Looking Glass 4 - Claws That Catch (13 page)

“I blame the fact that I had to on poor public schools,” Powell replied. “And good day to you, too, Gunnery Sergeant. I ought to drop you for push-ups for simply mentioning the Mongolian cluster grapp that was last week. And I'd sincerely appreciate it if we could simply forget the whole thing happened.”

“How can we?” Juda said, gesturing at the monitors in the room. “Forget posing for the camera, Third's been trying to get in the best one-liners. Wilson noticed that the guys who were getting good coverage were the ones that had the sharpest retorts. It's getting brutal in the barracks, let me tell you.”

“Right!” the first sergeant snapped. “Sir, permission to revise the training schedule!”

“What day?” the CO asked, grinning. “And why?”

“Today,” Top said. “And tomorrow. Starting at the 0900 formation. Uniform changed to field gear and combat ruck load.”

“Oh, hot diggity,” Eric said. “You're talking a good, old-fashioned, Powell Pounding, aren't you, Top?”

“We'll need to scare up an ambulance,” Powell said, with relish. “And a truck for the wounded. It's about time the company remembered who was boss.”

“That would be me,” the CO said. “But I'm in general agreement and can't think of anything that can't be moved around on the training schedule. Mandatory for the officers, by the way. Lieutenant Bergstresser, I hope you know where your combat gear is.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Eric said, grinning. “Hey, Top, can I call cadence and set the pace?”

“We may switch off, Two-Gun,” Powell replied. “If you remember how to march.”

“Military decorum, First Sergeant,” the CO said, still smiling.

“In that case: We may switch off, Sir Two-Gun.”

Miriam sat at her computer console in the linguist's office of the Blade
II, nearly motionless, staring blankly at the computer screen. The only lighting in the room came from the crack in the office door, and the dim blue-green from the monitor cast an eerily dancing silhouette of her slight figure against the bulkhead behind her. The only sound in the office was the tap tap tapping of the keyboard keys and a faint whistling of air rushing through the air conditioning vent. Her hands typed frantically, filling the open Word document in front of her with what might seem like techno-babble to the average reader, but on occasion the techno-babble had proven to be useful information to get them out of tight spots. So, Miriam had started writing it down, just in case.

“. . . as the scalar field consists of two stable neutral oscillations and two charged oscillations three of which can be described as massless and unphysical bosons while the fourth is the manifestation of the massive unstable particle with no spin or intrinsic angular momentum. A one-loop evolution diagram of the first order correction to this mass shows that it strongly couples to top quark fields and therefore typically evolves to top anti-top pairs. The addition of intrinsic properties to the massive boson creates a stable gauge entity from which metric structure can be manipulated . . .”

Miriam hated to admit it to herself but being away from the Blade during the past few months had left her with a feeling that something had been missing. She realized upon her return that it was the voice from the ship. At first she had hated the voice as it had nearly driven her nuts. But it was becoming sort of an old friend to fill void periods of time where she usually got bored.

Sometime during the last mission Miriam had begun hearing gibberish voices in her head. At first she had thought it was a faulty implant, but her reluctance to let the ship's sawbones crack open her skull forced her to keep quiet about it. After all, most of the crew already thought she was bat-shit crazy; hearing voices would only have put the purple icing on the fruitcake.

As time passed the voice finally went from gibberish to English techno-babble. Miriam soon realized that the techno-babble was indeed information that was somehow pertinent to the functioning of the Blade's alien drive system. Somehow, and for some reason, the little black box had chosen to dump user information into her mind. The information was about as useful, for the most part, as Chinese stereo instructions to someone who only speaks French and has never seen a stereo. Fortunately, in Miriam's case she spoke both languages and quite enjoyed music and every now and then she understood what the voice was telling her.

“. . . it is inconsistent for the mechanism between symmetry breaking aspects to be unitary as . . .”

“Hi, Miriam,” Bill said, sticking his head in the linguist's office. “I was wondering, did you happen to get anywhere with . . . ?”

“Shhh!” Miriam said as she tapped one last set of keystrokes. The voice stopped.

