Three months later.
Sagan Shipyards, Lunar Lagrange, 384,403 kilometers from Staten Island
The blank-faced recruits clogging the tube in front of Tig and Parker wore cheap, animated street clothes. He could see these cuffies were fresh off the boat. They'd wandered into the Staas Technical Training Station and stopped right in the middle of a three way ITC junction, lost and gawking like it was their first time off-world.
Tig said, "You think we should tell them where to go? Raw recruits reporting for greasing go straight to 9c for delouse."
"Let ‘em figure it out," Parker said. "When we got here, some graduating AMTS sent us to the waste reclamation modules."
Three months ago, Tig and Parker had been reporting for training just like that lot. Parker had signed up with a Privateer recruiter right out of school. For Tig it had been a simple choice between signing on with the Staas Company Privateers or going to jail for a long, long time. They tested him and told him he’d get to work on spaceships if he joined up as a redsuit. Three months later, Tig was a crewman graduate of the TTS, Staas Company’s Technical Training Station, basic training for an astronautics maintenance technical specialist, an AMTS m-13-05, a redsuit.
Tig carried his helmet under his arm as he and Parker made for the launch pads in red exosuits so new, the intensity of the cherry color almost hurt the eyes. "Still wish they gave us cool names like the pilots get."
She smiled and imitated their DI for the last three months. "Redsuits don’t get cute names. Redsuits don’t get no glory. Redsuits get shit done!"
"Make a hole, cherry." A senior weapons maintenance specialist in a charred, blood-red exosuit shoved Tig aside with his forearm and continued down the hallway. That red had two meters of clearance on either side. He just wanted to hassle cherries.
"Hey! Thank you!"
"Stifle it, cherry!" the lug shouted without looking back.
Even after becoming a full-fledged redsuit, AMTS 3rd class, he and Parker were still stuck being called ‘cherries’ and getting shoved out of the way by veterans. "I still hate it when they do that."
Parker shook her head. "You never learned to work within the SOP, Tig," She said, "Standard operating procedure says 'shit rolls downhill'."
"What the hell does that even mean?"
"This," she said, eying another group of fresh-off-the-boat pre-cherries just a few meters down the passageway. Seconds later, Parker said, "Make a hole," as she walked through them and nearly knocked one of them over.
"Hey! What the hell was that for?" the preemie shouted after Tig and Parker had passed.
Parker stopped and Tig stopped, and she smiled before she turned around. She was on him in two steps. Her gloved index finger extended and stabbed into the recruit’s chest. He was all dressed up in cheap animated fabric like he belonged in a nightclub. "Let’s get one thing straight before you get hurt." Her other hand gestured between herself and Tig, "Him and me? We are redsuits. But you..." She stared each of them down in half a second like a Training Chief out to break them. "You are nothing," she said. "No. You are less than nothing because you’re a preemie. When you see a real redsuit coming, then you get the fuck out of the way. Three months from now, if you can hack it, then you’ll be an AMTS like me wearing a red exosuit like me and you can shove some preemie newb like you out of the way. But. Until then, when you see us coming…" She punctuated each of the following words with a finger stab to the preemie’s chest as he winced. "Make…a…hole."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Did you say "ma'am"? Are you a UN swabbie? We don't say "sir" and "ma'am" in the Staas Privateers." If he'd had a helmet on, she would have cuffed it.
Down the passageway, after they took the next turn on the way to the O-sec B launchpads, Parker almost doubled over laughing. She said, "See, Tig? Let it roll downhill. Now, don’t you feel better?"
He laughed just because he was disappointed how he actually did. He hoped it wasn’t going to be like that on Hardway, because as cherries aboard an attack carrier, they’d be the lowest form of life among the ship’s salty reds.
Not many cherries got assigned to Hardway. Tig and Parker pulled the assignment everyone had wanted: SCS Hardway, the most famous ship of the war, the ship that fought the Squidies first, the ship that had served up more death and destruction to the alien aggressors than any other in any fleet.
The carrier had been holding station off the far side of Sagan for three hours, but he still hadn’t managed to get a good look at her with his own eyes yet. The space station was as big as a medium-sized city and it didn’t matter if that carrier was a kilometer-long or not, unless you were on the right side of the station, the view was perpetually blocked by the towers, like a pair of broad, skyscraper-filled, city skylines above and below the space station’s equatorial frame.
A few redsuits and a senior chief waited at the pads along with the six other cherries Hardway was picking up from Sagan, but Tig didn’t even notice them. He finally had a clear view of the attack carrier and now, all the other people in exosuits waiting for transport were just reflections in the diamond-pane glass distracting him from the view of his new ship.
Even from a distance he could see how some sections of the carrier didn’t reflect as much light. The armored hull there was charred and pitted from endless hours of high-speed particle bombardment. Some sections were shinier. They looked almost new. Those were sections that had been damaged so badly they’d simply been removed and replaced. After the routing the UN fleet took the first day of the war, Privateer carriers like this one were the only thing holding the Squidies back.
