Poor Man's Fight (12 page)

“A yeoman was a farmer in medieval Europe, Chief Everett.”

The older man laughed. “Jesus, you are a bookworm. Malone, in the navy, a yeoman is a clerical sp
ecialist. Like a secretary. Oscar Company needs a yeoman. There’s a lot of paperwork that goes with recruit training. A lot of that’s gonna be your job. Sergeant Janeka and I will assign tasks as necessary. Ordinarily a yeoman has a desk of his own, but I’ve found that separating the yeoman out from the company to do his work just makes him look like he gets some sort of privileges. I figure just giving you a holocom and having you do your work in the squad bay might leave you better off.”

“Thank you, Chief
Everett.”

“Don’t thank me, recruit. I’m not doing you any favors. I need this job filled and you look like the most qualified, but I could be wrong about that. You still have to keep up with the rest of your training just like everyone else
. If you fuck up, you’re fired. Understand?”

“Yes, Chief
Everett.”

“Here it is,” the Chief said, holding out the holocom. This model was a small silver rod that could easily fit in a pocket. Tanner accepted it and resumed the position of attention. “Keep it with you at all times. Come up with your own password—I recommend doing the retinal scan—and take care of that thing, because it’s your ass if you lose it. Any questions?”

“No, Chief—yes. I mean, yes, Chief Everett. Why did you ask me if I’m an honest man? Wouldn’t you expect that of everyone?”

“Recruit, I just gave you access to the records of every recruit in the company. You’re going to track everything from disciplinary infractions to testing scores to payroll. That’s a lot to check up on. A lot for Sergeant Janeka and I to double-check.

“You can mug a man or pick his pocket and anyone would call you a thief, but there are a million ways to cheat a man on paper and just call it a clerical error.”

Tanner nodded. “Understood, Chief
Everett.”

The chief looked at him for a long moment. Tanner remained at attention, thinking this was some sort of test to see if he could just hold a straight face or keep from speaking until he was spoken to.
It seemed like an eternity.

“Eight books and the recruit manual, huh?”

“Yes, Chief Everett.”

“So you probably already know all about what we’re doing here, right? I expect these weren’t children’s books.”

“I wouldn’t presume I know everything just because I’ve read a lot, Chief.” He remained at attention, unsure as to how casual his voice should be. “Most of it might have been thrown out the window already anyway, given what you’ve said and where we’re setting up living quarters.”

Everett
grunted. “Good. Now tell Recruit Baljashanpreet to get in here. I’m not done assigning section leaders.”

Tanner awoke with the sensation of falling,
interrupted by a pair of painful crashes. His thin mattress offered no significant protection from the impact of the concrete floor beneath him. There was even less protection from the weight of Gomez, his thin mattress, and the framework holding it all in place as it crashed down on top of him.

His head felt like it had imploded, to say nothing of the not-exactly-cushioned elbow that drove into his side upon impact. Tanner all but panicked. He didn’t know what could be happening, only that he awoke hurt and confused. He wasn’t even sure where he was in those first few moments; he thought of home, and his family, and possibly an earthquake or perhaps a vehicle hitting his building.

“Up!” someone snarled over the clatter, the groans and the protests. “Get up! Get on your feet, recruits!”

Scrambling out from under
the bedding, Tanner jabbed his knee in the metal framework of his rack, inadvertently shoved a neighbor to the floor and found himself immediately disoriented in the darkness. He was in the squad bay. He remembered that much. Moreover, he recognized the voice of Gunnery Sergeant Janeka instantly. It seemed her every word foretold some painful punishment, yet the penalty for sluggish obedience was doubtlessly worse.

His head started to clear. There was a flow to the wreckage; the line of collapsed bunks stretched from his end of the squad bay into the shadows beyond, where further crashes still pierced his ears. Tanner realized then what was happening. The furnishings were designed to be easily compacted for storage. All Janeka had to do was pull on a single safety rod
and turn a small lever to collapse a bunk.

“Line up!” Janeka barked. “Line up in front of your bunks! Line up at attention and sound off!”

They assembled as instructed beside their wrecked bunks and sounded off by number. They failed to synch up with one another immediately, leading to the first of the morning’s calisthenics.

“The sound you will hear before you awaken for the foreseeable future is this one,” Janeka announced sharply. A sudden alarm rang through the squad bay in a rapid, piercing tone. “That is the sound of an impending impact upon a ship. It’s the sound you’ll hear right before a collision. You will learn to brace for it, night or day, awake or asleep. You will get used to it. You will learn to wake up fast. And when you’re asleep in your bunks on your ship and something hits you, you’ll react appropriately, saving yourselves from injury, panic and death.”

Sergeant Janeka stalked the rows of recruits with an almost palpable aura of irritation. “You’re welcome,” she added.

“Thank you, Gunnery Sergeant Janeka!” the company bellowed in unison.

“Yesterday we had to learn to do as we were told and how to tell our left from our right,” she said, “which took two hours that ate up chow time and, apparently, didn’t quite get through to everyone. But I can tell that today we’re going to have to learn to count, too.”

She found a spot at the center of the assembled recruits and got even louder. She had amazing control for someone speaking at such a v
olume. “Does anyone know what ‘Oscar’ means in naval parlance?”

Silence. She sighed. “Does anyone know what ‘parlance’ means?”

“Parlance is a particular manner of speaking, Sergeant Janeka!” Tanner called out.

“I did not ask what it meant! I asked if anyone knew what it meant! Fifty push-ups, Recruit Malone, right now!” As he dropped, she looked around the squad bay
for signs of amusement. “Einstein! You, too! Drop!” The recruit grunted in frustration, but he obeyed.

