Temporary Duty (12 page)

The hangar they arrived at was run down, the sheet-iron siding rusting through the silver paint in blotches. "Looks like hell, doesn’t it," Chief Joshua remarked when he followed their gaze. "It used to hold a fighter squadron." He shook his head. "Times do change."

Sailors swarmed around the office block beside the hangar, painting and washing windows, and more were inside, sweeping and swabbing. "They’re getting good practice, Chief," Todd said. "Me’n Peters and a Grallt work crew are just barely going to have officers’ country fit to live in by the time you come aboard. It’ll take a month of field days to get the rest of it shipshape."

"Will it now," the chief remarked, not a question. He pushed a door open and urged them through.

The room was in sorry shape: cracked dark-green tile on the floor, faded grey paint on the walls, fluorescent fixtures with about every third tube dead or flickering. It was furnished with desks and chairs that were probably older than anybody in the room, maybe older than any two of them. One of the desks had a computer on it, net cables disappearing into the overhead through a roughly hacked hole.

Joshua introduced them to the people: Senior Chief BM (Aviation) Warnocki, Chief of the Deck and effectively Ops Officer in their truncated TO; Chief Corpsman Gill, assistant to the doctor; one of his assistants, Corpsman 2/C Kiel; Communications Tech 1/C Howard; and Yeoman 1/C (Data Processing) Hernandez, who was sitting at the computer, toying with a graph of some kind.

"I’m Linguistics specialty," Howard said as he shook Peters’s hand. "Translator. I’ll be learning the Grallt language."

Peters shook his head. "Everybody’s gonna have to do that," he said. "The way they got it set up, we’re gonna mess with the regular crew," he explained. "It’s like a restaurant, with waiters and all. You’ll have to know a little bit of the language to eat."

"Do tell," Howard murmured. "You guys already learned some of it?" he wanted to know, tone a little accusing.

"Yeah, ’bout like what I said," Peters told him. "How to order dinner, say sorry and thank you, that sort of thing. It’s all most of us’ll need. You’ll have plenty of chance to spread yourself." Howard flushed a bit at that, not too pleased to be so transparent.

The next few hours seemed very long to Todd and Peters. Between them, they described
Llapaaloapalla
as best they could, trying to convey the size of it and its general air of seediness. They tried hard to describe the untidiness, crudity, and air of dilapidation, but ran into a wall of disbelief. Nobody could imagine that anybody who had to live aboard ship would let it go that way. "Go ahead anyway, Chief," Todd advised an incredulous Warnocki. "A couple of wire welders, supplies, and some shipfitters’ tools will be worth the trouble."

Warnocki shook his head. "I’ll do it, but if it turns out to be a waste of time, you’ll hear about it," he warned. "What’s it made out of? I have to know, or I won’t know what kind of welding supplies to load."

Todd and Peters looked at one another. "Hell, I dunno," Peters admitted. "I was assumin’ it was steel. That’s what it looks like, anyway."

"A steel spaceship? Now I know you’re full of shit," Warnocki observed.

Nobody was pleased by the time difference. "That’s going to be tough," Chief Gill told them. "People can manage twenty-five or twenty-six hour rotations pretty easy, but thirty?" He shook his head. "Right off the top of my head, I’d say we’re gonna have to rotate rest days, and short-handed as we are, that could be a problem."

"I’ve worked forty-eight at a stretch before," Chief Joshua objected. "Even seventy-two sometimes."

"Sure. I’ll bet everybody here has. But thirty hours, every day, for two years?" Gill shook his head again. "I’ll look it up and get back to you."

"That reminds me. Got a job for you, Hernandez." Peters unstrapped Dee’s watch and passed it to the programmer. "What can you do with that?"

Hernandez inspected it dubiously. "Not much, I don’t think." He tapped it, held it to his ear. "Dios mio, this thing’s mechanical! Is it some kind of joke?"

"No joke," Peters assured him. "It keeps their time. We’re gonna need a conversion program, our time to theirs. Among other things, I know what time they’re comin’ back for us by that thing, but I don’t know what it’ll be in our time. You figure that out and let me know."

