109 hangar crewmen, including ordnance and reactor handlers, handling officers, launch & retrieval crew, QA, and UNREP "powder passers." 76 mechanical and electrical engineers, servicing the UFR Artaxerxes's hull, her autosystems, and of course, her flight of warmechs. 44 crane, lift, blast-door, airlock, and drop-gun operators. 36 nuclear engineers. Seven crewmen per gun turret and torpedo bay. Fifteen bridge staff, including the captain and his helmsman. Thirty navigators, airspace traffic controllers, and communications officers. Nineteen physicians, surgeons, dentists, nurses, and cybernetics engineers. Four logistics officers. Sixteen liaison officers. Fifteen clerks. Four chaplains. Twelve cooks. 28 janitors.
Six hundred and six personnel, all laboring day and night to keep two fireteams—that is, eleven 'ADAMAS' warmechs and eleven pilots—in the sky; greased and ready for combat. Gan appreciated the irony: from a certain point of view, he and the other four on his fireteam had 55 crewmen (each) assigned to personally keep them trim, fit, fed, rested, and getting where they needed going; that many maids and majordomos could staff a few bromine-barons' mansions back home. That many miners could keep a quarry open for a year. Each of them practically had an army to pamper them. And yet, when it came time to wake up for these ever-important missions, the best the Artaxerxes could muster for an alarm bell was—
"MISSIONNNNNN!"
—Ana Calypsi, smacking a titanium plate with a ball-peen hammer.
"COME ON, EVERYONE, UP AND AT 'EM! THE MISSION'S HERE! WOOOOOOOO!"
Ripped from the warm, tranquil womb of sleep, Gan found himself cradled, with the same quiet protest as a toddling, afterbirth-slick foal, in a familiar steel chrysalis: the paint on the floor worn down by his invariable flat-footed shuffle from bunk to toilet to sink and back. From the toothbrush in a beer mug sitting on top of the hot water pipe, to the Down with the Dogs poster (the collector's edition released on the album's tenth anniversary—with the band's blonde, buxom mascot straddling a rattlesnake) duct-taped above the porthole, to the crusty old bomber jacket hanging from a hooked locker handle, everything was where he had put it, and seemingly where it would sit forever if allowed, like it had been trapped in aspic and forgotten in the back of a forlorn refrigerator. Gan ached; not because his mattress was thin, or his sheets cold, but because the cold, rigid steel floor waited just beyond them; and beyond that, the cold, unyielding vacuum of space, through which he'd soon be floating in a different, even more cramped chrysalis of steel, glass, and worn-down padding. He groaned, quieter than the neverending groan of the hull and the strain of its copper arteries gushing with coolants and jettisons.
He heard Ana's fist rattling a door across the hall from his. Soon she would be haunting him. And this alone—the spite—would have to suffice once more for motivation. Peeling himself forcibly away from his bunk, he braced, landing on rolled ankles and springy knees. At once the floor began to sap away with his warmth. Tiptoeing over to the door, Gan dared not peek through its rusty, squealing peephole. He only waited to hear the telltale signs: the clang of jump boots on metal grating first, then her fist against iron. Of course, she was still chirping away: "ARE YOU ALL DEAD IN THERE? COME ON, YOU'RE ALL SO GORGEOUS ALREADY, HOW MUCH BEAUTY-SLEEP COULD YOU NEED?!"
Once her auditory assault-and-battery had finally reached his door, Gan knocked right back at her from the other side. "YEAH, YEAH, WE GET IT," he barked.
She only giggled back through the hinges—"Mornin', Gaaaaan!—" and skipped away on inch-thick rubber soles to the next door down. "C'mon, commander, that's enough cat-nappin' for you ..."
Gan propped himself against the wall and groaned a second time. One would think the weight of the world would be easier to bear in such low-gravity places. "How the hell does she do it ..." he murmured.
"She's still in her twenties," grumbled Yrma, who was finally stirring in the bottom bunk. All knotted up in her bedsheet, she freed her left arm, and held it up just long enough to read the digital interface on her clock before letting it drape over the side of the bunk once more.
