Troy Rising 2 - Citadel (4 page)

“Some people have also asked why I have a voice like a fifty year smoker when I don't smoke. The answer, boys and girls, is that I tried to breathe vacuum. I am one of, at this point, four people who have been exposed to full death pressure and survived. I only survived because of quick action on the part of a co-worker, who was trained in this facility, a nearby airlock and good doctors, also trained here.”

"So you understand that I have a personal interest in ensuring that the training here at Melbourne remains top-notch. I may, hope to some day, go back to space. In that case, should I again be, God forbid, in the position of sucking on nothing, it may be up to one of you to save my life. God, again, forbid.

"This course is very very expensive. Were you to find another such school, the course would cost in excess of half a million dollars. There are still very few qualified instructors and we don't work cheap. It requires, of course, high-power lasers which are also not cheap. At least in breathable. That, for those who are wondering, is the slang for atmosphere with breathable air.

"There is, rarely, a second chance in space. Space is an absolutely unforgiving bitch. The Company only wants very good people in space. They want people who are going to make them money not cost them money by paying for medical and death benefits. Therefore, figure that about half of you are going to wash out. Some, most, will wash out in the first few weeks. Others, despite the pre-tests, will not be able to handle the conditions in space. Boost has gotten relatively cheap but it still costs money to move people around. There's also the cost of your suits and implants. Again, at least a half a million dollars for the course, another half a million for the equipment. We are going to do our level best to find the weak links and eliminate them on the ground before they become a danger to themselves and others in space.

“So be prepared to work harder than you ever have in your miserable lives.”

“Hey,” Butch said, hitching up his backpack and looking around his dorm room.

The dormitory building looked sort of like a three story hotel but he'd noticed it was different. There weren't any windows except on the ground floor. And it had looked bunched up.

The reason became obvious when he saw his room. It was about half the size of most bedrooms with a low ceiling and no windows. It had a set of bunk beds that had about half the normal head room. There weren't any lockers or anything, just a sort of box welded to the base of the bed. He was going to have a hard time fitting. For that matter, there wasn't much space in the room, period. He could barely get into the room for the bunks, the desk and the guy sitting at it. They had managed to squeeze in a little fridge, though.

“Hey,” the guy sitting at the desk said, not bothering to look up. He was hunched over a book, reading by the single light, and had papers scattered all over the desk.

“Uh, I think I'm your roommate,” Butch said.

“Frack,” the guy said, finally looking around. “I knew it was too good to last. Well, you get top bunk.”

“Okay,” Butch said, tossing his bag on the bunk. Part of the briefing before he got his tickets to Melbourne was that he was only supposed to carry one bag capable of being used as a carry-on for all his gear. “I'm Paul Allen. Call me Butch.”

“I'm Nathan Papke,” the guy said, spinning the chair around and standing up.

If Butch thought he was going to have a hard time fitting in the bed, Nathan must hate it. The guy was a ten foot string-bean with a shock of unruly black hair on top. Okay, maybe six-seven. Really fracking tall and just skinny as hell. “I'm mostly called Nate.”

“Kay,” Butch said. He'd been given the rest of the afternoon to “get acquainted with the area.” Courses started in the morning.

“What are you here for?” Nate asked, shaking his hand.

“Optical welding,” Butch said. “You?”

“I'm here for the robotics course,” Nate said. “It's not as much EVA and I'm pretty good with computers. I'm not an In the Black kinda guy.”

“How long've you been here?” Butch said, sitting on the lower bunk. He had to hunch forward cause the top bunk was shorter than he was sitting down.

“Two weeks,” Nate said. “And it's been a ball buster, let me tell you. All it's been is more psych tests and robotic theory. We haven't even seen a schematic of a bot yet, much less what we're going to be working on. And we've already lost about half the class.”

“Dang,” Nate said. “Why?”

“This,” Nate said, waving at the papers on his desk. “The academic portion is absolutely killer. I was a geek in high school and I'm having a hard time keeping up.”

“Oh,” Butch said, rethinking his decision to take the course.

