Rich Man's War by Elliott Kay

sitting in my stomach when I got orders to come on board this ship. I figured this would be more of the same. St. Jude was bad.”
    “How bad?”
    Cry-yourself-to-sleep bad , Tanner thought. “Well, like I told the XO, it took forever to qualify for helmsman on St. Jude . I’d never done a damage control or battle stations drill until the last month or so on that ship. I mostly avoided casual conversations because I couldn’t handle all the venom. Whenever we were underway, I spent as much time as I could in my rack, which I’m told is a sign of depression. Didn’t know it then, but it fits.
    “The thing I don’t tell anyone is that I finally snapped about a minute before we lost the ship. The BM2 and I were about to go at it. One of us was gonna wind up with a broken neck. Then I saw the laser flash and there’s the BM2 floating out into space right in front of me and everyone else was just gone. That doesn’t come up in the interviews.”
    Kelly slowly nodded. “ Sounds pretty bad.”
    “Yes, ma’am.”
    “Stevens really fucked up.”
    “It wasn’t just Stevens, ma’am,” said Tanner quietly. “It was all of us. Myself included.”
    “Shit rolls downhill, Tanner,” Kelly replied, shaking her head. “Like I said, these corvettes have only so many people on board. If Stevens was that out of touch, it’s no wonder things went bad ly. Every other problem got that much worse because the captain didn’t do his job. Why do you blame yourself?”
    “I should’ve thought of some way to address it,” Tanner shrugged. “I’m not gonna shift all the blame onto other people. I still don’t know what I could’ve done, but throwing up my hands and saying it wasn’t me isn’t good enough, either.”
    “Maybe punching out the BM2 would’ve been a start. We could talk about what you might have done, but I can’t say if it would’ve done any good. There’s not a doubt in my mind that the problems came from well above your level. Not from what you’re describing. And after a ship like that, I don’t blame you if you weren’t excited about coming on board this one.”
    “ I wasn’t, but this ship isn’t the same at all, ma’am. This is like night and day from what I’m used to.”
    “Oh? Enough to give the service a second chance?”
    “Not a chance in hell, ma’am,” he said with a weary smile. “I am very grateful that there are so many people who are willing to deal with all this, but it’s not for me. I don’t want this to be my life. When my time’s up, I’m gone.”
    “You’re preaching to the choir, actually,” laughed Kelly. “But that’s not for a few more years. In the meantime, there’s a lot of good a body can do in the military…for yourself, and for other people. And I know you care about that at least, right? You’re here for the duration, so you might as well get what you can out of it.”
    “Yeah, I know,” Tanner sighed. “I’ve had a couple conversation s about picking a rating, but I’m not sure any of my options come close to what I want to do with my life.”
    “ This doesn’t have to be your life. You said before you want to do planetary surveys, right? You have to go to college to do that anyway. If I was in your shoes, I’d want to learn things they don’t teach you at a university.”
    “I hadn’t thought about it like that,” Tanner admitted.
    “It’s half the reason I signed up,” said the captain. “How much longer have you got? Three and a half years? Hell of a waste to spend it running out the clock.”
    He chewed on that thought. Eventually, he found himself looking at the captain once more. “Ma’am… your first name doesn’t begin with an ‘A,’ does it?”
     
    * * *
     
    Final adjustments to the plans continued even now, less than an hour before showtime. While primary overall plans were cemented weeks earlier, before the freighter landed on Scheherazade, the nature of a beast like this included constant tweaking and