COMBAT SALVAGE 2165 (2 page)

Tig carried his helmet under his arm as he and Parker made for the launch pads in red exosuits so new, the intensity of the cherry color almost hurt the eyes. "Still wish they gave us cool names like the pilots get."

She smiled and imitated their DI for the last three months. "Redsuits don’t get cute names. Redsuits don’t get no glory. Redsuits get shit done!"

"
Make a hole, cherry." A senior weapons maintenance specialist in a charred, blood-red exosuit shoved Tig aside with his forearm and continued down the hallway. That red had two meters of clearance on either side. He just wanted to hassle cherries.
 

"
Hey! Thank you!"
 

"Stifle it, cherry!" the lug shouted without looking back.

Even after becoming a full-fledged redsuit, AMTS 3rd class, he and Parker were still stuck being called ‘cherries’ and getting shoved out of the way by veterans. "I still hate it when they do that."

Parker shook her head. "
You never learned to work within the SOP, Tig," She said, "Standard operating procedure says 'shit rolls downhill'."
 

"
What the hell does that even
mean
?"
 

"
This," she said, eying another group of fresh-off-the-boat pre-cherries just a few meters down the passageway. Seconds later, Parker said, "Make a hole," as she walked through them and nearly knocked one of them over.
 

"
Hey! What the hell was that for?" the preemie shouted after Tig and Parker had passed.
 

Parker stopped and Tig stopped, and she smiled before she turned around. She was on him in two steps. Her gloved index finger extended and stabbed into the recruit’s chest. He was all dressed up in cheap animated fabric like he belonged in a nightclub. "Let’s get one thing straight before you get hurt." Her other hand gestured between herself and Tig, "Him and me?
We
are redsuits. But you..." She stared each of them down in half a second like a Training Chief out to break them. "
You
are nothing," she said. "No. You are
less
than nothing because you’re a preemie. When you see a real redsuit coming, then you get the fuck out of the way. Three months from now, if you can hack it, then you’ll be an AMTS like me wearing a red exosuit like me and you can shove some preemie newb like you out of the way. But. Until then, when you see us coming…" She punctuated each of the following words with a finger stab to the preemie’s chest as he winced. "
Make…a…hole.
"
 

"Yes, ma'am."

"Did you say "ma'am"? Are you a UN swabbie? We don't say "sir" and "ma'am" in the Staas Privateers." If he'd had a helmet on, she would have cuffed it.

Down the passageway, after they took the next turn on the way to the O-sec B launchpads, Parker almost doubled over laughing. She said, "See, Tig? Let it roll
downhill
. Now, don’t you feel better?"
 

He laughed just because he was disappointed how he actually did. He hoped it wasn’t going to be like that on
Hardway
, because as cherries aboard an attack carrier, they’d be the lowest form of life among the ship’s salty reds.
 

Not many cherries got assigned to
Hardway
. Tig and Parker pulled the assignment everyone had wanted: SCS
Hardway
, the most famous ship of the war, the ship that fought the Squidies first, the ship that had served up more death and destruction to the alien aggressors than any other in any fleet.
 

The carrier had been holding station off the far side of Sagan for three hours, but he still hadn’t managed to get a good look at her with his own eyes yet. The space station was as big as a medium-sized city and it didn’t matter if that carrier was a kilometer-long or not, unless you were on the right side of the station, the view was perpetually blocked by the towers, like a pair of broad, skyscraper-filled, city skylines above and below the space station’s equatorial frame.

A few redsuits and a senior chief waited at the pads along with the six other cherries
Hardway
was picking up from Sagan, but Tig didn’t even notice them. He finally had a clear view of the attack carrier and now, all the other people in exosuits waiting for transport were just reflections in the diamond-pane glass distracting him from the view of
his
new ship.
 

Even from a distance he could see how some sections of the carrier didn’t reflect as much light. The armored hull there was charred and pitted from endless hours of high-speed particle bombardment. Some sections were shinier. They looked almost new. Those were sections that had been damaged so badly they’d simply been removed and replaced. After the routing the UN fleet took the first day of the war, Privateer carriers like this one were the only thing holding the Squidies back.

Railgun batteries bristled on
Hardway’s
bow and from midships towers, but it was the launch bays that caught Tig’s eye first. Each of the two launch bay modules presented six, 70-meter bays on four sides for a total of 48 bays. From so far away, the open bays looked like tiny lit windows and the 50-meter junks inside were specks. All he could see of the F-151 Bitzers, the fighters patrolling around the ship in echelon, were their streaking, pale blue engine flares.
 

The carrier’s command tower had been set behind the primary bays and it rose hundreds of meters above and below her spine. Tig had stared at the limited deck-plans he could find on the TTS server for hours. Behind the ship’s command tower was another hab module, a medical module, and engineering, where the armor was the thickest. The five reactors housed there were protected by meters of it.
Hardway’s
five hearts had to be huge to power all her systems including the Novalifter engines. They were probably powerful enough to tow Sagan Station if you could rig up the lines and yoke the attack carrier like a tug.

"AMTS, Tig Meester," Parker said, "I do believe you’ve got a hardon for that ship." Parker’s reflection laughed in the diamond-pane window.
 

