Poor Man's Fight (33 page)

As he climbed through the hatch,
Stumpy glanced at Tanner to say, “Don’t puke.”

Tanner went over last, following after Miller. He moved from an environment of artificial gravity to the zero-g tube beneath, and then floated across it to the ship beyond. Tanner had to push hard to get through the invisible “floor” created by the gravity projectors in the decks of each ship. Abudllah-19’s
floor was slightly easier to deal with than
St. Jude’s
, but it still required significant effort.

Heaving himself through the hatch, Tanner found his crewmates in the center of the packet ship’s cargo bay surrounded by people. Most of the ship’s several dozen passengers sat
on the deck, though many others stood to give the boarding team room. There were slightly more women than men, along with a number of children. Some looked worried; others put up a better front. All of them seemed exhausted.

Gagne and the others pushed the faceplates of their helmets up. Tanner did the same, allowing him to hear better as the XO spoke with a representative from the packet ship.

“You’re actually from Qal’at Khalil?” the XO asked a bearded man in a tan vac suit. Tanner noted that virtually everyone else dressed in common street clothes. Some of the women wore hijabs while others did not.

“Yes, sir,” the man said in thickly accented English. “Some of us lived in Khalil City. Others are family. Many of us were there when the attack happened. We thought when the pirates left that the nightmare was over, but…” the man shrugged.

Gagne nodded. “I understand, captain.”

“We seek asylum,” the man continued. “Please, call me Rasim. I am no captain.”

“We’ve have to check several things before we allow your ship to move on to Augustine. I have to send some of my men to do a safety inspection on your engine room and I have to see your manifest.”

“Yes. Please, send your men. I have two people back there now. As for a manifest… this was not exactly a scheduled departure,” he shrugged awkwardly.

“Sure. We’ll need to get a visual head-count of passengers and crew, and we need to inspect the ship. Leone, Miller, Malone, you’ll go to the engine room. Morales and Stumpy come to the bridge with me.”

“Usman will show you the way,” Rasim said to Leone and Miller. “His English is very limited. My engineers, too. But I think they can manage.” He turned to another man in a vac suit and exchanged a few words in Arabic.

“Let’s do it,” Gagne said. “Keep your com channels open.”

“Aye, aye, sir,” Tanner replied, then realized he was the only one to do so. He fell in behind his crewmates as they followed Usman into the packet ship’s narrow passageways.

“You speak English, Usman?” Leone asked.

“Yes. Tiny. Tiny bit,” Usman said, looking back to them with a helpful smile.

“You are the engineer on this ship?”

“I am engineer, yes. Ah. Little engineer. Ah…
big engineer… higher engineer, you know? He stay on Qal’at Khalil. Not come… with.”

“No wonder they can’t fly straight,” Miller muttered with a skeptical frown behind Leone’s broad back. “Guy talks like a moron.”

Tanner looked up from the sniffer’s readout display. “English and Arabic don’t even have the same alphabets,” noted Tanner, carefully keeping his tone neutral. “English is hard to learn as a second language. Takes brains to pick up even a little. I get what he’s saying.”

“Yeah. Whatever. I just don’t get why they’re coming here.”

“You don’t follow the news?”

“It’s usually just a bunch of eggheads talking about shit that doesn’t affect me.”

Tanner grimaced. This was the guy responsible for care and maintenance of all the weapons and ordnance on the ship. “You know about the pirate raid on Qal’at Khalil a month back, right?”

“Sure. Everyone does. I get that’s why we’re doing more boardings now. But it was a tiny colony out on the ass-end of Hashemite space. How’s it turn into a mess like this?”

“Hashem’s a monarchy. That means they have a hereditary king,” he added, not wanting to take risks on Miller’s vocabulary. “The king has three sons in line for the crown. Two of the sons are dirtbags. The decent one was taken hostage on Qal’at Khalil.”

“Yeah, I heard about the hostage bit, but didn’t
they buy him back last week?”

