So after morning muster, we headed across the brow and into Port Farragut. The first thing I noticed was the increased “gravity”. It just meant that I had to make extra effort to pick my feet off the ground, but we got used to it pretty fast. It also helped get us oriented, because even though we were docked perpendicular to the pier, with the brow coming off our side, we entered through the overhead. So what I thought was going to be a tall elevator became a long concourse, with little shops, bars and kiosks lining the way. At least, that’s what it looked like would be going in. A lot of it was just blank walls with big Coming Soon! signs.
Farooq pointed out a moving sidewalk, and we jumped on, eager to get to the more inhabited areas of the base. “How far is it to the religion center?” I asked.
He looked at his tablet. “If this thing is right, about 5 kilometers.”
“How much of that is this friggin’ pier?” I asked.
“Three and a half.”
We passed a few bars that had already opened, and each had a good dozen of our shipmates that we could see. “Good grief,” I said, pointing them out to Farooq. “It’s only 9 in the morning.”
“Sure, and they may never get any further into the base,” Farooq said. “That’s one of the reasons I can’t find a liberty buddy.”
“Well, that and the mosque thing.”
“Aye, there’s that too,” he said, but I had laughed, so he grinned. I didn’t tease him any more about it, either, because I could tell he got plenty of grief already.
Once we got to the main part of the base, the directions to the religion center were pretty well marked. What surprised me was how many guys were going that way. Big Mike I expected, but MS1 Silver, Horowitz the gardener, and even Ensign Abercrombie ended up in the line to get in. Plus another twenty or so guys whose steel suits said Rosy Roads, but that I didn’t recognize.
And once in the door, everyone kind of went their own way. There were halls leading away marked with the major religions: Christian, Muslim, Hindu. But there were lots more, sometimes with three or more on a plaque, and few small rooms I could see with signs of things like Asatru or Zooastrian. But everyone went their own ways quietly and pretty respectfully. I just took a seat in the central common room, which had a monitor in the corner playing soothing music set to peaceful nature scenes, and several comfortable seats and couches. No one bugged me, and no one asked me to join them. I read a book, played a few games, and tried to get a feel for what to do after Farooq came back.
He came out after about three hours, looking relaxed and calm. He sat down next to me and sighed contentedly. “I could do this all day,” he said. “But I won’t. I’m sure there are other things you’d rather be doing.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s not like there’s much to do here.”
“Perhaps we could come back tomorrow?”
“Sure.” I showed him the map on my tablet. “I found Bottoms Up. There are a whole mess of places to eat in the area. Anything look good to you?”
“They’ve got a Thai place?” he said.
“I guess. Do you like Thai?”
He grinned widely. “I haven’t had it in ages, but yeah, I like it.”
So we went down a couple of levels and had pad Thai and massaman curry for lunch, and then wandered around the little shopping area, which was a bit more complete than what we saw on the pier, but not by much. Still it killed a few hours until it was time to meet up with Hernandez.
We didn’t have to ask for him. As soon as we walked through the door, he saw me and said, “Hey! The boy in the bubble’s here!”
We shook hands, and I introduced him to Farooq, and he introduced me to his two partners, Green and MacNamara.
“Let me buy you guys a drink,” Hernandez said. “Whatcha want? It’s mostly cheap beer, but they do have a pretty good IPA that’s brewed on Mars.”
“I’ll just have a soda, if you don’t mind,” Farooq said.
“You Muslim?” Green asked. When Farooq nodded, he said, “That’s cool, man. Avoid the potato soup, though. They put bacon in it.”
“Thank you,” Farooq said.
“What, you thought we would give you a hard time?” Hernandez said.
“A lot of sailors do,” Farooq said.
“Hell, we ain’t sailors,” MacNamara drawled. “We’re Seabees. Completely different.”
I looked around. “So you guys built this place?”
“Most of it,” Green said. “There was a Navy mining station when we got here, but we brought in the ABC’s.”
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I said. “What are the ABC’s?”
“Alcohol, babes, and churches,” Hernandez said.
“Ale, bimbos, and chaplains,” MacNamara said.
“Absinthe, bitches, and cathedrals,” Green said.
Hernandez looked at him. “Really? Absinthe?”
“You name me another liquor that starts with A,” Green said.
“Uh, how about Amaretto?”
“Apple martini?” I offered.
“Too long. Try to keep it one word,” Hernandez said.
“Applejack,” Farooq said.
“Dude, the sober Muslim nailed it,” MacNamara said. “We’ll definitely remember that one.”
I looked around. “So we’ve seen the religion center, and we’re at the bar, so where are the girls?”
“You really are loco,” Hernandez said. “This ain’t the 20th century, and we ain’t on Earth. You might see them if your captain arranges a social, but otherwise, they keep away from us squids. We’re slimy, you know.”
“I thought you were a SeaBee, not a squid,” Farooq said.
“Oh, man!” MacNamara said. “He scores again! You one good guy, you know that? You sit in that crazy pimple on your ship too?”
“The turret?” Farooq said. “Negative, that’s Wright’s alone. He’s Earthborn, you know.”
