Citadel: Chapter Two

    “Forty-seven, door four!” the speaker announced. “Forty-seven, door four!”

    James F. ‘Butch’ Allen gulped and got out of the hard plastic chair. He suddenly wished he’d dressed better.

    Butch had graduated from high school in June at which point his dad had, politely but firmly, reminded him that he was now a legal adult. Kids didn’t stick around in the Allen household. Home was always where, if you had to go there, they had to take you in. But with Mama Allen having Johannsen’s and Papa Allen having no great liking for condoms, there was always another bed being taken up. Eighteen and out was The Rule.

    The same month that Butch and his dad had The Talk, he’d gotten his draft notice. But Butch was pretty sure he wasn’t suited for military life. That meant college, which was still deferred for the moment, or finding a ‘qualified civilian occupation’ that meant he was exempt from conscription. He wasn’t the college type, either.

    The Allens had a long and illustrious history of working with their hands. His dad had worked at the GE plant in Springfield since he graduated from high school and was a fixture of the maintenance department. Butch had taken the vocational track at school. He wasn’t bad at math and he liked tinkering and was even in the Physics club. But he wasn’t real big on the ‘language arts’ stuff and his SATs had shown that. College was pretty much out.

    So he’d hitched a ride down to the Labor Office to look at the list of jobs he was qualified for that were ‘qualified civilian occupations.’ The list was depressingly short. He wasn’t qualified for any of them. Most of them were defense tech related jobs that he couldn’t even start to figure out. He could apply to be trained as a clean-room technician, for example. But when he checked, there were zero spots available.

    That left space. Just about any space slot was exempt. There were two problems, though. The first was that Apollo, which was the big name in space industries, mostly wanted older more experienced people. Most of the slots called for things like ‘three or more years commercial diving experience’. And even if you got accepted, it was a five year contract. Working in space took advanced training and high-tech implants.

    But Apollo was the only company that accepted ‘untrained, entry-level’ space technicians. Again, Butch had looked at the list of positions and his brain had sort of shut down. He didn’t know what an ‘Optical Welding Technician’ was except for it had something to do with welding. He could weld. He’d learned from his dad way before taking it in shop.

    So he took a deep breath and walked in door four of the Springfield Apollo Mining Employment Office.

    The room was small. The ceiling was low and it wasn’t much wider than the narrow desk of the pregnant lady manning it. How she got in and out was a question.

    “Good afternoon, Mr. Allen,” the lady said, smiling. She was pretty old, probably thirty or so, but not bad looking. And the pregnancy had clearly done some development on her knockers.

    “Hey,” Butch said, smiling and sitting down.

    “I’ve reviewed your record,” the lady said, smiling thinly. “You’re not very experienced.”

    “I just got out of high school, ma’am,” Butch pointed out. “And there’s stuff isn’t on there. My dad’s been teaching me to do stuff since I was a kid. I can rebuild a car, even one with computer ignition. And I can weld. Better than the B I got in shop makes it look like. I’m good with stuff with my hands, ma’am. I’m good at turning a wrench.”

    “Things are a little different in space, Mr. Allen,” she said, tapping on her computer. “It’s a very dangerous, very hostile, environment. And you can’t do things quite like you can on earth. Turning a wrench is a very complicated job in space. Why do you want to work at Apollo?”

    “It seems like a good job, ma’am,” Butch said. “Lots of opportunities.”

    “And it’s draft exempt,” the lady said, looking up.

    “I don’t think I’m really set out to be in the Navy, ma’am,” Butch said. “I do what I’m told but I’m not all up on that ‘Yes, sir, three bags full’ thing. I work good. I’m just not all up on…” He paused and shrugged. “I don’t think I’d do good in the Navy, ma’am.”

    “Describe…” the lady said, clearly reading off her screen. “Describe the procedure for assembling a four barrel injection system.”

    “On a car?” Butch asked. “Diesel?”

