The Fight for 221 KD
Part 3
“Oi!” he exclaimed, stepping back and raising a hand. “Now, where’d you come from?”
She narrowed her large blue eyes. “Where do you think, spacer? Off that rat-trap. Didn’t you see me? The girl they were lugging around?”
“I couldn’t tell,” he said defensively. “Not with that suit on.” Shouldn’t have untied her. What will that angry sod say to me?
She was his height or a little less, with short-cropped, pixyish yellow hair and a slender, gamine face. She had a straight nose, slightly turned at the tip, perfect cheekbones—except for a bruise—full lips, regular teeth—hard to come by these days; he was the beneficiary himself of refugee camp dentistry. Almost elegant brows—
Then he knew. “Suff. You’re a clone,” he said accusingly, pointing at her.
“Yah, good guess, and you came out of a uterus. What of it?”
“They’re rounding you lot up back home,” he said. “Putting you back to work. Making the new ones without any fight in them.”
“Old news. That’s why I’m out here,” she said. “I’m not going to be anyone’s skivvy again.”
“Didn’t do much good, I guess,” he said, feeling a little pity. “Joining the Provs.”
“Provs wanted to set us free. I’ve still got enough spit to go down kicking if I have to.”
Shouldn’t have untied her …
“Now, I did you a good turn, so don’t do anything violent when Fantomo’s people come back for you.”
She put her hands on her hips. “You’re mental. Do anything violent! Cuts both ways, spacer. Grow up like me, and you’ll see. Violent,” she said bitterly. “Whatcha think is gonna happen to me?”
He put his hand on the door, abashed. “Sorry, miss,” he said. “Listen, I have to report to the Chief Engineer and try to help get their tub put back together. I have to lock you in, but I’ll bring you something from the mess when I can, yah?”
She spread her gloved hands. “All right. I suppose I’ll be here.”
Of course, the lock did not work. He dragged a chair from the unused security station across the corridor. He jammed it under the doorknob, tying the data harness around the knob and the top rung of the chair on the theory it would hold the whole apparatus in place, jamming the legs against the wooden decking and hoping for the best. Not much of anywhere she can go, he thought with as much confidence as he could muster, but it should do the trick.
“Don’t even know her name,” he said as he hurried back to the lift. “Probably just as well,” he muttered morbidly as the cage rattled up, up, up into the low g zone.
In basic, the drill sergeant said knowing a man’s name made it harder to kill him. “No face, no name, no problem,” he said. “Never look in his eyes!”
Ghuidicello leaned against the chilly lift cage. Useless advice. He’d already looked into them, and they were large and blue.
He’d never seen combat. The only time he’d been under fire was at the age of thirteen in their apartment when the Provisional rocket punched through his bedroom wall fifteen seconds after he walked to the icebox for a sip of chilled water, smashing through the wall, through the floor, and detonating two stories down. Turning around in the kitchen to look into the hall as plaster and lathing collapsed, through his broken bedroom at the apartment block across the street, jets screaming overhead, and the empty jelly-jar cup waiting for that sweet, clear, cold water.
His mother screaming at him, his ears ringing.
Every time he got thirsty, he could still taste that drink of water he never got.
Instead, he tasted plaster dust for days.
***
He retrieved his suit from his EVA locker and wheeled it down to the lift. On the docking deck, the chief engineer and five men impatiently waited. “Suff, rock-biter,” the engineer growled. “Gawd, get him suited, someone!”
“Oi, I can do it,” Ghuidicello said.
“Twice as fun with two as one,” a crewman jeered, and they were clapping him into his cuirass and vambraces and pauldrons and greaves and helmet.
“Are you checking those seals?” he complained.
“You better hope we are.”
The pressure cycled up, and the lights turned green. No amber flutter indicating a pressure drop and corresponding upcycle, so they went out. “Never done this,” he confessed to the chief engineer. “So’s you know.”
The faceplate swung his way for a long moment. “What? EVA?” he said dangerously.
“Done that.”
“Thank g—”
“In training.”
The engineer made a simmering sound. “Never done what, then, exactly?”
“EVA repairs. I’m not a machinist. I just do signals and loading.”
“ … Give me strength. All right, great, you’re holding the patch plates and my spare torch. Lose them, and you aren’t coming back ashore. Varge, Elios, crawl this tub for every hole we don’t know about. Korys, Delim, fore holes. Rock-biter, you and me get aft holes. Farnos, you put in the new port instrument pod. Aye?”
“Aye!”
“Rock-biter, tell me, do you have some hidden talent that may help me out?”
“No, Chief,” he said honestly.
“Why’d they leave you here?”
“He had to leave someone.”
“Gawd. Pathetic. Come on.”
The chief engineer berated him in an almost conversational tone for the next seven hours. Ghuidicello held on to his net bag of metaplastoc patch plates and grunted when it seemed appropriate to acknowledge the abuse. They slowly covered the long score across the dorsal side of the Fantomo and three minor strikes that the search crew found while the other patch crew cleared the entry and exit punctures through the bridge that had killed the Number 2 XO.
“It ain’t armor,” the Chief Engineer said, “just like you ain’t a man, but it’ll keep air in and vacuum out, and that’s all I care about. Hump it, you sorry excuse for a toilet trout!”
All the while, Ghuidicello watched the twin refueling arms get anchored in and then felt the vibration as the tanks shivered greedily, nursing on hydrogen and He-3 sucked up the mast from the tank farm.
I think I’d rather keep being useless than sign aboard here, he thought. It’s the kind of tub they’d beat you with a pillowcase full of oranges in the showers.
Who am I kidding? They’d use soap bars. Who’d waste oranges?
Oranges! His mouth suddenly watered. When did I last have an orange? Back home, before basic even, marching down the road, all the conscripts in a line singing some new jingoism. There was an orchard and a burned-out villa. “Fall out and eat! That’s dinner today!” the cornet had yelled, and they all went over the stone wall into the field, stripping fruit off the branches wherever it seemed ripest. He could feel the leaves on his fingers, smell the bitter skin and taste the pulp as he ripped with his teeth to get the flesh, crushing pockets of juice in his mouth until they burst, the pips rolling across his tongue.
There was a grainy, thin yellow fluid in the mess that Supply claimed was orange juice, but he knew better. The rear echelons would got every drop of the real stuff.
“Rock-biter!”
“Yah!”
“You asleep?”
“No, just—what was it?”
“Done here, you berk. You like it so much, you can stay, aye?”
“Coming!”
“Thought so.”
Part 7
Good dialogue. I liked the humorous exchange among the crew.