Metal Boxes (9 page)

“I can follow those numbers, Gunny,” Stone said
, “but buying me drinks should debit their accounts, not credit mine.”

Gunny said, “Well,
sir, it seems the system is giving you credit for every drink that was ordered for you that you really didn’t drink. Since you are drinking Lieutenant Vedrian’s ‘special’ cocktails and the officers are ordering you some really weird and expensive mixes…well, you know how the system calculates those excesses. Not that you could drink that many colas. The numbers keep climbing as word is spreading how you wrestled the Hammer to the ground and backed Hellion down for a second time.”

“Wait a minute, Gunny. I didn’t make
Lieutenant Heller back down, I just distracted him. And Allie, you were there, I didn’t wrestle Lieutenant Hammermill to the ground either. He mostly tripped and I just gave him a little push.”

Gunny said, “I know what I sa
w, sir. You wrestled Lieutenant Hammermill to the ground with a special martial arts move that put his rear on the deck faster than he could react. And I saw you face down Lieutenant Heller and made him back off. That plus I have been serving you the most alcoholic swill I know how to make and you take it all in and are as sober as the day you were born. That is what I saw and that is the story I am telling.”

“But…
,” Stone said.

Allie shook her head. “The story has already taken a life of it’s own. It won’t really hurt those two too much, so we let it go.
”

“Yes,
sir,” Gunny added. “It just means you are going to walk out of here tonight with a tidy little profit and, if you don’t mind my saying, the prettiest woman in the room on your arm. Midshipman Stone, you are going to be the biggest legend the Marine Corps has seen since Lieutenant Stephen Decatur.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

S
tone sat at a work desk and spread the display in front of him. He used the stylus and added a column of numbers, wiped the response and re-added them.

“Nope, Allie. It is not coming out right.”

Allie looked up from her book. “Did you follow the directions?”

“Yes
sir, step by step, but I am still not getting the right answer.”

Allie glanced at his work. She nodded, “Here, you should have inverted these numbers.”

“But, the directions don’t say to do that,” Stone said.

“Don’t whine, Stone
,” Allie said. “You know, you are going to have to tell me what your mother calls you someday. I know you don’t want to be called Blackmon, but surely your family doesn’t call you Stone.”

Stone whined, “I’m not whining. But, this self-study doesn’t give me what I need to know to complete it properly.”
He decided to continue completely ignoring her queries into his past as he had been doing every time she asked a question about his childhood.

“I think this program may be assuming you already know some of these steps. Put that aside for now.” She called up another program on the display. “Try this program. Let’s work through this together. I’ll bet it fills in the gaps your
Lieutenant Vaarhoo is leaving out your studies. But, that is for next time.”

Stone slammed the display shut. “That is fine with me. We have been working through math problems so long my head is spinning…or maybe
it is just being with you that makes my head spin.”

Allie laughed and
brushed her hand through his hair. “If your head is spinning, it is because it isn’t screwed on tight enough.”

Stone looked down at his lap. “Now see what you started.”

Allie laughed again. “You keep bringing that subject up, so to speak, but I am telling you we are still not going there.”

“Yet?”
Stone grinned.

“Not yet
,” Allie replied with a nod. “Please don’t rush me, Stone. It has only been a week.”

“It’
s still my age, isn’t it? I mean if we were the same age you wouldn’t be hesitating to be with me,” Stone said.

Allie nodded again. “I wish it wasn’t a problem for me, because I do want to be with you. I don’t want you to think that I am leading you on or just a tease, but
I…well, I am just not ready yet, okay?”

“I don’t want to wait. But I guess I don’t have any other choice. Waiting isn’t going to kill me
…will it?”

“It feels like it sometimes,”
Allie replied and laughed. “It will get worse before it gets better, but we have only been seeing each other for a week.”

“It has been a good week
,” Stone said.

Allie smiled, “You think so?”
She leaned over and kissed him.

Stone knew it had been a good
week. It had not been without challenges. He and Allie had decided to take Commander Wright up on her offer to study in a spare office in her tower. Stone had not been prepared when he stepped out of the interconnecting tube between the central tower and the farms in tower one. He had been ready for the shift in artificial gravity where the deck became the bulkhead and the bulkhead became the deck. Shifting gravities was normal on commercial freighters.

