He glanced over his shoulder, saw Max, and froze. The crews stopped their exercise.
“You just spaced another crewman,” said Max, tilting his head toward a man who’d backed into the wall. “Carry on.”
He turned away without waiting for Kulakov’s salute. He didn’t know why he had such an effect on that man, but now he was thinking he should look into it.
He proceeded through several twisting corridors, designed to slow and confuse boarding parties headed for the bridge, and passed the gym. He needed exercise. The weightlessness was already starting to get to him. But he decided to worry about that later.
He paused when he came to the missile room.
The Black Forest.
That was the crew’s nickname for it. Four polished black columns rose four uninterrupted stories-tubes for nuclear missiles, back when this ship was intended to fight the same kind of dirty war waged by the Adareans. It was the largest open space in the entire ship. When the grav was on, the men exercised by running laps, up one set of stairs, across the catwalk, down the other, around the tubes, and up again.
Max went out onto the catwalk, climbed up on the railing, and jumped.
If one could truly jump in zero-gee, that was. He pushed himself toward the floor and prayed that the grav didn’t come on unexpectedly. On the way down he noticed someone who feared just that possibility making their way up the stairs.
Max did a somersault, extending his legs to change his momentum and direction, pushed off one of the tubes, and bounced over to see who it was. He immediately regretted doing so. It was Sergeant Simco, commander of the combat troops.
Every captain personally commanded a detachment of ground troops. It could be as big as a battalion in some cases, but for this voyage, with an entire crew of only 141, the number was limited to ten. Officially, they were along to repel boarders and provide combat assistance if needed. Unofficially, they were called troubleshooters. If crewmen gave the captain any trouble, it was the troopers’ job to shoot them.
Simco would enjoy doing it too. He had more muscles than brains. But then nobody had that many brains.
“Hello, Sergeant,” Max called.
“Sir, that was nicely done.”
“I didn’t have you pegged for the cautious type.”
Simco shook his head. “I don’t like freefall unless I’ve got a parachute strapped to my back.”
Typical groundhog response. “Are your men ready to board and take that Outback ship, Sergeant?”
“Sir, I could do it all by myself. They’re women.”
They both laughed, Simco snapped a perfect salute, and Max pushed off from the railing. When he landed on the bottom, he saw placards marked “Killshot” hanging on each of the four tubes. That meant they were loaded with live missiles, ready to launch. Something new since the last time he’d passed through the Black Forest. He saw handwriting scrawled across the bottom of the placards, and went up close to read it. A. G. W.
Under the old government, the hastily thrown together Department of War had been called the Ministry of A Just God’s Wrath. Considering the success of the Adareans, the joke had been that the name was a typo and should have been called Adjust God’s Wrath. Some devout crewmen still had the same goal.
On the lower level, Max continued to the aftmost portion of the ship, off limits to all crew except for Engineering and Senior officers. Only one sealed hatch allowed direct entrance to this section. Max found an off-duty electrician’s mate sitting there, watching a pocketvid. The faint sound of someone dying came from the tiny speaker.
Max stopped in front of the crewman. “What are you watching?”
The crewman looked up, startled. DePuy, that was his name. He jumped to his feet and went all the way to the ceiling. He saluted with one hand, while the thumb of the other flicked to the pause button. “It’s A Fire on the Land, sir. It’s about the Adarean nuking of New Nazareth.”
“I’m familiar with it,” Max replied. Political Education approved all videos, practically ran the video business. “The bombing and the vid. Move aside and let me pass.”
“Sorry, sir, the chief engineer said…”
Max turned as cold as deep space. He reached under DePuy to open the hatch. “Move aside, crewman.”
“The chief engineer gave me a direct order, sir!”
“And I am giving you another direct order right now.” Damn it, thought Max, the man still hesitated. “Rejecting an order from your political officer is mutiny, Mr. DePuy. A year is a very long time to spend in the ship’s brig waiting for trial.”
“Sir! A year is a very long time to serve under a chief officer who holds grudges, sir!”
“If I have to repeat my order a third time, you will go to the brig.”
DePuy pushed off from the wall. Though he seemed to seriously consider, for a split second, whether he wouldn’t rather be locked up than face Chevrier’s temper.
Max went down the corridor and paused outside the starboard Battery Room. The hatch stood open on the two-story space. One of the battery arrays was completely disassembled and diagrammed on the wall, with the key processing chips circled in red. A small group of men, most of them stripped to their waists, crowded into the soft-walled clean room in the corner. A large duct ran up from it toward the ceiling, the motor struggling to draw air. A crewman looked up and tapped the chief engineer on the shoulder.
“You!” Chevrier shouted as soon as he saw Max. “This is a restricted area! I want you out of my section right now!”
“Nothing is off limits to me,” Max replied.
“Fuck your mother!” Chevrier thundered, shooting across the room and getting right in Max’s face. Chevrier’s eyes had dark circles around them like storm clouds, and red lines in the whites like tiny bolts of lightning. He probably hadn’t slept since the spongediver was spotted; no doubt he was also pumped up on Nova or its more legal equivalent from the dispensary. That would explain his heavy sweating. It couldn’t drip off him in the weightlessness, but had simply accumulated in a pool about a half inch deep that sloshed freely in the vicinity of his breastbone. Max noticed that the comet insignia was branded on Chevrier’s bare chest. The Revolutionary government had banned that tradition, but the branding irons still floated around some ships in the service. Chevrier was the type who had probably heated it up with a hand welder and branded himself. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the empty spot on Max’s left breast pocket. “You haven’t qualified for a single ship’s system,” he said, “and you sure as hell aren’t reactor qualified. Now get out of my section!”
“You forgetting something, soldier?” Max asked, in as irritating a voice as he could manage.
Chevrier laughed in disbelief. “I wish I could forget! I’ve got a major problem on my hands, a ship with no fucking backup power.”
Max took a deep breath. “Did somebody break your arm, soldier?”
Chevrier’s eyes flickered. He made a sloppy motion with his right hand in the general direction of his head. Had Mallove sent word in the other direction too? Did Chevrier know that Max was supposed to leave him alone?
“Good. Give me a status report on the power situation.”
The chief engineer inhaled deeply. “Screwed up and likely to stay that way. The crewman on duty panicked-he folded the wings and powered down the Casmir drive without disengaging the batteries first and fried half the chips. We are now trying to build new chips, atom by atom, but you need a grade A clean hood to do that. And our hood is about as tight and clean as an old whore.”
Max had heard all this already, less vividly described, from the captain’s reports. “Go on.”
“Normally, we could just switch over to the secondary array, but some blackhole of a genius gutted our portside Battery Room and replaced it with a salvaged groundside nuclear reactor so we can float through Adarean space disguised like background radiation in order to do God knows what.”