The Magazine Hatch

The forward magazine smells of cosmoline and cold iron, and for eighteen months it has been Ordnance Clerk Elian Voss's whole world: five-inch shells, pallets of 5.56, linked belts of 7.62, every serial number logged and every requisition chit filed in triplicate. He is the only clerk on his shift who hasn't been flagged this quarter, because he counts everything twice.

Today the Admiralty auditors come down the ladder in black uniforms with gold at the cuffs and no name tags. Their leader wears a barcode tattoo on his neck that gives him authority to flag, freeze or delete. For four hours they pull every crate, and everything reconciles except one: damaged rounds from a live-fire exercise three days ago, the disposition chit still in the pipeline. Ordnance unaccounted for after seventy-two hours is flagged as lost. Lost means negligence. Negligence, Elian finishes for him, means desertion.

The auditor is summoned to the bridge with the job half done, and soon afterward the deck shudders, the aft hatch begins to glow, and a distorted voice on the intercom tells him to get out now. A heavy hand shoves him into a tunnel of white light that hums with serial numbers, and he lands in a corridor that loops back on itself, facing a dented olive-drab drone with a cracked lens and a peeling smiley-face sticker. This, it informs him, is the fleet-OS. He has been assigned the role of Ordnance Clerk, Level One, with a Requisition ability. Unauthorized requests will be flagged, flagged requests reported, and reported requests end in deletion: session terminated, no return to his point of origin.

Elian asks how he gets home. Home, the drone replies, is not an inventory item. Ammunition is.