Battlecruiser Alamo: The Price of Admiralty Read Free Page A

them seemed to fit; it was festooned with a collection of old mission patches from the pioneering days – Apollo, Artemis, even the Zeus III mission. Orlova looked him up and down.
    "Kinda suits you, Captain Danny."
    "Thanks. Hang around here for a bit. I'll let you know when I'm ready to come back."
    "Good luck with your sneaky infiltration of your own ship." She shook her head, smiling. At least someone seemed to be enjoying this.
    Marshall emerged from the airlock to find a state not much better than the shuttle he had just left. Crates of equipment were littering the corridor, a couple of bored-looking crewmen in Patrol Blue ticking them on and off a series of manifests. Some of them were labeled 'Triplanetary Fleet', but a depressing majority seemed to be labeled for 'Callisto Transfer'. Not a promising start.
    Neither of the crewmen paid any attention to him as he scanned his ident card past the access scanner, then made his way into the unattended elevator. He tried to think of an inconspicuous place to start – and the hangar deck was an obvious one. According to the specifications, Alamo came with a flight of six fighters. He didn't have any fighter pilots assigned yet, but if he was going to keep his flight pay, then he was going to have to become familiar with them. The elevator whisked down a pair of decks, then along the long axis of the ship.
    It opened onto an almost empty deck. All six of the launch racks were bare, some of the equipment stripped right down. Only a pair of shuttles remained, resting on their elevator airlocks. A group of maintenance personnel seemed to be playing darts in a corner of the ship, while an officer sat perched on a chair reading a datapad – presumably the same deck officer that was overseeing the disbursement of his equipment stores. Ignoring him for the moment, he made his way to the work gang in the corner, trying his best not to let the anger he was beginning to feel show too much.
    "You guys the deck gang?" Marshall began, looking around.
    A ruddy-faced man wearing the insignia of a Flight Sergeant turned and grunted, "Need anything?"
    "Just looking around. What happened to the fighters?"
    "Got flown out last night for transfer back home. Why, you a pilot?"
    "I was. Wanted to take a look at them."
    The sergeant reached down to an odd-smelling purple bottle and waved it in front of Marshall, a few drops frothing out over the side. "Sorry you missed 'em. Fancy a drink? I'm celebrating."
    "Yeah!" cheered a couple of the others.
    "Celebrating?"
    "A promotion." Scorn laced his words. "Apparently the Patrol doesn't want me any more, so I'm going from being a Flight Sergeant to a Petty Officer."
    "Nothing petty about you, Diego!" one of the other crewmen yelled.
    "You're staying on, then?"
    Diego spat at the deck, then smudged it in with his boot. "Doesn't seem like I have much choice. Sure you won't have that drink?"
    "Got to get back. Maybe next time, huh."
    "Sure."
    Marshall walked back to the elevator, shaking his head; the gang had already gone back to their previous revelry. As he stepped into the elevator he pulled out his datapad, scanning down the list of names. Shuttle Maintenance Technician, Petty Officer Diego Ramirez. Twelve years service in the Patrol, three Combat Stripes, one of them post-war, which was a fairly rare thing. Precisely the sort of senior crewmen he was desperately going to need, but if all the 'recruits' from the Patrol felt like that, he'd probably rather leave dock with only half a crew.
    He looked over the list of destinations again, and shaking his head, punched in for the engineering deck. The elevator sped its way through the ship, down to the far end, as far as could safely be traversed without getting into special gear.
    The doors opened, and he looked around the massive room. Three decks high, separated by mesh partitions, a couple of dozen workstations for various duties ranging from simple telltales to the complicated waldoes that were the