    “Car,” the lady said, looking puzzled. “I think.”

    Butch ran through the usual way that you’d assemble a four barrel injection system as she tapped on her keyboard.

    “You are using an electric arc welder to join a plate of stainless steel to a plate of conventional steel…”

    There were about nine questions related to various mechanical processes. They were mostly the sort of thing Butch could answer in his sleep. If his gay teacher hadn’t been a bastard he’d have made an easy A in shop.

    “When would you be available to start?” the lady asked at the end.

    “Am I hired?” Butch asked, surprised.

    “Hiring decisions are made at a later time,” she said. “You will be informed by a phone call or email if you are hired. But I need to know when you are available.”

    “I can start today,” Butch said. “If I don’t get an exempt job I gotta report to the draft board in three weeks.”

    “Very well,” she said, tapping some more. “Thank you for your time. You will be informed of our decision by phone or email within two weeks.”

    “Okay,” Butch said.

    “Have a nice day.”

 

---

 

    “How’d it go?” Mama Allen asked when Butch walked in.

    The Allen house was part of a block of two story ‘mill’ houses built in the 1920s. The mill had closed back in the ‘50s, but the houses remained. With brick walls and solid construction, they’d been up and down over the years. Currently, the neighborhood was back on the ‘up’ cycle as more and more people moved into Springfield and crowded out the families like the Allens that had been there for decades.

    “Don’t know,” Butch said, picking up Clarissa. She was one of three sisters, all younger. She wriggled for a second in his grip then subsided, sticking her thumb in her mouth. “That’s gonna make you get bucktooth, kid. The lady didn’t seem to think there was much chance but she asked me a bunch of shop stuff. Said I’d find out in two weeks or less.”

    “Well,” Mama Allen said, wiping her hands. She was preparing meatloaf, heavy on the bread. “You gotta go to the Board in three weeks. I told your father that it’s only three weeks.” She stopped and wiped at her eyes. “Onions. I told him you should have that much time at least.”

    “Yes, mama,” Butch said. “Thank you, mama.”

    “Go make sure Charlie and Susie ‘re doing their homework,” Mama Allen said, sticking the meatloaf in the oven.

    “Yes, mama.”

 

---

 

    “Good Lord, thank you for this food that you put on the table…” Papa Allen prayed.

    Butch sat between Clarissa and Susie, holding their hands, as his father said grace. Clarissa kept trying to pull away but that was just Clarissa.

    At a certain level it all seemed sort of distant. He’d been raised in this house. He didn’t know anything other than Springfield, his friends from school and the neighborhood. But in two or three weeks, he was going away. He might be going to the Board and then into the Navy or the Army. The way things were going, they were talking about a big war with the Horvath and some guys named the Rangora.

    The people already in the Navy, including some kids from the last class, were in ‘for the duration of hostilities.’ If he got drafted, he’d be in ‘for the duration of hostilities.’ And nobody knew how long ‘hostilities’ might last. If you went by the Horvath, until their planet was a smoking ball of craters. The Horvath just didn’t seem to get what a ‘truce’ meant.

    In a few weeks he’d be leaving this house. And he might never be coming back. That was kind of… It wasn’t scary so much as confusing.

    “Amen,” his dad said and reached for the bowl of mash potatoes.

    Butch’s cell phone rang and he looked guiltily at his dad.

    “No phones at the table,” his dad said. “You know the rules.”

    “It might be something about a job,” Butch said.

    “Check,” his dad said. “If it’s one of your girlfriends…”

    Butch checked the phone and didn’t recognize the number. It was an 800 number, though.

    “Hello?”

    “Mr.…Allen…” a robotic voice said. “This is a recording. You have been accepted by the… Apollo Mining Corporation as a… probationary optical welding technician. The contractual commitment is…five years. Starting salary is… eighteen dollars per hour with off-planet bonuses if the work occurs outside terrestrial atmosphere. If you conditionally accept this position, press one.”

    Butch carefully pressed one.