"Are you implying I'm old?" Gan said.
"Gettin' there. As fast as anyone. Pass me my leg."
Gan picked it up from against her locker, a cruel room's-width away, and handed it to her by its rubber peg. "I dunno about that. Not with your fifteen-year head start on the rest of us. What time is it?"
"It's 0247 Universal. And thanks a lot," she answered, growling and grunting as the muscles ached and creaked in sliding the cup over her stump, and fastening the clasps to her thigh, then threading the metal leg through the leg of her flightsuit. "Hrrk. At least when she wakes us early, she wakes us early enough for MidRats."
"Sugar and carbs are ... one consolation," Gan groggily agreed.
"Careful," she replied. "One day you'll go to bed 'getting old,' wake up the next and learn you're there. That's when all them sugar and carbs catch up to you." She clapped her belly as if to prove she was the cautionary tale, and indeed the impact rippled in her skin. But not much. Under her loose skin Yrma was mostly muscle. Muscle and vinegar.
Yrma's laugh was raspier, huskier, than Ana's. She didn't smoke, and the scars spanning the left side of her leathery, loose torso were shallow, no more than skin-deep, which left Gan to wonder at times whether her dad had smoked, or an invasive cybernetic in her throat had degraded over the years, or if she'd contracted a lung sickness long ago on a faraway strip-mining colony. Not that it amounted to anything more than curiosity in the night; he'd never hold the answer, or the question, against her. Through all the static and the degradation, no matter the mission or the miles, the rasp of her voice was unmistakable. Irreplaceable.
"I think that day will hurt you more than me. What will you do with yourself once you can't call me 'beanpole' or 'noodle-neck' anymore?"
She chuckled again. "I'll just have to switch to calling you 'doughball.' C'mon, Gan, let's get outta here." Quietly they zipped up, laced up, and threw on their leathers, kicking up against the wall out in the corridor as they brushed their teeth and ran fine-tooth combs through their hair. They were the first ones out there save for Ana, with whom they swapped "Mornins," and after they ducked back into their bunk to spit and rinse, Yrma had a question for her. It was the type of question to warrant checking both ends of the corridor for eavesdroppers; leaning in close, close enough to smell the mint oil on Ana's breath; and stoking Yrma's voice down into a low, smoldering pit of coals.
"I've been meanin' to ask: are you okay? You know—with a new bunkmate?"
"Of course!" Ana lilted. But a graveness soon conquered her face, and cast her gaze to the green and yellow lines painted on the otherwise naked steel of the corridor floor. "Or ... I'll get used to her easily enough."
Gan and Yrma didn't have to say anything; their gazes sufficed in squeezing down on her for more juice.
Ana, looking either ashamed of something (how easily she acquiesced to this interrogation, or how she was in some way "betraying" the rookie by saying this), or, at the least, worried that the subject of their illicit dialogue might overhear it, continued quietly: "How do I put this? I don't know. When I'm trying to sleep, and my eyes are closed, I can ... just tell that it's not him. F—For example, when he had a glass of bourbon before bed, he'd always be swirling the glass. The ice hitting the crystal ... clink, clink, clinkle. I got used to falling asleep to that sound, but she doesn't do that with her cup. And ... oh, and her footsteps are lighter, too; I think she puts socks on to walk around during lights-out. So I can't even shut my eyes and pretend that it's him. You know? All the little things like that that she does. Or doesn't do. They make me ... sad. It's like even his memory is being ... no. That's too far. I shouldn't say that."
Yrma stepped closer, her fleshy foot encased in rubber and leather and her sterile, surgical-steel peg alternating on the hard floor, and rested a heavy, callused hand on Ana's narrow shoulder. "If you ever wanna switch bunks—"
"Oh, no, I couldn't!" Ana insisted, shrugging herself away. "Thank you, but you're still mourning, too. Everyone is. It wouldn't be right."
