, as watches do no matter how seemingly interminible, and Peters surrendered the duty belt and sidearm to his relief. Gonsoles donned the gear, having to let the belt out to accomplish that, and set himself at parade rest in the dead center of the opening, facing outward at the stars. Peters snorted to himself. He hadn’t thought the roughneck was that imaginative.

  Chow and a nap, in that order. Flight ops at the beginning of the next ande.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The planet framed slightly off-center in the forward bay door was called Irkinnik, and its inhabitants were “bür”. Most of the sailors had trouble with the umlaut, but “beer” was close enough for most purposes. Dee had said they were warlike, and very, very good. She’d also said she thought the Navy pilots were better. That was about to be tested.

  Peters checked off another statuette. Here were the “Draculas”: tall, thin to the point of shoulder blades and hipbones showing clearly in their kathir suits, with long narrow faces, bright red lips, sharply pointed jaws and noses, and close-cropped head hair with distinct widows-peaks. All they needed was long black cloaks, especially when one smiled, bringing distinct, and sharp, canines into view. Either there wasn’t much difference between their sexes or only one sex was represented among the visitors to Llapaaloapalla.

  They were nice people, soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, and didn’t have much use for military drill or formal punctilio, but they weren’t the least sloppy. They’d approached in well-kept diamond formations, individuals peeling off to land while the others circled around, and their ships were parked in neat echelon alongside the demo plane, which was a Hornet this time. All their kathir suits were marked the same, a rich blue with red simulated briefs, except for different numbers and designs of yellow stripes on the sleeves, probably rank designations.

  “Well, now we know where this bucket of bolts came from,” Tollison rumbled cheerfully. Todd had expounded his theory about different “flavors” or “feels” of technology, and the two First Classes had talked it around; it was now the consensus of the humans, or at least the enlisted, and the evidence was persuasive. Bür ships were rectangular blocks with rounded corners, painted white with geometric designs here and there, collateral descendants of Llapaaloapalla if not direct ones.

  “The theory seems sound,” Mannix observed, “but perhaps we should ask someone likely to know more about
it. Dee, did the bür build Llapaaloapalla?”

  “I don’t know,” Dee confessed. “If so, it was before I was born.” Theoretically she was now liaison between the enlisted and the Grallt, and she was useful in dealing with the Trade organization—even after all this time none of the sailors had met her superiors—but that wasn’t necessary very often, and in fact Peters had better relations with the zerkre than Dee did. If the sailors needed to know something, usually Dhuvening or Linvenig told Peters, Peters told Dee, and Dee told the Master Chief.

  It kept Peters out of Joshua’s sight; he was even beginning to rub along fairly well with Howell. The fact that it didn’t make sense wasn’t worth considering.

  “Now hear this,” Joshua said over the general push. “Flight operations will begin in three-two minutes. All hands, rig for flight operations. I say again, flight operations will begin at the turn of the next ande. All hands rig for flight operations. That is all. “

  “I wish he’d decide whether to use Earth time or Grallt time,” Peters groused. “Mixin’ ‘em up that way’s likely to get everybody confused.”

  “Look on the bright side,” Mannix advised. “At least he’s using the ship’s designations sometimes. He started out using nothing but Earth time and bells.” Peters just grinned and headed up to collect his deck gear. Aunt Lulu had believed in ouija boards. Peters was certain that he’d never accept a message from beyond the grave as being from Mannix if it didn’t include the phrase “Look on the bright side” or some equivalent.

  Rupert was waiting at Retard Three, and Jacks ambled up as Peters was checking the settings: all correct. One of the ways the bür had endeared themselves to the sailors was by sending pathfinders—the first out of six alien encounters—with the proper mass and speed settings, and by seeming content to allow humans to operate the retarders instead of supplying their own crews. Not that they really needed them. The ships the bür flew might not look sleek and flashy, but they handled them with sure deftness, matching speeds so perfectly that the fields were rarely deployed. Peters recalled Keezer’s comments, but made sure the settings were correct anyway.

  The humans’ planes were first out as usual, Hornets in the lead this time, so the visitors could see how the system worked. Over the voyage they’d refined their plane-handling techniques with the enkhei remarks about “performances” in mind. The result was highly stylized, and would probably get them in trouble when they got home and had to operate twice as many planes in a quarter of the space, but it sure as Hell looked pretty. When the bür’s turn came they made an attempt to go along with the gag, mistaking a few of the ground-guides’ wand signals but not doing badly for newbies.

  Recovery wasn’t quite so pretty. The bür trapped first, coming in a little hotter than they had when coming aboard the first time and gathering in clumps along the side of the ops bay to watch. “Look alive,” said Howell when all the bür were in. “From the look of it things didn’t go all that good for our guys this time.”

  Commander Collins was hot enough to twang the first two retarders, the first time that had happened in quite a while, and almost all of the other Hornets were either hotter, sloppier, or both than usual. The first flight of Tomcats was about the same, and in the short pause after they trapped all the retarder crews double-and triple-checked their consoles. The second flight was manned by the alternate crews, and despite improvement they simply weren’t as good as the primaries.

  105 managed to twang number three before getting down to deck-maneuvering speed. The sailors exchanged looks as it taxied away. As they understood it, the low-powered lasers used in the mock combats caused a shock that was transmitted distinctly through the airframe. They also scarred the paint, and from the look of it Mr. Carlyle had gotten as much as he could dish out if he hadn’t actually come out second best. Multiple splotches marred the Navy blue of the wings and tail surfaces, and several irregular areas of peeled paint marched down the midbody, definite kills if the weapons were on their normal settings.

