by Ric Locke
“Maybe,” Peters told him cautiously.
“All right.” It was a growl. Then, in halting Grallt: “Thank you. Good day.” His accent was bad, but the words were understandable.
The zerkre grinned and returned a nod. “Good day,” she said agreeably, and marched out without ceremony.
Joshua shook his head. “Lord. Peters, come here, let’s see what else we can get from this.”
“Right, Chief.”
“And for God’s sake sit down. Now what the Hell’s this?” His fingers stabbed down on a clause.
Peters took a seat, perched on its edge, and studied the paper. “That there’s the part about when we’re leavin’, Chief. See, there’s the numbers; first llor, first ande, and this here word means ‘end’…”
The document was handwritten, or at any rate carefully hand block-printed; only one page, and sparse at that. They were to go to their quarters immediately after the first meal; they were to stay in those quarters until the evolution was completed; the ship was going to Keelisika, wherever (and whatever) that was. The only new information was that loose gear was to be secured—at least, that’s what Peters got out of a sentence advising that “… tools should be put away properly…”
“I think we’re done here,” Joshua observed. “Do me a favor, though, and go see if you can scare up Chief Warnocki and Chief Spearman. Ask them to come see me.”
“Aye, Chief,” Peters said with enough relief in his voice to attract a sideways glance from Joshua as he stood. “Chief Warnocki was havin’ chow the last time I seen him, and I reckon I can find Chief Spearman.”
“Good. And start passing the word.” Chief Joshua held up the paper. “Tell everybody we’ll be making up working parties and seeing to it that everything’s secure.” He laid the paper on the desk, glared at it, then at Peters. “These people may think of heading out to another star the same way Granddaddy did of driving across town, but I can’t help thinking it needs a little more prep than that. We are going to have all our gear battened down before it happens.”
“Glad to hear it, Chief,” Peters said without thinking; then thought, Oh, shit!
But the Chief didn’t react, or at least didn’t explode. “We agree on something, do we? I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear that.” He waved, a flick of the fingers. “Carry on.”
“Aye, Chief.” Peters nodded and left, Grallt style. The waiters spoke English but hadn’t changed their procedures, and everybody was starting to do that. Amazing how useful it was.
* * *
Peters sat on his bunk, back to the bulkhead, arms folded over his knees. Todd lay prone, with his arms under his head, the picture of relaxation if you discounted the clenched teeth.
Lacking any data about exactly what was to happen, the detachment had secured for foul weather. The airplanes were boomed down to padeyes in the hangar deck with short chains, as was anything else too heavy to lift easily. Everything small enough was stowed in lockers with the latches closed, every latch checked by somebody other than the one who secured it. Personal gear was stowed and the latches secured. All the sailors were in their quarters, in kathir suits with deck gear over, lacking the flak jackets and helmets. There wasn’t any way to secure the chairs at the study desks, and Peters was a little concerned about that. On the other hand, they weren’t new by any stretch, and didn’t have any dings or scratches other than those you’d expect from normal wear. Given that, Peters really didn’t expect much in the next few minutes, but it didn’t hurt to take precautions, at least the first time.
There was a rap on the connecting door, and Howard peered out, face apprehensive. “Hey, guys,” he said tentatively. “Mind if I join you?”
Peters shrugged and half-smiled, a quirk of the corner of his mouth. “Come ahead.” He scooted over a bit, leaving space on the bunk.
Howard shut the door, checked the latch, and sat down, feet on the floor, arms crossed over his chest. “Sorry,” he said, and shook his head. “The collywobbles were starting to set in. I’ve never even been on a cruise, and now this.”
“I know what you mean,” said Todd. His voice was tense, but nowhere near cracking, and he didn’t change position. “I’ve been on a few cruises, but this is a little different.”
“I reckon we’re all nervous for nothin’,” Peters observed. “The Grallt don’t seem to have no problems with it.” First meal had been a matter of tense body language, exchanged glances, and low voices, but only among the humans. The Grallt had been chatting and lounging about as usual, and had exchanged glances and comments of their own, mostly in obvious amusement at the nervousness of the sailors.