Railgun batteries bristled on Hardway’s bow and from midships towers, but it was the launch bays that caught Tig’s eye first. Each of the two launch bay modules presented six, 70-meter bays on four sides for a total of 48 bays. From so far away, the open bays looked like tiny lit windows and the 50-meter junks inside were specks. All he could see of the F-151 Bitzers, the fighters patrolling around the ship in echelon, were their streaking, pale blue engine flares.
The carrier’s command tower had been set behind the primary bays and it rose hundreds of meters above and below her spine. Tig had stared at the limited deck-plans he could find on the TTS server for hours. Behind the ship’s command tower was another hab module, a medical module, and engineering, where the armor was the thickest. The five reactors housed there were protected by meters of it. Hardway’s five hearts had to be huge to power all her systems including the Novalifter engines. They were probably powerful enough to tow Sagan Station if you could rig up the lines and yoke the attack carrier like a tug.
"AMTS, Tig Meester," Parker said, "I do believe you’ve got a hardon for that ship." Parker’s reflection laughed in the diamond-pane window.
It wasn't just the ship. He just couldn’t believe how much of a difference a few months could make in his life. Three months ago he’d been breaking into the spaceport's storage units and stripping stolen intercontinental hoppers for parts to resell. Now, they were going to let him work on Hardway. Tig knew he possessed a rare talent with machines, but in his short life, things had gone the right direction for him so infrequently that he almost couldn't recognize it when it was happening. But not this time. This time, he knew he was going to the right place. Hardway could use his talent, he thought. The way the war was going, they needed all the help they could get.
Parker said, "You hear about Horcheese?"
"What the hell is a Horcheese?"
"Not what; whom," Parker said, and he winced a little. She and her expensive education were always correcting him. "Our new Operations Chief is Horcheese and Chief Horcheese is legendary."
"Yeah?"
"Hell, yeah. Lives for the job. Turned down free regrows and got herself four artificial limbs just so she could portage a mining junk with one hand and crush armored Squidies with the other."
He said, "No shit," and she confirmed the story was true.
"No shit. That's how hard the Ops Chief is. And she just loves taking cherries on a cruise."
Tig was paying attention to all the flight activity in Hardway’s bays. He missed the sarcasm. "Really?"
"No, Tig. No. She hates dumbass cherries. Prepare yourself for ungreased reaming. That’s what Devon said." She thumbed over her shoulder at him.
"Dev throws scuttlebutt," Tig said, "but he never really knows spit."
"I heard that," Devon said. He leaned out from the huddle of cherry-red exosuits a few meters away. They were looking at the carrier, too. "I don’t know how you got this assignment, Tig."
"I don’t know how that carrier survived this long without me."
"See," Devon said. "That’s why nobody likes you, Tig."
"Parker likes me."
"Nope. Sorry, Tig," she said. "I just got partnered up with you on the first day and I hate quitting things. I can’t stand you either."
The longboat came in hot. Over the pads, it rotated its nacelles and blasted, but still set down three-times faster than any regulation landing. It practically slid sideways into the airlock docking ring. The shock absorbers took the hit, giving over a meter with the impact.
"Pilots don’t fly like that around here much," she said.
"Must be Hardway pilots."
Once they got through the locks and stepped into the narrow transport, Tig glanced forward to get a gander at who was driving. All he saw were the shoulders of their Staas Company blue exosuits and the backs of their helmets.
Parker sat next to Tig in the second row of seats. The other six cherries bound for Hardway sat behind them. The senior reds, the Chiefs on-board, took the front row, talking amongst themselves in low tones. He couldn’t hear them, but from where he sat, he had a good view of the brunette.
She got on just before the longboat launched, wearing street clothes that set off her hips...a tight-fitting top, something plain and long-sleeved made of real wool, maybe...thick, but revealing. She carried her exosuit in a bag over her shoulder, helmet and all, like it was a dead body. The way she shifted her weight made him hear the music from the strip clubs back on Staten Island, or the bass, at least.
Measured toe to crown, she wasn’t over two meters, but if you cut a piece of line and ran it up over the curvier parts of her body, then stretched it out, that line would have been three meters, probably more. She didn’t take a seat or strap in. She leaned her exosuit up against the bulkhead and stood behind the pilots with her hands on their seat backs. That should have been his first clue. That, and her eyes. They were milky like some kind of synthetic opal, clearly artificial, and not trying to look like anything else.
Parker said, "You going to tip the lady or just stare at her?"
"She definitely gets the tip."
"Check it out," Parker said. "I got our longboat's comms with Sagan. The tower is taking it personal." She held her helmet in her lap and even without putting it on, he could hear the voices.
