Rich Man's War (6 page)

“Don’t be. I’m sad, sure, but I’m also grateful.” His holocom beeped. “I’ve gotta get back to my post.”

“Yeah. I’ve got work to do, too.” The soft kiss she placed on his lips lingered, but she didn’t risk any real passion. It wouldn’t have helped. Andrea turned from him then, returning to her seat. She heard the door open, and looked up to watch him leave.

He paused at her door. “You have any plans for what to do with your life when this guy isn’t president anymore?”
he grinned.

“Tanner, don’t,” she shook her head. “It’s not fair to either of us.”

He let it drop, nodded, and walked away.

Andrea’s
assistant poked her head through the doorway. “That went okay, then?”

“Yeah,” Andrea sighed. “Yeah, he knew the score. Just… two adults having some laughs,” she muttered. “Took it like a man.” Her eyes fell to her desk. “I need something to do other than reading. What have we got?”

Tanner held his neutral expression until he was out of the public relations department. He found a bathroom, slipped inside and locked the door.

He only needed a moment.
The tears didn’t stain his uniform. The redness in his eyes quickly faded. Other men might not have even needed that much, but this was new territory for him. The short time he’d had with Andrea left him with a long way to fall. Nor was it any easier to face after his coffee break.

He couldn’t expect anything to last while he was in the military. He couldn’t put down roots. People would come and go. His life would be like this for the next few years. He had to accept that and push on. Someday, when his enlistment was up, he’d be able to choose his own directions. For now, all he could decide for himself was how to face whatever turns came.

Tanner checked himself in the mirror, took the sort of long, deep breaths he’d been taught in basic to settle his nerves, and walked back out into the world.

All Things Change

“We can absolutely afford a state-funded twelve-year educational system,” said presidential spokeswoman Andrea Bennet. “Marketing aside, the Big Three derive the illusion of indispensability from their size and scope, not their uniqueness. There’s nothing they do that smaller organizations—including other corporations—can’t do themselves.”

--“War of Words Escalates,” The Solar
Herald, April 2276

“All hands, secure from take-off,” said the voice over the PA. The message went through everyone’s helmets via the shipboard comm network, too, creating an odd sort of echo. “Repeat, secure from take-off. All hands to the cargo bay for briefing.”

The announcement required little of Tanner, though it did allow him and his fellow deckhands to pull off their helmets. They were already
straightening up
Joan of Arc’s
cargo bay as the corvette took off. He’d arrived late that night and found the crew both tired and busy. Yet despite some signs of stress and a full workload, everyone he encountered welcomed him aboard with handshakes, smiles and some friendly banter—the exact opposite of his first arrival on
St. Jude
.

The rapid pace of arrival and takeoff didn’t surprise him, given the urgency of his orders to report aboard at Fort Stalwart. Beyond that, though, Tanner found one sign after another that this would be a decidedly different experience from
St. Jude
.

“See?” said one of the other deckhands. “Told you we’d get a rundown of what’s going on soon as we got underway.”

Tanner looked around at the clean cargo bay and its neatly-stowed supplies and shook his head. “It’s not that I didn’t believe you. It’s just not what I’m used to. Is this gonna be an organized thing? Formation by department and all that?”

“Nah, man. Just everyone standing around while the captain or the XO explains what’s going on.” Crewman Apprentice Sanjay Bhatia was good-looking and fit, a little taller than Tanner and about the same age. He’d only been on the ship for five months, not yet long enough to qualify for the rank step up to Crewman. It appeared the crew respected him well enough.
No one seemed to treat Sanjay as “the boot.” “Why would that be formal?”

Tanner shook his head. “
St. Jude’s
captain used to call us all to attention at chow and lead everyone in a prayer.”

“You’re shitting me. Everyone went along with that?”

Tanner realized he didn’t want to say too much on the subject. He always felt the weight of the dead whenever the subject came up. That said, some of his old ship’s idiosyncrasies weren’t exactly a secret. “Didn’t seem like something a non-rate was supposed to bring up, y’know?”

“Shit, I’d have said something
. I might’ve said a lot. Anyway, no, nobody’s calls ‘attention on deck’ when the captain walks in. You only need to salute her and the XO the first time you see ‘em on a given day. Nobody plays ‘reveille’ on the speakers in the morning. The captain wants people to handle actual procedures like watch standing by the book, but all the extra etiquette stuff just gets in the way.”

