Imaginary Hazard to Navigation
“So, we were about three weeks out from Tanja – that’s in the Glimmerstars, don’ch’know – with the Blood and Gold, us in the Fifty-Eighth, just heading back from some little out-system where we’d been doing the hearts-and-minds thing. Glimmerstars was one of the Expansion Regions back then, for all it’s staid and civilized now.
“I was a green corporal in supply – green right down to the scales – and on the outs with the lads after a little slip-up with the coding that got us a couple of hundred gallons of the standard cleanser we use for the Havocs – our combat exoskeletons – but the perfumed civvie version, and those tight-wires in admin made us use it. The whole damn armory smelled like a startown house o’commercial affection for weeks, but that’s by the by.
“Anyway, on this run one of the vacuum-suckers working maintenance down near our section – this was on the Kinetic Didaxis, and an old nsang ex-merc, as it was the 58th – had decided he didn’t want to be in the Navy after all, but was only five years in, so he figured his best chance was to get out on an incapacity, if y’know what I mean, and the first gimmick he’d thought up was the imaginary skimmer, right? Whenever he was going anywhere more’n a couple of feet he pretended he was riding this thing – start it up, drive it where he wanted to go, shut it back down, signal when he had to turn corners, the works, right down to the last detail. Sounds, too. And he always remembered where the thing was when he wasn’t on it, and soon enough everyone in the section knew where he’d left it. Half of them reckoned they could even see the damn thing.
“So about half a year went by while we shuffled around the outworlds; he’d added a bunch of other stuff to his repertoire by then, and eventually they threw him out, but not on an incapacity, and when he was being marched off he drove his skimmer up to the airlock, shut it off, threw the keys in the recycler – claiming that he wouldn’t need it any more – and that should’ve been the last of that.
“Half the lads in the section could still see the thing sitting there, though – the chiefs weren’t at all happy when they kept walking around it – so in the end a bunch of them went down there in the night-cycle and mimed spacing the damn thing just to put an end to it.”
– MSgt. Vivek mor-Rakenn anecdotes