“Just nervous in the service,” Howard observed, getting the obligatory perfunctory chuckles at the century-old (or better) joke. “I don’t—look, something’s happening.”
They’d all become accustomed to the view out the window: Earth, Moon, starfield, or some combination, drifting by as the ship rotated slowly. Now stars were flowing by much too fast to follow, upper left to lower right from their point of view, and a flash was the Moon going by too quickly for anything but a subliminal impression of a crescent. That went on for a few seconds, then stopped abruptly. At no time did they feel anything out of the ordinary; if their eyes had been closed they’d have thought nothing was happening.
After about thirty seconds the starfield moved again, a quick jerk from right to left that took less than a second. That was repeated at irregular intervals and in different directions: left to right, various angles, up to down. At no time was there any sensation of movement.
“Well, I reckon they must be done with that part,” said Peters when nothing had happened for two or three minutes. “Wasn’t much to—oshit!“
Stars forward of the midpoint of the window flowed forward and the rest aft, leaving a black void in the middle. At the same time there was a brief sensation of acceleration, or rather deceleration, like the feeling when a fast elevator stopped, and directed forward rather than aft, as if the ship had stopped instead of speeding up. The sensation was so faint that they would never have noticed it except in contrast to the normal rock-solid feeling of the ship, and lasted a second at most. Then the stars snapped back to normal like a movie jump-cut, and everything was as before.
“You know, I’ll bet that’s it,” Todd remarked.
“You’re probably right.” Peters unfolded himself and walked over to the window. “Don’t look any different. Hang on, somethin’s movin’.”
Howard joined him. “Probably a planet. I don’t think we’ll see the stars move, you’d have to go pretty damn fast for that.”
“You’re probably right,” Peters drawled. The bright point drifted slowly by and disappeared aft, and nothing else happened.
Howard stood up, a little embarrassed. “See you later,” he said, not meeting their eyes, and disappeared into the head. Todd sat up, rubbed his forehead, and exchanged glances with Peters, who just shook his head and looked back out the window. The stars looked pretty much as they had for the last month and a half.
“Not too spectacular,” Peters mused.
“I’m a little disappointed,” Todd remarked, joining him at the window.
Peters eyed him sidelong. “Not too much, I hope,” he drawled.
Todd grinned. “Well, no, now that you mention it.”
Chapter Nineteen
“Wonder how long this lasts?” Todd asked.
Peters didn’t know, and wondered about that. There hadn’t been any mention of duration on the order sheet. Maybe the Grallt themselves didn’t know. That would be of a piece with the rest of it. Without computers or sophisticated communications—a runner to let them know a starship was leaving, for God’s sake—likely they were flying on lookouts and dead reckoning, like Columbus or Eric the Red.
The Grallt—at least, the trader-Grallt they saw in the messroom—acted like nothing had happened, was happening, or would ever happen. Flight operations weren’t possible. The bay doors were closed, a
nd Kitheridge reported that they were secured, with oversize versions of the claws that kept the hatches open. Maintenance people tinkered desultorily; the planes were remarkably simple without the engines, and there wasn’t much wrong. Painting resumed, all the enlisted participating without grumbles just for something to fill the idle hours. Even Chief Joshua joined in, and turned out to be a dab hand at it, which was to be expected, of course. He was especially good at getting the edge of the green stripe perfectly straight and even.
A lot of pinochle got played.
Their library was a small compartment on the O-1 in the officers’ area, across from the medics. Todd went there occasionally, but except for the medics enlisted people weren’t encouraged to mingle with their superiors, and besides it was all on disk and crystal, requiring readers they had to check out from a lieutenant (j.g.) who rarely showed up. Llapaaloapalla‘s library was just abaft the bridge, half a dozen medium-sized compartments filled with shelf upon shelf of bound books. Peters started using it, first to improve his knowledge of the written language, then out of genuine interest in a series of adventure stories set in the Grallt’s distant past. They had sailing ships on water oceans and some notable sex scenes; his vocabulary expanded. Cherin the librarian tended to giggle when he used archaisms.
