The Fight for 221 KD
Part 2
Fantomo-3 limped into dock, displaying more holes than he’d seen, and it was a fretful specialist-5 that surveyed the damage from the vantage of the docking arm. “There is no way,” he said aloud, “that I can fix that. What am I supposed to do, slap sheet metal over those holes, and use adhesive? They’ll depressurize as soon as they start cycling air. Not rated for this, not rated for this.
“We’ve got to try,” he argued and then put his hand to his forehead. “No, shut up,” he said. “Shut up. They’ll think you’re crazy.”
He was just as concerned they’d think him insubordinate and space him, or shoot him down, for all the good it would do them. Caballardo commanders ran hot-blooded.
He checked his hair again and felt his cheeks. He’d shaved. He had to be joking about the cake, he thought. Surely, he wouldn’t be expecting a cake.
The cake wasn’t mentioned, but the commandant was less than pleased.
“A thousand gs crush your skull,” he said as the crew filed off the cargo lift. “What in the lowest circles of hell is with this place? You are the only crew here?”
“The Gepardo walked through here six months ago and walked out with everyone but me.”
The commandant fixed him with a bloodshot eye. “It can’t be because you were the most competent.”
“Fleet command told him he couldn’t strip the base of the entire crew.”
“So he left you,” the angry officer said. “The least competent.”
“Yes, sir, that’s the size of it, sir.”
Commandant Neri turned an alarming shade of purple and, after taking a deep breath of cold station air, expostulated at length on the size of things and where things could go and in which direction, and Ghuidicello stood at attention while Neri itemized the plausible methods he had to rectify the situation, and some less plausible.
He finally wound down, gave a shudder that rattled his armor, and snarled, “Do you have a brig on this pathetic excuse for a rotten noodle-box unfit for cockroaches, you worthless excuse for sanitary paper?”
Ghuidicello knew better than to sigh. “Yes, sir,” he said. And please don’t leave me in it when you put out again, he thought.
“Then stick this in it and get back up here. You’re attached to my Chief Engineer until further notice. We get to clean up this mess, I see.”
Neri turned and seized a crewman by the arm and thrust him forward. Except it was not a crewman, but a prisoner. Ghuidicello released a relieved woof of air he could not hide. He knew Provisional markings well enough and the cerulean blue shoulders of their armored suits. The prisoner had some deep dents in his chest plate and visor assembly, and his arms were lashed together behind him with a two-meter data harness. “Move!’
Ghuidicello had not had jailor on his duty sheet before and hadn’t much idea how to carry on with it, but he took the man by the elbow (wincing at the frigid cold suit on his skin) and gave him a yank. “Come on!” he said, with some urgency: he saw other crewmen in the lift wrangling Caballardo corpses, and he had no desire to add undertaker to his job description.
The prisoner didn’t resist. Reorienting himself and the Provisional in the low g deck, Ghuidicello took the personnel lift down into the habitat ring. The brig was a quarter of the way around and had held nothing but a century’s worth of sanitary paper and a flat of emergency bottled water since before he was stationed there. He pulled open the door and flapped his hand at it. “In you go,” he said. “I guess you can sit down on the sanitary paper.”
The prisoner’s comfort didn’t count for much, he knew, because he would almost certainly be spaced or shot, either when the commander or crew of Fantomo-3 were in a foul enough mood or whenever the patched aviso limped into Odysseus Drydock or the Station around Iphigenia itself. Neither side had handled prisoners well, and as the new government mopped up, sympathizers of the defeated regime were being executed or indentured wholesale.
The prisoner made a muffled remark, turning his back and demonstrating the data harness tied around his elbows.
“You can’t be serious,” Ghuidicello said.
The prisoner said more words behind the visor.
Ghuidicello hesitated. The man would be locked up harmless with a lifetime supply of arsewipe … and what would he want someone to do if the Provisionals had captured him?
He groaned. He’d never heard the phrase ethical dilemma, but he knew one when he saw one. “Suff!” he said. “All right. Hang on.”
He clapped his hands on the man’s shoulder, and the Provisional stopped his twitching. He undid the knot in the cable and stepped back with the harness in hand. The other’s arms sagged, then he shook them, reached up to his helmet, and clumsily forced the collar, pulling it off with a cloud of warm vapor. He turned around.
It was a woman.
Part 7