"Hardway longboat zero-six, you violated five station protocols."
"Uh…copy?"
"I’ve got your number from your IFF and I’m reporting you for that landing. And the flyby. And the near miss. You’ll get 6 points on your CPL for this." She meant his commercial pilot’s license. Tig couldn’t hear any actual laughing on comms, but up in the front of the longboat, both pilot’s shoulders hunched repeatedly like they were either laughing or crying. The brunette thought it was funny.
"Sagan Tower, Hardway longboat zero-six copies that loud and clear. Anything else before we skip this floating hunk of rear echelon junk and go back to fighting the war?"
"You have priority clearance for ascent and return vectors."
"Roger that and thank you, Sagan. Have a nice, safe day."
The Hardway pilots made sure that their takeoff was as exciting as their landing, but since little boats like that longboat didn’t have powerful inertial negation systems, the acceleration gees pushed Tig into the seat hard.
The brunette didn’t fall in the inertial gees. She held on to the straps until the boat was clear of the station’s artificial gravity and then floated in zero-gee next to her wrapped-up suit.
After the pilots pulled the boat up and over and over again, Pardue elbowed him. "Look." She nodded out the porthole. "Breaching ships."
The wagon-wheel hulls of the interstellar breaching ships held station together five Ks off the docks.
"Never seen five of them together like that," he said. "You only need one to breach space." He knew Hardway would ship out soon with one of them, maybe two, but what were the others doing here? Those ships were so valuable that when they weren’t going somewhere, they stayed under heavy guard in Earth orbit. Hardway was the only ship scheduled to depart. What the hell did the carrier need five breaching ships for? He thought she was only stopping at Sagan as a matter of routine to pick up supplies and ordnance and personnel like Tig and Parker and the others, replacements for broken machines and dead crewmen.
The longboat turned to fly out past the shipyards and put Hardway directly ahead. He watched it grow larger in the pilots’ canopy. Closer now, he could make out not only the F-151 exo-atmospheric fighters and a few QF-111 Dingoes in the open bays along with the mining junks, but also tiny figures there, smaller than ants, so small he couldn’t give them a color, but he knew they were redsuits. So were the drivers of the knuckledragger mechs puffing around the ship, spot welding and hosting teams working the exterior of the kilometer-long carrier. Those were redsuits, too.
"Isn’t that?"
"Holy hell," Tig said when he saw them. Their arrival hadn’t been on any schedule and the reach of Sagan’s towers had blocked them from Tig and Parker’s view until the longboat got a few Ks out, but Hardway wasn’t the only carrier at Sagan today. Her sister ships, the attack carriers Araby and Pont Neuf had arrived sometime in the last half hour and now held station off the starboard bow.
"If you like that, you’re going to love this." Her finger stabbed the porthole as the longboat turned for Hardway and when he looked, he saw an armored mountain hanging against the starry black. Crowded railguns rose off her steep sides like copses of trees densely packed around the launch tubes. It was the most massive ship he'd ever laid eyes on.
"UNS Tamerlane." It was the last ship he expected to see. Past a cluster of accompanying, 500m cruisers, the newest capital ship of the UN fleet steamed a few Ks back, dwarfing every gunboat holding station in sight of her.
"UNS Bull Run... UNS Highland…" Devon said two rows back, "I can’t see the others well enough to say."
"Who the hell cares about the UNS gun-buckets. Look at that beast." Tamerlane was 600 meters across 500 deep and 900 meters long. "That armor is five meters thick. She can actually fire all those railguns at once. Must have a hell of a reactor cluster."
"The cruisers have 3-stacks."
Tig said, "You would know about piss-ass UN cruiser specs, Devon. I bet you secretly wanted to join the UN Navy swabbies and wear a sailor outfit instead of an exosuit."
The brunette up in the front of the longboat heard that and she laughed. It wasn’t loud, but he glanced her way before it was over and saw her floating breasts shake with humor.
Hardway was beginning to fill the canopy in front of the pilots and Tig decided time was running out. "Excuse me," he said to Parker as he unstrapped, pushed off the seat, and made controlled contact with the bulkhead over him.
"Tig. No. Come back," she whispered, but he’d already pushed off. He flew over the Chiefs in front of him and managed to catch a rung near the brunette with one hand and stop himself like a pro.
"I'm Tig Meester."
She looked him up and down. "And you’re going to Hardway." It wasn’t a question.
"Yeah. So are you." He leaned in and held the eye contact. Tig was feeling pretty good about himself today. Why shouldn’t she feel the same way? He raised his eyebrows just a little after he asked himself that question. The girls back in Freshkills would always get the idea when he did that.
She must have got the idea just like they had because she looked at Tig in what he took for wide-eyed amusement. That must be a bite on the line, he thought. Sort of. Probably just surprised because she’s a few years older and this doesn’t happen as often. She suddenly scowled, and Tig decided that was encouragement to sell himself harder. "I’m a redsuit now, but I’ve always had the touch. I can fix anything. I’ve got magic hands." He smiled.