Hernandez still looked dubious, but he pulled out a handheld, bigger and fancier than the one Peters was still carrying, and started pressing keys. "Stopwatch function, to get the basic interval. Never mind this thing," with a wave at the desktop computer, "it’s like cracking a nut with a sledge hammer. While we’re waiting, I haven’t heard you say anything about what kind of computers they’ve got up there. I’m interested, you might say."

"You’re lookin’ at it," Peters told him.

"What?"

"That’s right," Todd confirmed. "The most complicated gadget we saw is a one-way PA system, and I’m not even sure it’s electronic. We never heard it work." He glanced at Peters. "They don’t even have a radio on the
dli
, the shuttle they ride up and down."

Into the resulting, unanimous, stunned silence Peters said to Joshua, "That’s what I meant about radios, Chief. Earbugs for everybody, spares, talkies, spare batteries ’til Hell won’t have ‘em. Radios to talk to the planes, and power supplies to run ‘em, and battery chargers." He waved at Hernandez. "Computer types’ll have to take our own along. What we need’s a radioman. Got one on the list?"

"Highest rate’s a Third Class," said Joshua grimly. "That may have to change."

"No network?" Hernandez was incredulous.

"How loud can you holler?" Peters asked. The others chuckled, but Hernandez was wide-eyed, holding onto the mouse like it was a lifeline. He probably hadn’t been away from a high-speed network for more than a few hours for the last ten years.

Chief Joshua looked at his watch. "That’s enough for now," he said. "Let’s break for lunch." He glanced around the room, eyes resting at the last on Todd. "We’ll go to the EM club, everybody can get in. I’m buying. I take it you two don’t have any money on you?"

Peters flushed slightly. "We can buy our own lunch, Chief," he said, shushing Todd when he tried to object. "Not much more than that, though," he admitted. "Not much call for money in outer space." He would remember that, much later.

Lunch in a room full of people with noses was a relief. The food wasn’t much, mystery meat with green beans and mashed potatoes, but it was familiar and therefore comforting. They didn’t discuss their business at the table, confining themselves to chitchat about the world in general and the Navy in particular. Things hadn’t changed much, and Peters realized that it was only Thursday, after all: they’d been away only three days.

Back at the hangar, Hernandez went straight for his desk and started punching keys, and Chief Joshua called the rest to order. "OK, action assignments. Gill, you’ll be checking into medical consequences of the long days, right?" When the Chief Corpsman nodded, Joshua went on, "Warnocki, I’m gonna depend on you to scare up welders and briefing chairs. I’ll have my hands full chasing down radios." He shook his head. "Hernandez, come out of that for a minute, will you?"

"Sure, Chief," the programmer said. "What’s up?"

Joshua snorted. "Programmers. You know anything about setting up a network?"

Hernandez shook his head. "I could program one, no problem, but I don’t know much about the hardware. You need Interior Communications for that."

"Don’t I know it." Joshua sighed heavily. "I’ll look down the roster, see what I can come up with. Howard, I want you to get with our boys here and see how much of the language they’ve learned."

"Aye, Chief." The CT spared Peters a look that wasn’t too pleased.

"Take about an hour at it," Joshua went on, oblivious to Howard’s attitude. "By then we’ll have a first cut at making a list and working out how to fill it. You may get interrupted, so don’t waste time."

"Aye, Chief," Howard said sourly. "Come on," he told Peters and Todd. "We’ll use the old SDO’s office."

They sat on straight chairs with split upholstery in the cubicle that had once housed the Squadron Duty Officer, discussing the Grallt language and discovering in the process that, first, neither Peters nor Todd really knew all that much, and, second, that Peters in particular was a lousy teacher. It may have been personality. Howard wasn’t easy to like, and neither Peters nor Todd saw any particular percentage in investing the effort.

The only interruption came when Hernandez took Peters’s handheld. Peters paid nearly no attention until they’d broken with Howard and gone back into the main room. "There you are," the programmer said, holding the gadget up for display. "Call up the time function like normal. Then push ‘G’ for Grallt and it shows the Grallt time on a graphic like this." He held up Dee’s watch. "It’s probably as good as this mechanical thing. To set it in Grallt mode, push up-arrow for forward and down-arrow for back, then enter to confirm. It’ll adjust itself if you set it once in a while."

"How do I get normal time back?" Peters was alert enough to ask.

"Just push the time function again," Hernandez shrugged. "Hey, it isn’t fancy, but it’ll get the job done. I’ll do something better when we get aboard."