“Something’s wrong if Sanjay’s giving lessons on etiquette,” said the ship’s XO. Junior Lieutenant Booker strode into the cargo bay in the company of several other men and a couple of women in gr
ey Navy vac suits. Though Booker, like Sanjay, appeared to be a relatively new member of the crew, Tanner appreciated the lieutenant’s confidence. “We figured the only reason they’d loan us someone from the honor guard was to teach Sanjay some table manners.”

Sanjay threw Tanner an annoyed look and shook his head. “You bite a guy one fuckin’ time…” he grumbled.

The rest of the crew filed in, most of them similarly in good cheer. Tanner kept quiet and observed, but he had to wonder how different his life would be if he’d been sent to a ship like this one out of basic rather than
St. Jude
.

Eleven men and women in total took up spots to stand or sit in the cargo bay along with Tanner, comprising the full crew of
Joan of Arc
minus her current watchstanders and her commanding officer. Lieutenant Kelly arrived last, stepping into the cargo bay with a pair of active screens from her holocom floating beside her. Tanner remembered her from Oscar Company’s first trip into space. Her striking green eyes and bright, short red hair would let her stand out in most crowds.

“First off, everyone, thanks for a fast and smooth departure,” she said. “I wish I could’ve told you more than I did when this trip came up, but our orders were classified. Hopefully I dropped enough hints that those of you with families got everyone
at home prepared for a long deployment.” She threw a wink toward a couple of the engineers off to one side, who nodded in understanding.

“We are heading into Hashemite space, specifically toward the planet
Scheherazade. We’re going as fast as we can, so we should be in the system in a few days. Our orders are to establish comms with our consulate on the ground and with
St. Patrick
, which has been in the area for about a week with a civilian-registered Archangel passenger liner. Command advises that the situation in Hashem may be about to go to hell again and it may start on Scheherazade. We’re to hang around in the area and observe. If shit hits the fan, we evacuate our people in the consulate and any other Archangel citizens. Most of them will go out on the liner, but we’ll be there to lend a hand.

“Obviously, this mission has ‘hurry up and wait’ clearly written on the label.
Command admits that. We may drop out of FTL in the middle of a crisis or we may wind up sitting on our hands for weeks and then come home. In the interim, we’ll run drills and we’ll answer any distress calls per Union laws, but our priority will be to evacuate our people from Scheherazade at the first sign of trouble.

“I’ve been given a basic rundown that I’ll share on everyone’s holocoms. We’ll meet with
St. Patrick
and refine our plans from there. Inevitably, a situation like this will be fluid and chaotic. We’ll work out some contingency plans and try to adhere to the basic objectives, but all the planning may go out the window in the first two minutes. I’ll be relying on you all to adapt quickly.”

Tanner glanced around at the other assembled crewmembers. As if to answer his prayers, one of the mid-ranking engineers asked, “Ma’am, do we have any sense of how many people we’d be taking on?”

Oh my god
, Tanner thought.
Is she taking questions?

“We’ve got fifty cots, Erin,” shrugged Kelly, glancing at one of the bo’suns for confirmation. “That’s about as many as we can squeeze in between the cargo bay and the other available spaces, but ultimately we’ll take on however many we need to. If people
have to sleep in shifts and spend most of the trip home sitting against a bulkhead, I imagine they’ll prefer that to hanging around in a warzone.” Her tone remained even and matter-of-fact. She seemed to think it a reasonable question.

“Has there been any preliminary evacuation?” another crewman asked. “Non-essential personnel and families?”

Kelly shook her head. “Given the transit time for news, I don’t know any more about what might’ve happened over there in the last few days than you do, but I doubt it. Some of this comes down to politics. Nobody wants to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by pulling their people out.” Her frown deepened. “Obviously that’s the sort of thinking that makes sense to politicians
before
a crisis, and if things explode they’ll all start blaming each other for not acting sooner. But it’s not our call.

“I want to emphasize that we may be going into a genuine shooting war,” Kelly warned, her gaze sweeping the group once more. “We don’t want to get involved and we’re not there to pick sides. We will make every effort to hold fire, but we will defend ourselves and our people. I’ll have more for you once I’ve had a chance to confer with the other ships on scene. Like I said, we’ll have to make sure we stay adaptable.

“On that note,” she added, looking at Tanner, “we’ve got an extra pair of hands to help us out for at least the next couple months. Crewman Malone, welcome aboard. We’re glad to have you.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Tanner said with a nod.

Kelly grinned. “You look eager to get moving.”