Ana visibly anguished as several raging forces came to a stalemate inside her: should she resort to gratitude or to empathy? Stay on this path of obstinance, perhaps overcoming the grief sooner, if more painfully; or double back on her assurance, take the bunk across the hall, and give herself the sort of time she clearly wanted? Needed. To forget their former teammate and fallen comrade. Seeming ready to sound off her next excuse, Ana's face lit up with a moment's epiphany instead. "... Oh, and no offense, Gan! It's not that I'm avoiding bunkin' with ya! It's just—"
"I know," he said, to spare her from her own explanation. "If nothing else I'm sure she appreciates it. We're all teammates—her included, starting now."
"Right," Ana said, as much to herself as to him, with the glimmer of fresh, newfound determination. She inspired easily. "You're right."
"Besides," Gan continued with an impious smirk, "would Scyto have wanted anyone to be late on his account? You've got three more to muster before we can eat, Ana. Including your new bunkie."
Ana straightened out, bristling. "Ah!" she cried. "Thanks for reminding me! Chlotho! Ke—"
"We're up." Unceremoniously, the two shuffled out: the team leader, who, though grim-faced, her single eye glowering at nothing in particular, looked scarcely worse for wear, knotting the sleeves of her flightsuit around her waist, goosebumps ridging her full-sleeve tattoos. It was Chlotho, callsign Romeo, who emerged like a voodoo-zombie, shambling, groaning—even teasing his hair into its typical cowlick, dual-wielding a comb and a wad of pomade for the purpose, seemed an automated act, performed entirely through instinct and habit. After sliding into his flightsuit, he'd forgotten to zip it up.
Gan scratched his scalp. "I guess that leaves one more. Well," he corrected, eyeing the other dude, "one and a half."
"I'll go wake her," Ana whispered, slinking off toward the last door on the left fore-ways.
That's right; earlier Gan had ruminated on the 46 engineers, seamen, and other personnel per mech pilot aboard the Artaxerxes. But through an instinct and habit all his own, his math had been wrong: it wasn't just the five of them anymore. Despite all their hopes (and delusions) to the contrary, they couldn't leave that top bunk in Ana's room empty forever, as some kind of memorial; they had corporate hierarchies to please. Bottom lines to meet. A fireteam needed six mechs on the ground, not five. And it was this way for a reason.
To Gan, it only seemed a bit ... soon. To be acting like nothing was wrong. Like nothing had ever happened. To replace what they had lost. This rookie ... and insult to injury, she was making them wait for her.
Six hundred and six personnel, all laboring day and night to keep two fireteams—that is, eleven 'ADAMAS' warmechs and eleven pilots—in the sky; greased and ready for combat. Gan appreciated the irony: from a certain point of view, he and the other four on his fireteam had 55 crewmen (each) assigned to personally keep them trim, fit, fed, rested, and getting where they needed going; that many maids and majordomos could staff a few bromine-barons' mansions back home. That many miners could keep a quarry open for a year. Each of them practically had an army to pamper them. And yet, when it came time to wake up for these ever-important missions, the best the Artaxerxes could muster for an alarm bell was—
"MISSIONNNNNN!"
—Ana Calypsi, smacking a titanium plate with a ball-peen hammer.
"COME ON, EVERYONE, UP AND AT 'EM! THE MISSION'S HERE! WOOOOOOOO!"
Ripped from the warm, tranquil womb of sleep, Gan found himself cradled, with the same quiet protest as a toddling, afterbirth-slick foal, in a familiar steel chrysalis: the paint on the floor worn down by his invariable flat-footed shuffle from bunk to toilet to sink and back. From the toothbrush in a beer mug sitting on top of the hot water pipe, to the Down with the Dogs poster (the collector's edition released on the album's tenth anniversary—with the band's blonde, buxom mascot straddling a rattlesnake) duct-taped above the porthole, to the crusty old bomber jacket hanging from a hooked locker handle, everything was where he had put it, and seemingly where it would sit forever if allowed, like it had been trapped in aspic and forgotten in the back of a forlorn refrigerator. Gan ached; not because his mattress was thin, or his sheets cold, but because the cold, rigid steel floor waited just beyond them; and beyond that, the cold, unyielding vacuum of space, through which he'd soon be floating in a different, even more cramped chrysalis of steel, glass, and worn-down padding. He groaned, quieter than the neverending groan of the hull and the strain of its copper arteries gushing with coolants and jettisons.
