The Supply Officer, Part 1/2

We knew something was wrong when the monthly supply run arrived thirty hours late. Battlestations were sounded with three klaxons, and we ran to our positions as searchlights scanned the sky. The dust storms were high enough that respirators were required, and looking up, we saw the white beams shining as they caught the swirling dust.

I was in charge of the loading crew, because I was the supply officer. Soon as the cargo hopper set down and throttled down her rockets, I sent them out. The hopper’s loading ramp lowered, revealing her hold stocked high with ISO standard shipping crates. Beautiful stuff. For us of the supply officer breed, neatly stacked, perfectly rectangular ISO crates are our art, our exposed curves and pulsating thighs.

I grabbed my clipboard and stood in the shelter of the hopper’s tail while I counted the crates as they passed.

Then the loading officer came down the ramp. He was a short, pale flight crewman.

“Lieutenant?” he said.

“That’s me,” I said. No saluting, we were moving fast as we could to get out of the storm. I handed him my clipboard. “Sign here. Would you like to add a comment about what the delay was?” Logistics was reliability. We didn’t do supply runs the fastest, we did them regularly with fundamentally safe methods.

“Listen. Get word to your Colonel. This is going to be the last supply run for a long time,” he said. He grabbed my shoulder. Felt like he was trying to comfort me.

That was the worst thing he could have said, and it left me too stunned to think. “What are you going on about?”

“All runs are being put on hold indefinitely. Every other frontier base is getting the same warning. We figured the best we could do was top all you little guys off one more time,” he said.

            “This isn’t a self-sustaining outpost, fuck are you going on about?” Around me, the grunts hauled crates, completely oblivious to the doom hurtling towards them.

“Listen. You know all the political drama that’s been going on back in the core systems?”

“Yeah, what about?” I said. I don’t give a shit about core system politics, or I’d have picked a posting back there.

“It went hot. There’s some shit burning through there. Don’t know what except that a lot of people are dying. It hasn’t gotten here yet, but the entire supply net is going down. There’re no more freighters from the core worlds to the regional depot, which means no more supply runs to the frontier.” He shrugged. “I got it in writing, from Vice Admiral Holt to your Colonel.” He placed a slip of paper on my clipboard.

I tried to process that whole idea, of the fragile network holding our base and the hundreds of little outposts together just collapsing. I got stuck on the starvation bit. He just shook his head and muttered under his breath as he walked back up the ramp.

I checked off the cargo numbly because logistics must go on. Everything expected was present. One month of basic food and other consumables, spare parts for the mines, the generators and the other complex equipment on base, and good old individual mail orders. We got the cargo stored while I held our impending doom close to my chest. When it was done and the loading detail dismissed to the showers, I couldn’t hide it anymore.

I went through the base to the command bunker and found the Colonel playing chess with the Mayor. I slapped the note right on their board, scattering dust among the plastic chess pieces.

They read it. They looked at each other and then back to me. Mayor was sweating like any civilian when they were suddenly the subject of danger. The Colonel just stared at me with cold determination and kept staring until I straightened up and understood we would be surviving. She was good at staring. Only then did she give orders.

First order: make one month of supplies last forever. We were soldiers after all. We adapt, we overcome. Then we blow our pay on liquor and bad marriages.

Second order: don’t let anyone panic and fuck up the first order. After all, logistics must go on in its slow, reliable way until the end of time.

I spent the first night organizing a mass counting of every soldier present. Food, toiletries, bullets, batteries. Literally every piece of gear in the base and surrounding mining community that counted as ‘expendable.’ The mayor had all the miners and their families turn out their fridges and private stores too.

Fortunately, someone much smarter than me had built this base next to a buried glacier, so water was not an issue.

Counting for every food stash, private fridge, and MRE, we could last ten weeks before starving. Which wasn’t forever. By confiscating all supplies and reducing everyone to emergency rations, I could get that to fourteen weeks. Which was better, but still wasn’t forever.

First up, making the food last forever.

Our monthly vitamin c rations include preserved fruits and vegetables. Admiralty studies found actual organic produce vastly increased morale over flavored nutrient paste, supply shipments included the real things. Including all their seeds. I put out a bulletin requesting all civilians and soldiers save these seeds and bring them to the supply office.

