Captain Fodral Limbin looked up to see a large mass barreling down at him. His normally calm face froze with a mixture of surprise and anger. He pushed off from the floor and sprung up, knocking his head on the low ceiling.
Below him, the heavy object connected with a pile of cartons and shuddered to a halt. The white cartons tumbled about like so much slug from a shotgun. They were probably holding liquid gaseous cargo, so they fell slowly, some spinning for a while, then remaining suspended in air.
A giant crate, the runaway juggernaut that had caused the mess, was buried three layers deep into the cargo, and several scratches marked the sides.
“Private Mull!” Limbin shouted; the veins in his forehead were swelling. “Get over here!”
All around the storage bay assistants and officers paused, watching the scene. A few went back to work quietly, but most watched on. The steering cockpit atop the crate forklift opened and a sullen figure swam out. Mull grasped handles on the forklift and managed to get to the floor, where he swayed a little uncertainly, more or less at attention.
Limbin splayed his fingers against the ceiling and, with a precision born from years of practice, pushed down, coming to a stop within a few inches from the floor. He held his hands behind his back and stared down coldly at the private.
In all fairness to Mull, he tried his best to adopt the stance a young private was expected to take when addressed by a superior. However, the lack of gravity made it nearly impossible; his thumbs were in line with the seams of his trousers, but the action had started him rotating slowly towards the captain.
“Tell me exactly what you did wrong this time,” Limbin said through clenched teeth.
“Sir, I left the manual drive on in the auto-drive tunnel, sir.” Mull explained. “After I exited the bay, I couldn’t take over from the machine, sir.”
Limbin ground his teeth in fury; it was just like Mull to find the one error the forklifts had and use it to cause mass damage. Those cartons had to be restacked, punctured ones replaced or paid for, mess vacuumed up and surfaces decontaminated. Not only that, the forklift had probably taken damage, otherwise it would have barreled on through the pile of cartons. They would have really had a mess on their hands had that happened.
The captain considered his options. Mull had to be punished, but nowhere in all the fifty-four chapters of the S-Navy Manual was there a protocol penalty for destruction of civilian cargo with a forklift. Limbin would have to be creative.
“Seven months in D-Cell, Mull,” Limbin said, making his decision. “And four days duty on the patch deck.”
Limbin knew those two dreaded tasks were what every officer under him avoided like the plague. He also knew that most ships lost two men a year two those jobs, but it was the worst sentence he had left in his arsenal: Mull had been sentenced to galley cleanup only two weeks ago.
“Yes, sir,” Mull replied, hanging his head.
Limbin pulled out his pad and pen, to mark up the offense on Mull’s records. However, when he tried to write, the pen refused to mark anything more than broken lines. Limbin frowned and shook the annoying tool. Still no luck.
He looked up around him, but most of the officers were already heading back to their tasks. His eyes fell on Mull, still trying to stand attentively, but nearly bending over backwards in the process.
“Mull, at ease,” he ordered. “And give me a pen.”
“I haven’t got one, sir,” Mull said, feeling in his shoulder pocket. “Oh, but I have this.”
He handed Limbin a wooden object, similar to a pen in form, but vastly different. It was a bright yellow, with a metallic band and rubber nub near the upper end. The tip was a dark colored point.
“It just came in the mail, sir,” Mull explained. “My mother sent it to me to remind me of Earth…It’s a pencil”
Of course, archaic Earthen tools, just the sort of things the backward Mull would carry around. Then again, there was very little possibility of the thing malfunctioning like Limbin’s pen had.
Limbin took the pencil and set the point to his paper. He had heard that the center was some sort of soft mineral that left a trail of dark dust when pressed hard enough. He tried a single line and, even though the paper was designed for ink, it worked.
“Very good,” Limbin muttered, proceeding to write out the punishment. “Report to the quartermaster for your position on the patch deck.”
Mull nodded and took the paper. He rotated slowly and pushed himself towards the mess of cartons, already mostly cleared by servilbots. He did not ask for his pencil.
Limbin stared at the thing in his hand. It was a symbol of old Earth and the way humans used to live. In some way, it was part of his own heritage, even though he was space-born and had never set foot Earth. He rolled it around between his fingers for a while, and then slipped it into his shoulder pocket.
Spoiler! :
"Your story is about an officer in a futuristic space station borrowing a pencil."
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