It wasn't just the ship. He just couldn’t believe how much of a difference a few months could make in his life. Three months ago he’d been breaking into the spaceport's storage units and stripping stolen intercontinental hoppers for parts to resell. Now, they were going to let him work on
Hardway
. Tig knew he possessed a rare talent with machines, but in his short life, things had gone the right direction for him so infrequently that he almost couldn't recognize it when it was happening. But not this time. This time, he knew he was going to the right place.
Hardway
could use his talent, he thought. The way the war was going, they needed all the help they could get.
 

Parker said, "You hear about Horcheese?"

"
What the hell is a Horcheese?"
 

"
Not what; whom," Parker said, and he winced a little. She and her expensive education were always correcting him. "Our new Operations Chief is Horcheese and
Chief
Horcheese
is legendary."
 

"
Yeah?"
 

"Hell, y
eah. Lives for the job. Turned down free regrows and got herself four artificial limbs just so she could portage a mining junk with one hand and crush armored Squidies with the other."
 

He said, "No shit," and she confirmed the story was true.

"No shit. That's how hard the Ops Chief is. And she just loves taking cherries on a cruise."

Tig was paying attention to all the flight activity in
Hardway’s
bays. He missed the sarcasm. "Really?"

"
No, Tig. No. She hates dumbass cherries. Prepare yourself for ungreased reaming. That’s what Devon said." She thumbed over her shoulder at him.
 

"
Dev throws scuttlebutt," Tig said, "but he never really knows spit."
 

"
I heard that," Devon said. He leaned out from the huddle of cherry-red exosuits a few meters away. They were looking at the carrier, too. "I don’t know how you got this assignment, Tig."
 

"
I don’t know how that carrier survived this long without me."
 

"
See," Devon said. "
That’s
why nobody likes you, Tig."
 

"
Parker likes me."
 

"
Nope. Sorry, Tig," she said. "I just got partnered up with you on the first day and I hate quitting things. I can’t stand you either."
 

The longboat came in hot. Over the pads, it rotated its nacelles and blasted, but still set down three-times faster than any regulation landing. It practically slid sideways into the airlock docking ring. The shock absorbers took the hit, giving over a meter with the impact.

"
Pilots don’t fly like that around here much," she said.
 

"Must be
Hardway
pilots."
 

Once they got through the locks and stepped into the narrow transport, Tig glanced forward to get a gander at who was driving. All he saw were the shoulders of their Staas Company blue exosuits and the backs of their helmets.

Parker sat next to Tig in the second row of seats. The other six cherries bound for
Hardway
sat behind them. The senior reds, the Chiefs on-board, took the front row, talking amongst themselves in low tones. He couldn’t hear them, but from where he sat, he had a good view of the brunette.
 

She got on just before the longboat launched, wearing street clothes that set off her hips...a tight-fitting top, something plain and long-sleeved made of real wool, maybe...thick, but revealing. She carried her exosuit in a bag over her shoulder, helmet and all, like it was a dead body. The way she shifted her weight made him hear the music from the strip clubs back on Staten Island, or the bass, at least.

Measured toe to crown, she wasn’t over two meters, but if you cut a piece of line and ran it up over the curvier parts of her body, then stretched it out, that line would have been three meters, probably more. She didn’t take a seat or strap in. She leaned her exosuit up against the bulkhead and stood behind the pilots with her hands on their seat backs. That should have been his first clue. That, and her eyes. They were milky like some kind of synthetic opal, clearly artificial, and not trying to look like anything else.

Parker said, "You going to tip the lady or just stare at her?"

"
She definitely gets the tip."
 

"
Check it out," Parker said. "I got our longboat's comms with Sagan. The tower is taking it personal." She held her helmet in her lap and even without putting it on, he could hear the voices.
 

"
Hardway
longboat zero-six, you violated five station protocols."
 

"
Uh…copy?"
 

"
I’ve got your number from your IFF and I’m reporting you for that landing. And the flyby. And the near miss. You’ll get 6 points on your CPL for this." She meant his commercial pilot’s license. Tig couldn’t hear any actual laughing on comms, but up in the front of the longboat, both pilot’s shoulders hunched repeatedly like they were either laughing or crying. The brunette thought it was funny.
 

"
Sagan Tower,
Hardway
longboat zero-six copies that loud and clear. Anything else before we skip this floating hunk of rear echelon junk and go back to fighting the war?"
 

"
You have priority clearance for ascent and return vectors."
 

"
Roger
that
and thank you, Sagan. Have a nice, safe day."
 

The
Hardway
pilots made sure that their takeoff was as exciting as their landing, but since little boats like that longboat didn’t have powerful inertial negation systems, the acceleration gees pushed Tig into the seat hard.
 

The brunette didn’t fall in the inertial gees. She held on to the straps until the boat was clear of the station’s artificial gravity and then floated in zero-gee next to her wrapped-up suit.

After the pilots pulled the boat up and over and over again, Pardue elbowed him. "Look." She nodded out the porthole. "Breaching ships."

The wagon-wheel hulls of the interstellar breaching ships held station together five Ks off the docks.

"Never seen five of them together like that," he said. "You only need one to breach space." He knew
Hardway
would ship out soon with one of them, maybe two, but what were the others doing here? Those ships were so valuable that when they weren’t going somewhere, they stayed under heavy guard in Earth orbit.
Hardway
was the only ship scheduled to depart. What the hell did the carrier need five breaching ships for? He thought she was only stopping at Sagan as a matter of routine to pick up supplies and ordnance and personnel like Tig and Parker and the others, replacements for broken machines and dead crewmen.