What he had
not expected was the openness of the farm cylinder. Stone had stepped from a normal environment of four bulkheads, a deck below and a comfortable ceiling over his head into what looked like completely open air.

H
ad he not been holding hands with Allie he would have panicked and fallen to the deck to hold on. She squeezed his hand until he quit shivering and could open his eyes.

Commander Wright had explained
how they had to keep the ceiling open to keep the animals from going crazy. They had designed the whole tower to appear as if it was an open range on a planet. Looking up, all you could see was sky and sun, even though you knew that eight kilometers up was the other side of the cylinder. Everyone knew that if you started walking you would eventually end back up where you started.

Stone decided the difference between humans and animals must be that animals were designed not to be cooped up and humans were not designed to be in the open. He
was surprised to learn Allie preferred to stand in the grassy fields rather than in the normal, safe and sane parts of the ship with real ceilings.

He
was even more surprised to learn Commander Wright made it available for Allie to bring groups of transient marines into her farm areas for exercise in the fresh air under the sun. Wright even had some of the marines volunteering to help her around the farms. She said with over 150,000 square kilometers of farmland she needed all the help she could get.

Stone was very hesitant about bringing up the subject of getting transferred from warehousing to work with Commander Wright. He remembered her promise to have him transferred, but he hoped she had forgotten. On one hand, she would be a much better
supervisor. On the other hand, he was worried he would get stuck working under the open sky, or even worse, working with Skippy who seemed to always have his hands stuck inside of an animal of one kind or another for some reason or another.

Commander Wright seemed to understand his
problems with open spaces. She assured him that he would get used to it over time. She encouraged him to try and spend a little more time in the open each time he and Allie came over to study.

Allie was
not as understanding. She seemed to think humans were meant to live in the open instead of ships. Stone was shocked to silence to learn Allie had more than once walked out into the middle of the open fields. She slept and ate alone for two days in all of the openness. She called it camping.

Stone was almost ready to try that if it got him to spend the night with Allie.
At least, that is what he told himself until he stepped out from an office and into the open. He had to grab on to something and hold on until the dizziness passed, and then he had to make his way to his destination as quickly as he could.

Allie finally broke the kiss and pulled back. She stopped a long time before Stone was ready to quit. She sighed.

“Okay Stone. That is the last time we do that until you tell me about what your family-” Allie was interrupted as the office door flew open, slamming against the bulkhead.

Commander Wright stormed into the room. “What in the name of a two-bit horse is going on, Mister Stone?”

Stone leapt to attention, his face turning red with embarrassment. He was not embarrassed about having been caught with Allie. He was really quite flattered that she found him, if not attractive, at least entertaining. But, Wright had offered them a place to study, not a place to tryst.

Allie stood up, towering over the smaller woman. “Whoa, back up there, Commander. Stone and I aren’t in the same command. There isn’t anything inappropriate in our relationship so-”

Wright waived a dismissive hand as she interrupted. “I don’t give a hoot at an owl convention if you two play kissy-face until your lips get sore. I just got tore a new orifice for asking to transfer Stone to my division.” Her normally fair features were flushed and angry. She stood face-to-face with Stone. “What gives, Mister Stone?”

Stone stood rigid, trying his best not to let any emotion escape. Standing exactly as he had been taught by Senior Chief Tsosie back in training on
Lazzaroni. He replied, “Sir, I don’t understand. I really don’t know what you are talking about.”

Wright spat back. “Bull hockey,
boy! If you had Admiral Shalako as a personal patron you should have said so when I offered to transfer you to this tower. You let me step in it up to my knees.”

Stone could
not help himself. He stopped standing at attention and gawked at Wright. “The admiral is my patron? Are you nuts?” Just as he said it he realized that no matter how unmilitary-like Wright seemed at times, she was a full commander in the Emperor’s navy. “Commander, I apologize. I didn’t mean to imply any mental instability-”

“Maybe I am nuts
,” Wright interrupted again, using a slightly calmer voice. “All I did was to sign a simple request to have a lowly midshipman transferred from third watch tower three warehouse to third watch tower one farms. You would have thought I had taken a dump in the punchbowl at a ladies tea. It should have been a simple matter between Stephens, the commander of tower three and me, the commander of tower one. Instead, I get called in front of the admiral on one of his bad days.”

