“Compartment announce,” Spectre said coldly, shutting down all the speakers and transferring them to his own voice. “ON YOUR FEET, MARINES! Booster. Keep the speakers shut off from music until I give the okay.”
As half-dressed Marines started spilling into the corridor, the CO looked at the first sergeant.
“First Sergeant Powell?” Spectre said.
“Sir?” Powell replied.
“This is your problem. Fix. It.”
“It’s fixed, sir.”
“Bad day?” Miller asked as First Sergeant Powell collapsed onto his bunk.
“I wish they’d invented hypersleep along with all the rest of this stuff,” the first sergeant said, wincing. “I have thirty-six overgrown children to babysit. Bored, highly-trained, highly-testosteroned children. I’ve drilled them, I’ve run their asses off, I’ve worn them out to the point that it’s wearing me out and they can still make me look like an ass in front of the boat’s CO. I wish I could just wake them up a couple of days out, feed ’em a meal and then drop them on the planet.”
“You think it’s bad in the Marine compartments?” Miller said, chuckling. “Did you hear we lost one of the missile techs?”
“Define lost,” Powell said, sitting up. “Lost as in dead?”
“No, lost as in ‘Hey, has anyone seen Poolson?’ ” Miller replied. “It’s not really something to laugh about. The guy didn’t show up for duty for three days. Nobody would admit they knew where he was.”
“I take it they found him,” Powell said.
“Yeah,” Miller said, grimly. “XO initiated a quiet search. He was strapped to the hypercavitation initiator. One of the cool downs, somebody had put him in his suit and taken him out and space-taped him to it. He’d been out there for three days. They’d hooked up extra O2 and water, but his waste tank was overflowing.”
“That’s…” Powell said. “I think you’d define that as torture.”
“He apparently was not well liked by some of the crew,” the SEAL said, shrugging. “In sub crews you either get along or… You don’t like the results.”
“They find out who did it?” the first sergeant asked.
“He’s around the bend,” Miller replied. “They just put him in a straitjacket and strapped him into his bunk. Chet checked him out and described him as nonfunctional psychotic. They’ll keep him under wraps till we get back.”
“And the guys that did it to him?”
“Nada,” Miller said, shrugging. “That sort of thing goes on more often than you’d think in the ‘silent service.’ Like I said, you get along or they will convince you to find a new specialty. Or just drive you insane. The bubbleheads play very rough.”
“Well, if he was anything like my new armorer, I can understand their attitude.” Powell sighed. “I just got done with a thirty minute ass-chewing and I’m not sure it’s going to take.”
“Heh,” Miller said, grinning. “I heard about the music tantrum. You get one on every cruise, don’t you? Well, it’s not like the ops sergeant on the last cruise, is it? Sure, you could replace him with Lurch, but then you’d be out a shooter and have him freer to piss people off.” He rubbed his bald head in thought, then shrugged.
“I never had quite that sort of problem child, but a friend of mine did,” Miller mused. “Army, mind you. Anybody like that on the Teams we’d just send back to the regular Navy to chip paint. What he’d do is just catalogue his problem child’s sins of the previous day. Supply sergeant, if I remember correctly. Then the next morning — every morning, mind you — he’d call him in and give him a thirty minute ass-chewing. There was something about reading the overnight signals in there to get up to full wroth, but that’s not available to you…”
“I can read the boat’s XO’s training concepts,” the first sergeant said dryly. “That usually gets me into a pretty good frenzy.”
“That’s the ticket,” the SEAL said with a grin. “Get a good full head of steam, then blow it off on the problem child.”
“Every morning?” Powell said, grinning back. “I suppose I could do that. Seems like a lot of trouble, though.”
“I dunno,” Miller replied, shrugging. “Is he salvageable?”
“That is what I’m going to have to find out,” the first sergeant admitted. “He knows his shit. But he just gets off on pissing people off.”
“Well, there’s always the initiator option,” the SEAL pointed out.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
7
“You wanna see me, First Sergeant?” Portana said, standing at attention.
“You want to do that the right way around or do I need to send you back to Parris Island?” First Sergeant Powell said neutrally.
“Sergeant Julio Portana reporting as ordered to the First Sergeant,” Portana said, bracing.
“Portana, I have one of two choices as I see it,” the first sergeant said, still in a neutral tone. “One, I can request that we return to Earth to drop off one useless grapping armorer, which will seriously cut into our mission time, make me look bad, make the CO look bad and make the Corps a grapping laughingstock. Or I can just arrange to have you spaced. You have no clue how easy that is to arrange. Accidents happen all the time on this ship. You can be an accident, Portana. Just try me.”
“First Serg’en… lemme explain,” the armorer said, sweat beading on his brow.
“What is there to explain?” Powell said, standing up and walking over to circle the diminutive armorer. “It’s not bad enough that you make me a laughingstock with the ship’s CO by playing your music, in violation of not only basic courtesy but actual ship’s regulations, at maximum volume whether you are in your rack or out of it. It’s not bad enough that you’ve got half of the company deaf from having to play their own music at max volume to drown out your caterwauling. It’s not bad enough that you’ve managed to piss off every single Marine on-board. I’m surprised they haven’t already saved me the trouble of spacing your lousy gongoron. But none of that is bad enough, is it? You also are more than a hundred hours behind the power curve on suit fitting and maintenance! The rest of it is just personnel issues. Those I can handle. I can fix those. What I cannot fix is your lousy incompetence. How in the grapp did you get a week behind when we’ve only been in space for three days?!”
“Because I only got two pocking hands, First Sergeant,” the sergeant shouted. “I gots forty grapping suits to fit! Each of t’em take at least six hours to fit, if you want t’em fit bad! Eight, maybe twelf depending on t’e wearer’s shape if you wan’ t’em fit righ’! I week behind because we not supposed to leave for a mont’!”
“So you need help,” the first sergeant said, walking back to his desk and sitting down. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“I…” Portana’s eyes bulged. “I know you piss at me. I not going to say ‘I canna do it’ when first sergeant…”
“It’s a justifiable point,” Powell said mildly. “One that I’d actually considered. I was waiting on you to bring it to me, Portana. Actually, to the operations sergeant, but you could have brought it straight to me. When you’ve got a justifiable issue, bring it to me. It’s my job to fix it. Just as it’s my job to fix the problems you’re causing in the troop bay.”