“It's not as bad as all that,” Nate said, seeing the expression on his face. “All you got to do is keep your nose to the grindstone. And clean. We had two people get tossed out for popping on a piss test and one got a DUI. They don't want anybody that's got a substance abuse problem in space. Most of the rest quit cause of the academics.”

“There any papers we gotta write?” Butch asked.

“No,” Nate said. “Not so far. Most of the stuff is fill in the blank and short answer. No essays or anything. They just want to see you're learning the stuff not how well you can write.”

“Math?” Butch asked.

“Lots of math,” Nate said, nodding. “At least in my course. I don't know about yours.”

“I can do math,” Butch said. “What's there to do around here?”

“There's the beach,” Nate said, grinning. “Cocoa Beach is pretty nice and the view's pretty good if you get my drift.”

“Got it,” Butch said, grinning back.

“Lots of beaches,” Nate said. “Cocoa Beach is also the party spot. But unless you're a lot smarter than, sorry, you look, don't figure on doing a lot of partying. The homework is killer and they even load you down on the weekends.”

“That sucks,” Butch said, scratching behind his ear. “But if it's just math, I figure I can handle it.”

“Other than that, there's the mall,” Nate said, shrugging. “It's just up the road. Some pretty good restaurants if you've got the squeeze. But the food in the cafeteria is good so I've been saving my money.”

“Food's good?”

“Food's great,” Nathan said. “It's buffet style, but it's got stuff like Mongolian barbeque and crab legs. Big buffet. They feed us right. I guess so we don't keep going out for food and keep up with studying. From what the instructors who have been out say, it's pretty much the same if you're on a big installation like Troy. Not as good on the ships.”

“We work on the Troy?” Dutch said, confused. “I thought that was a defense station.”

“From what I hear, it's a work in progress,” Nathan said, grinning. “There are nearly as many Apollo employees on Troy as military. Then there's the Wolf stuff. Most of that is ship based, but there's room for about five hundred people on Granadica.”

“The fabber?” The Granadica fabber had been all over the news when it came through the Sol system on the way to Wolf. The mobile factory was the largest and most expensive piece of Glatun technology ever purchased and even though it was nearly a thousand years old, the most high tech. But he'd never heard that people could live on it.

“The fabber,” Nathan said, nodding. “There's a research and design team on it and guys who work on the space dock and gas mine Apollo's building. You got your afternoon to get your shit straight?”

“Yeah,” Dutch said.

“Go buy some pop and stuff,” Nate said, gesturing at the fridge. “You're going to want to have something in the room. There's times I don't want to take time to go to the vending machine. And speaking of which . . . I've got homework to do.”

Shit, Butch thought. High school never ends.

“What you're looking at is the Mark Four Grosson Optical Welder,” Mr. Methvin said, holding up what looked a lot like an oxy-acetylene welder head. “And you're all thinking ‘That thing ain't nothin' but a fancy OA rig.' And you're all wrong. If you keep thinkin' that you're gonna be dead wrong.”

The first time Butch saw his gay shop teacher in school he'd been bothered by the fact that Mr. Tews was missing about half the fingers on his left hand. But he'd learned that was pretty much where you got shop teachers. If they weren't missing bits, they'd still be working in the field not teaching shop.

Mr. Methvin had run into the same press or welding rig or jack or whatever that every other shop teacher ran into at one point or another. Except it had taken off half his left hand and he had some sort of funny stubs on that hand for fingers. They looked a hell of a lot like toes.

“Tell you one thing's different right off,” Mr. Methvin continued. “You, Allen, what's the maximum distance of an efficient flame on an oxy torch?”

The course had started with fifty-three guys and two chicks. After the first three weeks, it was a six week course, they were down to thirty-seven guys and both chicks. And it was just getting harder.

Hand laser welding was done almost exclusively in space. There was a good bit of it in robotics on earth but most of it was in space. So a good bit of the eight hour a day course was about how to work in space. Which, it turned out, meant a good bit of math and a lot of attention to detail.

Then there was the lasers themselves. Optics was a whole branch of physics, one that Butch's high school teacher had barely touched on.

