Troy Rising 2 - Citadel (8 page)

“Sounds like it,” Price said.

“If I transfer Allen, he's going to have to reestablish himself with a crew and the rate of second term failure on probationary transfers is so high he's unlikely to make the cut,” Purcell said. “But Gursy's the type who is going to figure out who did it eventually and up the ante. Which means he'll probably do something that's critically unsafe. I know the type of old. On the other hand, he's already had not one but two transfers. Which means if I request a transfer for incompatibility, he's going to get grounded.”

“And then he owes Apollo for the rest of his life,” Price said. “I'm not shedding any tears.”

“And, again, the rate of repayment of the loans is actually miniscule,” Purcell said, sighing. “Think about this, though. In this particular instance, Gursy is the one who was the victim. So I'm penalizing the victim.”

“That's a really backward way of looking at it,” Price said, his brow furrowing.

“I'm sure that will be Mr. Gursy's argument, or his lawyer's, in the lawsuit,” Purcell said, smiling thinly. “But the truth is, I doubt that Mr. Vernon wants people like Gursy in his company and I think he'd probably take to Allen. Even though it is in the best short-term interest of the company to retain Gursy, it is in the best long-term interest, with some risk, to retain Allen.”

“So get rid of Gursy and keep Allen?” Price said.

“Since I work for Apollo, yes,” Purcell said. “That is in keeping with the overall mission and philosophy. If I was still with Shell or BAE, Allen would be transferred so fast he wouldn't have time to pack. And don't let the door hit you in the ass. As it is, that's what I'm going to have to do with Gursy.”

“Drac, I need a quick word with Butch,” Price said, sliding into the probie quarters.

“You want me to . . . ?” Vlad said, confused.

“Go get a coke or something,” Price said. “This won't take long.”

When Vlad was out of the room, Price picked the newbie up by his collar and slammed him against the bulkhead.

“You ever try to pin something like that on me again, I will violate rule Niner-Delta in a way nobody will ever trace and you will be sucking vacuum for the rest of your very short life.”

“Yes, Mr. Price,” Butch gasped. The team lead was a mountain. Struggling was pointless.

“That being said,” Price said, lowering him to the deck, “and an understanding being reached, it was a very slick job. Not quite slick enough, but pretty slick. You also just barely missed being transferred.”

“Yes, Mr. Price,” Butch said. He knew better than to say “Sorry.” It was the worst possible thing to say. You took your chances and you took your lumps if you got caught.

“Gursy is getting transferred,” Price said.

“Mr. Price?”

“It was Purcell's call, not mine,” Price said. “He's already gone. There's going to be some grumbling but not much. Nobody really liked the asshole. But you'd better keep your nose clean as snow for the rest of your probation. I'll tell the crew it's time to back off. They won't quit, mind you. But they'll back off. Just keep learning your job and keep your nose clean.”

“Yes, Mr. Price,” Butch said.

“You may call me BFM.”

“You're not bad for a FUN,” Jablonski said, watching as Dana carefully went through the port gravitics relay checklist.

Despite their relatively small size, the Myrmidons were enormously complex. The main power was supplied by a twelve terawatt matter-energy converter located directly behind the engineer station. That drove a repulsor drive capable of pulling four hundred gravities of delta v. Pulling that much acceleration would turn a human to paste, though, so the craft had to have an Inertial Stabilization System, ISS that kept the internal gravity more or less normal. More or less because beyond one hundred gravities of acceleration the system started to fall behind. At full drive, the internals—crew and cargo—were subjected to three gravities of acceleration.

In addition to the drive and ISS, there were four magnetic grapnels capable of localized gradients of over nine hundred gravities. They were designed primarily to lock onto a ship for boarding but from what Dana had heard they were mostly used as ersatz tug systems. The Myrmidons could only “reverse” at sixty gravities so they were better for pushing than pulling. But they got stuff moved in space eventually.

Since you had to get in and out of the boat somehow, there was a forward ramp and airlock system as well as an emergency hatch in the flight compartment. The ramp was for terrestrial landings which very few of the coxswains on the Troy had ever done. For Dana it was just another damned thing to check. Not to mention the “useless as tits on a boar hog” as AJ had pointed out, landing jacks.