He heard Ana's fist rattling a door across the hall from his. Soon she would be haunting him. And this alone—the spite—would have to suffice once more for motivation. Peeling himself forcibly away from his bunk, he braced, landing on rolled ankles and springy knees. At once the floor began to sap away with his warmth. Tiptoeing over to the door, Gan dared not peek through its rusty, squealing peephole. He only waited to hear the telltale signs: the clang of jump boots on metal grating first, then her fist against iron. Of course, she was still chirping away: "ARE YOU ALL DEAD IN THERE? COME ON, YOU'RE ALL SO GORGEOUS ALREADY, HOW MUCH BEAUTY-SLEEP COULD YOU NEED?!"
Once her auditory assault-and-battery had finally reached his door, Gan knocked right back at her from the other side. "YEAH, YEAH, WE GET IT," he barked.
She only giggled back through the hinges—"Mornin', Gaaaaan!—" and skipped away on inch-thick rubber soles to the next door down. "C'mon, commander, that's enough cat-nappin' for you ..."
Gan propped himself against the wall and groaned a second time. One would think the weight of the world would be easier to bear in such low-gravity places. "How the hell does she do it ..." he murmured.
"She's still in her twenties," grumbled Yrma, who was finally stirring in the bottom bunk. All knotted up in her bedsheet, she freed her left arm, and held it up just long enough to read the digital interface on her clock before letting it drape over the side of the bunk once more.
"Are you implying I'm old?" Gan said.
"Gettin' there. As fast as anyone. Pass me my leg."
Gan picked it up from against her locker, a cruel room's-width away, and handed it to her by its rubber peg. "I dunno about that. Not with your fifteen-year head start on the rest of us. What time is it?"
"It's 0247 Universal. And thanks a lot," she answered, growling and grunting as the muscles ached and creaked in sliding the cup over her stump, and fastening the clasps to her thigh, then threading the metal leg through the leg of her flightsuit. "Hrrk. At least when she wakes us early, she wakes us early enough for MidRats."
"Sugar and carbs are ... one consolation," Gan groggily agreed.
"Careful," she replied. "One day you'll go to bed 'getting old,' wake up the next and learn you're there. That's when all them sugar and carbs catch up to you." She clapped her belly as if to prove she was the cautionary tale, and indeed the impact rippled in her skin. But not much. Under her loose skin Yrma was mostly muscle. Muscle and vinegar.
Yrma's laugh was raspier, huskier, than Ana's. She didn't smoke, and the scars spanning the left side of her leathery, loose torso were shallow, no more than skin-deep, which left Gan to wonder at times whether her dad had smoked, or an invasive cybernetic in her throat had degraded over the years, or if she'd contracted a lung sickness long ago on a faraway strip-mining colony. Not that it amounted to anything more than curiosity in the night; he'd never hold the answer, or the question, against her. Through all the static and the degradation, no matter the mission or the miles, the rasp of her voice was unmistakable. Irreplaceable.
"I think that day will hurt you more than me. What will you do with yourself once you can't call me 'beanpole' or 'noodle-neck' anymore?"
She chuckled again. "I'll just have to switch to calling you 'doughball.' C'mon, Gan, let's get outta here." Quietly they zipped up, laced up, and threw on their leathers, kicking up against the wall out in the corridor as they brushed their teeth and ran fine-tooth combs through their hair. They were the first ones out there save for Ana, with whom they swapped "Mornins," and after they ducked back into their bunk to spit and rinse, Yrma had a question for her. It was the type of question to warrant checking both ends of the corridor for eavesdroppers; leaning in close, close enough to smell the mint oil on Ana's breath; and stoking Yrma's voice down into a low, smoldering pit of coals.
"I've been meanin' to ask: are you okay? You know—with a new bunkmate?"