“
Yes. Nobody’ll say how much it cost, but estimates are in the billions. Both of the brothers argued that the king never should’ve paid. They say it’ll encourage more kidnappings, but really they’re just pissed to see that dad loves the third son enough to pay so much for him. That’s got the other two worried about their chances of taking the throne when dad dies, so they’re making power grabs.

“Yes. Yes,” Usman nodded. “He is right. Prince Murtada, he take over
Qal’at Khalil after the pirates go. He say we are cowards to not fight, but we have no guns! How can we fight? Murtada, he arrest many people. Take many things. Like pirates all over again. When Prince Khalil is free, Murtada say he cannot come back to Qal’at Khalil because he cannot defend.”

“And now everyone expects a civil war, right?”

“Yes! Yes. War. We believe war come,” Usman nodded, throwing open the hatch to the engine room. “We take ship while she is being fixed. Security, they want to leave, too, so they bring families and we bring ours and we run.”

Miller glanced at Tanner. “
How do you know all this? Are you just really smart?”

Tanner considered and rejected a dozen wiseass responses. “No.”

***

“Attention all hands, chow is served. Repeat, chow is served in the galley.” Tanner turned from the ship’s intercom
as Storekeeper Second Class Flores pulled the last of the chicken from the oven. “That clear enough?” he asked brightly.

“Just like that,” Flores said with disinterest. He slid the tray of baked chicken onto the counter and turned away. “Fill up the plates.” With that, he turned around the corner of the cramped galley into the walk-in refrigerator.

Once more, Tanner swallowed his concern about the cold shoulder he seemed to get from the whole crew. At least in this case, he hadn’t made any blunders. Mess duty wasn’t terribly difficult. He wasn’t surprised or annoyed to be stuck with it. Such was life as a non-rate. What he didn’t expect was for the cook to hardly acknowledge him.

By the time he
sorted out all the plates, several crewmen stood waiting around the two small tables in the galley’s cramped dining area. The tables were arranged in a T-shape, with four seats to a side on one table and only three seats at the other. Naturally, seats were arranged in a pecking order by rank, reserving the three-seat table for the captain, XO and the chief engineer.

Freeman cheerfully talked with the XO about upcoming playoffs in one sport or another. Leone, still virtually silent, slipped into a space between the larger table and the bulkhead opposite Wells, a non-rate engineering crewman Tanner hadn’t really met yet. Chief O’Malley and another engineer came up from the lower deck. Tanner spotted a junior Ops specialist named Harper and the deck department’s other non-rate, a tall and muscular blond guy a couple years older than Tanner by the name of Heifer. Morales and
Stumpy both trailed in shortly after them.

He quickly re-counted plates and matched them to seats. Sixteen crewmembers total, subtracting two on watch on the bridge, one on watch in engineering, himself and Flores…
and exactly eleven seats. He had plates ready. Yet everyone remained standing.

Freeman’s eyes drifted toward the entrance to the galley. “Attention on deck,” he said just loudly enough to be heard. Everyone came to attention as the captain entered. The tall, bald Lieutenant Stevens slipped around to the most accessible seat and turned to face the rest of the crew.

“Let us pray,” Stevens said, just as he had before take-off. Tanner watched as every head bowed in response. For all the trappings of religious tradition within the Archangel Navy, it was largely just seen as a matter of the system’s cultural heritage and historical roots. Prayer was by no means mandatory. Tanner was surprised to see ten out of ten heads bow in prayer at the word of their captain.

Then again, he considered, maybe they just didn’t want to make an issue of it. Tanner knew he didn’t.

“Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts which we are about to receive from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord,” the skipper said, ending with an “Amen” echoed quietly by the crew. The captain sat. No one followed suit until the captain said, “At ease.”

Tanner knew that meals on ships underway tended to be informal. Certainly
Los Angeles’s
galley never saw such ceremony. Yet here was a captain who opened up lunch with strict etiquette.

