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deck—it wouldn’t take all that much. He always could sweet-talk a fem into doing all kinds of things for him.
    He padded down the hall to the refresher, took a quick sonic shower, splashed depil on his stubble, and wiped it clean. Then, wrapped in a towel, he went back to don the uniform of the day.
    Tenn Graneet was past fifty, but he was in very good shape for a man his age. He had a few unrevised scars fromvarious battles when his station had been hit by enemy fire, or from when something had gone wrong and blown up, and a couple from cantina rumbles when he’d been slow to get out of the way of a broken bottle or vibroblade. Still, he was lean and muscular, and he could keep up with grunts half his age, though not as easily as he used to. The days when he could party all night and then work a full shift the next day were past, true, but on the obstacle course even the newbies knew enough to not get in front of him unless they wanted to get run over. It was a point of pride that, even after more than thirty years in the navy, nobody in Tenn Graneet’s gunnery crew could outdrink, outfight, or outwomanize him.
    He picked out his oldest uniform clothes, the light gray faded to the color of ash, and slipped into them. They were going to get dirty and smelly anyway today, so no point in messing up new ones. Word from uplevels was there was going to be another surprise battle drill around midshift. The Port Heavy Blaster Station CO, Captain Nast Hoberd, was a drinking buddy with Lieutenant Colonel Luah, who was the admiral’s assistant, and as a result the PHBS always got the heads-up when a drill or inspection was about to be sprung. The captain wanted his unit to look good, and since they always knew in advance when it counted, they always did look good. White-glove a surface in any of the six turbolaser turrets or two heavy ion cannon turrets, and there wouldn’t be a speck of dirt. You could eat off the floor in Fire Control on inspection days. Light the battle alarms, and the port battery was the first to report battle-ready. Every time.
    Rumor was that Hoberd was up for major, and his unit’s pretty-much-spotless performance during every drill and inspection didn’t hurt his chances any. Not that the blaster crew had any slouches on it. You didn’t get to shoot the big guns unless you had plenty of practice shooting the little ones, and anybody who couldn’t pull his weight, Tenn gotrid of fast enough to leave friction burns. He had his own reputation to keep up. CPO Tenn Graneet was the best gunnery chief in this being’s navy. If somebody gave them a target and it could possibly be hit, his crew would hit it, sure as there were little green beings living on Crystan V.
    Dressed, Tenn looked at himself in the mirror. A face that was every centimeter the grizzled old navy chief looked back at him. He grunted. He’d joined the Imperial Navy before it was the Imperial Navy, and he expected to die at his post. That was fine by him. A lifetime of military service wasn’t a bad life at all, as far as he was concerned. He left his quarters and headed into the hall.
    The
Steel Talon
was the ninth ship upon which he’d served; on the last four of them his duty had been that of a gunnery chief. An
Imperial
-class Star Destroyer, the
Talon
was the backbone of the fleet. Tenn hoped to be transferred, one day, to one of the four new
Super
-class Star Destroyers that were currently being built. Those were monsters indeed, eight or ten times the size of the
Imperial
-class ships, which were themselves over a kilometer and a half in length. The SSDs looked like nothing so much as pie-shaped wedges sliced out of an asteroid and covered with armament. Perhaps if he called in the right favors at the right time, he might wrangle an assignment on the next one scheduled to roll ponderously out of the Kuat Drive Yards. He still had a few good years left in him, and who better to run the big battery on one of those monster ships