“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, and 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.”