The officers came out en masse once a “day” to do calisthenics in the ops bay. A few of the enlisted, led by Tollison and Kennard, started doing the same. The Navy didn’t do much in the way of organized whole-unit drills, and participation was entirely voluntary. Nonetheless, sailors started joining in until a sizable fraction of the unit was participating regularly. It helped that what Tollison was teaching was a cross between aerobic dancing and tai chi rather than classic knee bends and jumping-jacks.
A couple of Grallt “females” joined in, then more came, and before long it was routine to have three or four hundred people of both races jumping and writhing in the ops bay for an hour or more every day. The Grallt had a couple of moves of their own, one a jump-and-twirl that would put you face down on the deck if you got it wrong but was downright exhilirating once you’d learned it; they added that and a few others to the repertoire. The welders got used for the first time, to attach hooks for hanging speakers. The Grallt were at first bemused, then enthusiastic, at having music for the exercise sessions.
Interspecies friendships started happening, mostly tentative, a few less so. Se’en was an early and energetic participant in the exercises. Jacks took the opportunity to resume the acquaintance, and before long his roommate, a seaman striking for Machinist’s Mate, reported that he was seldom to be found sleeping there. That raised sniggers and sotto voce comment, but Jacks wasn’t the only one to experiment, at least.
Not many sailors pursued learning the Trade, but a few kept at it, and roughly a tenth of the tables at any given meal were occupied by mixed groups exchanging cheerful confusion in two tongues. The Grallt told jokes, especially dirty jokes, as often as the sailors did. Allowing for different circumstances—visiting a strange ship instead of breaking down on a country road, for instance—the content was identical, and the first time Peters heard the one about the weight loss clinic (If I catch you, your ass is mine!) in Grallt he howled at the old chestnut until his sides hurt.
Zerkre were in evidence much more than before. Half a dozen of them brought out a thing like a cherrypicker and began replacing burned-out lights in the bay overhead. “I thought Chief Warnocki was gonna come in his pants when he saw that thing,” Schott reported. “You think we could get the use of it for a while? We don’t have enough paint to do the overheads, but we could sure as Hell clean ‘em up a bit.”
Peters put the question to the leader of the working party, a male Grallt in eight-way blue-and-whites; the zerkre was dubious but agreed to ask, and a little later Peters found himself twenty meters off the deck, brushing dust and grime off the beams with a long-handled broom. The machine’s mast was impossibly thin for such a long extension, but inspection revealed a cover that came off with left-handed wingnuts and concealed another shiny gadget, this one not much bigger than a big apple. He snorted. Apparently the mast was only for stability.
In the course of cleaning they found the actuators for the bay doors. More than half of the others found an excuse to inspect one or both of them, coming away with their heads shaking. They were open-frame universal motors that looked like they belonged in God’s hair dryer, actuated by unenclosed relays with contact points the size of an eyeglass lens and connected to the doors via mechanisms consisting of straight-cut gears, long shafts, and roller chain. Some of the gears were too big to encompass with spread arms, the shafts were half a meter in diameter, and the rollers in the chain were too big to get both hands around.
“Jesus fucking Christ on a bloody fucking crutch!” drifted down from the overhead. “I do not fucking believe this fucking shit!” There was a pause; the watching sailors grinned at one another, and the bucket with Chief Warnocki in it descended jerkily, operated by a man too bemused—or possibly too enraged—to concentrate on smoothness. “I don’t fucking believe this,” Warnocki repeated as he clambered out. “That fucking thing looks like it hasn’t been fucking greased since Columbus was a fucking ensign, one of the teeth in the biggest gear is just fucking gone, and there’s pits in the fucking relay contacts the size of my fucking fingernails!” He pulled off his hat, wiped his forehead with his arm, and surveyed the small crowd of sailors, who were making a real but futile attempt to keep straight faces. After a moment he deflated slightly and clapped his hat back on his head. “Yeah, real funny,” he observed with a ghost of a grin. “Peters, front and center.”
“Aye, Chief.” Peters was resigned as he pushed through to face the Chief. He figured he knew what was coming.
