As Lieutenant Michaels and I stepped out of the XO’s office, a thought occurred to me that hadn’t before.
I turned to him as we once again made our way down the corridor and asked, “Sir, is the reason the captain can’t meet with me yet related to the incident with Carmichael?”
“Yes,” he remarked with a wry grin. “She’s meeting with the MPs as we speak actually. We’re departing from port early tomorrow morning, so she has to hand Carmichael over to them, transfer over the security footage and the report on Doc’s broken nose, then arrange interviews with Doc and a couple witnesses who were there for the aftermath. It’s going to take a while and she needs to get it all done this afternoon.”
“Hmm,” I mused.
As we began to make a turn down an adjacent corridor, I noticed a man standing next to a door further down. He was severe looking, with black hair slicked back, and a red mark on his nose. The door opened, and just before it passed out of my line of sight, a haggard man in cuffs with the look of someone who had barely slept stepped out. He was pushed along by a man wearing the uniform of the military police, and followed by a woman wearing the same, hauling a large duffel. I was afforded a brief glimpse inside the room, where one final MP sat in a chair, and someone out of sight spoke.
“Come in, Doctor,” a woman’s voice said calmly. And then we were out of sight and continuing on.
—
“This is you,” said the lieutenant, gesturing to the door in front of us labelled "8-Man Berthing #2" as we stood in a passageway lined with doors. “Yours is the second lower bunk on the right. Stow your gear in the free locker, and there is a new service uniform waiting for you on your bunk. It’s a new version that the higher ups had all the strike frigate crews adopt last year. Quite comfortable I have to say,” he remarked thoughtfully. “Anyway Damien, Lieutenant de Soto should be down by the time you’ve changed, and he’ll take you to meet the rest of the crew, show you around the Ozzie and all that. I’ll see you later.”
With that, he patted me on the shoulder, and set off down the hallway. I shouldered my duffel and walked into a scene of mild chaos. There were eight bunks in total, two above and two below on each side of the room. Towards the back of the room, an equivalent number of lockers sat against the wall. A table with a few chairs was set up near the bunks, and several doors led into rooms labeled for the head and showers.
The two sources of said chaos sat at the table, a tall man with dark brown skin and tight black curls, and a freckled woman with red hair pulled back into a bun, loudly arguing about food. They were so caught up in the argument that they didn’t even notice me coming in. Another woman with blonde hair sat at the table with them, sipping from a steaming mug and looking incredibly amused.
“I’m telling you man, it’s the goddamn chicken parmesan! It’s fucking delicious!”
“What!? You’re fucking crazy! Seamus’s sushi is the best meal! No other ship in the entire fucking navy has a cook who can make reconstituted proteins taste like real fish!”
“That’s heresy right there John, how can you eat raw fish? It’s gross is what it is!”
“It’s not even real raw fish! But that’s besides the point, you’ve never even tried sushi! How do you know it’s gross if you’ve never even tried it!?”
And so on and so forth. As I walked over to the one unlocked locker, the argument continued, circling around and backwards and in on itself, until they came back to the exact same points. As I passed the table, the blonde woman noticed me, and raised her mug slightly in my direction. I opened up the locker, and stashed my duffel inside. After keying the lock to my implant, I grabbed the new service uniform and the pair of boots next to it from my bunk and went to the showers to get changed.
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It really was a nice uniform. A deep blue, almost black set of coveralls, with “TNV Ozymandias” stitched into the right sleeve. A patch with my rating and rank displayed was attached to the left sleeve and my name was stitched into the front. I couldn’t tell what the material for the suit actually was. The outside was smooth, almost slippery, but the inside was incredibly soft and comfortable. Interestingly, there was some sort of hood on it, and a pair of metal clips on the back that looked almost like attachment points for an O2 tank.
As I stripped out of my dress uniform and shrugged on the new one, I idly noticed that the shower stall I stood in had what looked like a drying function.
Well, I thought, That’ll make showers quick.
When I left the shower room, the argument seemed to have petered out, having shifted from food to wondering when the next “warm-up” would be. After hanging up my dress uniform in my locker, I wandered over to the table. The blonde woman, again, being the only person that noticed me, rolled her eyes then looked critically at my uniform.
“There should be a pair of gloves in one of the pockets,” she said, prompting me to check. “And there’s a wire you can unspool in the right sleeve that you plug into your implant. If we ever decompress, you just pull up the hood, ping your implant and boom. The whole thing seals itself up and you’ve got an instant vac suit.”
The other two looked momentarily confused, then looked behind at me and jumped.
“Holy shit!”, exclaimed the man, hand on his chest. “How long have you been here?”
“Uh, about 5 minutes?”, I said, feeling just a bit of schadenfreude. “You guys were too busy arguing to notice. Ah. Here they are,” I said, locating the gloves in my back pocket. I set the gloves down on the table and rolled up my sleeve to plug the wire into my implant. Pulling on the gloves, I looked at the group. “Engineman 3rd Class Damien Manelis.”
“Ooh, you’re the guy replacing Carmichael?”, the redhead eagerly asked. Then sheepishly, “Oh, sorry. Communications Technician 2nd Class Jordan McCune.”
“Environmental Technician 1st Class John Davis,” the man followed up.
“Weapons Technician 3rd Class Emily Hansen,” finished the blonde.
“A pleasure to meet you all,” I said. “And yes, I am replacing Carmichael. From what I hear, he was a bit of a problem around here. I saw the MPs hauling him out on the way down here.”
“Hah!”, barked Jordan, “Serves him right! I once walked in on that asshole screaming his head off about his tablet getting stolen when he’d just kicked it under his bunk! You have no idea how much living in the same berth as that guy drove up my blood pressure.”
“Yeah, he kept trying to restart his ‘gang’ from his old ship here,” mused John. “Which was stupid, because on a crew this small, and with officers this attentive, that shit would get shut down immediately.”
“Hmm,” I hummed, “You know, I’m… kind of surprised that the quarters are mixed gender. My old ship was real strict about men going into female quarters and vice versa.”
“Some psychology thing, I think,” said Emily, shrugging. “Some study said that de-segregation of genders reduces instances of sexual assault. Something about ‘de-genderization’ or ‘homogenization of civilian social groups’ or something like that. It’s probably working, no one’s been kicked off the ship for sex crimes in over two years, and the captain comes down hard on that kind of thing.”
“They tend to use this ship as a kind of testbed for new policies and stuff,” explained John. “Captain’s got veto rights on it if she thinks it will impact the mission, but-”
The door opening interrupted his explanation.
The man who walked in was grinning ear to ear, his wide set eyes wrinkling at the edges, and his brown hair looking ever so slightly disheveled. His uniform displayed the insignia of a lieutenant with “De Soto” on the front, and he had the just barely too heavy breath of a man who had sprinted all the way here.
“EN3 Manelis?”, he boomed out in the deepest voice I had ever heard.
“Sir!”, I said, snapping into a salute.
“At ease, spacer,” his voice once again boomed out, “None of that with me. You have no idea how long it took to get that shithead,” he said, nodding to John, “to drop the formalities and call me Miguel, and I am NOT going through that again.”
“Yes Sir,” I said, then received a dirty look. I hesitated, unsure how to respond. “...Uh, Miguel?”
“There you go kid! That’s what I like to see! I don’t give a shit what you call me as long as you follow orders, understand?”
“Yes S-...Miguel.”
This was going to be a weird afternoon, wasn’t it.