The Command

Below that was the lower level, with the engine foundations and the coalescers and fire pumps and the complicated hydraulics for the screw pitch control mechanism, and all the lube oil pumps and filters and tanks. Petty Officer Helm wouldn’t let her touch the lube oil. It was synthetic MIL-SPEC-23699 stuff that ate rubber seals. It would give you dermatitis and paralysis and birth defects. He worked on it himself, with rubber gloves and a rubber apron and a face shield. You were walking on diamond-treaded steel floorplates by now, and pulling them up showed you nothing below but the sea chests where pipes came in through the bottom, and red-painted steel, and slowly roiling water that was the bilge.

That was Main One. Main Two aft was pretty much like it, but she didn’t see much of it or the aux spaces or Control because Helm kept his watch section busy doing qualifications and cleaning the steam traps and doing all the other stuff they had to do to keep the engines and generators and pumps running. It wasn’t as hot down here as she’d thought it’d be, but it was so noisy everyone had to wear ear protection and shout at each other. It had been rough all the way across. She carried trash bags in her coveralls to throw up in. Ricochet was worse. He was puking nonstop. He lay on the IR flat whenever he could because he said there was less motion up there.

Her watch section was five people. Helm and Ricochet, whose real name was Sanders but everybody called him Ricochet because when he walked down the passageway he bounced off one bulkhead then the other. GSM3 Pascual, who everybody called the Porn King because he had a stash of books and magazines and tapes under his bunk he rented out by the hour. He read Velvet and Superman and Vero on watch. She’d opened one he left on the PLCC. All guys with huge cocks coming in women’s faces, the women rubbing it into their tits. Only you could tell it wasn’t real come because there was so much of it. She figured probably dishwashing liquid. Whenever she came across one of his magazines after that, she dropped it in the bilge. And Akhmeed, who had a little mustache shaved narrow and came from the Philippines and didn’t want to talk about anything but his truck.

It was Akhmeed who’d cut her down after the guys taped her to the overhead. The taping wasn’t so bad. What was embarrassing was having to wear a rubber glove on her head. You stretched the latex wrist over the top of your skull and your eyes and your nose. Then blew out until the fingers erected like a rooster comb on top of your head. You had to go around the ship flapping your arms and crowing. She’d come face to face with the exec by the Coke machine. Who’d yelled at her to take the fucking glove off her head and get back to her work space, this was a ship not a frat party.

But now the hazing was over and Chief Bendt had called down on the 4MC to wash down the GTG because they were going into Palma this morning. Helm had shut it down and told her to do the washdown with Sanders. She got her tools together and made sure the temperature was under 110 degrees. If it wasn’t, you could warp the blades spraying cold water on them. She climbed into the isolation module and started disconnecting the air lines and hoses. The ship was rolling and her mouth was watering and she didn’t like being in there. All somebody had to do was dog the hatch and light off the turbine and she’d cook. Nobody’d ever hear her screaming. So she kept the door propped open. She could hear the guys talking outside about why the rotor rings were sparking.

“We replaced the brushes and sandpapered the rings.”

“Is it the rotor? Is it warped?”

“Naw, it’s them rotor worms. They get into it and eat out at it from inside.”

“What kind of zit brain you think I am? You’re fuckin’ so lame, man.”

“Yeah, fuckin’ lame, you scammer. Red on the head like the dick on a dog.”

“At least when I fart you smell something, man. Not just dry old cobwebs.”

“You’re the fucking head of the class, man. Like when they told you to go see the chief engineer and ask her for twelve feet of fallopian tube.”

She climbed out and told Helm he could spin the motor now. You spun it at low speed from the panel, about two thousand RPM. Meanwhile she went up the ladder to the upper level and poured half a gallon of BNB into the wash tank. She didn’t know what the initials stood for, just that it was like a detergent. She cracked the valve to pressurize it, then went back down to the generator and carefully opened the solenoid valve next to the module. A hiss came out of the open door, but you never actually saw any water. It went in the engine and out the exhaust and evaporated when it hit the hot tubes in the boiler. She gave it one shot with the BNB and two rinses with fresh water. Then climbed back in to reconnect.