Captain Wanker viewed it all with dismay and a sense of foreboding, his freckled pug nose twitching. He looked younger than his thirty-eight years; in fact, his face was still boyish, and a still-boyish part of him was thrilled with the prospect of a new command. He had bright blue eyes and a receding chin and practically no beard at all. He was lucky to need a shave once a week. He had always worried about this lack of facial hair.
He considered it a shameful genetic defect.
Speaking of boyish thrills — yes, those forward sensor pods, their apexes stenciled in warning red, did indeed resemble voluptuous breasts. From the distended line of the keel, a huge particle beam accelerator hung like the professional equipment of an old stallion at stud, ready for service. At various places along the hull, orifices gaped and buttocklike features protruded. But the whole effect was more tawdry than erotic.
David Wanker sighed. And now he was captain of this space-going bawdyhouse. The prospect of a new command promptly lost its glamour.
He looked down through the repair bay and saw five hundred kilometers to the surface of the planet below. Epsilon Indi II was a world almost without weather, no clouds to obscure its endless wastelands, which made it the perfect space base. “Ship’s liberty” was meaningless here. There was nothing for an able spaceman to do, aside from having an ersatz sexual encounter in one of the base’s few simsex pods. The wait for the use of these ran to days, sometimes weeks. Otherwise, there was nowhere to go and nothing to do; no joy houses, no flesh pots, no diversions of any kind. No drunken spacemen ear-lye in the morning.
No cheap thrills, barring one’s classification of “mud-humping” as a thrill. He had heard about it. The planet’s surface was peculiar. Near the Space Forces base lay great shallow lakes of mud. Bathing in the mud was, according to scuttlebutt, fun and somewhat medicinal — good for a certain few ailments, especially “space crud,” a form of psoriasis induced by long exposure to dry, recycled air.
There were other mudholes, however, that offered even better recreational opportunities. The mixture in these shallow and completely safe quicksand pits was of such viscosity, texture, and slipperiness as to approximate … to put it bluntly, the mud sucked; hence, if a spaceman was aroused enough and in a sufficiently advanced state of carnal deprivation (there were simply not enough female personnel to go around, and some of them were — well, never mind), why, he could, trouserless, prostrate himself and let nature take its course.
Not that David Wanker would ever stoop to such a base practice. That was for your common swab. David Wanker was an officer and a gentleman. He had just spent three weeks down there and hadn’t gone near the simsex pods, much less the mudholes.
Again he took in the ugliness of the Repulse. Its hull bore the scars of micrometeorite impacts and the constant abrasion of the interstellar gas and dust that any starship encounters as it streaks through space at trans-relativistic speeds. The composite material of the hull was scratched and pitted. The repair crew was busy sanding down the worst of it but the task was endless and hopeless. A special detail was hard at work on the prow of the ship, repairing damage done in a recent mishap: a collision with a tanker. Unfortunately, mishaps were not unusual for the Repulse.
Wanker turned away from the wide view window and almost bumped into a burly chief warrant officer in a stained work jumper.
The warrant officer, some years Wanker’s senior, saluted casually and said, “Pardon me, sir. Can I help you?”
Wanker returned a crisp salute. Then his narrow shoulders slumped forlornly. “Only the Creator of All Things in Her infinite mercy can help me now.”
The chief squinted one pale eye. “Sir?”
“I’m the new captain of that”—Wanker gestured vaguely out the window—”sorry-looking tub.”
Understanding dawned, and the chief nodded commiseration. “Best of luck to you, sir. She’s a jinx, that one is. Never saw a ship that had so many strange things happen to her.”
“Oh, like what?”
The chief scratched his graying head. “Well, sir, for instance, take the last time she was in here for repairs. Total life-support systems failure. But it wasn’t just your garden-variety failure. Somehow — sir, don’t ask me how — the ship’s waste containment system got hooked up with the air circulation network. Some chowderhead connected two pipes that shouldn’t have been connected, and liquefied biomass got into the nitrogen/helium compressors.”
Wanker was appalled. “Good gracious.”
“That wasn’t the worst of it, sir. The compressors kept working and pumped atomized sludge into the air blowers. You wouldn’t have believed the mess when the biomass hit the rotoimpellers.”
Wanker’s gray-green eyes widened in alarm. “No!”
“Yes! Sir. Sludge blowing out every vent in the vessel. Everyone got a brown shower.”
Wanker looked suddenly queasy. “The very thought… ”
The chief shook his graying head. “It wasn’t a pretty sight, sir, that I can tell you.”
“Nor a pretty smell, I’ll wager!”
“No, sir. And then there was the time she collided with Admiral Dickover’s flagship in a docking maneuver.”
“I remember that. Dickover was fit to be tied.”
The chief nodded. “Took months to repair both ships. Then there was the time the engineering crew pulled all the control dampers out of the main dark-matter reactor.”
Wanker was stunned. “Why did they do that?”
“It stalled and they thought they could Chernobyl it.”
“But that’s dangerous!”
“Er, yes, sir. It is.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, the reactor went hypercritical and they had to do an explosive decouple and drop the whole reactor pod. Only trouble was, at the time they were in an unstable orbit over an inhabited planet.”
“You’re joking!”
“Wish I was, sir. The pod entered the atmosphere as the reactor was undergoing a hypercritical blowout.” Again the chief shook his head in infinite regret. “It was a mess below.”
“I should say so, all that radioactive debris scattered everywhere. What happened?”
“Well, sir, fortunately the reactor impacted in an area of relatively low population density. They managed to evacuate … and, well, sir, the upshot was that they had to write off a small continent. Could have been worse.”
“Dear heavens. Why didn’t I hear about this?”
“Hushed up, sir. I got the story from an ensign on the investigating team. Also, I supervised the installation of the new reactor. Sir, there wasn’t an old reactor to take out. Don’t blame you if you don’t believe, me, captain.”
“I’ll take your word for it, chief.”
“And then there was the time—”
Wanker held up a hand. “Chief, wait, please. I’m nervous enough as it is. Thanks for your help.”
“Sorry, sir. By the way, sir, may I ask where your authorization pass is?”
Wanker looked down the front of his threadbare uniform. The plastic badge he had pinned on at the checkpoint was missing. He was about to hazard an explanation when he looked up and found a mug shot of himself dangling in front of his face. The picture was on his authorization badge.
“Looking for this, Captain Wanker?” The chief’s eyes twinkled.
“That’s Vahn-ker.”
“Beg your pardon, sir?”