Free Ship's Boy by Phil Geusz Page B

well cared for.”
    I looked away—Sergeant Wells was approaching after briefing his marines one last time. “All I ever wanted was to be a ship’s engineer, sir,” I said softly. “Nothing else matters.”
    The captain’s eyebrows rose. “ You? A ship’s engineer?” Sir Leslie sighed and shook his head. “Help me take that ship, and I’ll do everything I can for you. I mean every bit of that—I’ll pull strings to get you into overseer school, or databunny training, or any other appropriate field you might choose. My word of honor on it! But…” He shook his head again as he began walking away. “A Rabbit as a ship’s engineer? David, you simply must be reasonable about certain things!”  
     

18
    Sergeant Wells and I were among the first through the airlock, since we had special equipment to set up. There were any number of eye-hooks on Hummingbird ’s outer hull to anchor our grapple to, and one was pretty much as good as another since the line wasn’t expected to come under much in the way of physical stress. The marine seemed surprised, however, when I snaked the line to three more anchor points and added connectors at each one. Yes, one single connection would indeed be enough to do the trick, most likely. But if all went well both the cable and the anchors were soon going to be carrying most of the power output of a medium-sized warship’s engineering plant, and more drain-points the better.
    From then on our job mostly consisted of waiting, though our crewmates had plenty to do. Hummingbird ’s lights went out sector by sector as the engineers shut down even emergency lighting, while the space-adept marines helped their less-nimble crewmates locate odd niches here and there to conceal themselves in. One place they didn’t hide, however, was inside the airlocks—open airlocks on a warship were an official signal of surrender, which was the last thing on Captain Blaine’s mind. Finally, as crippled and busted up as they were, the ship’s mechanical staff improvised a big, showy electrical arc not far from where the enemy’s last, most critical hit had penetrated our hull. They even set up a slow air leak to make it visible in the vacuum—it was a work of art, really. It must’ve made tons of radio noise on virtually any frequency one might name, while at the same time generating enough heat to mask the presence of functional life-support in those few areas of Hummingbird we’d left habitable. The thing was a masterpiece, in short, and I had to admire the skill and tenacity of the men who’d pulled it off despite having sustained so much damage to their own persons. Even if I still didn’t like them very much. Sergeant Wells punched my shoulder in glee at the sight, and I thumped him back twice by way of reply. Then something ripped through our souls as the enemy cruiser popped through into normal space, and there wasn’t any more time for casual jibber-jabber.
    I’d spent hours studying our antagonist through the ship’s computer, just as every other man aboard probably had. She was a Revolucion -class vessel, equipped with a battery of eight medium-powered naval blasters mounted in twin turrets and crewed by perhaps two hundred men. Fifty years ago the Revolucion s, as befitted their class-name, had been truly revolutionary vessels. They’d introduced a new, previously top-secret control-rod configuration, and in their day had been the fastest things in deep space. They were still damnably quick by any measure, but otherwise their time was long past. Their blasters took too long to recharge, their Fields were finicky and established themselves slowly, and worst of all there were incurable developmental bugs in the control-rod geometry. While practically every high-performance ship in the sky today used an improved version of the new setup, including both Broad Arrow and Hummingbird , the Revolucion s remained prone to sudden, massive engineering-plant failures—indeed, three of