For Honor We Stand (Man of War Book 2) by H. Paul Honsinger

Author:H. Paul Honsinger [Honsinger, H. Paul]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: 47North
Published: 2014-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

“Hey! Cho!” Recruit Spacer Second Class Antonio “Doozie” Balduzzi yelled down 37.9 meters of access crawlway to his partner, Able Spacer Third Class Cho Jintao. Fortunately, he had a powerful set of lungs to carry his voice over the distance, particularly with the profusion of humming, buzzing, chirping, clicking, whizzing, whumping, and even, occasionally, banging equipment between the two men in the confined space.

“Yeah, what?” Cho’s powers of projection, though not quite on par with Balduzzi’s, were still quite impressive. Neither man had any difficulty hearing the other. It never occurred to either to use their percoms to open a voice channel.

“This one’s running at 73 percent, and the one before was running at 77.”

“Damn, Doozie, I’m seeing the same thing. The last one I checked was at seventy-five, and the one before that at seventy-two.” Doozie crawled aft to the gravity generator regulator that controlled the gravity generators the two men had just checked. Cho was running a diagnostic routine on the mechanism and was getting nothing but green lights.

“I bet every one in this series is doing something similar.”

“I’ve got the same feeling, but I’ll be a Pfelung’s grandmother if I can tell you why,” said Cho. “I’ve just run two diagnostics on the regulator. It checks out across the board. The machine is clean and green.”

“What do you do in this situation?” Because he fell below the ship’s proficiency average in his specialty, Doozie had never been sent to work on an equipment problem that wasn’t instantly diagnosed by the computer or that turned out to be a straightforward fix involving swapping out a board or a module.

“Well, babe, what I normally do in this situation is I call Petty Officer Liebergot. Him or Aaron. They’re the “hottie Scottys” on all the electrical/environmental subsystems, and the gravity generators are right down Liebergot’s alley, but they’re both off limits today because of the skipper’s new training thing.”

“Is there anyone else we can call?”

“At 02:27? Any man not on the White Watch is in his rack inspecting his eyelids for photon leaks. So, my friend, you and I are the White Watch experts on this system. For better or worse, it’s you and me, babe.” Doozie was starting to get annoyed at Cho’s habit of calling him “babe,” but he did his best to overlook it.

“Can we leave it to the next watch? You and I and everybody else know that the Blue Watch has got a lot more on the ball than we do in White. I’m sure there’s someone in that bunch that can straighten this out.”

“Invalid input, babe. Two reasons. One, the work order came from Lieutenant Brown himself and he marked it ‘Resolve this Watch,’ which means it gets done before end of watch or we die trying. We don’t get to hand it off to someone else. And two, there’s a real safety issue. Think about it, Dooze: a man steps from one G nominal through a gradient that’s only a millimeter or two

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