Penn-2

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==Chapter 2 - Pennants==
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===The Past===
SLDF recruit induction center
Norfolk (City), Luna (Armstrong)
Sol System, Terran Hegemony
January 4th, 2734
"You okay? Hey, dirtyfoot?" She was tall, with Asian eyes and long fingers.
Kaneda Toshio had made it. Out of a graduating class from the An Ting university, his application to the Star League Defense Forces was accepted. And then he managed to trip and fall in the docking concourse on his way to officer training.
His very first day, and he'd forgotten to adjust his step for the low, low gravity of Luna.
"I'm… I am unhurt,. he said defensively.
"Ayeh, but you're embarrassed. Don't worry, nobody really notices in a dock. It happens all the time, even for Rokkahjakkah when they're at the bottom of a well."
He realized she had a hand extended to help him. Against his better judgment, he accepted it.
"First time offworld, or you just had to spend a lot of time at the bottom of a heavy well?" She was so… open.
Almost fascinatingly open.
"Hai, yes… First time in low gee for any long period," he confirmed. "I am Kaneda Toshio, from An Ting."
"I'm Anh Cu'ong, I'm a Rokkahjakkah from the anti-spinward region of the Star League," she said. And it was the first sign of something like proper discretion.
"What is a…"
"Belter," she said. "Only we call it something different back in the burrows of home."
Her apparent youth made sense now. The Star League Defense Force had a notoriously hard time recruiting the spacer borns from any of the member states. She's on a scholarship, I bet!
"Are you a student?" he asked cautiously.
"Assuming the paperwork's clean, yeah. The directions to the tram were written quite… obtusely. I think it's this-a-way," she gestured. "You?"
"First day here," he agreed.
"Excellent. I get to meet a cool guy with a Nihon name on day one. Things are looking solid." She smiled.
"You… think I'm cool?"
"A girl can hope right? See far places, meet new and interesting people… It's right in the recruiting pamphlets!" She kept smiling.
He felt his nerves ease. "What is your MOS?" he asked.
"Navigation and KF Drive Operations, probably going to try for Interstellar Survey… you?"
"Warship Branch," he told her. "I'm going for Captain as soon as I can prove myself to them."
"Heavy irons, neat! Come on, let's go catch the tram before the next shuttle docks!"
She carved a path for them both through the crowd of commuters.
They got there before the next tram was set to arrive, and the schedule showed enough time…
So she joined him for a light lunch at the food vendor's stall on the platform.
"What's it like, growing up in space?" he asked.
"What's it like spending your life at the bottom of the well, with only a magnetic field and gravity to hold the air in?" she countered. "Trust me, all my stories about life in burrows or on processor platforms are deadly dull stuff! I've got maybe sixteen hours lifetime on a planet without a dome or good solid stone roof, and that was only because I had to swap flights at Coventry, Tharkad, and New Earth. And those places use surface spaceports instead of more reasonable orbitals when you're riding in the cheap seats."
It was a little bit of a shock. He'd heard of people living like that…"How-?"
"Well, I've got sixteen hours clocked on habitable worlds, and eight years living on Hatter in the old mining tunnels," she confessed. "Not too different from Luna, here, except nobody's dumb enough to put windows on the surface… too close to the binary. But I left Hatter when I was thirteen and they got the new bone-meds. Docs certed me as 'healthy' enough to move in with the rest of the Association on mom's home burrow. 'Remarkably normal bone growth' and 'excellent walking skills'."
"Walking skills?"
"I learned to walk on my feet when I was seven," she explained. "They sent me to live with cousins under constant Gee-loading after the doc said my body wasn't square with calcium uptake. My skeleton wasn't forming right, so I got dumped on Cousins until I could be deemed 'healthy'. It's all really boring, routine stuff."
It wasn't to him… But he took the implied invitation to talk about himself…
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"...there’s a right way, a wrong way, and the Star League Defense Force's way of doing things. If you want to graduate this course, you're going to have to learn the Star League Defense Force's way of doing things and forget about your own ideas of the 'right way'!" Commander Hutsch scowled. "Cu'ong, where is the rest of your kit?"
"Sir, we were given a list of kit to bring aboard, sir. I have everything on that list, sir."
"Show me."
