Manticore Ascendant 1: A Call to Duty (eARC) by David Weber & Timothy Zahn

Author:David Weber & Timothy Zahn [Weber, David & Zahn, Timothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Baen Books
Published: 2014-09-30T17:00:00+00:00

BOOK THREE

1533 PD

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Like night and day was one of those figures of speech that Travis had grown up with, along with everybody in the Star Kingdom and probably every human being in the Diaspora. It was pervasive, quoted way too often, and aside from literal night and day he’d long since concluded that the term was hyperbole, a lazy choice of words, or both.

His life aboard Vanguard had certainly been a long, slow slide into night. With a few exceptions the battlecruiser’s officers and petty officers had seemed placid and coasting, with their priorities more on making life run smoothly than making sure one of His Majesty’s warships stayed as close to fighting trim as possible. The enlisted were even worse, with on-duty hours spent moving at half-speed—or avoiding work altogether—and off-duty ones filled with gambling, stealing or repurposing official ship’s equipment, and engaging in other activities he didn’t even want to think about.

And drinking. The drinking had particularly rankled. RMN rules put strict limits on the amount of alcohol available aboard, but that never seemed to stop anyone.

It had often made Travis feel like he was literally under siege on his own ship. He would be at the terminal in his section, trying to study toward his gravitics system operator rating, while drunken shouts and laughter went on outside his door. Every third day, it seemed, he would come upon a job that had been logged as completed, only to find it not only not finished but barely even begun. Reporting it to Craddock or Bowen seldom did any good, and by his third month aboard he’d learned that if he wanted those jobs completed his only practical recourse was to finish them himself.

And at least twice a day he found himself dodging, kicking, or getting slammed into by cleaning and damage-control remotes that had been rigged for jousting, racing, demolition derbies, or hide-and-seek in the service tubes and accessways. Often in tubes and accessways that should have been cleaned by those selfsame remotes, but clearly hadn’t.

Esterle’s accident with the gravitic array, and the subsequent halfhearted investigation had set his teeth on edge. The Phobos incident, and the emotional gut-punch of losing the two men who had put themselves on the line to save him from Lieutenant Cyrus’s vendetta, had all but sealed the black sense of frustration and despair that had been gradually settling in around him. It had gone so far that when his half-brother Gavin had come to him after Vanguard’s return to Manticore and asked about the disaster, Travis had told him that as soon as his five T-years were up he would be out.

It was a thought he’d never before even dared to put into mental words, let alone audible ones, and it was as soul-crushing an admission as anything he’d experienced aboard the ship. It was a statement of defeat, a recognition that the glowing life of Naval service he’d envisioned for himself hadn’t happened.

He hadn’t fitted into the world of his childhood and youth.

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