Poor Man's Fight (36 page)

“Sir, I don’t have to like him. My point is, sir, we’ve got nine other qualified OODs and helmsmen on this ship. The only time Malone’s ever gonna have to land
the ship or execute a manual link-up is if the computer’s fried and every other one of us is dead.”

Tanner moved down the ladder toward the cargo bay imagining the captain’s “pondering” expression. “And if we’re ever at battle stations and he’s all that’s left on the helm?” Stevens asked.

“Sir, if we’re ever at that point, we’re fucked anyway,” Freeman said half-jokingly. Tanner couldn’t disagree. In three months there hadn’t been a single battle stations drill. Nor had they run a damage control or firefighting drill, or an abandon ship drill or anything else. One could argue that they were too busy with boardings and active patrols. Still, it bothered Tanner.
St. Jude
was a military ship. He hadn’t once practiced what he was supposed to do in combat. He didn’t relish the idea of going into a fight, but the prospects of not even knowing what he was supposed to do in such an event was downright disturbing.

“What’s his battle station, anyway?” the captain asked.

Tanner winced.
Seriously? The captain doesn’t know?
“Port laser turret,” he muttered aloud. It was another breath before Freeman finally answered with the same thing.

Stevens gave another snort. “Can’t imagine putting that kid on a gun.”

Tanner stopped on the ladder. He gripped the rails tightly, trying not to be mad. “Okay,” he heard the captain say, “call him back up.”

A moment later, Tanner’s holocom beeped with a summons to the bridge. Tanner gritted his teeth. He hadn’t actually made it to the cargo bay. He turned off the comm channel for the bridge just
before the XO and Freeman passed by. Neither man said anything.

The captain sat reading a data screen as Tanner arrived. Tanner looked around at Reed and Harper, but both of them were also pointedly busy with other things. Trying to make himself useful, Tanner turned to take another check at overall comm traffic.

“Malone,” Stevens said. Tanner faced him. “Freeman’s signing you off on fine maneuver link-ups. You’ll be landing us when we get back. If you do that right, you’ll be signed off on that, too. Freeman says you’re ready to be signed off on all the rest, so as soon as we’re back on base and we’re secure, you’ll have your helmsman’s board. Are you ready for that?”

“Yes, sir,” Tanner nodded firmly.
He noted, silently, that the captain had been the one to direct this test, but he didn’t want to put his initials down on Tanner’s qual sheet. He simply deigned to allow someone else to do it.

“Okay. Back to work,” the captain said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder at the
worktable behind him.

***

“Ten months. Ten fuckin’ months on this boat with nobody but you to talk to, and no offense, right? But that’s a long goddamn time. I seriously thought I was gonna go crazy. Hell, maybe I actually did.”

“You have no idea how grateful I am,
Gina,” Vanessa Ramirez assured her. “For everything. You’ve been wonderful.” She stood with Gina at the airlock, waiting for the corvette’s boarding crew to finish their preparations. The pair wore the simple crew vac suits of the
Aphrodite
, though the ship’s emblems had been removed. It had been a long trip for her, too, but at least Vanessa knew what she was getting into from the beginning… and had done so with a sense of purpose. “I can’t imagine what those assholes would’ve done with the money they’d gotten from selling this ship, and the thought of them keeping it and using it for more piracy is just as bad. You saved a lot of lives by helping me with this. I couldn’t have done it without you.”

The younger woman looked sideways at her companion, smirking thoughtfully. “You know I thought for awhile that you were gonna plug me, too, right? I mean, after you took care of Haywood and Butler?”

Vanessa shook her head. “I thought you were going to kill me when I realized the astrogation computers had been wiped,” she chuckled. “But no. You’re a hero. Not many people are ever going to know it, but you are.”

Gin
a just laughed. “Hero. I like that. I never thought I was gonna be anything more than a plain old whore.”

“You can be anything you want when we get this ship where it needs to go,
Gina,” Vanessa said. “We’ll get you a new identity, get you in school, help you find a new job… whatever you want. And you’ll be paid for all this time. I can promise you that.”

The airlock seal indicators flashed and beeped. Vanessa reached for the controls.

“You ever gonna tell me who you work for?” Gina asked.

Vanessa smiled. “I more or less have to now,” she said.

“Permission to come aboard?” someone called through the airlock.

“Permission granted,” Vanessa called back.

Helmeted crewmen in Archangel Navy vac suits pushed one by one through the artificial gravity field at Aphrodite’s airlock. Each of them came armed, but made no sign of hostility. Vanessa and Gina waited until they saw the third, who wore a lieutenant’s bars on his uniform.

“Hi,” he said, flipping up his visor. “I’m Lieutenant Gagne. I’m the boarding team leader.”

Vanessa’s face went stone cold. She held up her holocom, which projected an intricate seal. “Lieutenant Gagne, my name is Vanessa Rios and I’m an officer of the Archangel Ministry of Intelligence. You, your boarding team and your crew are now hereby informed that this boarding and everything you see and do here is top secret. You are not to discuss this matter with anyone, for any reason, unless instructed otherwise by the Ministry of Intelligence. If you’re smart, you won’t even discuss it amongst yourselves.”

She let it sink in. Gagne blinked, looked to his shipmates, and then turned back to her. “I will need to speak with your captain to verify my identity,” Vanessa told him. “And then you’re going to send a secure message to Augustine Harbor for me and send me and this ship on our way.”

***

“So is there anything you’re actually good at?”
Stumpy asked as the cruise liner floated off toward Augustine.

Tanner looked up from the manual projected by his holocom to
Stumpy, who sat in the starboard side seat on the bridge doing basically nothing. That was how it usually was on watch. Tanner did all the work, because he was the apprentice and ostensibly needed the practice. He was already proficient at everything but helm, though, and thus it was really just a matter of the other qualified helmsmen taking advantage of him.