The brunette actually looked like she felt sorry for him for a second. "No." That was all she said, and she shook her head slowly when she said it, leaving no room for error just in case he was deaf and couldn’t read the word on her lips.
Tig tried hard not to glance back into all the sets of eyes looking his way when he pushed off and made for the second row and his empty seat next to Parker. The Chiefs in the front row didn’t eyeball him, but they shook their heads as he flew over.
"Longboat 3-2, this is Hardway AT, be advised the Bay 17 LB docking ring is still fully jaxed and non-op. If you ain’t got a suit and helmet, then you’re out of luck for a few minutes until we can clear another bay for you. You want to wait?"
"Negative, AT. This flight is all redsuits. We live in full gear and helmets. We’ll be fine without a docking ring."
The brunette set her fists on her hips and aimed herself at the Chiefs in front of Tig and Parker. She spoke to them like they were cherries. "Is Chief Bradley yours?" One nodded. "Why the hell hasn't he fixed that docking ring yet? That’s his bay. He begged me for it. Now, he’s got it and it’s falling apart."
The most charred redsuit Chief up front said, "I’ll find out." Then he put his helmet on and he must have got on comms because Tig couldn’t hear him, but he could see his jaw moving inside that helmet and that Chief was chewing someone’s ass.
Tig already had creeping suspicions about who the brunette was, but when she freed the exosuit she’d carried onto the longboat from its bag, the first thing he noticed was that it wasn’t new. It was a deep, dirty red.
One of the Chiefs asked her, "You have enough time at Sagan for ‘em to tweak your suit like you wanted?"
"Yup."
Tig got a look at the hash marks and patches on that suit and cringed. The rank insignia said she was a Senior Chief. That was enough to put the pucker in him. But when she began to strip off her street clothes to put on her liner and suit, he got another surprise. After he’d been gawking at her ass for a few seconds, he realized the skin below it, on her thighs, looked different. The color didn’t quite match what he saw of her buttocks. The texture on her legs was smoother, but it was too perfect somehow. He knew why right away. Her legs were artificial. Her arms were artificial, too. There was more under the surface. The way the overhead light hit her, whatever new parts were under the skin there like a second ribcage drew a shadow across her back and shoulders, from one to the other, connecting them. She probably had a second spine connected to reinforced hips, too. She’d need it to support all the power in those limbs.
Parker said to Tig, "Since your mouth is hanging open and you’re all pale and sweaty, I’m going to assume you now fully understand who’s leg you just humped." This was the Chief Parker told him about - the one that loved cherries.
The brunette didn’t announce her name until once they’d landed and were in the airlocks, cycling through. "I’m Chief Horcheese," she said. "You call me Chief or you call me Horcheese." Once they’d passed through the lock from the bays and taken off their helmets again, she stomped her foot three times on the belt-iron steel deck hard so it rang. She said, "Welcome aboard the attack carrier Hardway. 96 fighters, 36 junks, and a small pack of good ‘ol QF-111 Dingoes make up the air wing. We keep ‘em all fueled, loaded with ordnance, and running smooth along with this entire ship. The greensuit, glow-pecker, reactor tenders stay aft, locked up in a section called engineering, but the redsuits are the real engineers on any ship. If it breaks, a redsuit fixes it, usually while it’s still on fire."
"Cherry, cherry, cher-RI!" Whoever said it behind them said it like a farm hand calling a hog.
"Just look at ‘em… Fresh for the roastin’." As they passed with their flight helmets under their arms, Tig saw it was a pair of Bitzer interceptor pilots.
Horcheese ignored them so he did, too. "Hardway is Harry Cozen’s ship. Chief Lee is the Master Chief and the red in charge. But I’m Operations Chief. I’m the red in charge of getting shit done, from damage control to ordnance loading, to making sure the hatches on the 151s don’t squeak and upset our primadonna pilots. That’s what I do. But you... You are cherries. Your job, for today, is to get squared, watch closely, and stay the fuck out of the way."
The red that stepped next to her just then stretched his suit some around the belly. Close-cropped gray hair fringed his round face. His pink mug popped out the top of his exosuit like it was being squeezed out. "Don’t let Chief Piatrow’s proportions fool you," she said. "He can’t fit inside the six-way junction port of a Bitzer anymore, but in zero-gee, he’s a dangerous bastard. Follow his orders."
"Listen up, cherries. You're on a Staas Privateer," he said. "You don’t have to call anyone Sir or Ma’am like you would in someone's Navy. But. If you don’t follow orders, then I will put you out the airlock, proceed to the midships mess without a second thought, and fully enjoy eating a plate of burger-filled buns for lunch. Are we clear?"