Poor Man's Fight (35 page)

“Thing is, while he was making that summons, we scanned over a few more of the bodies and started seeing kids among them, and the captain kind of freaked. I mean he’s
got a wife and a little boy, right? So on the one hand, yeah, he screwed up, but on the other hand…” Freeman shrugged. “Well, it was a bad scene. Guy’s only human. So he said, right there on the open channel, that there were kids in the void and we needed help right away.”

“You’re not supposed to say things like that?”

“No. No, it’s in the manual under distress calls. There are reasons. Ultimately, it made the captain look panicky. He created a… what was it they said? He ‘created an unduly emotional atmosphere of crisis’ and made us look ‘less than professional.’ Got reamed for it by command pretty good. Base CO on Augustine called him in and read him the riot act.

“Biggest part, though, was that
Admiral Yeoh came through on an inspection thing or something, and I guess she bitched about how this came out in a press conference. Wanted to know why the president’s press secretary asked her about it. Said it was an embarrassment to the service. Skipper’s a religious conservative, so he doesn’t really care for this president or his people to begin with. He kind of fixated on how unfair it was to catch flak for some politician’s questions.”

“And we’ve been in the doghouse ever since,” Heifer put in.

Freeman nodded. “Yup. We’re the hardest working ship in the fleet now. Command gives us every shit detail and extra patrol they can cough up, and the captain salutes and says ‘yes, sir,’ and does everything he can to make up for his goof. We’ve spent fifty percent more time underway over the last seven months than the next-busiest corvette in the fleet.”

“
We do all kinds of bullshit no other ship’s crew does just so the skipper can impress command, too,” Heifer concurred. “Wait ‘til we’re doin’ PT out on the flight line under the ship. Or uniform inspections. And we spend a lot of time just cleaning the exterior of the ship. Hell, most of the time we scrub it down before we get to the atmosphere, and then again once we land. Seriously, we scrub the fucking hull while in space. That’s our job, being deck crew,” he added.

“All that for saying the wrong thing on an aid summons?” Tanner asked.

“All that for it getting into the media,” Freeman said. “Shit rolls downhill. We’re at the bottom. I won’t say that’s the only reason the skipper’s in the doghouse with command, but it’s the reason they harp on now. Listen, you want help, you get yourself qualified fast and you make sure you look sharp back at base.”

The bridge fell silent. Tanner looked from Freeman to Heifer and back again as the two lounged in their seats. “So you guys
will be training me a lot from here out, right?” he ventured.

“Gonna have to push yourself,” Freeman answered as he folded his arms behind his head. “A lot of times it’s too busy around here to
hold anyone’s hand, and when it’s not, we’re all pretty tired.”

Neither of the two crewmembers on the bridge with
Tanner saw his jaw drop. Each man looked to his own matters—not that those matters were ship’s business. Even now, Tanner was reluctant to criticize, but his department head had just said in a single breath that it was vital that Tanner trained up and that he was too tired to train him.

Tanner
stared the ops table. He already knew much of this by the book. He needed to learn what
wasn’t
in the standard manual, how this particular ship’s captain and crew wanted those things applied… and no one learned that alone and overnight.

Taking a deep breath, Tanner opened up the ship’s “book” on his holocom and began to page through its contents. He wasn’t listed in the stations bill yet. That
seemed understandable, except his orders had come through over a month ago. They’d had time to make changes. He looked at the names and ranks listed for battle stations, damage control, abandon ship…  and consistently found the name of a crewman he’d yet to meet.

“Who is Crewman Herrera?”

“He’s the guy you’re here to replace,” Heifer answered.

“Big shoes to fill there,” Freeman added.

Tanner looked over the various station bills. “So I’m on DC Team Two for damage control?” he asked. “And I’m on the port laser turret?”

“Yeah,” Freeman said, still not looking back. “We’ll get you trained up on that eventually.”

Tanner’s eyes bugged out of his head. Eventually? Freeman was just talking about pirate attacks in this very corner of the system, and they’d get around to training him on the ship’s guns
eventually?
Not starting maybe, oh,
tomorrow?
He didn’t know whether to be worried or angry.

Tanner
looked up at the projection of the ship’s “bubble” a heartbeat before a new contact came into view. He read it aloud just as the soft notification tone sounded, going by the book just as he’d been taught. “Contact, three-three-four by three-one-one, just out of FTL at three point six light minutes. Size rating ‘massive.’ Contact’s bearing is—“

“Woah, woah, waitaminute,” Freeman interrupted, climbing out of his chair. “You don’t need to give me all that. This isn’t a cruiser.”

“I’m sorry, Ben,” Tanner said with deftly feigned innocence. “How are we supposed to relay contacts on this ship? Could you show me?”

Nine
: Good Enough for Government Work

“Two degrees starboard.”

“Two degrees starboard, aye aye, sir. Mark.” Tanner kept his eyes on the screens embedded in the helm control panel. He glanced frequently at the belly of the long, sprawling hull of the vast and somewhat battered cruise liner below
St. Jude.
For all the computerized aid, manning the helm still required the naked eye and an instinctive sense of distance. All the manuals said so.

The manuals
couldn’t teach everything, though. Three months on board and he still wasn’t qualified as a helmsman. He had mastered everything about the post—though no one cared to acknowledge it—except its actual namesake.

Tanner put it out of his head and listened for the captain’s commands.

“We’re horizontally aligned now,” the captain said. Stevens sat in the port side chair little more than arm’s reach away. The captain seemed completely calm. His voice was firm. He wouldn’t blow up at Tanner, but he didn’t seem thrilled, either.

“Three meters forward,” Stevens said.