He stood for the entirety of each four-hour watch. There were only two chairs.

“I thought I was good at astrogation and comms,” Tanner replied evenly.

“No, I mean outside of
this,” Stumpy said. “Like in school. You do any sports in school? Anything you were good at?”

“I got pretty good grades in school,” Tanner shrugged, “but no sports, no.”

“How good?” Morales asked. He sat in the portside chair, scraping dirt out from under his fingernails with his feet up on the control panel.

Tanner didn’t answer immediately
. Much of the crew teased him about anything they could. With the exception of the captain—who could dish it out, but never had to take it—the crew gave one another shit all the time. As the newest body on the ship, Tanner got the largest share by far of such attention. His low rank sharply limited his options for retaliation.

Tanner
spent little time with his shipmates when they were in port. He preferred to be alone. It wasn’t like there were invitations, but then again, Tanner would have been torn on whether to take anyone up on such or not. Off-duty socializing might have presented a way to make things a little friendlier around the ship, but it could also just mean more time in the line of fire.

Such attention
always just a bit more venomous with Morales and Stumpy.

“Malone,” Morales repeated, “how good is good? In school?”

This got into territory Tanner didn’t want to discuss with the crew. Moreover, this was one of those conversations where people were “just talking” until they smelled blood in the water. Tanner looked for a safe response. “I wouldn’t have had trouble getting admitted into a lot of universities.”

“What, like St. Michael’s?” Morales asked. “Uriel Academy? That school on Augustine?”

“Yeah,” Tanner said, looking more at the deck than anything else. This stung more than they knew. “Yeah, I was above all their admission requirements.” He had acceptance letters, too, but nobody needed to know that.

Stumpy
snorted. “Think you could’ve gone to Harvard? On Earth?”

“Those big name universities on Earth can get pretty political. Their admissions choices don’t always have much to do with how good a student’s application is.”
It was an honest answer; they didn’t need to know that he had, in fact, met all the academic requirements for Harvard.

“I think it’d be cool to see Earth,”
Stumpy said.

“I’ve got a classmate going to West Point,” Tanner muttered.

“Was he a better student than you?”

“She. And no, not really. I mean she’s good. She’s smart, and I wouldn’t say I’m smarter, but being a good student isn’t always just about
that. She had other things going for her. I didn’t do any team sports. I swam a little, but not enough for it to matter.”

“You said you could’ve gotten admitted,” Morales said.

“Yeah.”

“But you didn’t apply?”

Tanner frowned. “No point.”

“Why not?”

“Turns out universities are expensive.”

“Yeah, but if you’re smart enough to get in, there’
re ways to pay for it, right?”

“Sometimes,” Tanner admitted, more to himself than to the other two men on the bridge. “I
might’ve gotten a couple of scholarships to help things along. Maybe worked during school. I just didn’t want to take out loans.”

“Uh-huh,” Morales grunted. “But you probably could’ve found a way. So why didn’t you apply?”

Tanner’s frown returned. He remembered whom he was dealing with. This wasn’t idle conversation. This was a probe. “Because I wanted to do this.”

“This was what you wanted to do coming out of school?”
Stumpy sat up in his seat, looking at Tanner as if his answer was somehow odd.

“Yeah. Why’s that weird?”

“Just doesn’t seem to suit you. I mean we all know you’re some kinda nerd. Heifer says you watch fuckin’ nature documentaries and shit. You wanted to be a navy crewman?”

“I can do the job,” Tanner said. “I did fine in basic. I’m zero-g qualified—“

“You might be qualified, but you puke half the time soon as you get back on board,” Stumpy snorted. “Didn’t you know you were gonna have trouble with that when you signed up?”

“
Had no way to find that out beforehand.”

“You get dizzy.
You don’t fit in. You really wanted this?”

He felt like he fit in fine during basic, socially and professionally, but he stepped on that argument. Tanner had no interest in discussing his initial motivations with these two
. “Why’s that so hard to believe? You think what we do isn’t important?”

Stumpy
just chuckled, settling back into his seat. Morales seemed to think it was funny, too.

Tanner figured
the conversation was done. He turned back to plotting out courses just for something to do. Then Stumpy threw in his last comment: “Hey, Morales, you ever notice how book-smart people never ain’t got no common sense?”

***

“And then she tells Miller, ‘It doesn’t matter how long I’ve been on this boat without a man, I wouldn’t let you touch me even with your spacesuit and your helmet on,’” Heifer laughed. He faced the bathroom mirror, dutifully scanning his face for blemishes or stubble. Little more than his towel covered him. It was a ritual he performed each time
St. Jude
returned to Augustine Harbor and the crew was granted liberty: shower, primp, drink. “Seriously, two spy girls on a beat-up cruise liner, and Miller sees nothing wrong with makin’ a play for either of ‘em.”

The other occupant of the barracks room sat on his bed, paging through ship’s manuals on his holocom. He wore simple civilian clothes without shoes. He had no plans to go anywhere. “Pretty sure you’re not supposed to tell me about this,” Tanner said for the third time. “Just saying.”

“Aw, Christ, Tanner, are you really that worried about it?” Heifer groaned. “I mean we’re all on the same crew. We’re all under the same information controls. It’s not like we have to keep it a secret from each other. What’re you worried about?”

Tanner genuinely worried about the loose lips of his fellow shipmates. He worried about being included among them when one of them slipped. He worried how much they would talk to impress girls in the bars once they’d gotten a few drinks in them. But he answered, “You’re telling me Miller stories, Heifer. Why would I want to hear more Miller stories?”