FREE STORIES 2012(15)

Now writing this, I just sound stupid. Quite literally nothing happened, and that nothing is what makes me so absolutely furious. I did nothing my whole watch. I had memorized all the usual docking procedure so carefully, and the station just refused to respond to me. The skipper got his back up once he realized that it was a Masadan on the orbital comms not a Manty with us having technical difficulties. He wouldn’t let anyone replace me. So I just kept parroting his announcements of what we were doing and how we were assuming clearance to dock and all this other stuff. It was really extremely rude. And my over-instruction on the comms section (the guy who was there to take over if I messed up since this was my very first time), changed our broadcast to copy to the clear, so absolutely everyone was listening. A ship like ours is supposed to dock easily at a place like this. It should have taken about a half hour with docking connections coming out a little to meet us and a couple little robot arms with fine motor control. We did it completely without assistance. It took hours and hours, so I stayed way past my regular watch length. I’m pretty sure I scratched up the side of the docking station. When it was all over, some other GSN captains on the pair of ships already docked got on the channel and laughed it up with our captain, again, completely in the clear.

Claire is maintaining that they were mocking the Masadans, and she framed a printout of the scratches on the docking station. I think if I scratched up the station, I must have scratched poor Manasseh up something fierce too. The Bosun sent a small team out to do touch-ups on our hull, which is not normal. He wouldn’t let me go, even though it was my fault.

The captain assigned escorts for Claire and me when we went about the station. It is officially Manty run, but there were a whole lot of Masadans there. Suleia, if you thought our news had made them into absurd monsters, I assure you they got it only partly wrong. A couple of them spit on the deck in front of me when I had to walk past. Some of the kiosks would not sell us food when they saw I was with the group. Finally, I stood around a passageway corner, and one guy went and got a load of sandwiches for all of us, before we tromped back aboard. Claire had had duty the first day. We both stayed on the ship the next day when the guys went out again.

When the guys came back they brought us food and the station rumors. They said that Masadans were only supposed to be operating the docking arms, and a Manty was supposed to be doing traffic control. Apparently with it being wartime, the Manties are really too short handed to keep an unimportant station like this fully manned and the people they picked to send to the station aren’t so great. The Manty who was supposed to be on watch was late back from a shore leave down to the planet and the Manty from the previous watch had just turned over to a Masadan instead of getting a proper relief. Apparently they had done it a few times before without the station commander or XO noticing. I don’t know if I really believe that, but it could be.

-Cecelie



* * *



[Reposted to Tester’s Blessings on the GSN private forum.]

[January 1922]

Suleia,

We just got over a nasty bug of some sort, which we must have picked up at our last port visit. The nanite customizers broke during routine maintenance that was done just after we left. They really should have done that maintenance before we docked or even at the station. It is a basic crew service system, and things break during maintenance more often than not. That’s not my division, thank the Tester, because the parts needed to get it up and running again could have been just pulled off the shelf at the station if the work had been done earlier. But everyone in that division must have been too focused on going on liberty to stay and do some routine, if exceedingly vital, maintenance.

Before this, it wasn’t quite so obvious just how critically important every little piece of machinery is. I mean, only a few people were sick for the first day or two. And then the lines filled up at sick call. The captain had to call in some personal favors to get the parts we needed from another ship. By the time the machine was repaired, the bug had spread to most of the crew. The ship’s doc started making announcements listing symptoms to encourage people to come get the nanite shot. And then he started just calling everyone to report to medical in sections by last name just assuming everyone had it.

So, that’s how I found myself in a line outside medical with about thirty crewmen from a smattering of divisions pretty much covering the whole ship. About the disease, I can’t really tell you much, because I have no idea if I ever caught it, or not. The symptoms were severe abdominal cramping with some experiencing muscle pain in the upper legs and accompanying diarrhea. It was during my monthly. So yeah, it hurt, what else is new?