Hardly anyone checked a sidearm when handed to him. The non-rate crew berth was a sty. No one briefed the crew before or after launch. Brand new, unarmed crewmen were sent on boardings. Poor coordination and communication had nearly gotten Tanner squashed against the hull…
yet the captain ran chow like it was a formal ceremony.

It was his first day. He was in no place to question anything or anyone. Tanner
served the captain, XO and Chief O’Malley first, as formal etiquette demanded.

“What’s your name, boot?” the captain asked without looking up.
Little emotion colored his question; it sounded neither friendly nor hostile.

Tanner stopped. “Malone, sir. Tanner Malone.”

“Where are you from, Malone?”

“Michael, sir. City of Geronimo.”

The captain’s grunt didn’t sound like one of approval. Stevens fell silent as he poked at his potatoes with a fork. Unsure as to whether he was supposed to wait or keep serving food, Tanner paused. After feeling awkward for a moment, he put down plates for the XO and the chief.

“Malone,” the captain said.

Tanner froze. He turned back to the captain. “Yes, sir?”

“What happened out there during the link-up, Malone?” the captain asked evenly. He looked up from his plate at Tanner. He seemed perfectly calm, but not at all casual.

His mouth suddenly feeling very dry, Tanner glanced away from the captain for a brief moment. He saw Freeman and Morales both watching, the former’s expression set in a firmly unreadable poker face while the latter frowned once more. “Sir. I was, um, having trouble getting the padding smoothed out because it kept, um, bunching and folding up on me, sir.”

“And so you weren’t watching what was going on around you when you were almost crushed flat?” the captain continued.

Tanner blinked. He was almost crushed because he couldn’t hear communications between the bridges of the two ships. Someone had decided that was the proper way to handle the procedure. He only heard the order to execute more or less by accident. Tanner had met exacting training standards for zero-g ops, and had even earned the right to wear a coveted pin on his uniform marking him as fully qualified… but all he could think was that it was his first day on board. He was a barely nineteen-year-old non-rate fresh out of basic.

Freeman and Morales
watched. Tanner didn’t dare look up at them, but he felt their gaze. “Sir, I was—I thought I had been, sir. I guess I just didn’t understand what was happening, sir.”

Stevens gave a slow, sagely nod. “You see how important it is to stay on your toes?”

“Yes, sir.”

The captain repeated his nod. He gave a small gesture as if to dismiss Tanner back to his mess duties.
Rather than finding the move galling, Tanner felt relieved to be let off the hook. He went back to passing out plates. When he got to Freeman and Morales, neither looked at him. Freeman returned to talking about sports. Morales listened with partial interest.

“Malone,” Stevens said before Tanner could slip back around the corner to return to Flores and his now comforting lack of conversation. “Turn on the viewscreen, would you?”

“Aye aye, sir.” He activated the flat screen against one wall of the galley. Any one of the crewmen present could’ve activated it from their seats with their personal holocoms. Instead, it fell to Tanner to press the right button. Given how the rest of his day went, he half-expected the viewscreen to fall off its mount or explode as soon as he touched it.

“Call up the most recent newscast. It should’ve been included in the last communications relay.”

“You think we’re already on the news again—?” Chief O’Malley asked cheerfully, but then caught himself. “Ah. I mean. You think today’s traffic is the news, sir?”

Tanner could
almost feel the captain bristle behind him. Something about O’Malley’s question had clearly been a faux pas. He scrolled through options on the viewscreen as he heard the captain say, coldly, “I don’t expect to see us so much as the situation out here, chief.”

As soon as he had the news rolling, Tanner stepped out of the dining area and into the small kitchen space. Flores casually put together plates for himself, Tanner and the current watch sections. Tanner glanced around for something to do. Finding nothing, he simply stood.

“You should go around the corner,” Flores said without looking up. “Be there in case they run out of drinks or whatever.”