Then there was the airlock. Airlocks for more or less Terran sized sophonts, which included Glatun and Horvath, were fairly standardized across the local arm. The airlock was essentially two hatches with a space a bit shorter than the width of the Myrm between. A squad of Marines could stack up in the space to do an entry.

The hatches were fairly conventional steel with a high-tech sealant and fairly normal wheel-latches. They had to be authorized for opening from the engineer of the boat and checked for closure. The detectors were futzy as hell. And you wanted to make sure the hatches were sealed before you went into the Black. Most of the time, if there was time, the engineer would get out of the flight compartment and do a manual check. Especially if Marines were the ones doing the closure.

Searchlights, shields, double four-terawatt lasers for close-air support, which took up most of the powerplant's output when used, avionics, more super-conductor relays than a terrestrial power-plant, the boat's engineer had to know all of it well enough to, at least, detect faults and report them for repair. In general, with the lack of higher support due to the way the Navy was growing and the lack of bay space on the Troy, most repairs took place in the bay with ENs, Engineer's First Class, and EMs, petty officer Engineering Mates, sweating and cursing in suits.

To make full rate, an engineer apprentice was required to demonstrate that he or, in Dana's case she, could just locate and analyze faults, not repair them. In a suit, in microgravity, in vacuum, in the dark.

And they had to meet minimum standard capability as coxswains in case the cox was disabled during an “evolution.”

“Checks completed, EN,” Dana said, straightening up and trying to keep from rubbing her back. Checking the gravitics mostly meant bending over for hours. The one good thing about Jablonski was that he barely seemed to notice her as a girl. “No faults detected.”

“Check completed, aye,” Jablonski said, making a notation on his pad. “No faults detected, aye. Good check.”

“Good check, aye,” Dana said.

“Break it down,” AJ said. “We have mandatory flight fun time this afternoon.”

“Flight fun time” translated as physical training. There was a basketball court and a gym. Dana spent most of her work-out time in the gym since there wasn't a good gymnastics set up.

She'd been a cheerleader in high school but mostly she'd been into the gymnastics. If she hadn't “blossomed” a bit young she might have made the pros. It was one of the reasons she was ahead of the curve for training in microgravity. With enough time on parallel bars, micro wasn't a really big issue. She still wasn't good in micro, but she could manage simple tasks.

“Break it down, aye,” Dana said, gathering up the tools and carefully stowing them away. The stow point for the boat's tools was to the starboard side of the flight compartment, just to the side and aft of the engineer's station. Over the compartment was a post-production welded on set of clamps with a crowbar installed. The second day she'd been working on the boat, AJ had come in with the crowbar, the clamps and a laser welding set and grimly welded the crowbar into place. He hadn't said anything about why but it wasn't until the crowbar was in place that Twenty-Nine was listed as flight-certified.

She'd wondered about the crowbar—it wasn't part of the standard tool-set and it seemed to hold some particular significance—but she hadn't asked. There were no stupid questions, but she had learned that there were answers you only got at a certain point in your training. She suspected the Significance of the Crowbar was one of them. She'd figured out some of the meanings. “Going crow” on a boat, or a person, meant beating the hell out of a part, or a person. But there seemed to be more. One time when one Bruce's boat had had a mid-space malfunction he had mentioned it “looked like crowbar time.” And EM Hartwell had been pretty grim. There was some significance to the Crowbar.

She'd find out when it was time.

“We have a special event for you today, boys and girls.”

Chief Petty Officer John Wagner looked like a recruiting poster. Tall, blonde and mustachioed he simply reaked of being God's gift to women. His good point was that he wasn't an ass about it and had never so much as hinted to Deb. On the other hand, he seemed to positively enjoy passing on the worst possible news to the Flight. So the fact that he'd fallen out for “flight fun time” meant that they were probably not going to like the result.

“With the activation of C-West, there are four new grav ball courts open,” the Chief said, grinning broadly.

There was a collective groan from the assembled flight.

“So it's helmet and pads time,” the Chief finished, grinning ear to ear. “Fall out for MWR draw.”