“Ma’am? No, sorry, it’s just…” His voice trailed off as he realized what he was about to say. From the first days after the disaster on
St. Jude
, he’d resolved not to speak ill of the dead. Six months later, he still wasn’t sure how much he should share, but… “I’m not used to crew briefings, ma’am. This is all new to me.”

Chuckles and snorts followed. The captain just smiled. “We’ll try to get you acclimated quickly. But unless anyone has something urgent to share, I know it’s pretty late and a lot of you would just as soon hit the rack. Any other questions? No? Al
l right. Good work, people. Dismissed.”

As the meeting broke up, Booker lingered. “Tanner, have you met
Grzeskiewicz yet?”

The
thin man beside the XO wore third class ops specialist’s markings. He rolled his eyes as he put out his hand. “Call me Stan,” he said. “XO here just likes to show off the fact that he can pronounce my last name.”

“Good to meet you,” Tanner nodded, shaking hands.

“Stan’s the old man in the forward berth,” Booker explained, “so he’ll make sure you’re all set up. There’s seven of you now with only six racks, but I’ll let you all sort that out.”

“I’ve got it, XO,” Stan assured him.

“Hey,” Sanjay spoke up, “I could always just share a rack with Ord—ow!”

She had to reach up to hit him on the back of the head as she passed, but the gunner’s mate seemed to have practiced
that. Her short black hair bounced along as she moved. “Ordoñez, hi,” she smiled by way of introduction to Tanner. The young woman never broke her easy stride, raising her middle finger up over her shoulder in Sanjay’s direction before she left the compartment.

Tanner glanced around, wondering if he’d finally found a source of tension between the crew, but no one seemed the least bit bothered by the exchange. “Anyway, that’s it,” said Booker. “Tanner, we’re still working you into the stations bill for damage control and all that. We’ll probably have it by morning. If anything happens before then, just stick with Stan or Sanjay, okay?”

“Yes, sir,” Tanner nodded.

With that, the XO moved out. Tanner followed Stan and Sanjay out as well, turning with them to head for the forward crew berth. This, too, was unlike Tanner’s experience on
St. Jude. Joan of Arc
had the exact same narrow compartment holding three stacked-up bunks embedded on either bulkhead, with the same small lockers and the same tiny head opposite the entry hatch, but the space looked and smelled considerably better than Tanner’s old living space. They found Ordoñez already in one of the top bunks, reading something from her holocom. The others were mostly empty, though one of them held Tanner’s few bags.

“I’ve already been told we can’t just grab one of the cots from the cargo bay and put it on the deck for you,” Stan explained. “I hate to say it, but you’re gonna have to hot-rack with someone. Which is going to require some extra shuffling, too, since you won’t be in the same watch rotation as everyone else until you qualify for helmsman.”

“What do you mean by hot-rack?” asked Sanjay.

“It means he has to use someone else’s rack while they’re not in it,” said Ordoñez, looking over from her reading. “Stan, they’re seriously sticking him in here with us? Don’t they have an extra space back in the NCO berth?”

“He’s not an NCO,” Stan shrugged.

“Sorry about this,” Tanner offered. “I know it’s gonna be a pain.”

Ordoñez shook her head. “I don’t care if you use my rack when I’m not in it, long as you don’t do anything gross. We’re all sleeping in vac suits, anyway, it’s not like the mattresses ever get sweaty. Just make sure you swap out pillows and it’s fine. I just half expected they’d put you in the chiefs’ stateroom or something.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Don’t you get extra privileges with an Archangel Star? Officers having to salute you first and stuff?”

Blushing fiercely, Tanner said, “That’s only if I’m actually wearing the medal. Or the ribbon. It’s never supposed to be a privilege thing. Honestly, the whole saluting deal just gets confusing, too
. I get officers staring at me wondering why in the hell I don’t salute. Anyway, it’s fine, I’ll take whatever rack is open. There’s locker space for me at least, right?”

“Yeah,” said Sanjay, “right over here.”

Ordoñez seemed to frown a little as she rolled onto her back again, calling up a new article on her holocom. The others set to sorting themselves out, mostly crawling into their own racks as Tanner stuffed his bags away. “Which rack is open now?” Tanner asked, gesturing to the empty spaces.

“Mike’s on watch and Teddy tends to stay up late,” Stan explained, “so you should probably take Mike’s.” He pointed to the rack underneath Ordoñez’s. “I’ll send him a note so he doesn’t
crawl in with you when he comes off watch. We’ll just shuffle around until morning and then figure it out.”