Claws That Catch

CHAPTER NINE

“What are you doing?” Weaver asked, rubbing his stomach and yawning.

It was two hours before his shift started and he’d been up late trying to catch up on paperwork. But he’d decided there was only one choice in the ongoing battle with Chief Dump — Duppstadt, which was to check on every meal before it was cooked.

Two hours was about right for the cooks to be just starting their preparations, but when he arrived four cooks were dumping scrambled eggs into containers, sliced bread was piled on the counters drying out and that horrible greasy bacon was already, supposedly, “cooked” and was piled in masses, the majority of it swimming in grease.

Bill had barely been able to conjure how Duppstadt could possibly have achieved his feats of culinary legerdemain. Now he had a clear vision. So clear he stood dumbfounded, just blinking at the startled cooks.

“Are you shiny, sir?” the lead petty officer asked.

“What in the hell do you think you’re doing?” Bill asked, broken out of his stasis. “Breakfast doesn’t serve for two hours.”

“Chief Duppstadt’s orders, sir,” the LPO said, stone-faced. “Get everything prepared in advance then clean the kitchen for inspection. Thirty minutes before chow’s up we have an inspection of the kitchen, so we have to have everything prepared in advance. Sir.”

Bill looked at the food and couldn’t figure out what to do. His first instinct was to tell them to dump the stuff and start over, but that would be a huge waste, one whole meal down the garbage chute. Given that the limiting factor on the Blade’s endurance was quite simply food, he couldn’t do that.

“And where is the chief?” Bill asked.

“He gets here for inspection, sir,” the LPO said. “We’ll be ready for you to inspect in an hour and a half or so. Sorry it’s such a mess, but we were…”

“Cooking,” Bill said. “The idea, though, LPO… Oh, never mind. When the Chief arrives for ‘inspection,’ tell him that it’s cancelled and he is to report to my office. I will expect him in one hour and forty minutes from now, not one hour and forty-two.”

“Two hours?” Bill shouted. “You’re having the cooks prepare the food two hours in advance so you can run some damned inspection?”

“I keep a clean kitchen, sir,” Chief Duppstadt said, standing at attention and looking at the bulkhead behind the officer. “Always have, always will. Won’t have no filth in my kitchen, sir!”

“No, you just serve it!” Bill snarled. “Chief Duppstadt, listen to me very carefully. Here is the revised schedule for your kitchen. You will begin your meal preparations at the latest possible moment to have food on the table for the shift’s designated meal times. You may then, when the service has been completed, clean your kitchen and inspect; then you will begin preparations for the next meal, repeating this process. If I ever go down there and find two hundred pounds of eggs prepared two hours in advance and cooling, I will upon our return to Earth ensure that you are sent to the coldest, nastiest, most forsaken outpost the United States Navy has to offer, be it on Earth or off. As something other than a cook. And you had better figure out how to actually apply both eggs and bacon to a griddle for long enough that they cook or so help me God I’ll have you strapped to the exterior guns for the duration of the voyage! If I’m feeling merciful, and I rarely am after eating your slop, I will afford you the luxury of a spacesuit!”

It had to be done.

Bill was just at his wits end. Systems breaking that nobody knew how to fix. Crew on the edge of mutiny over the food. More paperwork than could be done by a legion of clerks and the CO riding his ass Every. Single. Moment.

He just couldn’t take it anymore. He HAD to blow off some stress somehow. He was starting to figure out why submariners were such practical jokers. He’d considered that solution and rejected it. There was a better way.

He picked up the guitar, tuned it carefully, then kicked on the speakers. There was a dull thump that rattled the few nicknacks on a shelf. The curtain that had replaced his door fluttered in the sudden pressure change then settled slowly, quivering as if in anticipation. Or, perhaps, fear.

When under stress, Weaver liked to blow it off in one of several ways. His preferred method was going on long mountain bike runs. But that was sort of out on the Blade. Second to that was his karate fetish. He’d considered checking to see if any of the Marines had serious hand-to-hand skills but never quite had the time.

The last was to play guitar. Play it very loud. And headphones just weren’t the same.

“WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?” the torpedoman screamed.

He’d been just about to insert a microchip into one of the ardune torps. The chip had failed a diagnostic and since it controlled the ardune release, that was considered “ungood.”

Ardune was the Adar name for what humans called “quarkium,” a material made up entirely of unique quarks. What type of quark, up, down, strange, charmed, didn’t really matter. The thing about quarks was, they were the building blocks of matter. But they had to pair up to form “normal” particles like protons and neutrons.

A mass of “unique” quarks acted much like the neutrons in a fission reaction, breaking up not just atoms but their building blocks and, along the way, releasing lots of energy. Essentially all the energy in the matter. And since they still couldn’t bind, they kept going and going and going.

Antimatter worked on the basis of Einstein’s famous E=mc². But antimatter only hit regular matter and converted all the energy once. Quarkium did that and kept going.

It was brutally dangerous stuff. Also lovely for causing explosions. Which was why the torpedoes and missiles in the Blade used the stuff. But an uncontrolled release would be… ungood.

Fortunately, he hadn’t quite gotten it seated when the room began to vibrate. He was afraid the harmonics might just shake the whole damned room apart.

“ ‘MISSISSIPPI QUEEN’!” the torpedo room chief shouted back. “BY MOUNTAIN! ONE HIT WONDER FROM THE ’70S! GUITAR’S NOT BAD BUT I DON’T KNOW WHO IN THE HELL IS SINGING! HE SOUNDS LIKE A VULTURE THAT’S JUST FOUND A WHOLE ELEPHANT CARCASS!”

“XO, in my professional opinion, I find that your singing is an undue stress to the crew and a potential safety hazard,” the CO said balefully. He’d been a victim of part of the concert all the way back in Conn, which was a third of the length down the ship from the XO’s quarters. “In the future you will refrain from playing your music outloud just as the rest of the crew must. That, by the way, is an order, XO.”

“Yes, sir,” Bill said.

“Dismissed.”