Delta Green - [27]

“I wish to hell I was on board that thing,” Williams said.

“No, you don’t,” Dimatta told him. “It’s all remote controlled. You wouldn’t have a damned thing to do.”

MAKO THREE

McKenna caught a ride back to Themis on a milk run Mako carrying foodstuffs to replenish the stores of Army Staff Sergeant Delbert O’Hara, the chief Steward aboard the station. Almost all of the station’s food was pre-prepared Earth-side, brought up in refrigerated bins, and stored in the hub. It was transferred to the dining modules as needed by O’Hara, who reported to Deputy Commander Milt Avery. O’Hara did a credible job with what he had to work with, making frequent changes in his offerings and developing new recipes of his own for the specialists on Earth to develop into pouchable products.

Though it pained him to do so, McKenna rode in the cargo bay, in one of the passenger modules, since he would never usurp the flight command of one of his pilots, in this case, Navy Commander Art Ingram. McKenna used the Mako craft as the screening and training program for pilots — or in the naval tradition of Ingram’s case, aviators — who might eventually graduate to command of the MakoShark. The Mako pilots never got close to a MakoShark until McKenna was ready for them to do so, and he knew that all of them yearned to do so. If Brackman had been successful in obtaining a new MakoShark this year, he had already selected Ken Autry, commanding Mako Three, as its pilot. Now, with Delta Green gone, it appeared as if the schedule was again going to be delayed.

Benny Shalbot directed the docking, then closed the hangar doors and pressurized the hangar with breathable atmosphere. While he waited for technicians to free him from his cocoon, McKenna unbuckled his harness and spoke on the intercom, “Nice ride, Art. You, too, Glenn.”

Glenn Farrell, the backseater, was a Marine major.

“Thanks, Colonel. Do you have any pointers for us?” Ingram asked.

“None. You get gold stars on your OERs.”

The Officer Efficiency Reports, completed by supervising officers, were the primary sources of information for promotion boards.

With the craft’s payload bay doors open, one of the technicians unlocked and opened the hatch to the passenger module, and McKenna pushed himself downward through it. Momentum kept him going until he reached a hangar cell wall — every surface of every compartment aboard the station was a wall. Flexing his knees at contact, he straightened them with a snap and ricocheted off the wall toward the hatchway in the center of the inside bulkhead, sailing under the nose of the Mako.

The old hands aboard the station, practice making perfect, zipped around in the zero-gravity environment with alacrity. Strategically placed handholds and the textured plastic surface of bulkheads were launch, diversion, and landing points. The veterans found comic relief in the flight patterns of newcomers who learned quickly that momentum did not die away and that accuracy in launch meant fewer heads bumped against the wall next to a hatchway.

McKenna stopped himself by grabbing the edge of the hatchway and eased into the corridor. Benny Shalbot was tethered by Velcro straps to the hangar control console below a window that overlooked the inside of the hangar cell. He was double-checking the content of the atmosphere he had pumped into the cell and shutting down the control systems.

Shalbot looked like a weight-lifting leprechaun. Nearly bald, with a bulbous nose and a large head, he was muscled and fit. And beneath all that pate was a brain that not only remembered most of the formulas and schematics involved in radio, radar, computer, and weapons systems electronics, but also understood them.

“How you doing, Benny?”

“This fucking job is driving me crazy, Colonel.”

“Maybe it’s time to go Earth-side for awhile,” McKenna suggested.

“What! And lose my hazardous duty pay?”

Shalbot was among the first to bitch about the Air Force, the station, and his chores, but he would also be the first to stand ankle-deep in the gore and blood running from his wounds, and defend it.

“You okay, Colonel?”

“Fine, Benny.”

“Grapevine says an actuator relay cut out on Blue.”

“That’s what they told me.”

“Goddamn it! I should have caught it.”

Shalbot ran the electronics diagnostics tests on all of the aerospace craft, every time they docked at Themis, updating Brad Mitchell’s centralized computer maintenance files.

“It was probably fine when you tested it, Benny. Hell, you can’t catch all the glitches.”

“I can damn sure try”

“Don’t sweat it, Benny.”

McKenna grabbed a handhold on the console and pushed off toward the “down” end of the corridor. “Down” was toward the outer rim of the hub, and toward the spokes, and “up” was toward the core.

The hub was divided like two onion slices into the hangar/storage half and another half that was a maze of corridors, offices, and more storage spaces. Technicians swam along the corridors, appearing from and disappearing into labs and maintenance areas.

McKenna waved through a window at Mitchell as he went by the maintenance office, then slowed to peek into the exercise room. It was Compartment A-47, but outside of the station commander and the maintenance officer, McKenna didn’t know anyone who called it that.