    “You are required to present yourself at the… Springfield, Missouri… Apollo Mining Employment office where you applied for this position within thee days. Your confirmation code is six-one-seven-three-five-two. Thank you. Goodbye.”

    “What was that?” Maricela asked.

    “I’ve got a job with Apollo,” Butch said, blinking in surprise. “A probationary… optical welding technician? I don’t even know what it is.”

    “Laser welding,” Papa Allen said, nodding. “It’s the new thing. Apollo’s pretty much the only people teach it right now. That’s a good job. See you don’t mess it up.”

    “Yes, sir,” Butch said.

    “Now eat your food for it gets cold.”

 

---

 

    “Good afternoon and welcome to the Probationary Optical Welding Technician course,” the instructor said. He was a big guy with fair hair and a beer gut. Butch figured he probably carried Johannsen’s. He also had a really raspy voice. “My name is Mr. Joseph Monaghan. I am one of the instructors of the space based OWT course here at the Apollo Melbourne Facility and, as such, I was chosen to welcome this new class. You will refer to me as Mr. Monaghan, not Joe or Joseph, just as you will address all of your instructors as Mr. or Ms. and their last name.

    “Some people wonder why Apollo based its training course in a place like Melbourne, Florida,” Mr. Monaghan continued. “Since the Mercury program in the 1950s, Melbourne has been the primary support city for the Cape Canaveral Kennedy Space Center. Other smaller local cities include Palm Bay, Cocoa, Cocoa Beach and Titusville. From experience some of you will become more enamored of Cocoa Beach than will be good for you.

    “Brevard Community College is one of the few community colleges in the world to offer a vo-tech course in space technology. Apollo based its training here shortly after the first launch of its first a SAPL mirror. Over the last ten years we have graduated thousands of young men and women to fill the burgeoning space industry, where they work in thousands of fields from robotic management technician to food services. Yes, we train people on space based food services because everyone who goes into space has to know, at a minimum, how to survive if the worst happens and you find yourself trying to suck vacuum.

    “Some people have also asked why I have a voice like a fifty year smoker when I don’t smoke. The answer, boys and girls, is that I tried to breathe vacuum. I am one of, at this point, four people who have been exposed to full death pressure and survived. I only survived because of quick action on the part of a co-worker, who was trained in this facility, a nearby airlock and good doctors, also trained here.”

    “So you understand that I have a personal interest in ensuring that the training here at Melbourne remains top-notch. I may, hope to some day, go back to space. In that case, should I again be, God forbid, in the position of sucking on nothing, it may be up to one of you to save my life. God, again, forbid.

    “This course is very very expensive. Were you to find another such school, the course would cost in excess of half a million dollars. There are still very few qualified instructors and we don’t work cheap. It requires, of course, high-power lasers which are also not cheap. At least in breathable. That, for those who are wondering, is the slang for atmosphere with breathable air.

    “There is, rarely, a second chance in space. Space is an absolutely unforgiving bitch. The Company only wants very good people in space. They want people who are going to make them money not cost them money by paying for medical and death benefits. Therefore, figure that about half of you are going to wash out. Some, most, will wash out in the first few weeks. Others, despite the pre-tests, will not be able to handle the conditions in space. Boost has gotten relatively cheap but it still costs money to move people around. There’s also the cost of your suits and implants. Again, at least a half a million dollars for the course, another half a million for the equipment. We are going to do our level best to find the weak links and eliminate them on the ground before they become a danger to themselves and others in space.

    “So be prepared to work harder than you ever have in your miserable lives.”

 

---

 

    “Hey,” Butch said, hitching up his backpack and looking around his dorm room.

    The dormitory building looked sort of like a three story hotel but he’d noticed it was different. There weren’t any windows except on the ground floor. And it had looked bunched up.

