Dry, No Lube Ch. 02: Pixy's Choice

"Emergency, ma'am. Officer of the Deck told me to wake the captain, but standing orders are to wake you first. So... yeah."

Jesus. Who was this moron? It sounded like her own Denman, but no way should she sound so stupid. "Tell me in loud, slow words," Pixy grated, "what is happening and why I am awake!"

A sigh. "Ma'am, one of the Army guys is, like, dead."

Ah. Well, that was different. "Where?"

"They called the surgeon first, ma'am, so I think he's in sick bay."

So someone had at least a modicum of wit. "Who called the surgeon?"

She could almost hear Denman blinking quizzically. "Why... I think the Army did, ma'am." A heavy pause. "Overdose, ma'am," came the last of the message, very quietly.

Okay. That explained the nervousness; Denman was one of her top dealers. "I see. I'm on my way to sick bay. Go ahead and wake the captain."

"Ma'am." Pixy was stepping gingerly into a fresh uniform, the clothes objecting as they rose over her stained skin, but Pixy couldn't worry about that now; it was still fastening itself as she raced down the corridor. Captain Nyhre's hatch, she noticed, was still closed. She'd never yet seen it open.

It's normal for people to hate being in sick bay; nobody likes being reminded of illness. But Pixy hated it more than most, ever since the Battle; this place had been slaughterhouse red on that day. It had been the same with the bridge, but she'd had to get over that; it was her job. In sick bay, there was no avoiding the memories.

A light in the corner showed nervous Dr January, his adam's apple bobbing, bent over the corpse. Pixy was tempted to step in hard, taking charge, kicking ass, but the Army was already there; both officers, the sergeant-major, and Cooper's commo operator were all huddled around, staring at her with carefully neutral expressions. "What's up?" she blurted, knowing immediately it was the wrong thing to say. She focused on the doctor; the soldiers might as well not have been there. "Anything I can do?" She faltered then, seeing who it was on the slab.

Stillness, waxy broken skin, and the absolute absence of blood; it was eerie. "I need you to get out of the way," Dr January said low and fierce, sounding just as shaky as the rest of them felt, but that was easily understood: he was a pediatrician by trade. She shuffled aside, numb, then looked up into the hostile eyes of Lieutenant Mozz.

"I told you," she said with her usual distant malevolence. "He was a recovering addict."

"I've got to get the head off." January was burrowing for his saw, and Pixy's eyes found Cooper's. Strange, she thought distantly; he'd been inside her not two hours ago. Now he was a stranger, as he had been before tonight. "There might be time."

Pixy glanced back at the body. "How long?"

"No idea." Cooper's voice was as dead as Woj. "Schwartz here, she found him."

"He wasn't breathing." The commo girl was tiny, looking far too small to carry the beam units, but Pixy had to believe she could pull it off. "He was still warm, though." She was dressed in worn workout clothes, as was Mozz; Cooper had the same uniform he'd just slid on over his cummy body. Pixy shuddered.

"Might be time. If the blood hasn't coagulated, parts of the brain might still be semi-vascularized." January had found his saw. He swallowed. "Okay. You guys might want to step back." He looked at the corpse. "Well back."

So might you, Pixy thought; the poor guy sounded like it was his first day on the job. She drifted over to join the soldiers against the far wall. "Captain's on his way," she threw out distantly.

"Yours? Or ours?" Mozz still sounded bitter, but Pixy's answer didn't matter; with a loud, pneumatic whine the saw was plunging into old Woj's neck, and the slaughterhouse was back in effect.

The blood, apparently, had not coagulated.

Captain Reye appeared as the head came off, Corporal Schwartz on her knees vomiting quite freely. He said nothing, but when a corpse is being cryogenically decapitated there's not much to say. He and Pixy shared a meaningful glance, but everybody held their tongue until January had the head hooked up to the haemodrive, the little motors swirling inside. He frowned, peering into the gristle and cartilage that had been the pilot's neck at one point, studying the haemodrive's instruction sheet. "I think I got the tubes right," he muttered.

Reye looked a moment at the regurgitant corporal, then nodded briefly toward Cooper. "Sorry for your loss," he said coolly. He'd put on a clean working uniform over some pink carpet slippers. "Had he been ill?"

"He's a junkie." Mozz sniffed. "Sir."

"Oh."

Cooper glanced quickly at his XO. "Get Schwartz out of here, Miri. Chow's at 0700; you can tell everyone they got the head off."

"Sir." Mozz kicked at the shivery Corporal Schwartz. "Get up. Let's roll."