That announcement must have made the reality of our isolation finally sink in, because my office was deluged by a mob of civilians and poorly disciplined soldiers loudly demanding an explanation. I came out with a clipboard and offered to take down their concerns, which did not quell them one bit.

I was saved when the Colonel slid between me and the angry crowd, and they all took three steps back.  She told them all to shut up and get back to work, and they silently did. Colonel’s good at making people shut up and obey. That’s why she’s the Colonel. Then before they left, she told them to save the seeds or else.

Every fridge on base was filled within the week. Turned out one of the foremen in the mines had gotten a couple of her miners together and been planning on doing a little gardening on their own, and I appointed them chief gardeners. They were grateful to get out of the mines and I was grateful I didn’t have to force anyone into the job.

 Then came the problem of actually growing them. Topsoil on our host world of Ziggy-3 is dry, sterile dust with a sprinkling of salt to ensure its sterility. Nothing has lived on the surface since the primordial oceans dried up half a billion years ago.

Fortunately, we had a ready-made tunnel extending under the earth, two and a half kilometers deep.

I got ahold of the schematics and bribed the foreman with a bag of coffee beans to explain it to me. The mine followed a lithium vein deep below the dry layers, into Ziggy-3’s blue past. It intersected with a dried volcanic lava plume. She led me down to the parts not contaminated by lithium byproduct to do a soil sample test.

The hard part was convincing the corpie director to close the mine. Even with the mayor and myself insisting that there was no pickup freighter coming and no corporate office in the Magek system to buy it, he proclaimed that business still needed to be done and surely this silliness would be sorted out. After all, if corporate came back and found no production, the mine would be on the hook for lost profits.

I called the Colonel and in five minutes he ordered the mine to stop digging and start excavating. In fact, he promised her he’d even put mechanical failures in the logs to ensure no one ever questioned why it had been shut down. Soon we had nutritious volcanic solid packed in every spare cupboard, every empty corridor space, and even in the upper layers of the mine itself. Rigging hydroponics to them was a matter of drilling piping to the submerged glacier, mine engineers doing calculations, and a couple dozen bored grunts hauling dirt.

That done, every man and woman became a gardener suddenly. Officers compared different watering patterns in the mess. An enlisted stopped me on the way to work the next day and asked me if he should save his own shit for fertilizer.

That was actually a good idea. I put out a call to the Colonel and got three miscreants with petty offenses to their names. I put them on shit mixing duty. It wasn’t great, professional corporate grade fertilizer, but as a nutrient additive, it would do.

I was showering dirt off when I got a call to the Colonel’s office.

Some enlisted man had been giving a speech that the officers and the mayor were getting full food rations while everyone else was on three-quarters and hungry.

She told me to fix that or give her a line to fix it with.

I went to the officer’s kitchen and then the enlisted and compared their output. And confirmed that the officers were, in fact, still getting full rations plus junk food from the vending machines.

I compiled my numbers and took the solution back to the Colonel: put the officers and everyone else on the colony on the same rations. We’d stretch our supplies and extra week, as a side effect.

Her brows furrowed up and she cursed under her breath, then went down to the kitchens to confirm.

With everyone eating the same, the divide between officers, civilians, and grunts disappeared. Everyone started mingling in the grunt’s cafeteria because it was the largest and had bucket seats. I found myself eating meals alongside enlisted and miners, when I didn’t eat in my office.

After three weeks, the targeting array for the defensive turrets failed. Every piece of electronics on the surface had electrostatic projectors to repel the dust at range, and a physical dust shield. That never stopped the dust completely. A few grains of metallic sand had slipped inside, and slowly ground through the electronics, until a damaged wire sparked, arced to the power conduit, and melted the entire unit.

 Normally, we could fill out a requisition form and get a replacement from regional supply within a week. We couldn’t now, and that meant we were impotent at altitude above a hundred meters.

Well, I’d done a lot of ordering parts for the mines, and I knew the miners used something called a seismic sonograph to prospect. It was a little quartz bubble protecting speakers within. It sent sound waves racing through the earth, and listened when it echoed back. They had a range of a few hundred meters.