    The reason became obvious when he saw his room. It was about half the size of most bedrooms with a low ceiling and no windows. It had a set of bunk beds that had about half the normal head room. There weren’t any lockers or anything, just a sort of box welded to the base of the bed. He was going to have a hard time fitting. For that matter, there wasn’t much space in the room, period. He could barely get into the room for the bunks, the desk and the guy sitting at it. They had managed to squeeze in a little fridge, though.

    “Hey,” the guy sitting at the desk said, not bothering to look up. He was hunched over a book, reading by the single light, and had papers scattered all over the desk.

    “Uh, I think I’m your roommate,” Butch said.

    “Frack,” the guy said, finally looking around. “I knew it was too good to last. Well, you get top bunk.”

    “Okay,” Butch said, tossing his bag on the bunk. Part of the briefing before he got his tickets to Melbourne was that he was only supposed to carry one bag capable of being used as a carry-on for all his gear. “I’m Paul Allen. Call me Butch.”

    “I’m Nathan Papke,” the guy said, spinning the chair around and standing up.

    If Butch thought he was going to have a hard time fitting in the bed, Nathan must hate it. The guy was a ten foot string-bean with a shock of unruly black hair on top. Okay, maybe six-seven. Really fracking tall and just skinny as hell. “I’m mostly called Nate.”

    “Kay,” Butch said. He’d been given the rest of the afternoon to ‘get acquainted with the area’. Courses started in the morning.

    “What are you here for?” Nate asked, shaking his hand.

    “Optical welding,” Butch said. “You?”

    “I’m here for the robotics course,” Nate said. “It’s not as much EVA and I’m pretty good with computers. I’m not an In the Black kinda guy.”

    “How long’ve you been here?” Butch said, sitting on the lower bunk. He had to hunch forward cause the top bunk was shorter than he was sitting down.

    “Two weeks,” Nate said. “And it’s been a ball buster, let me tell you. All it’s been is more psych tests and robotic theory. We haven’t even seen a schematic of a bot yet, much less what we’re going to be working on. And we’ve already lost about half the class.”

    “Dang,” Nate said. “Why?”

    “This,” Nate said, waving at the papers on his desk. “The academic portion is absolutely killer. I was a geek in high school and I’m having a hard time keeping up.”

    “Oh,” Butch said, rethinking his decision to take the course.

    “It’s not as bad as all that,” Nate said, seeing the expression on his face. “All you got to do is keep your nose to the grindstone. And clean. We had two people get tossed out for popping on a piss test and one got a DUI. They don’t want anybody that’s got a substance abuse problem in space. Most of the rest quit cause of the academics.”

    “There any papers we gotta write?” Butch asked.

    “No,” Nate said. “Not so far. Most of the stuff is fill in the blank and short answer. No essays or anything. They just want to see you’re learning the stuff not how well you can write.”

    “Math?” Butch asked.

    “Lots of math,” Nate said, nodding. “At least in my course. I don’t know about yours.”

    “I can do math,” Butch said. “What’s there to do around here?”

    “There’s the beach,” Nate said, grinning. “Cocoa Beach is pretty nice and the view’s pretty good if you get my drift.”

    “Got it,” Butch said, grinning back.

    “Lots of beaches,” Nate said. “Cocoa Beach is also the party spot. But unless you’re a lot smarter than, sorry, you look, don’t figure on doing a lot of partying. The homework is killer and they even load you down on the weekends.”

    “That sucks,” Butch said, scratching behind his ear. “But if it’s just math, I figure I can handle it.”

    “Other than that, there’s the mall,” Nate said, shrugging. “It’s just up the road. Some pretty good restaurants if you’ve got the squeeze. But the food in the cafeteria is good so I’ve been saving my money.”

    “Food’s good?”

    “Food’s great,” Nathan said. “It’s buffet style, but it’s got stuff like Mongolian barbeque and crab legs. Big buffet. They feed us right. I guess so we don’t keep going out for food and keep up with studying. From what the instructors who have been out say, it’s pretty much the same if you’re on a big installation like Troy. Not as good on the ships.”