Tanner swallowed. “Three meters, aye aye, sir.” Normally, such commands were keyed or spoken into the computer. Maneuvers this fine weren’t ordinarily left to manual control. They were, however, part of the many tasks that Tanner needed signed off on his qualification sheet. Half his skill requirements on helm control remained unsigned; he couldn’t finish those, many of which were much easier, until he executed this one.

Three meters. One for every time he’d screwed up this test. One for every dent he’d put in the ship. At least, the dents he’d put in while at the helm.

In his defense, they weren’t big dents.
St. Jude
was a warship. She wasn’t exactly made of paper. But a dent was a dent, and each one provided silent testimony to someone screwing up.

Tanner kept his grip on the yoke light, just as he’d been taught, and gave the acceleration grip on in his right hand the gentlest twist he could. It was hardly even a twist, really. He just tightened the grip.

St. Jude
crept forward ever so slightly along the bottom of the liner.

“Easy. Brake.”

There weren’t brakes as such on spaceships.
St. Jude
had a button on the left hand control that fired maneuvering jets to counter minor forward movement. Luckily, computers handled that; Tanner didn’t want to think about how tricky it would be to stop the ship manually. Tanner pressed the button and let it go, rather than leaving his thumb on it like he had on his second test.
St. Jude
came to a stop relative to the liner.

He waited for another command, or a criticism, or something. The captain didn’t speak. Nor did Freeman, Reed, or even the XO. The bridge was crowded. Technically, Morales and
Stumpy had the watch, but they stood out on the hull. Tanner was on watch now, too. After his second failed test at the helm, Freeman directed Tanner to stand every other watch, rather than one watch out of three, in order to get more practice and more motivation.

He’d been
plenty motivated all along. He learned every other aspect of watchstanding quickly. He could astrogate. He could run comms. He did both all the time. Helm vexed him, though, and the extra watches hardly brought more practice time.

Freeman claimed it wasn’t a punishment. Tanner was pretty sure that Freeman almost believed that. At least, he was pretty sure that Freeman almost believed it had a point
besides
punishment.

“Okay,” the captain said, “pull us away and do it again. You’re on your own.”

Again, Tanner gulped. “Aye aye, sir,” he managed, bringing
St. Jude
further away from its targeted airlock-to-airlock link-up with the
Aurora
.

St. Jude
didn’t go far. That wasn’t the point. Tanner only had to move the ship far enough away to wipe out the advantages of earlier expert guidance. He halted the corvette relative to
Aurora’s
motion, then took a deep breath and said over the comm channel shared with
Aurora’s
bridge, “Beginning link-up approach.”

“Confirmed,
St. Jude
,” said the liner’s comm officer, whose voice carried far more good-natured patience than anyone on Tanner’s crew.

“Okay, guys, keep your heads down now,” Freeman warned over the ship’s private channel.

Tanner tried to ignore the quip. Freeman’s teasing didn’t help. Ultimately, though, it didn’t matter what Freeman said or thought here. It mattered if Tanner could slide his ship into place over
Aurora’s
airlock, which he did. It mattered if he could close the distance smoothly, which he did. It mattered if he could align the ship properly for link-up, which, after a couple of very minor adjustments, he did. And it mattered if he could connect gently…

…which, in this case, resulted in a ship-shaking “thunk” as
St. Jude
connected with the extended airlock passageway of the
Aurora
.

Tanner
stared at his control panel. The instruments said he was fine. The video screens said he was fine. “Deckhands,” he all but croaked, “check connection. Do we have a good link-up?”

The voice on
Aurora’s
end said he was fine. His ship’s crew, given voice by Stumpy, said only, “Yup. You’re a fuck-up.”

Tanner winced.

“What’s wrong?” the captain asked, open annoyance coloring his tone.

“We’ve got some scratches, sir,”
Stumpy said. “’nother little dent here.”

“We have a good seal, sir,” corrected Morales. “It could’ve been cleaner. There are some cosmetic scuffs.”

Stevens leaned in over Tanner’s screens, as if his own weren’t good enough, and then leaned back. “Are you satisfied, BM1?”

“Yes, sir,” Freeman nodded.

“Very well. Morales, Stumpy, come on back in and suit up for boarding.” The captain sat back in his chair, tossing a look at the other men on the bridge.

“Hey, Tanner,” Freeman spoke up, “head down below to the cargo bay and make sure
everything’s set for the boarding team.”

Tanner accepted the obvious busywork. Everything was already set up after their first boarding that day, but it got him off the bridge
. “On my way,” Tanner said.

Outside the bridge
, Tanner keyed the audio on the helmet slung over his shoulder. Experience had taught him how sloppy the crew could be with turning comm channels on and off. Today was no different.

“…got to be the worst hand on the helm I’ve ever seen,” he heard the captain say.

“I dunno, sir,” Reed mumbled, “could be worse. Some people can’t do it at all.”

“He
got the job done, sir,” the XO pointed out.

“With more dents in my ship.”

“Oh, I bet Stumpy’s exaggerating, sir,” Freeman said, “and anyway, we’ll clean it up.”

“We can’t even fix the other dents. We’re lucky they don’t show too badly, but up close?” The captain shook his head. Tanner didn’t need to see it to know.

“Sir…” Freeman ventured, clearly trying to keep well short of arguing with his CO, “he may be barely passing, but he did pass. Chances are he’ll never have to do manual fine maneuver again. He can take off, he can land—“

“I’m surprised nobody lost a tooth last time he landed us,” the captain snorted.

“—and he sucks at it, and we know that, and he knows it, sir. He’s spent four hours on the simulator program every time he’s been on watch in port, sir, and he comes in to practice on his own time, too. He qualified for in-port watch on time.”

“I
’m surprised you’re sticking up for him. I thought you guys didn’t like Malone?” broke in the captain. Tanner froze. It was one thing to know it through implication, another to hear it outright. “I know Morales doesn’t.”