Since the mine was deactivated, I requisitioned the lot. Turned out, when listening to Ziggy’s atmosphere instead of rock, they had a range of one kilometer in all directions. I found a couple mining techs and a ladder. We waited until the dust storms hit a minimum and rigged two in place of the old targeting array. Boom. Not a great firing solution, but good enough.

By now, people were starting to demand the first shuttle out of here. While the Colonel and I kept them alive, Captain Poebelt handled their feelings. Unlike us, he was a natural smiler and concerned himself with people’s feelings, so he was ideal for the role.

By now it was four weeks and I’d slept about six hours in that time. So, I took my day off and passed out in my cabin.

I was awoken by a boot hammering my door. It’s easy to tell who’s knocking by the sound their boot makes when connecting with your door. Miner’s boots made a low, soft thump as thick leather hits plastic. Military boots had metal toes and hammered like thunder reverberating through the tunnels. These were metal toes.

I came outside and found Captain Poebelt and the Mayor smiling at me.

The mayor took me by the shoulders and politely explained the negatives of suboptimal nutrition. People got frustrated easier, argumentative, and thought irrationally. He informed me that it would be better for the entire base if military and civilian leadership were entitled to full rations. Captain Poebelt played the good public relations officer and nodded along eagerly the whole time.

I’m not a soldier. I’m an accountant with a uniform and I had two orders. I explained my two orders and recommended them to the Colonel since she’d given them. They tried with me for twenty minutes like a good, persistent leader would. But I kept recommending them to the Colonel because I don’t fight battles. Then I went back to sleep.

I was woken up again by a soft tapping on my door. I threw my uniform back on and stumbled to the door, wondering who would insult me by only using their hand to knock.

It was Valya; the mining foreman now running the garden.

“We’ve got a problem,” she said.

“Another one?” I said.

She crossed her arms and stared at me wearily. “This one is life threatening.”

“Another one?” I said. Her frown deepened but I was too tired to care. “Why are we going to die?”

“So, running the farms has about doubled our power usage. Our batteries passively recharge, but there’s a limit to the recharge,” she said.

“We’re not running the mining equipment,” I said.

“The mining generators are on a separate circuit from the base.” She shrugged.

“Right, forgot about that,” I said. Someone had wanted to save money not boring tunnels through the kilometer and a half of bedrock separating the mine from the base and laying cables through it. Now it would slowly kill us all.

“How long?” I said.

“Batteries reach brown-out mode in one week at the current rate.”

I nodded along. Then, a question occurred. “How do you know about engineering?”

Valya had been born to debt-bonded beef farmers in the Cariso system. At twelve, they’d smuggled her off on a transport, to a real community farm with actual grass and bio-domes full of fresh air. She’d learned everything from farming to hydroponics to how to run the power grid.

I learned this over helmet radio while we stood outside the barrier wall and were buffeted by slow, endless sheets of dust. I listened quietly, before posing the question; what was her favorite farm animal?

“Yorkie terriers,” she surprised me. “They catch rats, krepids, and every other interstellar pest we can find.”

I nodded with enough exaggeration for her to see through the whirling dust. Then held up my wind sensor. Twenty knots. Slow enough to put up a windmill, but the dust would shred the propellers, and jam up the machinery.

As I looked up, I caught a glimpse of the silver disk of Ziggy’s single moon through the brown dust sky. It was a grey disk pockmarked with craters that had never filled in due to having no atmosphere. It was a cold, dead rock, orbiting Ziggy-3 at one rotation every twenty-nine days.

Thinking of it orbiting, I had an idea.

“To generate power, a windmill just needs to be pushed around by the wind, right?”

“I’m not a proper engineer but that’s the theory. We had a water wheel on the farm too. Used it to power the irrigation pumps for free,” she said.

“Let’s go back,” I said. “I have an idea.”

Sergeant Grika had gone to university for engineering. He’d gotten his master’s just as the current recession hit and found that even engineers could be out of a job. So, he’d enlisted.

He heard my idea and tipped back a long drink of something that smelled awfully like moonshine. , I think he would’ve told me to fuck off If I wasn’t an officer and didn’t have Valya by my side.