    “We work on the Troy?” Dutch said, confused. “I thought that was a defense station.”

    “From what I hear, it’s a work in progress,” Nathan said, grinning. “There are nearly as many Apollo employees on Troy as military. Then there’s the Wolf stuff. Most of that is ship based, but there’s room for about five hundred people on Granadica.”

    “The fabber?” The Granadica fabber had been all over the news when it came through the Sol system on the way to Wolf. The mobile factory was the largest and most expensive piece of Glatun technology ever purchased and even though it was nearly a thousand years old, the most high tech. But he’d never heard that people could live on it.

    “The fabber,” Nathan said, nodding. “There’s a research and design team on it and guys who work on the space dock and gas mine Apollo’s building. You got your afternoon to get your shit straight?”

    “Yeah,” Dutch said.

    “Go buy some pop and stuff,” Nate said, gesturing at the fridge. “You’re going to want to have something in the room. There’s times I don’t want to take time to go to the vending machine. And speaking of which… I’ve got homework to do.”

    Shit, Butch thought. High school never ends.

 

---

 

    “What you’re looking at is the Mark Four Grosson Optical Welder,” Mr. Methvin said, holding up what looked a lot like an oxy-acetylene welder head. “And you’re all thinking ‘That thing ain’t nothin’ but a fancy OA rig.’ And you’re all wrong. If you keep thinkin’ that you’re gonna be dead wrong.”

    The first time Butch saw his gay shop teacher in school he’d been bothered by the fact that Mr. Tews was missing about half the fingers on his left hand. But he’d learned that was pretty much where you got shop teachers. If they weren’t missing bits, they’d still be working in the field not teaching shop.

    Mr. Methvin had run into the same press or welding rig or jack or whatever that every other shop teacher ran into at one point or another. Except it had taken off half his left hand and he had some sort of funny stubs on that hand for fingers. They looked a hell of a lot like toes.

    “Tell you one thing’s different right off,” Mr. Methvin continued. “You, Allen, what’s the maximum distance of an efficient flame on an oxy torch?”

    The course had started with fifty-three guys and two chicks. After the first three weeks, it was a six week course, they were down to thirty-seven guys and both chicks. And it was just getting harder.

    Hand laser welding was done almost exclusively in space. There was a good bit of it in robotics on earth but most of it was in space. So a good bit of the eight hour a day course was about how to work in space. Which, it turned out, meant a good bit of math and a lot of attention to detail.

    Then there was the lasers themselves. Optics was a whole branch of physics, one that Butch’s high school teacher had barely touched on.

    The course was a lot of skull sweat. But fortunately it was the sort of skull sweat that Butch was good at. He’d stuck with it. He’d avoided going to the titty bars pick-up joints along the Cocoa Strip to do homework. He’d read optical laser manuals until his eyes bled. He’d worked harder than he ever had in school. There were two big reasons. The first was that he really didn’t want to join the Navy. The second was that he just didn’t want to tell Papa Allen that he’d failed.

    There were some little reasons, too. The training he was getting worked just about as well on the robots being used in every part of industry. When he was done with his five year hitch with Apollo, he could just about set his salary. Laser robotic technicians, which was a short course in robotics from what he was learning, earned over a hundred grand a year groundside. More in space.

    That was the other part. He was currently being paid twelve bucks an hour and the course had dormitories for ‘probationary’ technician trainees. When he passed the course that jumped to eighteen buck an hour which wasn’t chump change.

    The rate for space work was time and a half when you were in atmosphere and double time in EVA. Overtime was time and a half up to forty-eight and double time after that. If he was working EVA on overtime over forty-eight hours, he’d be making seventy-two bucks an hour. As a probationary tech. And there was a bump in pay each year he stayed rated during his first hitch.

    Rate for full tech, base, was twenty-four bucks an hour. A fully qualified technician made nearly a hundred bucks an hour on OT in EVA, and the provided room and board so you weren’t even out that.