Kaneda watched as she unpacked her duffel, laying out the complete issue on the deck.
"Gather around, Nuggets," the Commander-instructor ordered. "Cadet Cu'ong, demonstrate how you backed your gear."
"Aye sir."
"This, children, is how you're supposed to do it the Star League Way," Commander Hutsch explained. "She made everything fit, and kept it fit for use. While Hydrogen Fusion engines allow an amazing amount of thrust, which allows for quite a lot more… slack… in terms of volume and mass control, you can’t always count on having that slack. Especially when lifting off of, or going into, a combat scenario."
Kaneda, unlike some of the other cadets, didn't feel a spike of envy or hostility as the Commander instructor used Anh as a living example.
Part of this was knowing her over the last few months, having her help with hyperspatial navigation calculus, and having her owe him.
Case in point, the woman had never ridden a bicycle before-not even as a young girl, never mind driven a surface vehicle, and despite her eager openness the first time they met, her default seemed to be 'wallflower'.
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SLS Toniah
Sol System, out past Pluto
Terran Hegemony
2736
"These old ships had some good ideas. Not a lot, but some," Anh clarified. "But they had a lot of bad ideas too." She put the diagnostic kit back in its bag like it was a reflex, then turned to face him. "Silver for the conductors on the radar? Good idea. Running the power supply through a biodegradable conduit? Not so much. The faults we were seeing from the sensors in the command deck? is because the insulation's degraded. It's shorting to the spaceframe because this mothball hulk has a mildew problem… and rats."
"Rats?"
"Feeding off the roaches, which are feeding off the mold, which is here, because while the ship's been kept pressurized for sixty some odd years since it was put in mothball? There's condensation, so the spores get some nice clean water and a ready supply of food. Since insulation for the power runs is mostly the same stuff jacketing the fiber optics, and the fiber's just silica-based, it gets moldy too. A ship in service wouldn't have that problem because the crew would notice a funny smell in the filters, and there's the natural side activity of having a crew in place maintaining it."
"But this vessel's in reserve!"
"So? There's a 'caretaker crew' who visits what, once a year maybe?" She shook her head. "Lots of ships in storage out here, ships nobody's going to use, so here's my speculation…" She prodded a junction box. "...they do a spacewalk once or twice a cycle, and maybe they short the inspections. After all, plenty of front line ships out there, who needs an old Baron right? So the mothball crews, they have things they want to do instead. They check over the consumables lockers and do a function test on the weapons systems and maybe the drives say, once every five years or thereabouts. But nobody does a deep clean on it unless there's an inspection coming up. They got other things they can be doing, maybe even things that are important, and nobody stays at a post like this for long. Either your boss is on his way out of the Service, or he's on his way to another posting somewhere equally dead-end, and he knows it."
"So is it repairable?"
"Sure, but I’m not sure why the brass would bother," Anh asserted. "The results of fielding Barons is how the Feddies lost at Malagrotta, and they weren't much of an asset during the periphery campaigns, even when their opponents weren't fielding warships of their own."
Kaneda inclined his head, and waited for their grader to speak.
"Full marks for historical awareness, Ngo, and full marks for tactical analysis. Now tell me why your strategic analysis is dead wrong." Commander Binetti anchored herself above the two cadets.
"Because any ship is useful if it still works as a ship, just not in the role it's supposedly intended for?" Anh asked.
"Bingo. You two are probably the best out of your year so far."
"How's that?" Kaneda asked, curious.
"Because you actually thought through the reasons why you're out here, instead of just blithely accepting what you were told. Then the two of you actually went down to see what was causing the fault, instead of merely documenting and reporting it as being present."
"Didn't everyone else do that?" was Anh's response to this. "I mean, nobody in our year is actively stupid or lazy!!"
"You didn't finish checking over the weapons mounts or the drives yet," Binetti noted. "You're actually behind the rest of them that way. You went for the first major fault and tried to address it, instead of collecting the full litany before prioritizing."
"Oh, but the mold and the vermin problems are going to be in those systems too," Anh couldn't resist arguing.
"Yep," Binetti nodded. "They are, as a matter of fact. How did you logic it would be there?"