“I don’t get it, Commander
.” Stone shook his head. He looked to Allie for help.

Allie just shrugged in ignorance.

Stone continued, “I have never met Admiral Shalako and I didn’t think he even knew who I was.”

“Oh he knows you alright
,” Wright snorted. “Did you know that he personally signed your papers out of midshipman’s school? I’ve seen your records from training, Mister Stone. You would still be on Lazzaroni Naval Base if you hadn’t received a personal and special request by name from an admiral of the fleet.”

“Oh crap!”

Wright agreed. “Oh crap indeed, Mister Stone. I can see the dawn of understanding in your eyes. You jammed me up with an admiral and I want to know why. If you mess up, then you ‘fess up. Come on, boy!”

Allie shifted on her feet.

Stone realized Allie had been poised on the balls of her feet in attack mode. He wondered if she really would have attacked a full commander to protect him. She had just shifted back on her heels and was looking at him expectantly.

“I want to hear this, Stone
,” Allie said quietly.

“I don’t know anything about this for certain. Grandma said this might happen, but Grandpa said Stone was such a common name that it
shouldn’t be an issue,” Stone replied.

“What
shouldn’t be an issue? Quit stalling, Stone,” Allie demanded.

“How close is
Admiral Shalako to retiring, Commander?” he asked.

Wright said, “How should I know? Well, okay I can guess that he is pretty close. The last half a dozen
admirals on the Periodontitis have retired after this posting. It is kind of like getting assigned here is the death-knell to a navy career.”

“I am sorry, Commander
,” Stone said. “I was trying to keep my family ties to myself. I didn’t want to be given special treatment because of who I am.”

“I can understand th
e attitude. So, what makes you so special?” Wright asked.

“I am not anyone special, but I am one of the Stones of the Stone Freight Company
,” Stone shook his head in resignation.

“Why didn’t you tell me? We talked about them, but you didn’t say anything
,” Allie all but shouted. She glanced at Wright. “You know them, Commander. They say the Stone family is almost as rich as the Emperor himself. Did you ever watch the vid-shows about them? They even number the family for order of succession. Like who is the top dog in the family! Twenty-nine this and Forty-seven that, they even call each other by the numbers. So, is that why you don’t go by your first name, Blackmon? You got a number?”

Stone nodded. “Blackmon is a family name. It was my father’s last name. He changed to Stone when he married Mom. Grandpa is One and Mom is
Dos. I became Trey the day I was born.”

Wright stood as if in shock.

Allie shouted, spitting out the words as if they hurt coming out. “Trey? You are third in line to inherit the biggest privately held fortune in all of human space?”

“No, Allie
,” Stone shook his head. “I am number three because Grandpa already controls the family fortune. Mom is first in line to inherit, so I am really second in line to inherit control, but that doesn’t mean the money is mine or ever will be mine. It belongs to all of the family. I would just-”

“Stone, how dare you do this to me?
” Allie clenched her fists. “Alright, you made me a cradle robber and a cougar, but now you’ve turned me into a gold digger as well? That is too much. No. No more!” She turned and ran from the room.

Stone rushed to follow her, but two
meters past the door he realized he was standing in what looked like the front lawn of a small office building on a farm. He tried to look at Allie’s fleeing back and not look up into the sky, but he couldn’t help it. He froze. He tried to go after Allie, but he could not move. He tried to go back to the office, but he was not able to back up.

Coming to
Commander Wright’s farm office had been difficult. He had managed by holding Allie’s hand and looking at the ground. He was stuck without her steadiness. A firm fist grasped the back of his collar and dragged him back into the office.

Wright let go of his collar and said, “Son, if you can’t run across fifty
meters of open grass, then maybe the admiral did me a favor by not granting your transfer. Okay, so why does your family wealth interest the admiral?”