“Attention on deck!” the Master Chief overrode all the chatter. “Get to your duty stations and stay there, this is the Navy, not a circle jerk! Green Three, what’s your status?”
“Consoles are manned and ready,” Howell replied without looking around. He was right, but only just. Most of the retarder crews, Howell included, were watching the action around the Hornet, but the section leader shook his head like a dog shaking off water and looked back aft. “Nothing on approach, Chief.”
“Keep a sharp watch. This is serious, Howell.”
“Aye, Chief.”
Lieutenant Williams got out of the cockpit under her own power, but the medic hustled her onto a stretcher as soon as her feet hit the deck. The Hornet was looking a little worn. Its entire upper surface was bare of paint, the plastic of the canopy looked misshapen, and the vertical stabilizers were no longer at the correct angle.
“Near miss,” Rupert deduced.
“Near hit,” Jacks corrected, old joke.
Nothing visible happened for what seemed a long while, except that Howell occasionally lowered the binoculars, shook his head, and lifted them back to his eyes. “All right, I think it’s over,” he said at long last, tone bemused. “They’re coming in.”
“Green Three-One, Green One. How many?” the Master Chief wanted to know.
“Counting now, Green One.” Howell raised the binoculars. “… thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. No, wait.” There was a long pause, then the First Class sagged and lowered the glasses. “Green One, this is Green Three. Seventeen, I say again seventeen visible on approach. They all made it!”
“All right, listen up,” the Master Chief growled. The entire enlisted human contingent of Llapaaloapalla, less Chief Gill in the infirmary and Cheives with the duty, stirred and came to attentive positions, conversations cut off as if with a switch. Enlisted quarters had no big rooms, so they’d taken over the mess room, half filling it. Waiters lined the walls, and sailors eyed them from time to time, but no other Grallt were present, it being between meals. “First off, you all know the good news,” Joshua went on. “All our guys got back OK.”
That raised a muted cheer, which Joshua cut short with a lifted hand. “Injuries: Ms. Williams is partially flash blind, the Doc says she’ll recover with time. Mr. Everett and Mr. Hubert have broken arms, and Ms. Kline has a fractured elbow. All of them took radiation, lifetime safe doses in a few cases. In case you hadn’t heard, those were nukes the bad guys were tossing around, but their aim was lousy, and Commander Bolton says nukes are a piss-poor weapon under these conditions. I don’t understand why, but it seems he’s right.”
Another general murmur, cut off the same way. “As for the bad guys,” Joshua continued with a thin smile, “our guys among them claim thirty-one kills.” Standards for what constituted a “combat kill” had been tightened up, so that probably meant fifteen or sixteen hard downs. “Plus they carved a chunk off the carrier with their lasers, so as to give ‘em something to remember ‘em by.” That got a chuckle.
Chief Joshua let the susurrus pass in its own time instead of cutting it off. “All right,” he said finally, straightening to attention and picking out eyes in the group to catch. They quieted and leaned forward slightly, and the Master Chief said in a low carrying voice, “That’s it, sailors. What with upside-down girl friends and beer on tap at the geedunk stand, we’ve all been treating this like a cross between liberty at Mariel and ropeyarn Sunday, and I’m no better than the rest of you, but that. Has. Got. To. Stop.” He punctuated the last five words with sharp raps on the table in front of him, and a hundred and ninety-nine sailors breathed out at once.
“We’re gonna start acting like the U. S. Navy again, and that’s all there is to it. Starting as soon as we can get a roster set, there will be lookouts at the fore and aft bay doors, with binoculars and earbugs, half-ande watches. All hands will be on that roster. That includes me, by the way, so all you twenty-year Firsts can report to the proverbial Ms. Waite to apply for exemptions, you hear me?” Another chuckle.
Joshua sought out a particular eye. “Hernandez, how are you fixed for paper?
“Not bad,” the computer section leader judged. “We haven’t been using much.”
“Good. We’re gonna start publishing the Orders of the Day again. To save paper they’ll only be posted at the fore and aft hatches to the O-1 level quarters, but they will be orders. Section leaders, pass the word to your sections. We’ll muster at our duty stations right after breakfast and do a head count, and all the other Navy bullshit we’ve been slacking on, you got that?
“Last thing: From now on, when the ship’s planning to drop out of high phase we’ll all be in full gear, and as soon as we’re sure we’re down we’ll be manning duty stations. Commander Bolton’s setting up a rota of his own, and we’re gonna be launching a two-plane CAP that’ll be on duty from as soon after we’re down as possible to when we’re sure we’re on orbit and secure.”
That generated grumbles, but the Chief was right. They’d been goofing off, and it was time to be Navy again. Joshua relaxed a little. “Questions?” he offered. Whispers were exchanged, but nobody took him up on it. “Nothing?” he asked, a little amused.
Mannix stood up and glanced around. “Master Chief, I think I speak for most of us when I say that there will undoubtedly be details to take care of, but we can’t efficiently settle them here, so there’s little or no point in trying to hash them out. I do have one question: Who were our guys shooting at? It’d be nice to know.”
A rumble of agreement went through the group, but the Master Chief shook his head and held a hand up. “I don’t know, and neither does the Commander. All any of us knows is that they attacked, they were pretty damned stupid, they had lousy weapons and didn’t know how to use those, and they ain’t here any more.”
“Well, Master Chief, it occurs to me that we’re wasting a resource in that connection,” Mannix opined.
“Hm.” Joshua scanned the group, his eye finally falling on Peters. “Petty Officer Peters, you got any problem with goin’ up and asking about that? Seems to me you’ve got a pretty good relationship going with the ship’s crew.”
“Aye, Master Chief,” Peters responded, his tone resigned. “Dreelig didn’t know nothin’?”
“I get the impression Dreelig isn’t real popular upstairs right now,” the Master Chief told him. “At any rate, if he’s getting the word he ain’t passing it on.”
“I reckon I coulda figgered that out.” Peters’s tone was grimly amused.
“Yes, you should’ve, shouldn’t you? At any rate, soon as we’re done here you go make whatever prep you think you need and shag ass up there.” Joshua gestured in the general direction of the bridge. “See what you can find out.”
“Aye aye, Master Chief.”
“All right.” Joshua glanced over the group. “You’ve got the basics. Chiefs and section leaders in my office as soon as this meeting breaks up. Which is now, as far as I can see.”
“Aye,” was the consensus of the murmurs, and the sailors began getting up and milling around.
“One question more, Master Chief,” came a voice.
“Eh? Oh. What is it, Everett?”
“Before all this happened we were scheduled for liberty,” the weasel-faced First Class offered. “Is that still on?”
The group quieted as the Master Chief considered that. “I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “Peters, another thing for you to get us up to speed on.”
“Aye, Master Chief,” Peters responded with some reluctance.
Joshua gave a short nod. “Let’s get to it, people.”