"Can it convert a future time?" Peters asked. "I still don’t know exactly when the
dli
is comin’ to pick us up."

Hernandez stared into space. "Sure," he said finally. "Just act like you’re setting it until you get the right time display, but don’t push enter. Then when you push G it’ll show the converted time. Push time once more, and it goes back to the current time. I didn’t design it to do that, but it ought to work. Give it back; I want to try it. What time do you need to convert?"

"Fourth
utle
of the sixth
ande
." When Hernandez looked blank, Peters shook his head. "Sorry, that’s the names of the time units. Big needle on this mark here, and the middle one here." He indicated it on Dee’s watch.

"That’s the other way, but it still ought to work." Hernandez played with keys. "Yep, it works," he said with satisfaction. "Not too handy, but like I said, I’ll do better when I have the time. And it looks like your ride will be here a little before 2030."

The rest of the afternoon was spent in discussion, sometimes descending to raucous argument, of what the detachment would need for the voyage. Joshua didn’t have many questions, but he did have a few acerbic comments. His attitude puzzled Peters a little, until he realized that the basis of it was simple: he and Todd didn’t have enough chevrons for the Master Chief to take them seriously.

Warnocki gave them some credit, actually listening to what they had to say, but even he was more disbelieving than otherwise. Gill and the corpsmen were investigating time-shift effects, with Hernandez helping with the net search, and at any rate neither Peters nor Todd had learned much that would be interesting to the medics. The worst was Howard. CTs had to be bright to get the rate, and got a lot of training; they were used to being the smartest people in any given room, and having a couple of juniors ahead of him made this one grumpy and hard to get along with.

Around 1500 they broke for coffee and head calls, and when they got back a man and a woman, dressed upscale and carrying briefcases, were sitting at the table with the Master Chief, with a pair of Federal Security goons in green blazers standing behind them, arms folded. "Like you to meet Agent Styles and Agent Cade of the IRS," Joshua introduced them, face and voice studiously neutral. "We’ll be gone for quite some time, and we have to have our ducks in a row with the tax people. Agent Styles?"

The man stood. "Thank you, Mr. Joshua. Gentlemen, as you can imagine this situation causes a great deal of difficulty for us at the IRS. You’re scheduled to leave before the end of the tax year, and you may not return for as many as three cycles. We’ve carefully studied the Executive Order that authorizes this expedition, and the tax implications aren’t at all clear." He hesitated as the sailors exchanged glances, then went on, "This has been put together much too quickly for us to determine policy. As an interim measure, we need for you all to complete your forms for 2053 before you depart. For those of you with no income other than your Navy pay the end of the tax year will be as usual; simply include your pay for December as income. If you have other income, you’ll have to fill out a 9327A to end the tax year on 1 December. We can stretch the regulations to push your December income into taxable year 2054. After that we don’t know what provisions will be made."

One of the sailors raised a hand. "Mr. Styles, won’t we be on combat exclusion?"

"Please stand and give your name," Styles said. "And I prefer ‘Agent Styles,’ if you don’t mind."

"Kiel, Corpsman Second Class." Kiel stood slowly. "In an exclusion zone we don’t pay taxes on our Navy pay. Won’t it be that way on this deployment?"

Styles shook his head. "That determination hasn’t been made, Mr. Kiel, and in any case you’re required to file even when the combat exclusion is in effect. Furthermore, income other than your Navy pay and benefits isn’t subject to the exclusion; you would have to file and pay tax if you have such outside income." The agent pursed his lips in an expression of distaste. "The best we can do is let you terminate the tax year early, so you’ll be in compliance for 2053. Further determinations will have to made when you return."

"It would really be best if you had an agent who stayed behind," the woman put in. "Your pay and other income will be accrued here, and such an agent could file for you. There’d be the irregularity that your signatures wouldn’t be present, but that’s minor. I’m sure the penalty could be waived."

"Hire a lawyer to keep our tax forms current while we’re gone?" Hernandez objected. "That’d eat up my whole paycheck."

Styles regarded him with disfavor. "We can’t help that. You’re required to file."

"Perhaps a dependent," the woman suggested.

"None of us has dependents," Chief Gill objected. "It was one of the requirements for volunteers."