“What's wrong with grav ball?” Dana asked. She was actually pretty excited. She'd heard about the sport but the only people who seemed to play it were the Marines. And she'd been pointedly warned about playing them.

“Where to start?” Bruce said, receiving a set of knee and elbow pads and a helmet from the MWR civilian manning the desk. “You know the rules?”

“Sort of like hockey,” Dana said, accepting her own pads. “Five person teams. One goalie, two forwards, two defense. Two goals. Once you catch the ball you can't push off from the walls, you have to pass. Okay, hockey and ultimate Frisbee. You can bounce the ball off of any wall. Move it down the court to get it in the enemy goal.”

“Ever really thought about it?” Bruce asked. “The walls have padding. Some. You've got to be able to bounce the ball so it's not real thick. Then there's the viewing wall made out of optical sapphire which is, let me tell you, very, very hard stuff. Note the pads and helmet. The first Marine unit to play it had about ten percent injuries that required doctor's input. Of course, they have since created jungle-ball which you don't want to play.”

“What's jungleball,” Dana asked as they reached the null grav court.

“Null grav actually has about a hundred thousand rules,” Bruce said. “Most of them related to no hitting, biting, scratching or kicking the other guy in the balls. The Marines wear a cup. It's like Aussie Rules football. The first rule of jungleball is ‘No weapons.' There's seven more.”

“Oh,” Dana said.

They'd reached the court and Dana started to get a feel for why Bruce wasn't exactly looking forward to null-grav ball.

The viewing wall fronted on the corridor and was a three story tall wall of optical sapphire. The door was even sapphire with a small, recessed, latch. The other five walls were lightly padded. One end of the court was broadly marked in blue, the other red. The overall court looked like an extended version of a handball court.

The goals were recessed nets about two meters wide surrounded by six recessed hand-holds. Dana recalled that the only person who was allowed to retain traction, hold on to the grips, was the goalie.

The court was apparently still under gravity since First division's engineering personnel were just filing in. The engineering crew, a couple of administrative seamen including Sarin and CM1 Glass. He was tossing a soccer ball up and down in his hand and looking positively happy.

“Since I'm not neutral in this group, I'm going to be refereeing not playing. Bigus and Carter, you're team captains. Divvie them up.”

Dana ended up on Carter's team but got cut from the first string along with Sarin. All the SAs and EAs got cut and pulled out of the court to watch.

“This is going to be insane,” Sarin said. “Carter was bitching up a storm.”

“It looks like it should be fun,” Dana said.

The two team captains faced towards their own goals with Glass in the center, holding the ball.

“And . . . grav off,” Glass said, releasing the ball. “Game on.”

Bigus, the EM3 of shuttle Thirty-Two, managed to hit the ball first sending it towards the blue team that was starting to float up, slowly. Carter had taken a swing and floated off in a random direction.

The ball missed the blue team entirely, caromed off two walls and headed down court towards Red. Which pushed off from the floor and all missed intercepting the ball. Which, fortunately, was slowing due to air-resistance. Bruce managed to get a hand on it and passed it to Bigus. Which sent Bruce spinning off into the sapphire wall, cracking his head hard enough to ring the aluminum alloy.

In no time at all it was a maelstrom. Despite the jerseys, Dana couldn't keep up with what was happening and she was pretty sure neither could anyone on the teams. People were more or less randomly ramming into walls. She saw Bigus drive for the goal at one point—he'd managed to snag the ball in mid-air while headed in more or less the direction of the goal—and nearly make it. Problem being it was his own goal. He corrected at the last minute and tried a pass to Bruce but that was intercepted by a Red team SN Dana didn't know who made the goal.

“Dead ball,” Glass called. The ball had stopped in mid-court and so were all the team members. He'd managed to take up a position near the top of the court and more or less hang there by making very light motions. He pushed off lightly and plucked the ball out of the middle of the court.

“Moose for Danno,” Bigus called. He was sort of upside-down and drifting slowly in the direction of the blue goal but so far away from the walls he might never make it.

“How am I going to get out?” Bruce called. He was hanging more or less motionless on the red side but, again, nowhere near the walls.