Janeka continued. “Oscar is the letter ‘o’ in the military alphabet, and has been so for centuries. Way back in ancient history, sailors on ships used color-coded flags
to signal messages to other ships. Each letter had a distinctive flag. Each flag also had a specific meaning apart from that letter. The ‘Oscar’ flag meant ‘man overboard,’ meaning someone had fallen into the water and was in danger of drowning.

“If you fall off of a ship at sea, you may be able to tread water for a time, or maybe hold onto something that floats. If you are lucky, you may be in water warm enough that you won’t just die of hypothermia regardless of your ability to stay afloat.
You may survive a few hours.

“You have not signed on for a seagoing navy. The Archangel navy works in space, boys and girls. They may not have explained this to you before you got onto the wrong shuttle on your way to retard summer camp.

“A human exposed to the vacuum of space will survive unprotected for roughly thirty seconds if he is exceptionally lucky. A human in a vacuum suit can survive for upwards of a few hours if his suit functions properly and if he has an oxygen tank. But if you are wearing a vacuum suit and you are accidentally dumped from your ship, the chances that your suit has also taken some damage are high.

“Thus, we still have drills for ‘man overboard,’ even in space, and they must be carried out with all possible speed,” she said, stressing the point. “
That
shipmate
out there does not have long to live without your immediate aid.”

She paused until both Tanner and Einstein completed their push-ups. “Recover,” she said. They both resumed the position of attention. Janeka pressed home her point: “You people move awfully slow for a company with a name like Oscar. This is intolerable. You will all learn to move with deliberate haste and accuracy. You will run
faster and more often than any other company. You will learn to jump out of those bunks or out of your chairs like someone’s life is at stake
whenever
you are called. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Sergeant Janeka!” came the responding chorus.

“Morning chow is in fifteen minutes and the galley is clear on the other side of the base from here, so we’ve got a jog ahead of us. I will recommend only once that you avoid any sort of stimulants like caffeine. Learn to cope without them, ladies and gentlemen.

“Also, Recruit Gomez, don’t forget: you do not sit down at a table to eat. Fall out onto the street, people.”

Darren
expected more screaming, or crying, or some pleas for mercy. He figured they’d beg to be spared or something. That’s how it always went in the movies. Instead, the passengers mostly remained silent as they were shaken down one by one by his new shipmates for jewelry, pricy personal effects and cash. He imagined hours of wild, opportunistic looting, but everything was put into a single hoard to be shared out in an orderly manner later.

Darren
also hoped to be given a gun right away, but in hindsight, that was perhaps a bit naive. All he’d done was step over the make-believe line in the carpet when Casey called for recruits from
Aphrodite
’s crew. It wasn’t like he’d earned his wings yet. Or his pirate eye patch. Or whatever pirates used to separate men from boys.

He helped with crowd control in the passageway, preventing anyone from running off and generally keeping an eye out. Beside him stood Marcos, one of the passenger attendants. Darren really didn’t know anything about him other than the name on his uniform. Machinist’s mates didn’t often associate with attendants.

Marcos seemed to enjoy all the manhandling and slapping people around. It probably came from years of having to kiss ass to these people. Darren did as he was asked, but Marcos clearly got a kick out of this. Then, almost abruptly, he stopped spewing insults. He went quiet, and just pushed passengers along like Darren did.

“Marcos? You okay?”

Marcos nodded, not looking up.

“Is something in your mouth?” Darren asked.

Things changed. There weren’t any more passengers, just Marcos being held down while two pirates roughly searched him. Darren had blood on his hands. It was from Marcos’s mouth, which bled while Darren held him down.

“A necklace,” yelled Murray, an angry pirate with long red hair and a scar running halfway down the left side of his face. “You stupid fuck, this was all over a fucking diamond necklace.”

Marcos coughed out an apology, or maybe a plea. Darren couldn’t make it out, because the guy’s teeth were ruined. He kept trying to speak as Murray, Yuan and Darren all pushed Marcos into an engineering access airlock. Marcos stumbled to the floor as he was pushed in, and then Murray—no, Darren—reached up, hit the controls and sealed the internal hatch.

Then Marcos pounded on the hatch, and screamed, and sounded just like the door chime in one of the passenger suites.

“We don’t want anyone sneaking up here and trying to take the ship while most of the crew is down dirtside living it up,” Casey explained. “The crew has a serious decision to make about this ship. We’re looking at five or six hundred million for it if we decide to sell, but we can’t hold a vote on that while everyone’s stir crazy from the cruise. People need to let off some steam first. In the meantime, we can’t have our prize float away.”

“Okay,” Darren nodded. He sat on the edge of the bed in his appropriated passenger suite, clad only in his underwear and sweat. He hoped he didn’t seem shaken up by his nightmares in front of Captain
Casey and Wilson, the pirates’ chief engineer.

“It’s happened before with other ships,”
Casey said. “But not to us.”

“Isn’t that why
we’re leaving a watch section on board?”

“Sure,”
Casey smirked, “and in general, I trust my crew… but this is an awfully tempting prize, isn’t it? Enough money spread among fewer hands might make a few men a little crazy.”

“I could do this myself, but you’re a native bilge rat on this ship,”
Wilson said with a strange accent and a black, creepy stare. “So you’re gonna do it, and you’re going to send us a specific list of what you’ve done.”

Darren’s skills and knowledge helped him get in good with his new shipmates quickly. He had been only a junior machinist’s mate, but that meant that he actually did work as opposed to sitting around on his ass and “supervising.” Darren single-handedly cut in half the time it took the pirates to get
Aphrodite
up and moving again after the raid. He knew where all the spare parts were kept and the real performance numbers of the engines, as opposed to what was listed in the manuals. His expertise also meant that when
Vengeance
and
Aphrodite
docked on the repair platform orbiting Paradise, he was a natural pick to stay onboard the prize vessel with the first watch rotation.