    Butch wasn’t planning on getting hooked to a wagon any time soon, but like most guys he figured he’d get married someday. Even if his wife had full blown Johannsen’s, he’d have an easier time supporting a family on a hundred bucks an hour than his dad did working in the mill.

    Then, hell, it was space. Butch had enjoyed the astronomy portion of his physics classes and he’d even gotten into reading science fiction, partially because all the geeks in the class read it and he couldn’t get most of their jokes without some basis. There were hardly any new books out but the old guys were still pretty popular. He’d gotten hooked on the vision of space as the next frontier. He wasn’t old enough to remember Grandpa Allen, who had been a kid when his parents moved to the Missouri frontier. But he’d heard the stories. There might not be red Indians, but there were Horvath and Glatun and more and more star systems getting opened up all the time. Truth was, space was the place.

    And this question was dead easy for once.

    “Depending on the system,” Butch said, “inch and a half to two and a half inches, Mr. Methvin.”

    “Right,” Mr. Methvin said, walking over to a sheet of steel he had propped up. Butch noted that there was another, much thicker, piece of steel behind it. “Behold,” Mr. Methvin said, holding the Optical Welder about a yard away from the plate. He fiddled with the controls for a second then held it out. “Goggles.”

    Even with the goggles, Butch could see the beam from the optical welder. And it cut through the steel faster than any oxy rig he’d ever used.

    “Whoa,” one of the guys in the class said.

    “A Mark Four has a maximum range of about six meters,” Mr. Methvin said, cutting off the beam. “Which is just a stupid design. There’s a way to set the beam for any length you want, from either a tiny little beam that’s not much thicker than a hair to one thick as a finger and six meters long. Which you monkeys are probably going to cut each other up with once you get in space. But I don’t get to tell the people that design these things they’re idiots. So I’m telling you. They’re idiots. You’re idiots. And if you ever use a long beam on one of these things, you’re probably gonna kill some other idiot…”

 

---

 

    “Welcome to your final exam,” Mr. Monaghan said. He’d been Butch’s instructor for ‘theory and practice of space movement’ and he’d been an absolute bastard. Now he was the ‘faculty advisor’ for the ‘extreme confinement environment test.’

    They’d been warned that the test wasn’t just ‘can you handle an extreme environment?’ It was ‘can you handle an extreme environment under enormous stress?’ Stress wasn’t just cumulative, it was multiplicative. General stress, is everything okay at home, got multiplied by other stress, am I going to make my car payment, got multiplied by other stress, is my air working, until just about anyone had a break point.

    The ECET wasn’t designed to find that break point. Everyone has a break point and if you hit it what you have afterwards is what’s called PTSD and generally you were busted for space work. It was designed to find people whose break point was too low.

    Nate had flunked out on the ECET. The ECET was the last major test before you went to the ‘space environment’ portion of the training, going out in the Black. Because they weren’t going to spend the money on boosting and planting you if you couldn’t pass the ECET.

    “The first thing I want to stress,” Mr. Monaghan said. “Is that this test is perfectly safe. The reality is that you will never be in danger. Since the grabber material does not allow for movement, you can’t even get the mask off. And if you can’t get the mask off, you, probably, can’t die.”

    The ECET was simple. You got loaded in a steel tube, put on a mask, a bunch of gunk got poured in on you that prevented you from moving, at all, and you got asked questions. For hours.

    Most of the answers were less important than how you handled them. The point was that you had to be hard, not impossible, to get upset in the test. The ones that were important were the ones that related to your field. There were two hundred of those alone and you had to have the answers at the tip of your tongue.

    “In the, likely, event that you totally freak out,” Mr. Monaghan said, “you will be sedated, decanted and wake up in recovery. You will then be given your final check and a ticket back to whatever miserable hole you crawled out of. There is no appeal. You pass the ECET or you don’t. Period. We will be taking four at a time. I would suggest that those of you who are not called at first study your test question booklets. Allen, Armstead, Ashline and Beckett.”

