Taking one last look through the night-for-day lens in my helmet, I located the controls for the rear hatch and opened the kettle. As the thick metal doors slowly rolled apart, revealing a bustling launch bay, I stowed my helmet in the latrine. Armor that had helped me slip past a dozen guards deserved better than a stay in a Mogat shitting booth, but I had no choice.
Teams of mechanics stood around the opened engine compartment of a nearby transport. A pack of commandos entertained several onlookers telling stories about how they had routed “those U.A. bargers,” using their guns as props as they spoke.
None of this could have happened without Philips. If I survived this, I planned to petition for him to be restored to the rank of corporal. I thought I could talk Brocius into approving the request, but I had no idea how to keep Philips from getting himself busted back down to private without retiring him or throwing him in the brig.
Before I could do anything for Philips, there was the little matter of surviving the trip. I thought, just for a moment, of Samson captured and put on display in a Philistine temple. Samson asked God to give him the strength to destroy that temple, committing suicide in the act. Me, I had no desire to go down with these particular Philistines. I would pull a fast exit before I sent in the coordinates. The Unified Authority made a vengeful god indeed.
“You. What are you doing there?” An engineer walking by the base of the transport saw me standing in the darkened kettle.
“Tertiary system back up,” I said, trying to come up with a lie no one would investigate. “The pilot asked me to have a look at it.”
“No, shit,” the man said. I pretended to laugh because the man looked so specking pleased with his pun.
“I wish,” I said. “There’s a mountain of it. Where are the septic removal kits?”
The man grimaced and pointed to a row of doors.
“I know it’s in the supplies, but which door?” I asked. “I mostly just mop and polish.”
“Third door. Have fun,” he said.
“You ever clean up a crapper that overflowed in zero gravity?” I asked. “That’s not my idea of fun.”
The guy grunted a laugh and walked away. If he asked any of the commandos about the toilet, my goose was fried; but I doubted he would.
The storage room turned out to be a gold mine. The septic removal kit came in a twenty-four-inch tin cylinder that could easily hold my helmet. I also found a laundry cart filled with grimy janitorial crew smocks. A guy in a dirty smock carrying a “septic cylinder”—there is no better camouflage.
So I stepped into janitorial rags. The cloth smelled bad and felt wet against my skin. The pile I stole it from was headed for a washing. So much the better. I took a septic kit and headed back to the transport. Locked in the booth-sized latrine, I emptied out the kit—a large cylinder for waste and chemicals for cleaning. I flushed the chemicals down the crapper. Then I loaded my helmet into the cylinder and sealed it. In a real tertiary situation, I would compress the refuse and discharge it into the cylinder. For good measure, I fished some slime from the septic system and smeared it around the top of the cylinder. Both my hand and that cylinder reeked fiercely. When I left the transport, I felt confident that no one would bother me. I looked bad, smelled worse, and had a big slimy septic cylinder in my hands. No one would approach me unless he had a good reason.
By the time I came down the ramp, the last of the Mogat commandos had already left the launch bay. They would go back to their barracks. They would shower and change. Their commanders would give them the remainder of the day to rest as a reward for winning the skirmish. They deserved it. They’d taught Philips’s stiffies a thing or two. They would go off to whatever served as a bar on the ship, get drunk, and tell evermore-exaggerated stories about the deadly firefight they had won.
As for me, I needed information. I needed to know where I was and if I was near the Mogat home base. Knowing how to find the Mogats would be valuable enough. That information alone could turn the tide of the war, if we could reach them. The galaxy was one hundred thousand light-years across. The Unified Authority had eighteen fleets; but without the Broadcast Network, they could only patrol one-one-thousandth of 1 percent of galaxy.
The Mogats, with their self-broadcasting fleet, could go anywhere. Their base could be a single light-year from Earth in any direction, and without some facility to broadcast its ships, the U.A. Navy would never reach it.
On the plus side, I thought that I might have an ally nearby. True, nearly a month had passed since the SEALs and I distracted the Mogats while Illych boarded their transport, but I thought I might find him somewhere lurking around their base. The problem was that I had no idea how to contact him.
Leaving the launch bay I entered a main corridor of the ship. A group of sailors loitered near the door doing, as far as I could tell, absolutely nothing. They might have been off duty, but they were still in uniform and standing in one of the most highly trafficked areas of any ship. It did not surprise me to see that the Mogats ran a relaxed ship. They were, after all, civilians in sailor uniforms. In a real navy, men go to rec rooms and canteens during their off-duty hours. If they are tired they remain in their barracks.
The dawdling oafs paid little attention to me as I walked by. They showed no signs of suspicion. One man sneered at me. He probably resented my dragging a septic cylinder down his clean corridor. On the most part, the only interest I elicited in the men I passed was interest in seeing me leave.
After two excursions on a derelict battleship, I had no trouble finding my way around. I went up three levels and headed toward the bow of the ship. This would take me into an observation deck below the bridge. Once there, I would scout the space around us for stations, ships, and planets. If I did not find anything, I would need to go to the bridge. That might be a problem; I’d stand out like a leper carrying a septic cylinder onto the bridge.
I made my way down the main corridor. People steered clear of me and generally ignored me until I stepped onto an elevator. The door opened and there stood a lieutenant. “Where do you think you are going?”
“Fifth deck, sir,” I said.
“Not with that shit can,” he said. “Take the cargo lift.”
I saluted with my refuse-stained hand. He did not return the salute.
When I found the cargo lift, I decided I liked it better than the elevator. I had the car to myself, for openers; no stuffy lieutenants. The car was an open platform. The only light in the shaft came from floodlights in the ceiling, but I did not need creature comforts.
The lift let me off in a dark service corridor. I did not know how Mogat sailors spent their time, but ship maintenance could not have ranked high on their priority list. A row of work carts lined the wall, ending by a pile of empty pallets.
I thought that I might have a use for this empty corridor. I needed a place to hide my helmet. The area was not secure enough to test the old interLink, but I did take the opportunity to stash the cylinder with my helmet, cylinder can and all, on the floor between the carts and the pallets. Then I went to explore.
I found my way out of that service corridor and meandered in the general direction of the observation deck. It was essentially a rec room. Off-duty sailors came here to drink and talk. I worried that a man in janitor clothes would stand out; but now that I had ditched the smelly cylinder, no one paid attention to me.
The Mogats ran the rec room like a nightclub. It had chrome-and-glass furniture, dim lighting, a bar made of some kind of obsidian glass. Men lounged about, some drinking, some smoking, some doing both. I could not tell if the mix included officers and enlisted men. In a navy as informal as this one, officers and enlisted men might share the same bar.