“Earthie?” Hernandez said. “Man this keeps getting better and better! My wife won’t believe it! Are you from California, too?”
“No way,” I said. “I’m Texan.”
“That’s where my family’s from,” MacNamara said. “Not me, though, I was born out here in the deep black.”
Farooq said, “Is there a place here I can call my family?”
“Sure,” Hernandez said. “Comms center can patch you in to just about any place in the solar system.”
“Is that how you talk to your wife?” I asked.
“Naw, I just go home at night. She and the rug rats are waiting for me every day.”
“You have your family here?” Farooq asked. “How is that possible?”
“SeaBees, dude,” Green said. “We come out to rock like this, and we’ll be here five years getting everything ship shape and ready to turn over to the regular Navy. Then they’ll send us to another rock, and we’ll do it all over again. So our families usually join us after the first year or so. It’s a pretty good gig.”
We spent another hour or so with them, eating crappy bar food and drinking weak beer. But we had a pretty good time, and nobody got drunk in our group, although Hernandez was loud enough that everyone thought he was. It was one of the best times I had had in the Navy so far.
After they left, Farooq and I headed to the Comms center. I called my Grampa and told him about everything, including meeting Hernandez, Green, and MacNamara. “SeaBees, huh?” he said. “Those guys are a little nuts. I tagged along with one of their crews back in the day, watched them turn a patch of Martian desert into a working habitat. Took like six weeks, and then they settled in and really started making it nice. Didn’t get to stay for that part, though.”
I suddenly felt very alone, and I said, “I miss you, Grampa. It’s weird being out here, so far away from you.”
It took five minutes for his replay to come back. “I miss you too, Pete. I didn’t expect you to be out in space when you joined. Stay safe. Are they allowing emails still?”
“For the moment. But this is better,
despite the delay.”
“I agree. I love you, boy. Come home safe.”
“I will, Grampa.”
We signed off, but I sat there for another ten minutes before my tablet buzzed, and I read Farroq’s message: You ever coming out?
We headed back to the ship, but instead of berthing, I slept up in the hot seat. It reminded me just a little of camping under the stars with Grampa. In fact, I never slept in berthing again, and only went down there to make sure my bunk would pass inspection. Homesickness is a real bitch.
The next day we went back to the Religion Center for the morning. I was sitting by myself again when someone sat next to me. I was engrossed in a book, so I didn’t pay attention at first, but then the smell of perfume hit me, and I looked up.
She had a dark blue steel suit, just like mine, but her patches said she was a Seabee. She had dark hair pulled up into a messy bun, and hazel eyes that were watching me with amusement. “What?” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen a girl before?”
I closed my mouth. “Not many since I enlisted,” I said.
She held out her hand, and I shook it. Even through steel suit gloves, there was a little thrill, like I was doing something inappropriate.
“Katy Panetta,” she said. “And I don’t bite.”
“Peter Wright,” I said. “I’m just unsure of what I’m supposed to do right now.”
“Well, generally, two people meeting for the first time shake hands and tell each other their names,” she said. “But we’ve already done that part, so now is usually the time for some light conversation.”
“Aren’t there supposed to be chaperones or something?” I said.
“This isn’t a date,” she said a bit sharply. “Where the hell are you from?”
“Earth,” I said. “Back there, I knew what to do when I met a girl. Here, I’m not sure.”
She nodded. “Now it’s making sense. You’re afraid of crossing some invisible line that you’re not aware of, aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “I’ve been to a few socials since I’ve gotten out here, but I barely even talked to any of the girls. And you just sit down next to me and start a conversation? I’m confused, to say the least.”
She laughed. “We’re in the Religion Center,” she said. “The normal male-female interactions are a little more casual here, at least in the common area. How long have you been in space?”
“A little over two years.”
“Just a baby, then,” she said. “You’ll figure it all out, I’m sure.”
“Sometimes I think the same thing,” I said.
She laughed again, and said, “Are you waiting for someone?”
“My buddy Farooq,” I said. “He’s in the mosque. And you?”
“My friend Greta is Catholic,” she said. “I come with her sometimes, but I usually do like you, and just wait.”
We sat there for a few minutes, and when the silence started feeling awkward, I blurted, “I didn’t know there were female Seabees.”
She shook her head. “What, you thought they only took guys?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess if I had thought about it, I would have thought you had separate units, kind of like the all-female ships.”
“We do,” she said. “But there’s plenty of work to be done. And besides, do you think the guys should be building the women’s levels after the women get here?”
I shrugged. “I hadn’t thought about it. But I don’t think I would have a problem with the guys I met yesterday being around women. They’re all happily married.”
“Who’d you meet?”
“Hernandez, Green, and MacNamara.”
“At the Bottoms Up?” she guessed.
“Affirmative.”
“It figures,” she said. “But Hernandez doesn’t know when he’s being too loud or too off-color.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s just being a guy.”
“Sure, and that’s fine, when you’re around the guys,” she said. “Listen, I’ve worked with them, and I know they’re harmless, but the civilian girls especially tend to get their panties in a wad if someone even looks at them funny.”
