For the centuries out to Tau Ceti, the body of the Nauvoowas meant to turn. Ten levels of environmental engineering, crew quarters, temples, schools, wastewater treatment, machine shops, and forges, and at the center, the vast interior. It would have been a piece of Earth curved back on itself. Soil and farmland and the illusion of open air with a central core of fusion-driven light and heat as gentle and warm as a summer day.
All the rooms and corridors in the body section—the vast majority of the ship—were built with that long, slow, endless season in mind. The brief periods of acceleration and deceleration at the journey’s ends hardly mattered. Except that they were all the ship had now. Those places that should have been floors were all walls, and would be forever. The vast reinforced decks meant to carry a tiny world’s worth of soil were the sides of a nearly unusable well. Someone slipping from the connection where the command and control levels met the great chamber could fall for nearly two full kilometers. Water systems built to take advantage of spin gravity and Coriolis stood on their sides, useless. The Nauvoohad been a marvel of human optimism and engineering, a statement of faith in the twinned powers of God and rigorous engineering. The Behemothwas a salvage job with mass accelerators strapped to her side that would do more damage to herself than to an enemy.
And Bull wasn’t even allowed to fix the problems he knew about.
He passed through the transfer station and down toward his office. The rooms and corridors here were all built aslant, waiting for the spin gravity that would never come. Stretches of bare metal and exposed ducting spoke of the rush to finish it, and then to salvage and remake it. Just walking past them left Bull depressed.
Samara Rosenberg, longtime repair honcho on Tycho Station and now chief engineer on the Behemoth, was waiting in the anteroom, talking with Bull’s new deputy. Serge, his name was, and Bull wasn’t sure what he thought of the man. Serge had been part of the OPA before that was a safe thing to be. He had the traditional split circle insignia tattooed on his neck and wore it proudly. But like the rest of the security force, he’d been recruited by Michio Pa, and Bull didn’t know exactly how things stood. He didn’t trust the man yet, and distrust kept him from thinking all that well of him.
Sam, on the other hand, he liked.
“Hey, Bull,” she said as he dropped onto the foam-core couch. “Did you get a chance to talk to the XO?”
“We talked,” Bull said.
“What’s the plan?” Sam said, folding her arms in a way that meant she already knew.
Bull ran a hand through his hair. When he’d been younger, his hair had been soft. Now it was like he could feel each strand individually against his fingertips. He pulled out his hand terminal and scrolled through. There were five reports waiting, three routine security reports and two occasionals—an injury report and a larceny complaint. Nothing that couldn’t wait.
“Hey, Serge,” Bull said. “You hold the fort here for an hour?”
“Anything you want, chief,” Serge said with a grin. It was probably just paranoia that left Bull hearing contempt in the words.
“All right, then. Come on, Sam. I’ll buy you a drink.”
In a Coalition ship, back when there’d been an Earth-Mars Coalition, there would have been a commissary. In the OPA, there was a bar and a couple mom-and-pop restaurants along with a bare-bones keep-you-alive supply of prepack meals that anyone could get for the asking. The bar was in a wide space that might have been meant for a gymnasium or a ball court, big enough for a hundred people but Bull hadn’t seen it with more than a couple dozen. The lighting had been swapped out for blue-and-white LEDs set behind sand-textured plastic. The tables were flat black and magnetized to hold the bulbs of beer and liquor to them. Nothing was served in glasses.
“Che-che!” the bartender called as Bull and Sam stepped through the door. “Moergen! Alles-mesa, you.”
“Meh-ya,” Sam replied, as comfortable with the mishmash Belter patois as Bull was with Spanish or English. It was her native tongue.
“What’re you having?” Bull asked as he slid into one of the booths. He liked the ones where he could see the door. It was an old habit.
“I’m on duty,” she said, sitting across from him.
Bull leaned forward, catching the barkeep’s eye, and held up two fingers.
“Lemonades,” he said.
“Sa sa!” the barkeep replied, lifting a fist in the equivalent of a nod. Bull sat back and looked at Sam. She was a pretty enough woman. Cute, with pixie-cut hair and a quick smile. There had been about a minute when they’d first met that Bull had seriously considered whether he found her attractive. But if he’d seen the same calculus in her, they’d gotten past it.
“Didn’t go so good?” Sam asked.
“No.”
Sam lifted her eyebrows and leaned her elbows against the tabletop. He sketched out Pa’s objections and rationale, and Sam’s expression shifted slowly into a fatalistic amusement.
“Waiting for the refit’s all well and good,” she said when he was done, “but if we try and test-fire that bad boy, it’s going to make an awfully big owie.”
“You’re sure about that?”
“Not a hundred percent,” she said. “High eighties, though.”
Bull sighed out a tired obscenity as the barkeep brought the bulbs of lemonade. They were about the size of Bull’s balled fists, citrus yellow with ¢³ðïäîîâîù „}„p„|„„Š„p „„€„„„u„‡„y printed on the side in bright red script.
“Maybe I should talk to her,” Sam said. “If it came straight from mec”
“It came straight from you, probably it would work,” he said, “and they get to tell me no on everything from now on. ‘Bull asked for it? Well, if it was important, he’d have sent the Belter.’ Right?”
“You really think it’s about you not getting born up here?”
“Yeah.”
“Wellc you’re probably right,” Sam said. “Sorry about that.”
“Comes with the territory,” Bull said, pretending that it didn’t bother him.
Sam plucked her lemonade off the table and took a long, thoughtful drink. The bulb clicked when the magnet readhered to the tabletop. “I’ve got nothing against inners. Worked with a lot of you guys, and didn’t run into a higher percentage of assholes than when I’m dealing with Belters. But I have to get that rail gun’s mounts reinforced. If there’s a way to do that without undercutting you, I’m all for it.”
“But if it’s that or mess up the ship,” Bull said, nodding. “Gimme a little time. I’ll think of something.”
“Start when you want to shoot someone and count back eighteen days,” Sam said. “That’s my deadline. Even if everyone’s sober and working balls-out, my crew can’t get it done faster than that.”
“I’ll think of something,” Bull said.
The larceny complaint turned out to be from a repair and maintenance crew who couldn’t agree how to store their tools. The injury report was a kid who got caught between a stretch of deck plating and someone driving a salvage mech. The cartilage in the kid’s knee had gotten ground into about a dozen different bits of custard; the medic said a good clean bone break would have been better. The injured man would be fine, but he was off active duty for at least a month while all his pieces got glued back together.
The security reports were boilerplate, which either meant that things were going well or that the problems were getting glossed over, but probably they were going well. The trip out to the Ring was a shakedown cruise, and that always meant there’d be a little honeymoon period when the crew were all figuratively standing shoulder to shoulder and taking on the work. Everyone expected there’d be problems, so there was a grace period when morale didn’t start heading down.
Chief security officer on an OPA ship was a half-assed kind of position, one part cop, one part efficiency expert, and pretty much all den mother to a crew of a thousand people with their own agendas and petty power struggles and opinions on how he should be doing his job better. A good security chief kept bullshit off the captain’s plate as a full-time job.