    Damn.

 

---

 

    “Good morning, Mr. Allen. Are you comfortable?”

    Just my luck I get fracking Monaghan. As to the question, the grab-goo was pressing on his chest so he could barely breathe. But since he liked confined spaces…

    “Just fine, thanks, Mr. Monaghan,” Butch said. “It’s sort of comfy.”

    One of Butch’s favorite games growing up was hide and seek. As the runt of three brothers, it gave him some time when he wasn’t getting pounded on. It was amazing the spaces you could squeeze into with a little will.

    “List all the major parts of the navopak of a Mark Fourteen Space suit,” Mr. Monaghan said.

    “Recycler…”

    “In alphabetical order. Take your time…”

 

---

 

    Butch wasn’t sure how long he’d been in the tank but he was sure the recyclers were messing up. He wasn’t getting enough breathable and he was getting a carb panic. The CO2 was up.

    “I’ve got a picture of your sister here,” Mr. Monaghan said. “Cute. Clarissa is it?”

    “I’ve got a sister named Clarissa, Mr. Monaghan.”

    “So why’d you have a naked picture of her on your iPod, Butch? Don’t you know that’s child pornography.”

    “I don’t have one, Mr. Monaghan,” Butch said.

    “Well, I’m looking at one,” Mr. Monaghan said. “Cute. Nice little picture. Nice girl. You think she’s hot?”

    “She’s six you sick bastard!” Butch said.

    “She’s six Mr. Monaghan,” Mr. Monaghan said.

    “Anybody that talks about a guy’s six year old sister like that don’t deserve the title Mister, Mister.”

    “Do you want to pass the course, Butch?” Mr. Monaghan said, mildly.

    “Yes,” Butch said.

    “So, repeat after me. You are a sick bastard, Mr. Monaghan.”

    “You are a sick bastard, Mr. Monaghan,” Butch snarled.

    “And then there’s…Susie. Beautiful hair. Both ends.”

    Butch snarled and ground his teeth but didn’t say anything.

    “She’s really blossoming, don’t you think, Butch? I require a response, Butch.”

    “I have a sister named Susie,” Butch said. “And you don’t have a naked picture of her. Or Clarissa.”

    “Susie, I note, has a mole on her butt,” Mr. Monaghan said. “So, yes, I am currently looking at a picture of your naked sister. Your naked, twelve year-old…”

    “I still don’t think you’ve got a picture,” Butch said.

    “She’s probably got Johannsen’s with hair like that,” Monahan said. “If you catch them at just the right time, girls like that are just putty in your hands…”

    “When I get out of here I’m going to rip your head off and shit in your neck,” Butch said. “Mister Monaghan.”

    “That would cause you to fail the course, Butch,” Mr. Monaghan said, in that same mild tone.

    “Screw the course,” Butch said. “You don’t go around looking at pictures of a guy’s sister. You don’t talk about popping ‘em. And you sure as hell don’t tell him about it.”

 

---

 

    “How’s he doing?” Monahan asked, looking over at the vitals tech.

    “Angry, that’s for sure,” the tech said. “But his heart rate and BP aren’t up all that much. He’s balancing as well as he can. Or he’s just a natural.”

    “You’re not going to top him on this track,” the psychologist said. She was monitoring all four tests and making suggestions.

    “It’s his main hot-point,” Monahan said. “He’s very protective of his sisters.”

    “It will require counseling,” the psych said. “He’s marginal. He’s very wrapped up in that emotional attachment. I’d say you’ve gone about as far as you can. I’d also say that with some training he’s a pass. That’s my professional opinion.”

    “Concur,” Monahan said.

 

---

 

    “Okay, Butch, we’re letting you out, now,” Monahan said. “We’re also going to up your O2 and get rid of some of that carb. When you come out, you can take a swing at me or we can talk. Your call. Take the swing and you’re going home to see your sisters.”