  106 and 107 were a little calmer but still hotter than usual, and bore similar if less extensive evidence that the bür were several cuts above the opponents they’d encountered before. Number 108 was lagging, and Howell pulled out his binoculars and took a look. “Shit,” he said. “It looks like he’s lost it. This could get interesting.”

  “Who is it?” somebody asked.

  “Carson,” another replied.

  “Oh, shit.” It was obvious to the naked eye that his attitude was wrong. Carson’s problem seemed to be that he couldn’t bear to head directly for the ship. Peters could sympathize a little—the times he’d been outside it had been much easier to think of the ship as “down” than “over there”—but if the pilot was too rattled to get the nose down it was likely to cause problems.

  Sure enough, the nose was way high, at or above the angle it would use when landing on the carrier. That wasn’t what Carson had in mind, though, because the wings were still folded back in high-speed mode. If he’d reverted to the training he’d gotten, the wings would be extended—or maybe not; he would have learned on modern airplanes, which didn’t have variable geometry.

  Twang! went the first retarder.

  The nose-high airplane caught the air inside the bay. It rose and kept rising, meeting the beams of the overhead with a shower of sparks and a crash that reverberated down the bay.

  Having the wings back, and a little luck, saved two lives. As it rose the Tomcat pitched nose-down, catching one of the crossbeams just aft of the rear cockpit, shearing the vertical stabilizers off clean with a Hell of a screech but sparing the canopy and its occupants the same fate. It then fell to the deck with another reverberating crash and skidded down the bay, leaving long scars in the nonskid and spraying yellow fire. It didn’t take telepathy for two hundred and forty-eight humans to share variants of the same thought: No fuel, thank God, no fire, thanks be to God in His mercy.

  Kraewitz got there first and yanked the escape handle. Explosive bolts sent the canopy sailing, and the backseater’s bubble tumbled after it. The canopy coamings were still above their heads, which caused a delay that was probably fortunate. Peters cat-scrambled up the side, jamming the toes of his boondockers into the slots provided for that purpose, but the action gave him time to think a little. Without the threat of fire they could take time to make sure there were no broken necks or backs before moving the flight crews, instead of snatching and grabbing in a pile of slippery foam while praying that the ordnance didn’t cook off.

  There weren’t any scars on the NFO’s helmet, and the straps seemed to have held; Lieutenant Carson seemed to be in about the same shape. Cunningham was reaching for his straps but stopped when Peters hissed, “Wait for the medics.” The other Second Class backed off, content to observe if a little itchy. A shout of “Make way, there!” from below gave Peters just time to swing over and crouch on the intake before the corpsman was swarming up to take charge. Another was heading for the front seat, obliging Cunningham to perch insecurely on the canopy edge.

  SPEYR, LTJG, it said on the NFO’s helmet, with a single bar and a design of red stripes like stylized ram’s horns. The corpsman felt around the base of the man’s neck, then undid the snaps of the oxygen mask and worked the helmet off, revealing a sweaty disheveled face. He handed the helmet to Peters and began to expertly palpate the officer’s neck and upper back. “Bear a hand here,” he said when he seemed satisfied, not a request.

  He and Peters got the straps undone, fumbling a little because despite training neither of them had done it often. By that time the officer was able to cooperate, managing to stand up in the cockpit with a little help and swing his legs over onto the maintenance stand somebody’d had the wit to bring up. “Thanks,” he said faintly. “I think I’m okay.”

  “No, sir, you ain’t okay ‘til the doc says you are,” the corpsman said firmly. He and Peters got the officer to sit, head down between his knees, until a litter was passed up. They got him on it and the
straps tight; another sailor took one end, and he and the medic worked it down the steps and set off across the bay, with Carson just behind in his own litter.

  Peters clambered down more slowly, shaking with reaction, and sat on the deck, bracing his back against the crumpled port engine nacelle. He pulled off his helmet, dumped it, and put his own head between his knees, breathing deeply to come down off the adrenaline high. Sailors were crowding around, but Warnocki’s bark of “Clear away there!” started them moving off, and the Chief came over to Peters. “You okay?” he asked. “What happened?”

  “He was nose high. You seen the rest.”

  “Yeah,” Warnocki said sourly.

  * * *

  Peters was relaxing on his bunk, deep in the tenth volume of the long-running saga of Orberig the Sailor, when someone pounded on the door. “Come,” he said shortly.

  “The results of the board are in,” Howell said without preamble. “Simple negligence.”

  Peters nodded, wondering why the First Class had taken the time to pass the word. They’d learned to get along, but they’d never be friends. “‘Bout what I expected. When’s the Court?”

  “There won’t be a Court,” Howell said, keeping his mouth in a tight thin line.

  “That don’t sound right,” Peters observed, not quite correctly. An Accident Investigation Board finding of “gross negligence” on the part of an officer generated a Court-Martial as a matter of course; “simple negligence” could be handled more simply. “What’re they doin’ to Carson? Limited duty and a note in his 201?”

  “You got it. He’s off flying status and gets a note in his file, and that’s it.”

  “Well, at least he’ll be out of our hair.”

  “Not precisely,” Howell advised. “In fact, not at all. Which brings us to the best part. The Board in its wisdom has ruled that a contributing cause to the accident was, quote, ‘failure of poorly-trained and poorly-supervised enlisted crews to properly operate important safety equipment’. That means thee and me, Peters, not to mention Kraewitz and Bannerman. We get love letters in our 201s too.”