For this, among other reasons, very few people—except the specialists who actually did the repairs on other vessels—wanted assignment to a DSR. Young officers considered such an assignment proof that someone was down on them; Esmay followed the herd in this, if nothing else, and took it as evidence that exoneration by the official court hadn’t convinced someone of her innocence. She looked up the next available transfer to Sierra Station. Because she had arrived on Comus almost 24 hours before her leave was up, she could just catch a Fleet supply run to Sierra . . . and she had no good excuse not to catch it, since her duty status went active the moment she logged on to pick up her orders.
Esmay checked—the supply ship had space available, and she had two hours to report aboard. A bored clerk stamped and validated her original and amended orders, updated her hardcopy ID and her files. She dashed in and out of the tiny PX to pick up her new insignia—the clerk told her that her promotion to lieutenant had come through while she was on leave—and get a Koskiusko shiptag for her duffel. That wasn’t required, since she hadn’t signed aboard, but her duffel was more likely to arrive there if it had a shiptag than a name—and-number. When she got to the docking bay for the supply ship, she found herself in a queue with half a dozen other Fleet personnel making a transfer. No one stared at her; no one seemed to know who she was or care. Most of the talk was about a parpaun match played recently between the crews of two ships in dock—apparently someone had kicked all three of the possible goals in one play—but Esmay had never really understood parpaun. Why two balls? Why three differently colored goals? Why—she often thought to herself, but would not say—bother? Now she was glad to hear the others full of enthusiasm for something that banal, and she hoped that her moment of fame had already vanished.
The supply ship was hauling parts that would resupply Koskiusko; its exec had noticed her orders, and put her to work checking the inventory. Sixteen days of counting impellers, gaskets, lengths of tubing, fasteners of all kinds, tubes of adhesive, updates to repair manuals (both hardcopy and cubes). . . . Esmay decided that someone at Headquarters really hated her.
She was good at this kind of thing; she didn’t find it difficult to keep her concentration. On the fourth day, she noticed that of the 562 boxes supposed to contain 85mm star-slot fasteners with threads of pitch 1/10 and interval 3mm, one was labeled for 85mm star-slot fasteners with threads of pitch 1/12 and interval 4mm instead. Two days later she found three leaky tubes of adhesive, which had glued themselves to neighboring tubes in a container; it was clear from the discoloration of the labels that they had been flawed from the beginning; she noted that. She could see why this was necessary—someone would find the errors and better now than in the midst of an emergency repair—but it wasn’t the glamorous sort of job she’d thought of when she had dreamed of leaving Altiplano. Either time she’d left Altiplano.
She wondered if she’d spend her entire time aboard Koskiusko doing the same thing. That would make a very long two years. She didn’t want notoriety, exactly, but she would like something more interesting than bean-counting.
In her off-shift, she listened to the sports fans, hoping for a change in topic, but they seemed to have no other interests. Apparently, they had all played on a parpaun team at one time or another, and after they’d rehashed the recent match they were happy to tell each other in detail about every match they’d played. Esmay listened long enough to understand at last what the rules were, and why two balls (each team had its own ball, and scores could be made with the opponent’s ball only on the third, “neutral” goal. It still seemed an unreasonably complex game, and as boring as any other for nonplayers to listen to.
She finally gave up and started reading the supply ship’s tech support cubes. Inventory control, principles and practice. The design of automated inventory systems. Even an article on “static munitions recognition systems”—which she couldn’t imagine needing—was better than the eighty-eighth rehash of a game she hadn’t seen and didn’t care about anyway. She was sure she’d never come face to face with a Barasci V-845 mine or its nastier cousin, the Smettig Series G, but she stared at the display until she was sure she would know them again if she were unlucky enough to see one.
Sierra Station served both Fleet and civilian interests, but Fleet predominated. Two long arms docked only military vessels; Esmay watched the names scroll past on the wardroom screen. Pachyderm, the oldest active cruiser, and Fleet’s largest. Plenitude, Savage, and Vengeance, cruisers much like Heris Serrano’s Vigilance. Plenitude had a star by its name—it was the flagship of some combat group. A gaggle of patrol craft: Consummate, Pterophil, Singularity, Autarch, Rascal, Runagate, Vixen, Despite . . . Despite? What was Despite doing here?
Esmay felt cold all over. She had left that very lucky (in one way) and unlucky (in another) ship almost the full length of Familias space away . . . she had not expected to see Despite again unless she was transferred to its sector. Why had they moved it at all? And why, of all places, here?
She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to see that ship again; the memory of victory could not erase the memory of what had gone before, that bloody mutiny, and the mistakes she had made later.
She shook that off. She couldn’t afford to be upset by it, and it was unlikely she’d have anything to do with Despite and her new captain.
Koskiusko, the screen read, blinking now because she had put a tracer on the name. She noted the concourse and docking number in her personal compad. One corner of the screen turned yellow, then flashed their arrival dock number in blue. Esmay referred to the station map . . . Koskiusko was out at the far end of the longest arm, but she could get there without going past Despite.
When she made it to the gate area, a pair of Fleet security personnel checked her orders again. To her surprise, they made no move to open the access hatch. “It’ll be a few minutes, Lieutenant,” one of them said. He had sergeant’s stripes on his uniform, and his unit patch read Sierra Station, not Koskiusko. Esmay noticed that nowhere on the deck of the gate area were the traditional stripes defining ship space from station space. “They’ve sent a pod but it’s not here yet.”
“A pod?”
“DSRs don’t actually dock at stations.” The tone was carefully respectful, though Esmay had the feeling she had just asked a stupid question. “They’re too big—the relative masses would play hob with each other’s artificial gravity.” A pause, then a neutral, “Would you like to see Koskiusko, Lieutenant?”
“Yes,” Esmay said. She’d already shown she was ignorant; she might as well learn what she could.
“Here, then.” Up on the gate display came a blurry view of something large; the view sharpened, leaped nearer, and finally stabilized as the biggest and most unlikely excuse for a ship Esmay had ever seen. It looked like the unfortunate mating of an office building with a bulk-cargo tank and some sort of clamshell array. “Those funny-looking things are on the main repair bays,” the sergeant said helpfully. “They’ve got ’em open now, testing. As you can see, an escort can fit all the way in, and even most patrols . . . then the ports swing down . . .”