"Because it's here," Anh stated. "When you find one evidence of neglect failure, you're only looking at the first instance. Bby the time it turns up on the BITE panel, there's more failures. And when it's easy-diagnosed, like this was? It's gonna be widespread."
"Also, the ship HAS been kept pressurized to one atmosphere while in storage," Kaneda commented. "So mold spores… are gonna circulate. So will the roaches and the rats."
"What’s your next step then?"
"NOW we document how widespread the problem is. We know what to look for, so we know where to look," Kaneda asserted. "The ship held pressure, so leaks are going to be minor even if they're present. But the vermin and mold are deadline level issues according to the manual."
"Your solution?"
"Vent the atmosphere and conduct the rest of the ship survey in vacuum to verify what has to be removed, cleaned or replaced," Anh suggested. " By venting you prevent further immediate damage and you only have to fix what's there. If you do it in stages, you can corral the smarter rats and roaches for easier cleanup… But I don't see why we're fixing this, or talking about fixing it, when it should be going to the scrapper for recycling."
"Strategic!" Binetti demanded. "WHY would the Star League store it, when it's a dog?"
"Expense," Kaneda stated. "Billions of Star League dollars invested, enough that the return on scrapping is more costly than simply maintaining it."
"That doesn't make sense!" Anh scoffed. "Maintenance is a long term cost, especially when it's slack maintaining!"
"Think quarterly," Kaneda argued. "The budget is metered by fiscal quarters and fiscal years. The immediate cost of scrapping is a high cost, with a negative return number inside that three month period that exceeds the quarterly expense of maintaining it. The approval would have to go through the Star League's financial office and they analyze by quarter and year, not by sustained costs… at least, in peacetime. If a war kicks off, a real one?? They'll eat the scrapping cost or eat the cost of a rebuild, because the money flows more readily in wartime. Though I'm thinking the High Command would rather unload these on a client state as military aid, which would require addressing the degradation and doing enough repairs that it at least matches original spec."
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"...not many surprises with you, Cadet Lieutenant Kaneda. Your marks in hyperspace navigation theory, celestial mechanics and engineering are top shelf like your admission paperwork suggested they would be. You've also made a spacer into your friend and asset." Captain Stephen Von Jankmon, his faculty advisor, laid the paperwork on the desk. "You're approved for command track via Operations, straight to the Warship branch. Congratulations."
"Thank you, sir!"
"There are a couple of issues you're going to need to be aware of with that track, Kaneda," the senior officer told him. "One of those is that your associations are under a microscope. Star League Internal Security has a flag on Cadet Cu'ong. You should distance yourself from her socially as soon as it is convenient if you want to make senior rank."
"Why? Why her?"
"Her home of record is the Kowloon system, and that system has a… reputation with the brass, especially brass from Terra or Apollo," Captain Von Jankmon explained. "We're still looking at her for a possible slot with good time in the service, but… She’s from a suspect origin, and the SLDF Naval branch is deeply aware of how such suspect origins can turn into moles or insurgents… or agents against us."
"Sir, she’s shown me nothing but competence and loyalty, sir," Kaneda defended his friend in her absence. "I don’t believe Cadet Cu'ong has insurgent sympathies!"
"I hope you're right. She's being interviewed by IG this morning. Maybe they'll give her a clean bill, maybe I'll have to process her discharge. But if there's anything hanging on her, it can spill on you. You two have been practically joined at the hip for the last two years."
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"How did it go?" he asked her.
Anh winced. "About what I expected," she said. "They stopped short of accusing me of stealing children like the old folktales talk about, at least. But it made the background check interview they gave me on Coventry look like 'Hi, how's the weather'... You want to go out tonight?"
"Tonight?" he asked.
"We're not on the duty roster, and the academy's not on lockdown. We can maybe go somewhere private, have a drink, eat something exotic?"
"Yeah, we should do that," Kaneda said quietly. "They want me to distance myself from you, and I can't think of a single reason why I care."
"Suspect Background" Anh supplied. "I understand there's something similar in the Combine…"
"Why do you think I left? My marks at An Ting could've gotten me a fast commission in the DCA. I chose to spend five more years as a student to be part of the Star League!"
"Ouch, sorry man… So out tonight?" she asked.
"Yeah, let's go out tonight. Somewhere we can dress in civvies and have a good time," he told her.
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