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“Tell me, what’s your secret to maintaining a positive attitude?” “Not needing to.” She explained simply. “Uh, what?” “I still have a job to do, Colonel. I am going to do that job, whether it sucks or not, until the last lightbulb on this ship goes out. I don’t know what the Army is like, Sir,” there was that cocked head again, “but the Marine Corps doesn’t much care whether you’re having a good morale day or not. You do your job, regardless. Semper fidelis. Not when-I’m-feeling-it fidelis.”
But sometimes I wanted to see the ship, see the old-fashioned way with photons bouncing off the hull and being picked up by my eyes. Because portholes were a weak point in the ship’s structure, there weren’t many of them on the Flying Dutchman. One place that had portholes was the rear of the forward hull; the portholes there were intended for emergency use when ships were attaching to the hardpoint docking platforms. Even the proudly and stubbornly cyborg Thuranin, who liked to control the entire ship through cybernetic brain implants rather than physically touching buttons, levers and
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We had been jumping continuously until ship and crew were exhausted. There was a nightmarish period of two days when we had to jump every thirty three minutes, because that is how long it took a pair of Thuranin cruisers to find us after every jump. We finally managed to shake those two ships, and now we had the luxury of almost two hours between jumps.
That was one of my favorite episodes of the BSG reboot.
“Joe, this is like rednecks-on-meth stupid. This is stupid on the level of a buck-naked Florida redneck crashing his stolen truck into a police station to complain that the meth he bought isn’t, you know, methy enough.
“Joe?” “Yeah?” “Hold my beer.” “No!” We jumped. Or something like that.
“And now the humans are laughing at you, dear? Tsk, tsk,” Nagatha feigned sadness. For a sweet lady, she had a streak of iron inside her. “Well, when you call the crew monkeys and then give them a reason to laugh at you, I suppose there is a valuable lesson we can all learn,” she said in her best schoolteacher voice. “What’s that?” Skippy sounded thoroughly miserable. “Payback is a bitch, dear.”
When you make a plan, the universe chuckles and rubs its hands with delight, because it has another golden opportunity to screw with you.”
The most popular theory is that I am an idiot.
It was a decent workout, in fact I overdid it most of the time, because I was exercising in a single passenger compartment, surrounded by a crowd of people who were waiting for their turn. To save myself from utter humiliation, I often set the dial for about ten pounds heavier than I was used to lifting aboard the Dutchman. The agonizing muscle cramps I got after the first time should have taught me a lesson, but I’m a guy, so I’m genetically predisposed to doing stupid things over and over. I didn’t even have the excuse of saying ‘hold my beer’.
“What is this, Skippy?” “Balloons, Joe. They will lift you out of there.” “Balloons? Uh, you also included a parachute, right?” “No, dumdum, a parachute would add too much weight.” “I need a parachute in case the Thuranin shoot down the balloons and I need to go skydiving, Skippy.” “You don’t need a parachute to go skydiving, Joe.” “I don’t?” “No. You need a parachute to go skydiving more than once,” he laughed. “Anyway, get moving.”
The tunnel slanted down more steeply and curved to the left. After one revolution, we realized the tunnel had become a spiral. Constantly turning to the left made me feel like a NASCAR driver.
Joe is dead.
Joe is not dead!
What that means is, as soon as all three microwormholes have solid returns, I am punching the jump drive. Joe, as this may be the last time we ever talk, I want to say something profound.” “Like what?” “Hold my beer.”