He was right. “Peters, you know the language,” Warnocki started out. “You go get all cleaned up and snappy and get your ass up to the bridge. Tell those cuntfaces we are pulling maintenance on that thing.”
“They might not go along, Chief,” Peters warned. “They done said they ain’t too happy at the idea of us workin’ on the ship systems.”
“I-did-not-tell-you-to-ask-for-per-mis-sion, Pe-ters,” Warnocki ground out in distinct syllables. “And I didn’t tell you say we are gonna be doing it. I told you to tell them we are doing it, and that’s exactly what’s about to happen.” He tore his gaze away from Peters and searched the group, focusing on an Electrician’s Mate. “Laval, go find Schott and tell him to get up there and disconnect the power to that piece of crap. Hendricks, you and Morales start putting the LIG together and get it over here. Bring the crackerbox too, we don’t have enough cable to LIG in the overhead, so we’ll have to weld brackets and haul the thing up there.” He shook his head. “Peters, you still standing there with your thumb up your ass? Get it in gear, sailor.”
Peters shook his head and headed off to his quarters for a shower, looking back as Warnocki continued, “Jereboam, as soon as Schott’s got the thing safed, you get up there and take a tooth profile. Aliano, my compliments to Chief Gross, how much number-two moly grease did we bring, and he’s to issue a couple of kilos of it and grease guns…”
When he passed back through the bay the LIG welder was sitting by the cherrypicker, a Second Class was bending a snatch block onto the lifting eye with a short piece of chain, and a crew in helmets, flak jackets, and knee pads was faking a piece of half-inch hemp down in long loops. The basket was up, and although he couldn’t see who was occupying it, the comments from overhead (This motherfucker’s got over four hundred volts on it! Any of you assholes got any ideas about where the goddam cutoff might be?) made it Schott, more than likely. Warnocki was supervising with folded arms and a set jaw.
* * *
Elevator, corridor, stairs, more corridors, more stairs; the watchstander at the entrance to the ship’s offices recognized him. “Hello, Peters, I haven’t seen you in a little while. What do you need?”
“Hello. I need to speak to Dhuvenig.”<
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The Grallt frowned. “Dhuvenig’s not on duty. It’s his sleeping time. Is it immediately important? Can someone else help you?”
“It’s fairly important, yes. We have found a problem with the ship’s equipment and have begun to repair it. My superior told me to inform the proper people.”
“A problem with the ship’s equipment.” The Grallt—Peters had the name now: Leffin—passed his hand down his facial cleft in a thinking motion. “Almost all the bridge crew are sleeping. You should talk to Heelinig. She’s the only one on duty who is responsible for such things.”
“Heelinig is the second person of the ship, do I have that correct?”
Leffin nodded. “Yes, that’s correct. Go on in. Just sign the book and look for Heelinig. Tell Kheef I told you to go ahead.”
“Thank you, Leffin.” Peters gave the man a nod and pushed the door open. The office doors were closed, and the other watchstander—Kheef?—sat near-dozing at the bridge entry. Peters signed in, carefully forming the loops of his name in Grallt characters. He mentioned his business and Leffin’s instruction to Kheef, who shrugged and stood aside without comment.
Heelinig was the only person on the bridge; she turned away from the forward windows when he entered. “Yes? You’re Peters, if I recall correctly,” she noted, tone brisk but not disapproving. “What do you want?”
“Yes, I’m Peters,” he told her. “Our group has found a problem with the machine that opens and closes the aft bay door. We are repairing it, but the door cannot be operated for some time.”
“This is not normal procedure,” Heelinig said with a frown. “The ship’s crew should do such repairs when they are necessary.”
“Yes, they should, but it has not been done, and my superior decided to repair it.”
“Ssth.” Heelinig strode to the bridge access. “Kheef, go wake Dhuvenig and tell him to go immediately to the operations bay. The human are doing something with the ship’s equipment.” She watched the junior Grallt disappear down the corridor and turned to Peters. “Go back and tell your people to stop work until Dhuvenig arrives.”