"Did he get the drugs from you guys?" Reye's whisper was mild, but Pixy was not encouraged.

"I hope not, sir." She did not need to ask how Reye knew she was the ship's supplier; that's how it worked all through the Fleet. The Second Officer was always the kingpin. "I gave orders not to sell to him, but I'm sure we sold to the rest of the platoon. After that..." She shrugged.

Reye was nodding. He turned to Cooper as the hatch slipped shut behind Schwartz. "Well. My apologies; the Fleet's drug-control measures don't always work as they should." The infantryman flapped his hand dismissively.

"Please." He was shaking his head, frowning at the headless corpse. "Woj had no trouble finding that shit, no matter where we went. He's probably still got some snuck away inside the shuttle, left over from the Cygnus operation." He shrugged. "Matter of time. Even if the head's still viable, there's probably no point placing an order; I think most of his clone was already used up."

Pixy raised her eyebrows. "Don't you special operations guys get two clones?" Cooper just stared at her, silent. "Holy shit. This dude worked his way through two whole clones?"

"I'm telling you, he had a problem." Cooper spread his hands. "I think he already died once, like, all the way. This is his third heart, probably parts of his second brain." He sighed. They all watched in silence as Dr January, still pale, got the cryo bag sealed off; he'd have the EEG running soon, then. "That's not even the least of the problem. It's not like we buzz around the galaxy with an extra fucking pilot."

"Can he... if he..." Reye was sure what he wanted to say, but he was struggling to figure out how to say it. "Like, if he's viable, can he still communicate enough to talk one of you through a drop?"

"No." January was unequivocal and loud. "No way." He waved a hand toward the broad bloodstain on the tiled wall. "See that, captain? That's his vocal cords. He's not talking anyone through anything."

"Ah." Reye had his hands behind his back, conscious of his exalted position here; he was trying for dignity, but the fuzzy slippers were not helping. "So..."

"I'm told," Cooper was saying slowly, "that there are many Fleet officers who can fly shuttles."

"All of us are trained for it," Reye agreed. "Some don't get much practice. Others?" He coughed delicately, and Pixy could read his mind: the Army had lost its pilot. He'd OD'd on drugs. There were a lot of drugs in the Fleet. Pixy was in charge of the ship's drugs. Pixy knew how to fly shuttles; had been decorated for it, in fact. She sighed; she knew the skipper would not be so indelicate as to tell her to volunteer, not in front of the infantryman. But she also knew she'd have to, whether these had been her drugs or not.

And if they had, she'd be ripping off Ana and McChang's heads and pissing down their necks. She cleared her throat, staring at the rooster-tail of gore all over the wall.

"I can fly a shuttle," she shrugged, hoping she sounded louder than she felt; Pixy had not joined the service to go into danger, and she never enjoyed it. "How hard can it be? Gravity should do most of the work," she went on lightly. Captain Reye was nodding; Cooper was about to open his mouth, but Dr January finally had the EEG online.

"Got a signal, sort of." He bent to study the plot. "Something, anyway."

Pixy sighed. "So, yeah. Doc, I need to know how much power your cryo bag will need to draw; I'll find it somewhere." When she looked back over at Cooper, she was careful to veil her glance. "I guess I'll go check out the shuttle later this morning." Cooper was looking at her, still with that air of greed, the pride of a man looking at a woman who still has his semen sloshing around inside her. "If you'd agree to give me a tour, Lieutenant Cooper-Crick." She didn't bother trying to keep the loathing from her voice.

"Oh, certainly ma'am." A tiny flicker of that shit-eating grin crept back. "I'd be glad to." Reye, between them in his ridiculous slippers, sighed.

* * *

PART III: The Planet

* * *

"This is not the way I wanted to spend my afternoon, ma'am."

Pixy smiled, that tight and grim smile she showed when she was trying to cover up something deeper. She looked once more at the unfamiliar controls, feeling nearly as confused as the Tygon was, and then composed herself and turned to stare at him. "Just humor me, Mr Amisuul. Run through the sequence again; that's a good boy."

"Supposed to be a fucking Service officer..." Amisuul glared once more at the panel before him, frowning, one yellow fang protruding.

