Tranquility Lost

Chapter 6: Gearing Up

The pulsing beat of electronic music greeted me as I entered the hatchway leading to Deck 18's General Cafeteria. The faded white text had been all but covered with posters plastered on and removed for seemingly the better part of a century, the most recent ones advertising DJs and musical artists. It was a strange contrast to the clinical environment I'd seen so far. Entering the cafeteria, I saw an open dance floor where rows of tables would be, figures gyrating and howling as multicolored lights flickered all around them. Someone on the periphery glanced at me and shot me a friendly smile as I approached.

"Hey there! Haven't seen you around before... are you a passenger?"

I nodded, struggling to hear over the heavy beat. "This is a cafeteria?"

The stranger laughed. "Nah, we turned it into a nightclub ages ago," she said, a faint hint of some hard liquor on her breath. She turned and pointed to what appeared to be a food stand in the corner, where three people were lined up. "You're looking for the quartermaster, right? He's just over there."

"Thanks," I said, glancing at the cup she held. "Hey... can you drink here?"

"Not officially." She winked. "But we're on the front lines, you know? Anything under Deck 20 is exempt from inspections. We're all militia just trying to live it up while we still can," she said, drifting away as she spotted a group of others. "Hey, you made it!"

I holstered my tablet and went over to where she'd gestured, just as one of those waiting in the line left with a broad smile and a hot dog overloaded with sauerkraut. This seemed a strange place for a quartermaster, but I was doing my best to let my preconceptions fall away. Within a couple minutes I was swaying to the beat and inching closer to what looked every bit like one of the food stands I remembered back in Florida.

From within its dim interior emerged a man with gray-streaked hair and a silver eyepatch where his left eye should be. He scratched at a bulbous nose and examined me, ruddy features nearly a demonic red as the light show continued. "What'll it be, pal?"

"Are you Quartermaster Harvard? I was told to report here."

He leaned in closer. His single eye bulged out at me. "Oh, right... yeah, you look new. Show me your ID. On the tablet."

I did as he asked. The quartermaster pulled out a scanner and nodded to himself.

"Well, Carlos, looks like you've racked up a few cal credits." He tapped a metal sign beside him that listed a dozen different food items. The number beside one of them changed even as he continued talking. "That's how rations here work, you see. You earn credits to spend on food. Used to be a straight conversion into calories, but with Mutinies and crop failures down in AgSec there are definite market fluctuations as well. But don't let me bore you. Looks like you're an officer on station on the front lines, so you'll make 2.5k cal creds a day. Don't spend 'em all in one place," he added with a wry smile. "You can save them up for a week for something special, but then they expire."

My stomach grumbled. "Yeah, I'll take the loaded hot dog and chips," I said. "Maybe I'll get seconds later... I haven't eaten all century."

Harvard let out a sort of grunt as he tapped on his tablet. "You'd be surprised how many times I've heard that joke. I greet all you freshly thawed billionaires, you know."

The quartermaster himself didn't move at all, even as a whirring bundle of slender metal arms and legs clacked over. They moved a bland white bun into the heater with clinical precision, even as another arm reached for a hot dog and placed it on rolling metal cylinders, the meat already steaming under the heat.

"I'm not a billionaire," I said, eyeing the robotic movements. I'd heard about such contraptions but never seen them myself. There was something distinctly odd about it all.