Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [45]
“I hear that,” he said. “And, yeah, I’d love to have some of that coffee. Thanks.”
After pouring him a mug of the dark, not-quite-steaming liquid, Guitierrez handed it to him. “I really don’t mind your flying, you know.”
“Uhm-hmm,” Mayweather grunted as he took a cautious sip, then decided that the stuff was at least marginally potable. He looked at her, determined to change the subject to something other than the relative merits of his piloting skills. “So how long have you been with the MACOs?”
“Coming up on my sixth year since I first donned the gray cammies,” Guitierrez said. He couldn’t tell if she sounded proud, disappointed, tired, or some combination of the above.
“And have you accumulated a pile of wild and woolly war stories yet, like McCammon?” He looked aftward as he spoke, and saw that the other MACOs seemed to be utterly absorbed in some other tale of MACO derring-do. Catching Guitierrez’s eye, he was more than a little glad to see her smile at his question; she definitely seemed more human than most of the others.
“I don’t know. I’ve been in ten or twelve small engagements. Nothing too heavy, though. Mostly endless patrolling on border worlds or frontier settlements.” She took a sip of her coffee and added, “I was deployed in the Janus Loop for about six months.”
“And you still get spacesickness?”
“Oh, you heard that, too, huh?” He saw her look out the forward window, off into trackless space.
He waggled his finger toward the spacecraft’s aft section. “Remember, there’s no privacy aboard a shuttlepod,” he said very quietly, smiling. “Don’t get too confessional.”
She grinned in response. “Yeah.” She paused to glance backward, as if to confirm that Chang, McCammon, and Eby were all too busy with their bull session to eavesdrop on her. “I dunno,” she said finally. “Lately I’ve been getting sick some. Maybe it’s my diet, or something to do with being out in the Expanse. I hope it’s not some strange new anomaly thing.”
“Me, too,” Mayweather said. Her comment reminded him that Trip and Hoshi and over a dozen other crew members were even now lying in sickbay, victims of some bizarre burp of Delphic space. He sent them a quick “get well soon” thought, though he knew from his long experience hauling freight with his family aboard the Horizon that a bag of kind wishes was worth exactly the price of the bag.
“How ’bout you? What’s your story?” she asked. “Sub-Commander T’Pol must trust you a hell of a lot to put you in charge of this mission.”
Mayweather tried not to smile too broadly at the comment. The Vulcan was rarely complimentary to anyone, so the fact that a relative stranger to Enterprise’s bridge hierarchy had interpreted his assignment to this mission so favorably made his chest swell with pride.
“Well, for starters I don’t get spacesick,” he said, letting a bit more of his smile creep out. “I was born in zero-g, and grew up behind the consoles of various cargo ships.”
“Ah, you’re a boomer,” she said, not really asking, but instead merely making an observation.
“Yep. My dad was the captain of the Horizon. It was a J-class freighter ship that used to run dilithium between the Vegan colonies and Draylax.” He looked out the forward window for a moment, focusing on the beckoning Delphic stars even as he suppressed an unbidden gulp. His father had been dead for nearly nine months, and the loss still felt like an open wound; after Travis had left the family business to join Earth’s Starfleet, he had never really reconciled with his father, Paul, Senior.
“Ships were pretty slow back then, huh?”
“Yeah, they were nothing like the new NX-class,” Mayweather said, looking down at his flight controls. Not being warp-capable, the shuttlepod was traveling at its top velocity of point eight c, a speed that made even the Horizon’s lumbering maximum seem enviable; he couldn’t help but wish he could push the impulse engines just a little bit harder. “Fastest we could