“I always wanted to be an engineer. This is God laughing at me,” he said, and held up my crayon drawing. I kept staring at him until he nodded. “I’ll try.”

Mine elevators were designed to haul heavy ore and rock to the surface. We had plenty of those, and plenty of rotating gears from our ATV fleet. Grika and his crew of miners and grunts put together an A-frame, with a double wheel-hub hooked to six large scoops. No one could find a drill big enough to weigh the whole thing down, so I had rock waste from the mine hauled over, placed in trash bags, and piled on the foundation.

Grika had made a dust wheel. It even spun without falling over. Dust and wind pushed the scoops around. They dumped the accumulated dust before coming back up for another load.

I got the wiring hooked up. Colonel came out and watched the thing shudder and grind to a halt.

She ripped off her filter mask and shrieked out a stream of profanity that would set oil on fire. The dust wheel shuddered and whirred to life.

We put up four of them. Then inaugurated Grika’s ingenious contraptions with a party and a talent show, judged by the Colonel and the by now completely unemployed corpie director.

“I’ll put you up for a medal when this is over,” the Colonel said.

“Grika built it after all, I’m not an engineer,” I said.

“He gets a medal too,” she said. “This whole survival is your planning.”

“I’m just an accountant, really,” I said and held up my hands.

The Colonel stared at me until I finally nodded. She was good at that.

“I’d be grateful for a promotion too. And a posting at a nice big supply depot in the inner worlds,” I added hopefully.

“I’ll see what I can do. I do have connections back in the admiralty,” she said.

Excellent. I’d changed my mind about the core systems. Cushy desks with a ready supply of food and fresh air were a wonderful luxury.

The next morning, I formed up supply detail and waited on the launch pad. The monthly supply run didn’t come. The Colonel turned on the satellite telescopes and looked to the stars. Not a single signal reflected. The entire Ziggy system was empty, except for us.

We waited for six hours anyways, then went back inside and picked the dust out of the dust-proof seals on our enviro-suits and respirators. I slumped on the bench, itching in my own dust-covered fatigues, and looked around the room.

Twelve dust-streaked soldiers stared back at me with an empty look in their eyes. I felt the panic. There was no news for an entire month now. We were alone.

I felt I should do something inspiring. Words didn’t come, though. I’m not a leader, just an accountant. I ended up standing up.

“Shower, then we wipe this room down,” I said.

They followed me to the showers, then back to the cleaning room in our fresh sweats. We cleaned the airlock and ready room so thoroughly it shined like brand new.

After, we all ate lunch together. Word had gotten around the base about us definitely being alone and I got a few messages following up on requisition requests from disbelieving soldiers. I gave them the same generic reply and referred them to the Colonel if they had further complaints.

After lunch I got up, and all twelve of them got up with me. I looked around, and they were all looking to me for instructions. Which sent shivers running down my spine.

“We’re going to do a dust sweep of the whole perimeter,” I decided. That had been forgotten about in the confusion of the last few weeks.

As one, they acknowledged, with minimal complaints.

Dust sweeping is a simple task. You grab an electromagnetic probe and screw it to the end of a long pole. Then you poke around every EM shielded part of the base for dust that slipped through the shields. The temperature was four degrees centigrade, and the storm had picked up, completely obscuring Ziggy-3’s moon, but the principal task remained.

The hard part is in coordinating it. Common wisdom says you start with the most important equipment and work your way down the list. That means by the time you get to the other end, everyone is exhausted. That means the least important things start jamming up and adding up into more important problems.

I came up with a different plan. I divided us into two groups. Onne group started at the top of the list, and the other at the bottom. We met in the middle eight hours later, exhausted and smelling the dust through our respirators.

I woke up the next morning to Captain Poebelt kicking my door.

“What did you order?” he said with a polite smile.

“Nothing?” I said and stared back. I had given zero orders prior to bed.

“Well you clearly said something.” He gestured up and down the corridor in that polite way he had about everything.

The corridors were shining. Every door was properly sterilized and polished. The orange maintenance tag hanging over the electrical box at the end for the past three months was replaced with a blue ‘fully functional’ tag.

I shrugged. Then went back to sleep.

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