Poor Man's Fight (37 page)

Heifer snorted. He couldn’t argue that. Satisfied with his grooming, Heifer crossed their barracks room to open his side of the tall lockers that stood between his bed and Tanner’s. “So you just gonna sit there and read all night again?”

“Yup.”

“Man, how come you never go out?”

“Never been invited,” Tanner said, wondering how Heifer would take it.

Heifer paused. “No, I mean, you could go out on your own.”

Tanner smirked. That was still more tactful than anything he expected. “I have no money to blow,” he said.

“You make almost the same money I make,” countered Heifer. “Where’s it all going?”

“Education debt.”

“Hah! I’ve got education debt, too. We all do. You don’t see it breaking our backs, do you? Just pay the minimum on it. They can’t go after you for more than that while you’re in the militia.”

“I don’t plan on making a lifelong career of this,” Tanner said. “I’d like to make some actual progress on it before my enlistment is up,” In truth, he had to cough up at least five hundred credits a month just to keep up with the brutal interest rate, and more than that to make any progress. He had no intention of discussing those numbers with Heifer, though. His roommate might pass it on to someone else on the ship who could actually do math, and then Tanner would never hear the end of it. “Besides,” Tanner said, “I go out.”

“You go to the shooting range and the gym on base,” Heifer snorted. “Meet a lot of women there?”

Tanner shrugged. “It’s cheap entertainment.” He walked over to the refrigerator to grab a drink.

The door chime interrupted their conversation. Heifer opened the door to greet Stumpy, Wells and Miller. “You ready?” one of them asked.

“Time to get wild!” Heifer answered. Laughter and
backslapping followed, along with talk of impending hangovers.

They all saw Tanner there. Not one of them acknowledged him before they left, much less invited him along.

Tanner thought little of it. He didn’t really want to hang out with his shipmates, anyway, and it wasn’t as if he had ever asked if he could go along… not that inviting himself seemed at all palatable.

Before he enlisted, he never had a Friday night to himself. There was always some party, some event, or even, more than a few times, a date.
No such prospects ever turned up on Augustine. He refused to feel sorry for himself, but that made him no less lonely.

He stared at the manuals open on his bed. There was only so much studying he could do. Not for the first time, Tanner found himself alone and filled with the urge to hit or shoot something. The range was closed, but the base gym stayed open all night and had a full set of hand-to-hand combat drones.

Tanner opened his locker to grab his bag of gym clothes. Heifer wasn’t the only creature of habit.

***

As it happened, Tanner’s final board examination for helmsman didn’t happen until
St. Jude
had been back in port for a full week.

He sat with his back to the wall at the center of the ship’s larger galley table. Facing him were Gagne, Freeman, Reed and Morales. Each held paper copies of the exam in front of them, trying not to look bored.
Within the first ten minutes into the process, even Morales knew Tanner would pass.

“Which four alarms are on independent switches on the bridge?” Reed asked in his perpetual mutter.

“General quarters, engine critical, collision and abandon ship,” Tanner replied.

“Can you run those from anywhere else on the ship?” Morales all but yawned.

“They’re also on the auxiliary helm control in engineering.”

Then it was Gagne’s turn. “What does ‘bingo fuel’ mean?”

“It means we have just enough fuel to return to base at cruising speed, sir,” Tanner said. “Ordinarily that means here on Augustine. If we’re in fleet ops or based out of another port, the helmsman recalculates accordingly, informs the OOD and puts it in the log.”

Gagne nodded. “Good.” He turned to Freeman.

“Okay, you can take a moment to think this one through,” Freeman advised before presenting the question. “If we’re at 75% fuel and, for whatever reason, we have to do a maximum speed FTL run, how long will the fuel hold before it runs out? Don’t include the reserve, just main fuel cells.”

“If everything’s working according to our standard efficiencies, we’d get a 150-hour run,” Tanner said, “which at max speed would
at least cover the distance between any two systems in the Union.”

Freeman’s mouth twitched and he nodded, seeming a bit impressed that Tanner could comfortably put all that together. “Correct.” He put his initials down on the space beside the question.

“But that’s the ballpark. The question is posed to offer up simple numbers for the sake of illustrating normal fuel consumption. It would never be that neat and tidy in a real situation.”

“
Sure,” Freeman said, glancing to Reed to move on to the next question.

Tanner decided he wasn’t finished. “Given
St. Jude’s
current engine performance, we’d probably be looking at 141 hours. I could crunch the numbers more accurately if I had a pen and paper or a holocom.”

Freeman blinked. “Where’d you get that number?”

“I read the engineer’s logs.”

“Huh. Is that about right?” Freeman asked Reed.

The ops specialist shrugged. “We’d run a little less beyond what the original ship’s books say, yes. I’d have to ask one of the engineers, but that’s probably about right.”

“Well, okay, then,” Freeman shrugged.

“We could stretch that out further by taking most of the ship’s non-critical systems offline and hooking the critical ones up to the power supply for the main cannon,” Tanner said. “That’d take about twenty percent off the engine’s power demands and would increase the flight range accordingly.”

Freeman blinked. Gagne hid a grin. Morales finally stopped looking at the ceiling as Tanner continued. “
We could also open up the magazines and pull the fuel cells from the missiles. It’d take some time to strip the cell casings, but once we did that, we could use the fuel cores to feed the ship’s main engines. Every one of them would give about another fifteen minutes of flight time at maximum speed.”

“Who told you that?” Morales frowned skeptically.

