Expendable - James Alan Gardner [7]
REASON 2: The envelope bulged like the head of a spermatozoon where it surrounded the ship itself, then tapered off into a thin tail that stretched some 15,000 kilometers to our stern. In flight, random fluctuations of magnetic fields in space made the tail whip wildly like the tail of a swimming sperm.
REASON 3: Given time, a ship’s crew will attach sexual innuendo to anything. It makes their jobs more exciting.
Walting In the Transport Room
When I reached the Transport Room, Lieutenant Harque was grimacing at the tracking holo and gingerly twisting dials. Captain Prope leaned over his shoulder and blocked his light. Each time the lieutenant ducked to one side to see more clearly, the captain moved with him like a shadow. I’d seen the routine many times before, and Harque had never asked the captain to step back.
Vile little toady.
In the rare moments that he had a clear view of the holo, Harque was manipulating our aft electromagnets in order to wag the tail of our Sperm. Somewhere far behind us, the Golden Cedar was doing the same thing, with the goal of snagging one tail on the other and forcing the two to fuse into a single continuous tube. It was a ticklish business at the best of times, and worse with a captain breathing down your neck. The best operators in the Fleet sometimes spent more than twenty minutes at the job. Harque was not one of the best operators in the Fleet.
Yarrun sat against the far wall of the room, well out of everyone’s way. He looked more alert now; either he had managed to get some sleep or had forced himself awake with a cold shower, caffeine, something. From the depths of his closet, he had rummaged up his dress blacks, as wrinkled as raisins. Every stitch of clothing Yarrun owned was rumpled and worn; he came from a splinter culture on Novolith with a religious stricture against vanity in one’s attire.
Thanks to Explorer programming, Yarrun was just as obsessive in keeping his clothes mussed as I was in keeping my hair parted straight.
I inflated a chair and sat down beside him. “Are they close?” I asked in a low voice.
He shrugged. “Since I arrived, the captain has shouted, ‘You almost had it!’ three times.”
“Has she called him a fool yet?”
“No.”
“Then they aren’t close.”
Yarrun and I had spent a lot of time waiting in that room. We knew each bleep, chirp, and fribble the machinery could make. We knew each bleep, chirp, and fribble a tail-operator could make. After a while, the noises blended into a harmonious whole.
“You almost had it that time, Harque! Can’t you be more careful?”
“Sorry, captain.”
The observation deck where we sat was a U-shaped mezzanine around the actual transport bay, twelve meters below and separated from us by thick pink-tinted plastic. The walls around us sported rainbow-striped jacaranda trees; this was the first area most visitors saw when they came on board, and Prope was desperate to make a jaunty impression.
The control console occupied the base of the mezzanine U. Opposite it, down in the bay, was the Aft Entry Mouth, a circular aperture leading out of the ship and into the Sperm-tail. At present, the Mouth was closed with an irising mechanism that bulged slightly outward under the air pressure of the ship. When the iris opened, anything in the transport bay weighing less than twenty tonnes would be propelled out the Mouth and spat through the tail like phlegm.
It wasn’t an elegant way to travel—Admirals usually arrived in trim little shuttles, as did delicate cargo shipments—but receiving such deliveries meant dropping our Sperm field, then waiting twelve hours while the forward Sperm generator rebuilt the envelope. It only took a second to reestablish the field