The course was a lot of skull sweat. But fortunately it was the sort of skull sweat that Butch was good at. He'd stuck with it. He'd avoided going to the titty bars pick-up joints along the Cocoa Strip to do homework. He'd read optical laser manuals until his eyes bled. He'd worked harder than he ever had in school. There were two big reasons. The first was that he really didn't want to join the Navy. The second was that he just didn't want to tell Papa Allen that he'd failed.

There were some little reasons, too. The training he was getting worked just about as well on the robots being used in every part of industry. When he was done with his five year hitch with Apollo, he could just about set his salary. Laser robotic technicians, which was a short course in robotics from what he was learning, earned over a hundred grand a year groundside. More in space.

That was the other part. He was currently being paid twelve bucks an hour and the course had dormitories for “probationary” technician trainees. When he passed the course that jumped to eighteen buck an hour which wasn't chump change.

The rate for space work was time and a half when you were in atmosphere and double time in EVA. Overtime was time and a half up to forty-eight and double time after that. If he was working EVA on overtime over forty-eight hours, he'd be making seventy-two bucks an hour. As a probationary tech. And there was a bump in pay each year he stayed rated during his first hitch.

Rate for full tech, base, was twenty-four bucks an hour. A fully qualified technician made nearly a hundred bucks an hour on OT in EVA, and the provided room and board so you weren't even out that.

Butch wasn't planning on getting hooked to a wagon any time soon, but like most guys he figured he'd get married someday. Even if his wife had full blown Johannsen's, he'd have an easier time supporting a family on a hundred bucks an hour than his dad did working in the mill.

Then, hell, it was space. Butch had enjoyed the astronomy portion of his physics classes and he'd even gotten into reading science fiction, partially because all the geeks in the class read it and he couldn't get most of their jokes without some basis. There were hardly any new books out but the old guys were still pretty popular. He'd gotten hooked on the vision of space as the next frontier. He wasn't old enough to remember Grandpa Allen, who had been a kid when his parents moved to the Missouri frontier. But he'd heard the stories. There might not be red Indians, but there were Horvath and Glatun and more and more star systems getting opened up all the time. Truth was, space was the place.

And this question was dead easy for once.

“Depending on the system,” Butch said, “inch and a half to two and a half inches, Mr. Methvin.”

“Right,” Mr. Methvin said, walking over to a sheet of steel he had propped up. Butch noted that there was another, much thicker, piece of steel behind it. “Behold,” Mr. Methvin said, holding the Optical Welder about a yard away from the plate. He fiddled with the controls for a second then held it out. “Goggles.”

Even with the goggles, Butch could see the beam from the optical welder. And it cut through the steel faster than any oxy rig he'd ever used.

“Whoa,” one of the guys in the class said.

“A Mark Four has a maximum range of about six meters,” Mr. Methvin said, cutting off the beam. “Which is just a stupid design. There's a way to set the beam for any length you want, from either a tiny little beam that's not much thicker than a hair to one thick as a finger and six meters long. Which you monkeys are probably going to cut each other up with once you get in space. But I don't get to tell the people that design these things they're idiots. So I'm telling you. They're idiots. You're idiots. And if you ever use a long beam on one of these things, you're probably gonna kill some other idiot . . .”

“Welcome to your final exam,” Mr. Monaghan said. He'd been Butch's instructor for “theory and practice of space movement” and he'd been an absolute bastard. Now he was the “faculty advisor” for the “extreme confinement environment test.”

They'd been warned that the test wasn't just “can you handle an extreme environment?” It was “can you handle an extreme environment under enormous stress?” Stress wasn't just cumulative, it was multiplicative. General stress, is everything okay at home, got multiplied by other stress, am I going to make my car payment, got multiplied by other stress, is my air working, until just about anyone had a break point.

The ECET wasn't designed to find that break point. Everyone has a break point and if you hit it what you have afterwards is what's called PTSD and generally you were busted for space work. It was designed to find people whose break point was too low.

Nate had flunked out on the ECET. The ECET was the last major test before you went to the “space environment” portion of the training, going out in the Black. Because they weren't going to spend the money on boosting and planting you if you couldn't pass the ECET.