Citadel: Chapter Four

    “Yo, Behanchod, you got the cut done, yet?” BFM commed.

    Butch figured the company got the name of his job wrong. He wasn’t an optical welding technician. That implied he occasionally joined two pieces of metal together. So far all he’d been was an optical cutting technician.

    Robots did most of the actual welding. Putting things together, the way Apollo did it, was dead simple. Most of the parts were pre-fabbed on earth and generally went together like Legos. He hadn’t been part of the crew that did the life-station on Troy but he’d heard enough about it. There were sixty different massive pieces which had fit in the plug cut out of the Troy like a three dimensional puzzle. But it was a puzzle the robots had in their guts and so no problem.

    Almost no problem. The plans were never perfect and when it got to putting stuff together there were always problems. Sometimes a part needed to be joined that wasn’t on the plans. More often, some joker on earth had left a bit too much steel here or there. The stuff on earth was supposed to be all robots, too. But Butch had seen enough of how dumb ass robots could be to not be too impressed.

    Point was, when something like that happened and it wasn’t too big, it was generally easier to get a ‘sophont’ with a laser rig to come over and cut the bit off. Chop here, chop there, stuff fit together.

    When it was too big for a human to cut, they brought in the SAPL and everybody ran for cover.

    “Just done, Mr. Purcell,” Butch said. He could ignore his handle at this point. Despite the fact that that bastard Monahan had been right and the crews had zeroed in on his sisters the first week. Then Gursy found the perfect handle to piss him off.

    And they pushed. He’d had little mutilated Barbie dolls left in his locker, his personal stuff messed with. They’d found pictures of his sisters on the internet, Susie and Jodie had both ended up in the home town newspaper a couple of times, and done really ugly things with them. Just about everything but his suit messed with. The rules on that one were absolute. It was an automatic, do not pass go, firing offense to ‘molest, disturb, change, modify, add to or in any other way bother the personal safety system of another employee.’

    Gursy was the worst. The rest of the guys seemed to do it for the reasons Mr. Monahan had talked about. But Gursy was just a bully. Butch was pretty sure it was Gursy who had put the girls’ pictures in his locker with…stuff on ‘em.

    Well, Gursy had his ‘issues’ too. And the rules said you couldn’t futz with a guy’s suit. They never said nothing about a sled. Butch had checked real carefully.

    Most of the welding wasn’t done in suits. Butch had been on the Troy for a month and he’d spent maybe four hours, other than ‘familiarization’ in his suit. Most of the time he worked in a laser sled. The lasers they used were powered by an annie plant and an emitter, not the SAPL. So they had to have something to tow the laser around with. The laser sled was like a little mini space ship with arms, called waldoes for some reason, that you controlled from the inside. Some of the control you did with your plants. Most of it was using your hands to manipulate the waldoes.

    Two of the waldoes were laser heads, one a low-power and the other high. There were four more ‘grip arms’ that could go in just about any direction and amplify the strength of the user. Overall, the sleds looked sort of like an octopus. With, and this was important, a crystal porthole on the front.

    “Move down to lever Two,” Price said. “They’re putting in a power plant and figure it’s going to have something needs done the fracking bots can’t figure out.”

    “Right away, Mr. Purcell,” Butch said, turning his sled around and heading towards the big ‘lever’ horns that punched up into the main bay of the Troy.

    “Who the frack?” a voice screamed over the open channel. “God damn joking bastards! This is a safety violation! Get it off! Get it OFF!”

    Butch tried not to giggle as he headed down to Lever Two and somebody else had to pull off the plastic spider taped to Gursy’s porthole.

    “Somebody has been a bad boy,” Dracula said, rolling into his bunk and turning on the TV.

    “Really?” Butch said, trying not to sound too interested. “What happened?”

    Dracula, AKA Drac, AKA Vladimir Anthony De Rosa was also a probie but he’d made it past the ‘hard’ probation period. He only had a couple more months and he’d make full tech. He was also Butch’s roommate and a ready source of the sort of gossip that wasn’t shared with an absolute FNG.

    “Somebody, and Gursy is steaming mad to try to find out who, taped a spider to his porthole,” Drac said. “He’s also filed an official safety complaint.”

    “I’m so sorry to hear that,” Butch said.

    “What I can’t figure out is how they did it,” Drac said. “Somebody would have to go out in a suit, or a sled, and tape it there.”

    “Unless, and this is just a guess,” Butch said. “Somebody noticed that Gursy always uses the sled parked at slot Three. Then, if somebody was an evil bastard, all they had to do was put the spider on their sled and park it at Three.”

    “In which case, when Gursy finds out the last guy to use the sled, he’s going to be making a formal complaint,” Drac said.

    “That assumes that the last guy to use the sled knew the spider was there,” Butch said.

    “How could you miss a spider on your porthole?” Drac asked.

    “Well if, and this is just thinking you understand,” Butch said. “If you knew that the guy using the sled was going to go back to Three because Gursy was out and three is the closest to the entrance that didn’t have a sled and you knew that he was only going to be gone for less time than Gursy, somebody, and I’ve got no idea who, could tape the spider in place above the porthole on a bit of monofilament and space tape and hold it in place with regular scotch tape. The scotch tape was going to last long enough for somebody like, oh, BFM, to go out and back and never notice the spider cause it was way up over where he could see without doing a full exterior. And it might be particularly hard to spot sin…if it was up under the Number Four Arm. Just a guess.”

    “Damn,” Drac said. “That’s…complicated. Whoever thought that one up was a genius. But…BFM?” He chuckled at that and then guffawed.

    The team lead was a regular and serious practical joker. But whereas Gursy’s jokes were never very funny, BFM’s were hilarious. It had just the right touch to be a Price. Complicated, hard to prove…

    “Gursy is going to try to pin this on Price,” Drac said. “Which means making an official safety complaint.”

    “Read the regs,” Butch said. “Strangely enough, futzing with a suit is covered but not a sled. The spider could have been in the sled, and it wouldn’t have been a safety violation. Not officially.”

    “I see a new reg being written,” Drac said. “And since you’re a temp probie…”

    “I had nothing to do with it,” Butch said. “What temp probie could possibly have come up with something that crazy?”