“Miriam?” Weaver blinked his eyes to adjust to the darkened room. “Uh, you know, my grandma used to tell me not to sit too close to the TV with all the lights out or I'd go blind . . .” His voice trailed off as he realized Miriam wasn't paying attention. Or more like she was paying attention only in the way she did when she translated for someone.

“Sorry, Bill. I didn't want to lose my train of thought.” She clicked the minimize box on the document she was typing.

“Uh huh.” Bill nodded. “If now's a bad time . . .”

“And I was expecting to see you. We have manuals for all the Hexosehr systems,” Miriam said. “They're not stupid enough to have given us the equipment and no repair manuals. It was mostly what I was doing on the way back, translating them all. I mean, they'd been autotranslated but that left a lot of ambiguity. What we don't have, I just discovered, is all the parts and tools we're supposed to have for them. They're all listed, they're in the required parts and tools inventory, we had them when we got back but now they're missing!”

“That's not good,” Bill said, the air going out of his lungs in a rush. He walked around to look at her computer and contemplated the list. “Holy Maulk, that's a lot of stuff. And none of it's standard inventory. We're going to have to get it all straight from the Hexosehr.”

“You're missing something,” Miriam said, pulling up another list. Bill couldn't figure out what it was then noted that it was an inventory of “non-vital materials” removed from the ship for storage landside. “They gave us everything we needed when they built the ship. Enough to last for a cruise or two, at least. This ship was absolutely turnkey when we got it. But some idiot pulled it all off the ship as nonvital.”

Bill looked at the annotations on the form and felt his blood pressure start to go through the roof.

“GE-E-E-E-E-ST-NER!”

“Where's Top taking the company?” Portana asked. “We're starting loading tomorrow!”

“I'm sure the first sergeant is cognizant of that, Sergeant,” Berg said, grinning. “He's pissed people are mugging for the cameras so he's going to administer a Powell Pounding.”

“Glad I got stuff to do,” Portana replied. “You infantry types can have it. I don't have to go, right?”

“No, Portana, you get to stay back here,” Berg said. “But I need you to do me a favor. A big one. I need you to run in town and pick something up for me. A sign. Then I need you to . . .”

“So where is it now and why doesn't this have your signature or mine on it?” Captain Prael asked.

“Equipment transfers of nonspecial inventory are handled below our level, sir,” Bill replied.

“XO, if the most advanced Hexosehr technology isn't 'special inventory,' I don't know what is!”

“Yes, sir,” Bill replied. “Agreed. Among other things, he shipped out fourteen hand melders. Fourteen. And a fabricator! A whole grapping fabber! I don't know what the street value of one would be but I'd put it as at least a million dollars. Possibly a billion. Punch in the design and it will turn out the most advanced microchips we make nearly as fast as a multibillion dollar plant! But it's not noted as being special inventory or even particularly expensive. It's not like they were trying to requisition a hundred rolls of space tape. It actually opened up our budget for material, probably the reason that Gestner and the Eng did it. This was a routine movement out into normal distribution channels. The problem being that none of the stuff is normal inventory. It doesn't even have Federal Stock numbers and nobody had any idea how to inventory it. I've tracked it as far as Newport Base. They didn't know what to do with it so they sent it to the main supply base at Norfolk. Norfolk, assuming it was surplus and out-of-date material, shipped it to the surplus and salvage yard. That's as far as I've gotten. I'm hoping that surplus and salvage can find it for us.”

“Where did the tracking numbers come from, then?” Prael asked, frowning at the screen. “There's even associated costs. Low ones. Most of them are under a hundred dollars. Including the fabber? Jesus Chr—”

“Not sure, sir,” Bill said, shrugging. “Not my department at the time.”

“Damn,” Prael said, shaking his head. “Grapp me. Okay, find this stuff. We're grounded until we get it back. And I now have to call SpacCom and explain to them that we're non-mission-capable until a couple of tons of unobtainium parts and tools get found!”

“With all due respect, sir,” Bill said. “Sucks to be you.”

Prael stiffened. “Thanks, XO. Send a message to the Eng and Gestner. Tell them I want them standing at my door in ten minutes. In the meantime, I need to go over to SpacCom and report on this little grapp-up in person. I'll probably be a couple of hours.”

