The man is positively vibrating with energy, he is so excited. People under duress tend to fall into one of three categories, all out terror, unbridled excitement, or total apathy. My friend here is a category two, I’m more of a three who swings into a category one when I’m trying to get any sleep. My man Encino here is an adrenaline junkie, and he’s so excited to go kill some ‘bad guys’ that he seems to be able to walk on air he is so elated. Big dude, but didn’t quite hit the mark to pilot his own walking tanker unit. So he balked at the chance to be a Fire Team leader while sulking, and instead is our squads heavy. In size and savagery. You need a jar, or a chest cavity opened, he’s your boy. Not an ounce of fat on him, and no self doubt either. He’s a real menace when the Mississippi leg hound in him takes full effect. He doesn’t have many close friends, let’s put it that way, but he’s a hulking, useful idiot. My role, unofficially that is, is to guide his worst, yet most squad beneficial tendencies towards our targets and goals. Wind him up, point him in the direction where his carnage suits our needs, then collect him afterwards.
“That’s the static charge coming off of the rail guns, if I have my ship board weapons load out correct. We’re placed directly behind the port side battery, and there’s a slug loader located directly underneath our dormitory. That lump, dump, bap bap bap, we here is them testing the auto loader, and switching between round types. The heavier the slug the harder we feel the spring loaded arms collapse into place.” I said, knowing full well that Encino isn’t really listening to me.
He’s staring out the view port from our common room lounge watching the welders doing EVA’s while attaching additional guns and armor plating to the hull. The shielded torches they are using spew white phosphorus out a ceramic nozzle, and occasionally sputters and splatters of weld material pop off and float around like angry fire flies. The wash of the phosphorus lights up the hull for several meters even in the inky blackness, and you start to get a sense of just how massive some of The Company’s vessels really are. Those brilliantly bright spots are scattered all over the hull, at least from our vantage point. The scale is immense, and terrifying. This ship, The Dirty Starling is humongous. A real behemoth of man made ingenuity. Encino is standing with his broad nose pressed firmly against the clear concrete glass, his breath shooting waves of condensation radiating out from his face every few seconds. He is visibly excited, and bumping the glass with every breath he takes. Flecks of spittle splash the glass each time he talks.
“Could you imagine being a pilot?” Encino says, his voice muffled due to his face being pressed against the glass. “The big ships aren’t all that much fun to pilot, the navigators do all the heavy lifting anyway.” I say, now that I’m comfortable in my own lounge chair, and I can tell that Encino is here to stay for a while. No need to stand needlessly while I babysit him. Taking my seat I look around the room to make sure we won’t get any surprise visitors.
I occasionally have to wave off both men and women that swing by from other squads or departments who come to look at him when he isn’t paying attention. Sure he’s handsome. But, he’s big, mean and not what you’d call a gentle lover. That big dumb grin of his seems to pull anyone not using their brain into his orbit of any sexual orientation you can imagine, and then I have hours of paper work to file on his behalf. I’ve made it known he’d be more inclined to enjoy fucking a raging bull moose than a typical human, but that grin, and his muscles lure them in anyway. I can only unfurl so many human pretzels in my life time. The only acknowledgement from Encino on the matter was a surprise “I really hurt him.” He said, once, over breakfast when reaching for an apple.
Outside in the vacuum the welders are walking over the kilometers of hull plates looking for any signs of weakness and damage. As the flotilla wide count down clocks draw nearer to zero, the pace of the work increases. Tiny single person vehicles scuttle about, holding weapons, or beams or instrumentation clutched in their extendable arms. The pilots have one hand in a haptic glove which allows them to perform some very minute actions with the claws, or other tools on the end of the arm. Imagine a tuna can flying fat sides forward and back, with a torso sized bubble out the front, and a massive multi tiered arm mounted below it. The back is all thruster cones and a rack for spare tooling for the arms. Cameras and lights fill the rest of the space on the small squat crab unit. That’s our boy Encino’s dream vehicle. To mill about space in a rickety old crab unit, fixing stuff and exploring the exterior of any large vessel. All the while dressed for EVA, because those crab units don’t have any life support in them. Step in and go! Handy if you’re rated for the appropriate exterior working gear. I mean, you could potentially use out fight suits in it, but you couldn’t weld anything as that 5000 degree phosphorus would bleed right through the material in seconds. All of the low level pilots onboard the Dirty Starling have their welders guild licences. Those orange and black tuna cans are pretty nimble when they want to be. I think they are ugly as all get out, but to Encino, that shit’s The Tits.
The PA system crackles to life drawing me out of my reverie. “This is a flotilla wide announcement. We have T-Minus six hours until we commence Operation Scouring Pad. Please meet at your designated muster stations when we reach T-Minus two hours. Your station chiefs will see that you are prepped, dressed and loaded into the appropriate transports, based on waves, and objectives. This message will repeat…”
The crackle dies down as the volume of the message drops a few percent after each repetition. A large flashing blue and orange light let’s us know that we can still tune in to the flotilla wide communications channel directly from our wrist biometrics to hear the message or read it if need be. The machine shop guys usually need to read them while the shop is so uncomfortably loud.
“You know what the favourite part of my day is.” Encino asks me as we walk side by side to our muster station together. “That brief second when I catch the smell of my neck ring going over my head. It smells like the beach near where I grew up.” He smiles at this. He doesn’t follow it up with anything else. All I can think about is how after three months the battle is only a few hours away, and I need to take a shit.
Part Thirty Eight: Ghost of the Dirty Starling.
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