Pixy was never sure about Amisuul; he was a useless and insubordinate pile of shit most of the time, but she'd been thoroughly impressed by his performance in the Battle. He'd stayed at his post even after the hull breach, and despite the billion other details clogging Pixy's mind that day she'd found the energy to notice what he'd done with the Pulver's unimpressive arsenal. He'd stayed focused on his panel and nothing but his panel, concentrating at his station even while little Cheops shrieked for his mother as he bled out all over Amisuul's boots. She'd seen the Tygon work magic that day, his scaly green fingers fluttering over the relays, playing with the power as he tried to keep up with the targeting computers.

Tried? Succeeded; that second enemy cruiser had disintegrated only after Amisuul had gotten the idea to mass-fire the last three torpedoes into its cooling sleeve. It had been an inspired shot, probably made while he sat in his own waste; by that time, nearly everyone on the bridge had shit themselves.

"Naw, sir, it's the blue relay, the one over there..." Fraze still hadn't lost his patience, remarkably, even after four times through the sequencing drill.

"Fuck!" The Tygon nearly had it that time. He shook his head and turned to the stocky sergeant. "You're saying Woj used to do the weapons at the same time he was flying?"

The crew chief shrugged and spat more stim juice into the swamp he'd already left in the little bowl he always seemed to carry. "He was the best, Lieutenant." He scratched irritably at his balls. "He had his problems, but not while he was flying, and that's no shit neither." Fraze squinted across the panel. "You doing okay down there, ma'am?"

Pixy swallowed her trepidation and raised an eyebrow. "Why? Want to come help me, sergeant?"

"Aw, hell naw." Fraze winked. "I never even come up here, most of the time. But I figure, if it takes two Fleet lieutenants to step in for one old junkie Army sergeant-major, well, that sounds like something worth seeing." He grinned, his remaining teeth dark brown. "You two are going to do just fine."

"Your vote of confidence is appreciated, Sergeant Fraze." Pixy was desperately worried, her stress heightened by the need to pretend she wasn't. She wondered how many of the Army types could see right through it. Immediately it had become clear, from the moment Cooper had gestured her wordlessly onto the flight deck, that she'd need help: a shuttle was a shuttle was a shuttle, but the usual flight controls in here were draped in an unfamiliar array of customized weapons and evasion panels. No way could she learn all that in two days. So, as usual, Amisuul had been the only one of several shitty choices.

"I can get off the duty roster even when we come back, right?" He'd been desperately eager to get off bridge watch. It made him nervous to be that close to the captain; something about him freaked Amisuul out. "I think it's his smile; doesn't there sort of seem like there's something a little bit 'off' about it?"

"Never mind that shit." Pixy had been in no mood to negotiate. "You come with me and do weapons in the shuttle, and you're off the roster from now until two days after we get back. Final offer. Otherwise, I'll take Purcell." Amisuul shuddered visibly; the entire ship knew that the tall, lovely Purcell was his favorite fuck. "Good chance we won't come back, too," Pixy went on viciously. "Wouldn't that be awful, if I brought her down planetside and got her killed because you pussied out of it?" That had been enough for the Tygon, and with Captain Reye's grudging consent, a visibly pale diBiase had sat at the First Officers' station during the mission rehearsal next day.

Amisuul sighed now, going over the weapons steps in his mind. "I just need to get, like, five sequences down," he mused, frustrated; the idea was that certain events in the infantry mission called for certain responses, and that a good weaponeer was someone who could dial in those desired responses quickly and accurately: engagement during descent? That called for Relays #4 and #6 (torpedo tubes 1 and 2) and Lever B, the blue one at the bottom of the panel, for the shield preset. A rising engagement would call for the same, but no shields; they'd draw too much power from the ascent engines. "What's that?" he asked Sergeant Fraze, flapping a hand at the two prominent slap-buttons at the top of the display. One was blue, the other green.

The man stared at the two big buttons and licked his lips. "Might want to ask the LT about those," he decided at last. Pixy found it jarring how the Army called their leaders that. They spelled it out as "Ell Tee." "Those are for the FPF presets, but you should probably let one of us mess with them."

"FPF?"

"Final protective fire? Like, when you're getting overrun..."

"No, I know what it means. We have that in the Fleet, too." Amisuul gazed thoughtfully at the panel.

"Don't go getting any ideas, dude," Pixy said after a moment. Pulver's FPF had saved them in the Battle, at Pixy's command; one emergency FPF order and every gun aboard had contracted, every laser projector or arc-mortar had shortened the range, and then they'd all fired at once. It was meant to fend off enemy ships; Pixy had ordered it offensively, while they were actually flying into other vessels.

Seemed to work.