Since there were no hills of any significance in the entire Norfolk area, the first sergeant had promised to find some. The nearest, he'd opined, were in Richmond.

Most of the company had chuckled at what they took to be a joke. Richmond was eighty miles away.

The more experienced members of the company just groaned. You could do eighty miles in one day, if you counted a day as from when you woke up until you collapsed in exhaustion. The trick was alternating a slow dog-trot with a fast walk. With enough training, a person could do that trick until their body ran out of muscle to eat or they went stark staring mad from sleep-deprivation dementia. With First Sergeant Powell in the mood he was in, either was possible. Nobody had mentioned anything about busses once they got to Richmond. They'd have to come back, too.

It was somewhere around Williamsburg, just short of thirty miles into the march and all of six hours later, that Berg got to take over cadence. The problem being that the first sergeant, who had the most remarkable memory for lyrics and cadences Berg had ever experienced, had used up just about everything. Six hours of cadence calling that ranged from standard military cadences like “Yellow Ribbon” and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” to rock and roll tunes with an appropriate beat. Hell, he'd even slipped in Britney Spears. If you worked with it, you could march to both “Oops, I Did It Again” and “Hit Me.” “John Brown's Body” was buried back in Newport News. So were “Early Morning Rain” and “Yellow Bird,” all twenty known verses including all the dirty ones.

But Top's musical tastes were just divergent enough from Eric's that Berg had a few Top hadn't thought of. Not eight hours worth, and they'd be going for a lot longer than that. But he could keep the company groaning out cadences for an hour or so just on Within Temptation, a few Manowar songs Top had missed, and Crüxshadows. Hell, there was some ZZ Top that the first sergeant had missed.

But start with the good stuff.

“Languid waves of desperation fall before the rain,” Eric sang, grinning at the groans from the experienced hands. “A vanguard to approaching war is born upon the sea. The icy breath of cyclones bent on raging our destruction, drills hard against the hearts of heroes, called here to defend. Double-time . . . march! Chorus, Marines!”

“What do you mean you don't know where it is?” Weaver said, trying not to whimper.

The warehouse was vast and filled with packing crates. If the Arc of the Covenant was buried anywhere, it was in this warehouse.

“How do you maintain inventory?”

“We don't, really,” the warehouse manager said. “When stuff comes in it's dated and moved to a particular section. If it sits there for ninety days, it's put up to auction. Yours had been here less than ninety days, right?”

Bill looked at his forms and sighed in relief. Sixty days, maximum.

“It should have gotten here around the middle of July,” he said. “You should have it.”

“Mid July,” the warehouse manager said, muttering to himself. “What did you say this stuff was?”

“Misplaced parts and tools,” Bill said. “It's mostly in heavy plastic containers. They may look a little weird.”

Hexosehr fabbers had no issue with curves so their output had a tendency to look a bit more organic than human manufacture.

“Oh, hell, I remember that stuff,” the supervisor said, nodding. “We opened up a couple of the boxes but couldn't figure out what the hell it was. I figure somebody might buy it for scrap. Section eighteen.”

“Which is where?” Bill asked,hurriedly.

“I'll take you over in my cart,” the supervisor said, standing up and heading to the door. “But you're not going to be happy.”

“Why?” Bill asked.

“This is Section five,” the man said, waving around the warehouse. “The whole warehouse, that is. Section Eighteen's the same size. And all I know is that it's in there. Unless I can find the driver who put it away, you're going to have to get some people to come toss the place.”

“Oh Maulk,” Bill said.

“Oh double maulk,” Bill repeated when they entered Section Eighteen. It was, if anything, more packed than the first warehouse. “I am so grapped. We are so grapped.”

“What is this stuff, really?” the supervisor asked. “I'm sorry it took me a while to figure out who you are. You're the guy who was on TV, right?”

“Yeah,” Bill said. “And if you can keep it to yourself, I'll tell you.”

“Lips are sealed,” the super said, taking a corner a tad fast.

“It's all the parts and tools the Hexosehr gave us along with the Blade
II,” Bill admitted. “The stuff you couldn't figure out? Well, if you did you'd think you were looking at magic. It was priced in the system as nearly junk value. To say that was an underestimate is the understatement of the year.”