“And I guess everyone just knows how these things are supposed to work.”
She grinned and said, “Affirmative.”
“Then how am I supposed to figure it all out?” I asked.
“You need a contact, someone who knows how the other side works.” She placed her tablet on top of mine and tapped a couple of buttons. “There you go. All my contact info. Email me, and I’ll tell you what’s what.”
I took my tablet and looked. Seven email addresses and three screen names. I said, “Thank you.”
She shrugged. “No big.”
We lapsed into silence again, but this time, she broke it first: “Is your ship part of the war fleet?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re just a little behind is all.”
“It happens,” she said. “When do you get underway?”
“First thing in the morning.”
“Make sure you’re watching one of the monitors. There’s a fine particle dust cloud about thirty minutes out, and it’ll make some great auroras in your ship’s mag shield.”
“Don’t need a monitor,” I said. “I’ll be sitting in a little turret with only some polycarbonate between me and whatever there is to see.”
“You’re in a what?”
“A turret. They call it--” I stopped, flustered, not sure if I should use the nickname or not.
“Just spit it out,” she said. “It’s nothing I haven’t heard before, I’m sure. I’m both a sailor and a Seabee after all.”
I shrugged. “It’s called Rosy’s dick. A little gun turret mounted on the bottom of the ship.”
Her eyes widened. “I think I know what you’re talking about.” She punched a few things on her tablet and showed me the page she had brought up. “Does it look like this?”
It was my turret, without the guns, and embedded into the surface of an asteroid, not a ship. “Yep, that’s it.”
“Sweet.” She pulled her tablet back and swiped through a few pages. “I installed a couple of dozen of these a couple of years ago, on an asteroid called S-85… 38? 39? I don’t quite remember. It’s called S-Edgerson now, after the guy who first found it in the forties. Not much value mineral wise, but it sits on the inner belt in a great spot to do observational work, so turrets.”
We spent the next hour talking about how my turret was different than the ones she worked on, and we probably would have spent longer except her friend came out, gave us a funny look and said, “We’ve got to get going, Katy. Our shift starts in a couple of hours, and I’m hungry.”
Katy said turned to me. “Do you want to get some lunch with us?”
“Is that allowed?” I asked.
Greta looked even more confused, but Katy laughed. “Since I’m asking you, then yes, and it’s understood that this is a purely platonic situation. If you had asked me, however…”
“I wish I could,” I said. “But I have to wait for my buddy.”
“No problem,” Katy said. “Maybe next time you come into port.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I sure hope we come back here.”
“Me too.”
Farooq came out thirty minutes later. I didn’t tell him about the girls, mostly because I didn’t want him to feel guilty for keeping me from going with them. But also, I knew he would tell the rest of the workcenter, and I didn’t need more teasing. So we went back to the Thai place (pad seiu and volcano chicken), wandered around until dinner time, and hung out with the Seabees again. Then I called my Grampa one last time. I told him about Katy. He just gave me that grin that he always gives me when I tell him about a girl, and wished me luck.
The next morning, as we were pulling away, I got an email from Katy. She said to tell her all about Juno when I could. I finished reading it, and looked up to see our shield glowing in undulations of green, purple, and yellow. T
he auroras made me smile almost as much as her message.
All non-essential comms got shut down shortly afterwards due to entering the hot zone. We were headed for combat.
Chapter 11
I know what you’re saying right about now: Nothing’s happening. Tell us about the fight at Juno. But that’s part of what I’m trying to explain. The life of a sailor is a lot of boring time, crossing an ocean, or a void, to get to where the action is. And then it’s terror, agony, and hell. Followed by more boredom. I’ll tell you about the battle, but I want you to understand—all those other things are what made the battle important to me. If it hadn’t been for Big Mike, Smitty, Farooq, and all the rest, I probably wouldn’t have done what I did, and I wouldn’t be anything. A blip. A footnote. I did what I did because of them, because they meant something to me. I could give a rat’s ass whether or not it means anything to the Navy, the United States, or anybody else.
We were still ten days out from the rest of the fleet when they got to Juno. Most of us were watching a monitor somewhere, and every one of them showed the same thing: Juno, a big gray ball in the center of the screen, and the fleet, twenty five blue dots surrounding one red dot—the USS James Madison, BBS-97. Even though we were so far behind, the captain called GQ when the rest of the fleet did, and I crawled into my steel suit and clambered into my turret. I was listening to the weapons division net in my right ear, and the fleet net in my left. I had all four monitors on, each with a different set of data. The most important stuff I kept on my heads up, though: the members of the fleet with good comm status, displayed on the window where I could see Juno with my eyes. Thanks to the heads up, I could see the fleet, dispersing into a staggered line of green dots as they moved into orbit.
As they approached, the chatter on the fleet net became terse. The Madison would call for checks from certain ships, and the response was always the same: “Nothing unusual. No enemy activity.”
It went on like that for over an hour. My jaw hurt from clenching, and I could hear the boys in my right ear talking about what a waste of time this was going to turn out to be if they just surrendered. Smitty said, “What about you, Wrongway? See anything interesting?”
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