"Yeah, so the idea is that the mission leader orders an FPF only if the end is near. Blue button for if you're in space, green for if you're planetside." The sergeant shrugged. "LT calls the codeword over the beam, whoever's up here hits the button, and all hell breaks loose. After that, you typically just fly away tout suite."

"How powerful is the FPF?" Amisuul was professionally curious, but he was asking the wrong man.

"Fucking super-duper powerful, sir." Fraze spat again. "Hell, it's all the special earmarked munitions loaded and calibrated just for the FPF, plus whatever remaining ordnance is in the tubes, minus the emergency reserve. It's a lot of fire, sir. A lot; I've only seen it during pop lifts." He didn't bother waiting for one of the Fleet officers to ask. "See, the special weapons are so heavy that the shuttle has a problem lifting off on plus-gravity planets. So all that weight needs to be jettisoned prior to lift." He shrugged. "A pop lift. You just do an FPF to waste your ordnance, then lift, and by the time shit's stopped exploding behind you you're already in orbit."

'Sounds expensive." Pixy had a supply officer's dislike for waste, as long as other people were doing it.

The sergeant added to his swampy bowl. "Keeps the enemy from coming after you. They're too busy putting out the fires." He laughed coarsely just as Cooper poked his head up at the top of the ladder. "What's going on, LT?"

"Everything good up here? You guys getting orientated?" Pixy gritted her teeth; a lot of military people said orientated when they meant oriented, as though the extra syllable conferred added wisdom. "Any questions?"

"Can you tell me the last time the plus-ups were serviced?" Pixy knew he couldn't. It still galled her that she'd let him fuck her. "No? Then no, Cooper-Crick. No questions."

"How powerful is the FPF?" Amisuul repeated with a glance over his shoulder. Cooper brightened.

"That, I can answer. In normal atmosphere, it's around .6 kilotons. 15% of spacecraft mass. The space-based FPF is more like 10 kilotons; it needs to go in all directions, and it's not intensified by atmosphere." Amisuul whistled. "I know, right? That's half the shuttle mass."

"Wait." Pixy was certain she'd misheard. "Half your mass is space-based ordnance?"

"Yup." Cooper seemed proud of that. "Attack while in space is the enemy's most dangerous course of action, so we plan for it. But I've never had to use that, and we only do a ground FPF when we pop-lift; do you know what that is?"

"Yes," Pixy bit out shortly.

"Yeah. So, then. But I don't think anyone in the Army has ever seen a real, space-based FPF from a P/E shuttle." He frowned thoughtfully, then his glance slid back toward Pixy. "Say, ma'am, didn't your ship do an FPF at that 447 engagement? I think I read something about that?"

Amisuul looked quickly at Pixy, who shrugged evenly and spoke to her console. "Something like that," she echoed at last.

Cooper paused, then shrugged. "Yeah. Well, I think a cruiser FPF is like over twenty kilotons? Something like that." He paused again, the squelching noise of Fraze's mouth dominating the flight deck. "I'd think that would completely scramble your ship's systems, being in the middle of all that. Gravity, shields; I'd think they'd short out." He looked thoughtful. "There are a lot of theories about using space-based FPFs offensively..."

You have no idea, Pixy thought darkly. She smacked Amisuul on the back of the head. "Come on. Get your sequences squared away." The Tygon went guiltily back to work, and Cooper sighed behind them.

"Mission briefing at 1930, ma'am, after dinner." He still sounded charming, damn him. "I'll present your flight plan then, and you two can rehearse all night if you want to. Departure at 1115 tomorrow."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." She'd never turned to face him. "You can go now." She didn't need to look; she knew Amisuul and Fraze would have their eyebrows up around their hairline now, wondering what was up between Pixy and Cooper. But she wasn't feeling like enlightening them. Hell, Amisuul at least should have smelled it on her by now, the spoiled-starch odor of curdling semen. She hadn't been able to shower yet; when duty called... "I think we're good, sergeant. You can go do... whatever it is you do. Lieutenant Amisuul and I will just stay up here and fool around."

"Sure, ma'am." He got to his feet and scratched at his crotch. "Find me if you need me. I'll be loading all the ordnance starting at 2100, so don't press any buttons after that."

"I'll make sure to remember," Amisuul replied dryly. He had a chart in front of him, torn out of the manual he'd found behind his seat, that showed the pre-landing bombardment patterns for various kinds of opposed landings. Fraze had cheerfully told him that, ideally, he should memorize the entire chart. The Tygon waited until the dirty little man had disappeared before he turned to Pixy. "We're pretty fucked here," he told her dourly.