"Of course!" Ana lilted. But a graveness soon conquered her face, and cast her gaze to the green and yellow lines painted on the otherwise naked steel of the corridor floor. "Or ... I'll get used to her easily enough."
Gan and Yrma didn't have to say anything; their gazes sufficed in squeezing down on her for more juice.
Ana, looking either ashamed of something (how easily she acquiesced to this interrogation, or how she was in some way "betraying" the rookie by saying this), or, at the least, worried that the subject of their illicit dialogue might overhear it, continued quietly: "How do I put this? I don't know. When I'm trying to sleep, and my eyes are closed, I can ... just tell that it's not him. F—For example, when he had a glass of bourbon before bed, he'd always be swirling the glass. The ice hitting the crystal ... clink, clink, clinkle. I got used to falling asleep to that sound, but she doesn't do that with her cup. And ... oh, and her footsteps are lighter, too; I think she puts socks on to walk around during lights-out. So I can't even shut my eyes and pretend that it's him. You know? All the little things like that that she does. Or doesn't do. They make me ... sad. It's like even his memory is being ... no. That's too far. I shouldn't say that."
Yrma stepped closer, her fleshy foot encased in rubber and leather and her sterile, surgical-steel peg alternating on the hard floor, and rested a heavy, callused hand on Ana's narrow shoulder. "If you ever wanna switch bunks—"
"Oh, no, I couldn't!" Ana insisted, shrugging herself away. "Thank you, but you're still mourning, too. Everyone is. It wouldn't be right."
Ana visibly anguished as several raging forces came to a stalemate inside her: should she resort to gratitude or to empathy? Stay on this path of obstinance, perhaps overcoming the grief sooner, if more painfully; or double back on her assurance, take the bunk across the hall, and give herself the sort of time she clearly wanted? Needed. To forget their former teammate and fallen comrade. Seeming ready to sound off her next excuse, Ana's face lit up with a moment's epiphany instead. "... Oh, and no offense, Gan! It's not that I'm avoiding bunkin' with ya! It's just—"
"I know," he said, to spare her from her own explanation. "If nothing else I'm sure she appreciates it. We're all teammates—her included, starting now."
"Right," Ana said, as much to herself as to him, with the glimmer of fresh, newfound determination. She inspired easily. "You're right."
"Besides," Gan continued with an impious smirk, "would Scyto have wanted anyone to be late on his account? You've got three more to muster before we can eat, Ana. Including your new bunkie."
Ana straightened out, bristling. "Ah!" she cried. "Thanks for reminding me! Chlotho! Ke—"
"We're up." Unceremoniously, the two shuffled out: the team leader, who, though grim-faced, her single eye glowering at nothing in particular, looked scarcely worse for wear, knotting the sleeves of her flightsuit around her waist, goosebumps ridging her full-sleeve tattoos. It was Chlotho, callsign Romeo, who emerged like a voodoo-zombie, shambling, groaning—even teasing his hair into its typical cowlick, dual-wielding a comb and a wad of pomade for the purpose, seemed an automated act, performed entirely through instinct and habit. After sliding into his flightsuit, he'd forgotten to zip it up.
Gan scratched his scalp. "I guess that leaves one more. Well," he corrected, eyeing the other dude, "one and a half."
"I'll go wake her," Ana whispered, slinking off toward the last door on the left fore-ways.
That's right; earlier Gan had ruminated on the 46 engineers, seamen, and other personnel per mech pilot aboard the Artaxerxes. But through an instinct and habit all his own, his math had been wrong: it wasn't just the five of them anymore. Despite all their hopes (and delusions) to the contrary, they couldn't leave that top bunk in Ana's room empty forever, as some kind of memorial; they had corporate hierarchies to please. Bottom lines to meet. A fireteam needed six mechs on the ground, not five. And it was this way for a reason.
To Gan, it only seemed a bit ... soon. To be acting like nothing was wrong. Like nothing had ever happened. To replace what they had lost. This rookie ... and insult to injury, she was making them wait for her.
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