The Worst Ship in the Fleet (Dumb Luck and Dead Heroes, #1)

by Skyler Ramirez

on this bucket could still say the same

wake up the transport’s other two remaining

Where once her paint scheme might have been a uniform gunmetal gray or even the matte black of a Navy warship, now she was a patchwork of discolored hull plates that were evidently being held in place by chewing gum and maybe a few toothpicks. She looked like a kindergartner’s wild drawing of what a warship might look like…if that kindergartner was terrible at art and hated the Navy and everyone in it and wanted them to collectively die from embarrassment. My new home in space was shaped roughly like a long box, with an unevenly tapered front end and a flare at the back for the ion drive nozzles. On her dorsal hull, she had a small conning tower with an observation pod at the top of it. As with most warships, that observation pod had the only windows on the ship. It was designed as a last-ditch place for the ship’s officers to visually target enemy craft if their entire AI targeting system failed or their external sensors were all fried. Of course, that was ridiculous; anything that could take out both the AI and the ship’s external sensors would surely take out the thick glass enclosure of the observation pod well beforehand.

‘Cheng’ was the near-ubiquitous shortening of ‘chief engineer’ that had been used on naval ships since time immemorial. It had probably originated on Old Earth even, but no one knew for sure.

When you marry someone, you sort of expect that you’re in it with them until the end and that when that end comes, you’ll go out together, preferably holding each other to the last second. And even though I’d driven her into the arms of another man, destroyed our