 

---

 

    “Sit, Butch,” Monahan said, tossing the probationary trainee a half full pack of Marlboros. “As long as you were in the tank you could probably use a smoke.”

    “Thought there was no smoking in the building,” Butch said, still glaring.

    “There are rules and rules,” Mr. Monahan said, shrugging. “They’re waived under certain conditions. Get the nic fit under control so we can talk. To start, no, I never had a picture of your sisters. I am, in fact, a very sick bastard. But not on duty.

    “The next question at the top of your head is did you pass. The answer is…sort of. You got all the fixed answers solid. You did your homework, that’s obvious.”

    “Thank you, sir,” Butch said, his jaw working.

    “But you need to get that temper under control,” Mr. Monahan said. “There’s a time and a place for it. But if you get put on a crew they’re going to test you. They won’t have all the information we have, but they’ll wiggle it out of you. And they’ll find your hot points. And they’ll poke. They test the hell out of the FNGs that come up there, much harder than we can here. The best I could do was talk dirty about your sisters. They’ll find a picture of one of them, Photoshop it onto a real piece of child porn and stick it in your locker just before you go on shift. Then call the nosies to tell them you’ve got child porn in your locker.”

    “That’s sick,” Butch said.

    “They are, we are, a very sick crew,” Mr. Monahan said, still in that same mild tone. “There’s actually a reason for it. The same reason we do it here. You know about the ninety day probationary period and the penalties for failure if you don’t pass it?”

    For the first ninety days of actual work, the trainee was on ‘hard probation.’ They could be dismissed with our without cause. And they owed the full cost of their training, preparation and suit, nearly three quarters of a million dollars. It was more money than Butch could ever repay and one of the tiny little codicils in the contract he’d barely read.

    You could quit at any point in training and not owe a dime. But once you got implants and a suit, the company owned you.

    “What is not mentioned in the contract,” Mr. Monahan said, “is that every crew has the right of refusal over a new member. Oh, they don’t abuse it. There’s just too much damned work. But if two crews refuse to work with you, you get dismissed. And then you owe more money than you’re ever going to see in your life.

    “They are, in fact, the final test. They don’t want to work with anybody that can’t hack it. Their lives depend on you being able to keep your cool, no matter what. So they’re going to push and push and push and push, looking for a weak point. Your protectiveness of your sisters is admirable. I did have pictures of them, but only fully clothed. They are lovely young ladies and you are blessed to have them in your life. The crews are going to take that admirable emotion and rip it to shreds. That is why you are still considered marginal. You can probably hack the actual physical aspects of space work. The emotional part is your weak point.”

    “So what do I do?” Butch said. The smoke was helping and he was smart enough to see what Mr. Monahan was driving at. It made sense in a sick sort of way. He figured once he was a full tech, he was probably going to do the same thing. You didn’t want somebody who was a hot-head holding a laser that could cut through the suit of the guy next to him.

    “There are various techniques,” Mr. Monahan said. “Deflection: ‘Yep, she’s hot.’ One-upmanship: ‘Yeah, Susie’s a nice piece. Unlike your wife.’ Rolling with it. That, however, can make you look like a wuss and they’ll be wondering when you’re going to crack and go SAPL. Practice responses in a mirror. Come up with a list of good one-liners. You can often stop something like that with a good joke at the right time. There are books of practical jokes and that is another thing that will be practiced on you. Be prepared. And prepared to retaliate. The crews much prefer a smart come-back or a good counter to a joke over somebody who just smiles and takes it. They tend to keep upping the ante to see what will work. But mostly you need to find your hot buttons and get them under control. You with me?”

    “Yes, Mr. Monahan,” Butch said.

    “Good,” Monahan said, nodding. “I still think the best part of you dripped down your momma’s leg.”

    “At least I had a momma, Mr. Monahan,” Butch said, smiling pleasantly.

    “Ah, it can learn.”