“Nobody told me. I read the ship’s ordnance manual. The fuel cores aren’t any different from the ones powering the ship’s engine. They’re the same size and everything. They’re just expected to burn out faster because missiles are meant to go really fast.”

The four examiners glanced at one another quizzically. Gagne asked, “So you didn’t ask any of the engineers if this would work?”

“No, sir,” Tanner said, “but I’d be surprised if they haven’t thought of it already, or wouldn’t in the event it was necessary. They’re engineers. It’s their job.”

Still controlling his grin, Gagne keyed up his holocom and waited for an answer. “Yessir?” the chief’s voice piped up.

“Hey, chief, I’ve got a hypothetical for you. If ran out of fuel for some reason, could we cannibalize the missile fuel cells and run the engines off them?”

“
Sure, we could do that if we had to,” came the answer. “It’d be a little messy and you’d only get so much power from each individual fuel core, but they’d fit in there just fine. Why?”

“Just had the question come up while we’re giving Malone his board. And if you had to run all the ship’s non-flight critical systems on the power supply for the main gun, how much of a load would that take off?”

The chief whistled for a moment, then fell silent, and finally said, “Oh, I’d say around twenty percent. I’m pretty sure that’s in a book somewhere.”

“And Malone didn’t ask you about any of this?”

“No, sir. He asked Leone what manuals there were and asked for permission to download ‘em, but that was weeks ago, sir.”

“Thanks, chief. We’re good.” With that, Gagne cut the channel. “You hoping to be
come an engineer, Malone?” he asked, no longer trying to hide his grin.

“No, sir,” Tanner shook his head. “I was hoping to go hospital corpsman or maybe research tech if there are spots open when the time comes.”

“But you read the ship’s engineer’s logs.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And the ordnance manual.”

“Yes, sir.”

“In preparation for your helmsman’s board, when the only thing you had to read the helmsman’s manual?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I imagine you read the OOD manual and the astrogator’s book, too?”

“Yes, sir, I did,” Tanner nodded innocently.

“Search and rescue manual? Rules of traffic flow? Court martial guidebook?”

“Haven’t read that last one, sir. We’ve been really busy.”

“Malone,” Freeman chuckled, “how many of the goddamn ship’s books did you read?”

Tanner’s mouth twitched. “All of them.”

“And you understood ‘em all?” Morales pressed, his skeptical scowl deepening.

“Yes, BM2, I did,” Tanner said, his tone becoming ever so slightly firmer as he looked his supervisor in the eye. “I’m
book-smart
.”

Ten
: Things Will Go Wrong

Yaomo
got screwed on the Qal’at Khalil loot.

The thought burned in her captain’s mind day in and day out. He’d thought of it in the bars, he’d thought of it in bed, and he thought of it now, staring at the instruments and situation feeds on the bridge. Especially now. Had they not been screwed, they wouldn’t be out here now.

Ming sat in the captain’s chair with baleful eyes fixed on a holographic display of the CDC destroyer swinging in close to his ship. She’d just pulled off of another freighter, moving into close scanning range while
Yaomo
crawled along.

His crew was tense. Ming couldn’t blame them. If that destroyer got suspicious,
Yaomo
would have to bug out in a hurry. A boarding team
might
not find anything, and they
might
be bribed out of saying anything even if they did. There was an equal chance that
Yaomo’s
makeover wouldn’t be good enough, that they’d be identified, and then it’d be a race to go FTL before
Yaomo
got splattered.

None of it would be necessary if Ming and his ship hadn’t gotten screwed when the loot was shared out.

They divided the cash fairly. Ming couldn’t complain there, though it galled him to grant even that concession. Some of the material loot got split fairly, too, since that could be sorted out by sight and measurement. Each ship received an even split of fuel salvaged from Khalil City’s spaceport. Guns were doled out equitably.

It was all the other random bullshit that just didn’t work out right. Jewelry. Artwork. Pricy toys. Something about the offers put up by Paradise’s fences
didn’t wash. Maybe it was the instant inflation that hit the planet as soon as the fleet returned. Maybe it was the smug looks on the faces of the Tong’s guys, or Wheezy’s “I’m so full of shit right now” grin, or the complaints the other fences made about the loot being too hot to be worth much.

Ming told the fences to take a hike.
Yaomo’s
crew voted to hold their share of the material loot, even while the bars raised their prices and Lauren said her prostitutes were overbooked and even the common whores started expecting
tips
for fuck’s sake. None of the other ships’ crews gave a shit. They were all too drunk or too stupid or both.

Helena received extra shares for her ship because of their recon work.
Casey and Lauren earned extras for their exploits. Hell, even that dumb fucker who’d let
Aphrodite
get stolen won an extra share out of the whole mess for suggesting they just throw cars at the palace, as if that was some form of rocket science.

After freefalling over the planet’s largest city and dropping makeshift bombs,
Yaomo
needed a serious radiological scrub, an engine overhaul and external modifications to change her appearance. A hundred different cameras recorded her bombing run. Naturally her crew ran low on cash while all the other pirates from the raid still swam in booze and ass.

She had plenty of loot squirreled away in her holds. Ming just needed a serious buyer. Finding that buyer took months, and he damn sure wasn’t going to Paradise
for pick up.

“Understood,
Norfolk
,” said Orion at the comms station. He coughed twice, then croaked, “We will hold this course and speed and…” he coughed again, “wait for further ins… instructions.” The skinny pirate let out a wheeze. “
Sara’s Dream
out.”

“That’s a good cough,” Ming grunted.

“Got out of school a lot with that cough,” Orion smiled.