"No, Sir, thank you, Sir," Sean replied, wondering if the clear liquid was anything other than water. Then the smell hit him.
"Chief Warrant Officer Robert Kearns," the warrant continued, putting the bladder away. "I'm the physician's assistant on this tub. You may call me Doc."
"Yes, Sir," Sean said.
"Did you get stowed away? Got a locker, bunk, all that stuff?"
"Yes, Sir. The Bosun met us and assigned us quarters."
"Good, good," the warrant replied. "Where'd they ship you in from? You're Manticoran, right?"
"Yes, Sir," Tyler said.
"Wanted to come slum with the religious nuts?"
"No, Sir," the SBA replied. "I had applied for a transfer to the Grayson service nearly a year ago. It's considered a good move promotion-wise, working with other Alliance forces."
"Uh, huh," the warrant said. "So, you're telling me you volunteered for the Francis Mueller?"
"Well, I volunteered for Grayson service and there was a priority opening on the Mueller, Sir, so here I am." He looked around, then decided to take a chance. "I made a serious mistake, didn't I?"
"Yup," the medic replied, taking a pull off of his reinforced tea. "You ever have to trank anybody on your previous ship?"
"Once," Tyler replied. "Is that... a particular problem?"
"We get about one trank call a week," the warrant admitted. "Sometimes more on bad weeks. What we do then is put 'em in a jacket and tie 'em to their bunk. When they come around we try to decide if it was temporary or permanent. If they talk nice, we let 'em out. If they don't, we leave them in confinement until we can get a transship to a safe ground area."
"One a week?" Sean gasped. In his six months on the Victory there had been a total of four people who had succumbed to "situational stress disorder" or "the bug" as most people called it. "And you've still got a crew at all?"
"We've got guys on this ship, I swear, are addicted to trank. Kopp, he's a missile tech, he's been tranked about six times. Cooper in Engineering, it's about once a month, like clockwork. Heck, the reason you were a priority replacement is that the other two SBAs were both medical evacs. If the timing had been different you would have met your predecessor on the way over; we transshipped him to the Victory."
"Weird," Sean said. "Any particular reason?"
"Oh," the warrant said with a slight catch in his voice, "I think you'll come to a few conclusions over time."
"Now hear this! Now hear this! Morning prayers! All hands not on watch, uncover for morning prayers!"
Sean hadn't had a chance to meet any of his fellow compartment sharers last night; they were all on second watch and had racked out by the time he entered the compartment. Now, as the lights came up and the other three stood up and clasped their hands, he wondered what to do.
Being a Manticoran, he was not a member of the Church of Humanity Unchained, so he was under no obligation to join in the morning prayers. But getting up and getting ready for the day wasn't exactly a good idea, either. So he figured he'd just bow his head and sit through it. How long could it take?
"Tester," a nasally voice said over the enunciator, "spare us this day from your Tests.
"Please, Tester, don't let any of the airlocks blow out. Let the environmental system, old as it is, shudder though another day of labor. Please, Tester, let the water recyclers make it through a few more days, even though Engineering says they're just about shot. Tester, please see fit to keep Fusion Two from terminally overloading and blowing us all into Your arms; we love you but we want to see our families again some day.
"Please, Tester, if you could maybe see clear to keeping the compensator on-line? If we don't have the compensator, we can't make our acceleration back home, and we'll drift in space, a derelict, until the systems begin to fail and the power runs out and the air gets foul and we all start eating each other..."
It continued in the same vein for a good fifteen minutes as the quavering voice slowly worked its way through every imaginable disaster scenario.
Spaceships were, inherently, disasters waiting to happen. It was one of the main reasons that "the bug" was a problem; any reasonably intelligent individual dealt with a certain amount of "apprehension," as it was politely termed, as soon as he was out of the atmosphere. Vacuum is very unforgiving stuff and even the most advanced technologies could not make space truly safe.
But most people were polite enough not to mention that in public. Much less broadcast it, in detail, over the enunciator.
He began to see why people tended to flip out on the Francis Mueller. And he wondered, as he was getting dressed in the crowded but mostly silent compartment, how much worse it could get.
"What do you mean we're lost?"
Warrant Officer Kearns had just brought Tyler to the bridge to meet the captain. The first words out of his new commander's mouth were not ones to settle Sean's... apprehension.
Captain Zemet was incredibly handsome, with high cheekbones, an aquiline nose and a chin that you could use to crack walnuts. He probably could have been a holovid star with one exception; he was short, even by Grayson standards. On Manticore the word "dwarf" might have been used. He was looking up at the not much taller lieutenant with an expression of absolute perplexity on his face.
"We're not lost, Sir," the lieutenant standing braced in front of the captain replied. "We just appear to be... off course."
"Do you know why?" the captain asked.
"Not yet, Sir," the lieutenant said. "We appear to have suffered a change in course due to a... gravitational anomaly."
"Gravitational anomaly?" the captain replied.
"Yes, Sir," the sweating lieutenant replied.
"We're lost." The speaker was a tall man by Grayson standards, with a pale complexion and a thin, ascetic face. He was dressed entirely in black. Either Death had decided to visit the Francis Mueller, a possibility that had some validity all things considered, or Sean was in the presence of the ship's chaplain.
"We're lost, wandering helpless in the depths of space!" the chaplain said. It was the same reedy voice from morning prayers.
"We're not lost, Chaplain Olds," the captain said. "We simply have to make a course correction. How much of a course correction?" he asked the astrogator.
"We're still computing that, Sir," the lieutenant replied. "But we're at least a hundred and twenty thousand kilometers off base course."
"Good Tester," the captain swore. "It occurs to me that we made a close pass by Blackbird Six. You did figure that into your equations, didn't you, Astro?"
"Err," the lieutenant hesitated. "Let me check my notes."
"You didn't, did you?" the captain said. "It suddenly occurs to me that if you didn't figure it into your calculations, you probably also didn't consider that it was out there, did you? It crosses my mind that you didn't mention that we were doing a close pass until Tactical picked up the moon on lidar at under sixty-three thousand kilometers. I remember thinking that was cutting it a bit close, all things considered."
"I'm... not sure, Sir," the lieutenant said.
"Sweet Tester!" the chaplain exclaimed. "In my wildest nightmares, I never considered that we could slam unthinking into a celestial body! The ship would be strewn across its surface! Unless we noticed in time and sent out a distress call, we would be lost for all time! No one would ever find the wreckage! We would die, lost and alone, our bodies and souls left to drift helplessly in the depths of space!"