The admiral looked hard at him for a moment, then relaxed. “Very well. You’ll need to talk to Master Chief Joshua.” He gestured with his thumb toward the back of the formation. “Dismissed, then. Carry on, men.”
“Aye, sir,” they chorused, and saluted again. The admiral returned it, and the party of officers broke up, obliging the sailors to salute each as they encountered them.
Master Chief Joshua was a stubby, bullet-headed individual in dress blues. He raised his eyebrows as Peters and Todd came up. “I’m Joshua,” he said by way of introduction.
“Howdy, Chief. I’m Peters, and this here’s Todd.”
“Good to meet you boys.” They shook hands. The Chief’s general air was no-nonsense competence with a little overlay of worry. “I’ll be your leading chief, and it looks like I’m the closest thing to an Air Boss this evolution is gonna have, so you might say I’m real interested. How long you boys got?”
“All day, Chief,” Peters told him. “The boat’ll be back to pick us up tonight, I don’t know exactly what time. I mean, I know it in their time—” he held up his wrist with Dee’s watch on it, “—but not in ours.”
Joshua tilted his head and narrowed his eyes. “I think we can fix that. Come along, we got things to do, and you need to meet some people.” He led them to where a vehicle was waiting, a Suburban painted haze gray with Navy markings on the doors.
At the main gate Joshua jerked a thumb at an F/A-18 Hornet, nose hopefully pointed toward the sky but firmly attached to a welded steel framework. “Our stuff looks pretty piss-poor in comparison, don’t it?” he remarked.
“We ain’t as far behind as you might think, Chief,” Peters suggested. “They can do things we can’t, but we got some shit that makes their eyes pop. We can do business if the powers that be get their thumbs out.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” the Chief advised. “Net’s been full of it-ain’t-workin’-out. Some of ‘em are sayin’ it’s too bad, but those folks are just going to go off and leave, and we won’t ever see ‘em again.”
“Chief, if there’s a place to put money on that, you put some down against it,” Peters said earnestly.
“Can’t say I’m sorry to hear it, seeing as how I’m gonna be with ‘em when they vanish,” the Chief commented. He settled back into his seat. “Speaking of which, you boys said there were some things we needed to bring along. What, pray tell, does the U.S. Navy have that you can’t find on a spaceship?”
“Pillows, wardroom chairs, and radios,” Todd summarized.
“Weldin’ gear and all the electronics you can scrape up,” Peters added.
“Pillows?” Joshua raised his eyebrows again.
“Pillows. You take a look at these Grallt, they’re all real narrow shouldered, Chief,” Todd explained. “They don’t use pillows because they don’t really need them. We each need to bring a pillow, maybe a few spares.”
“Easy enough,” Joshua commented. “Just one more thing to add to the seabags.”
“Them seabags can be pretty light, Chief,” Peters remarked. “We ain’t gonna need many clothes. Couple sets of skivvies, dress uniforms. Everybody gets issued a kathir suit, and that’s really all anybody’s goin’ to need.”
“Kathir suit? What’s that?”
“Sort of a junior-grade space suit,” Peters described it. “Fits like a second skin, stays clean all by its ownself, makes air when there ain’t none, and it’s got pushers on it, so’s you can move around when there ain’t no gravity.”
“You’ve already been issued yours, I take it. How come you didn’t wear them?”
Peters looked him in the eye. “They ain’t regulation, an’ we don’t know you yet.”
Joshua grinned. “We’ll talk more about that later. Wardroom chairs? Sounds like you’re setting up something real luxurious.”
“Oh, Hell, no, Chief, just tryin’ to get it shipshape. They got this big room, gonna set it up as a ready room for the crews.” Peters was careful not to be specific about who was setting things up. This Chief sounded pretty jealous of his authority; it wouldn’t do to have him find out that a Second Class and a Third were making most of the decisions. “They got most of the stuff, but we thought, they’ll need chairs. The big leather things they use for briefings on the ship.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Joshua assured him. “Briefing chairs, not wardroom chairs. There’s probably a Federal Stock Number for them: Chair, Briefing, Officers and Aircrew, FSN umpty million dash something. I’ll get after the supply folks. Looks like we’re here.” They were passing through the dilapidated iron arch that marked off NAS Jacksonville from the surrounding slums. The Marine guard said something to the driver, and they accelerated away toward the flight line.
The hangar they arrived at was run down, the sheet-iron siding rusting through the silver paint in blotches. “Looks like Hell, doesn’t it,” Chief Joshua remarked when he followed their gaze. “It used to hold a fighter squadron.” He shook his head. “Times do change.”
Sailors swarmed around the office block beside the hangar, painting and washing windows, and more were inside, sweeping and swabbing. “They’re getting good practice, Chief,” Todd said. “Me’n Peters and a Grallt work crew are just barely going to have officers’ country fit to live in by the time you come aboard. It’ll take a month of field days to get the rest of it shipshape.”
“Will it now,” the chief remarked, not a question. He pushed a door open and urged them through.
The room was in sorry shape: cracked dark-green tile on the floor, faded grey paint on the walls, fluorescent fixtures with about every third tube dead or flickering. It was furnished with desks and chairs that were probably older than anybody in the room, maybe older than any two of them. One of the desks had a computer on it, net cables disappearing into the overhead through a roughly hacked hole.
Joshua introduced them to the people: Senior Chief BM (Aviation) Warnocki, Chief of the Deck and effectively Ops Officer in their truncated TO; Chief Corpsman Gill, assistant to the doctor; one of his assistants, Corpsman 2/C Kiel; Communications Tech 1/C Howard; and Yeoman 1/C (Data Processing) Hernandez, who was sitting at the computer, toying with a graph of some kind.
“I’m Linguistics specialty,” Howard said as he shook Peters’s hand. “Translator. I’ll be learning the Grallt language.”
Peters shook his head. “Everybody’s gonna have to do that,” he said. “The way they got it set up, we’re gonna mess with the regular crew,” he explained. “It’s like a restaurant, with waiters and all. You’ll have to know a little bit of the language to eat.”
“Do tell,” Howard murmured. “You guys already learned some of it?” he wanted to know, tone a little accusing.
“Yeah, ‘bout like what I said,” Peters told him. “How to order dinner, say sorry and thank you, that sort of thing. It’s all most of us’ll need. You’ll have plenty of chance to spread yourself.” Howard flushed a bit at that, not too pleased to be so transparent.
The next few hours seemed very long to Todd and Peters. Between them, they described Llapaaloapalla as best they could, trying to convey the size of it and its general air of seediness. They tried hard to describe the untidiness, crudity, and air of dilapidation, but ran into a wall of disbelief. Nobody could imagine that anybody who had to live aboard ship would let it go that way. “Go ahead anyway, Chief,” Todd advised an incredulous Warnocki. “A couple of wire welders, supplies, and some shipfitters’ tools will be worth the trouble.”
Warnocki shook his head. “I’ll do it, but if it turns out to be a waste of time, you’ll hear about it,” he warned. “What’s it made out of? I have to know, or I won’t know what kind of welding supplies to load.”