“You’re an idiot, rookie.”

The junior pilot scratched his stubby beard. “I really don’t see where this is coming from, Sue.”

“Church,” she corrected. She’d be damned if she let a rook get comfortable calling her by her first name.

“Sure, whatever.” Leonard lifted another spoonful of sludgy potatoes. They dripped back down to his plate in slow motion, courtesy of the ship’s artificial gravity. “Point is, this goddamned food is starting to give me nightmares, and I really don’t see why the company doesn’t put it in the budget to something good every now and then.”

“Like a [i]reuben[/i]?” Church asked as if the rook hadn’t been whining for swiss cheese and sauerkraut for a week on end.

“Yes, like a decent reuben. It isn’t even that hard!” Leonard raised his hands in a now very familiar prelude to a very familiar rant. “Corned beef doesn’t go bad. Cheese doesn’t go bad. And sauerkraut sure as hell doesn’t go bad. And it’s not like I’m asking for caviar-marinated lobster or anything like that. This shit’s cheap!”

“Okay, I’ve let this go on for way too long,” said Church. She flipped her napkin clean-side-up and pulled out a pencil. “We’re not leaving until you figure this out.”

“Figure what out?” The younger pilot put on a peevish frown that almost made Church physically ill.

“Why you’re a colossal fucking tool. [i]And[/i] why the company doesn’t offer a five-star menu to freight crews.” Church ignored Leonard’s juvenile groan and began scribbling numbers on the napkin. “Bread for a crew of three hundred is going to be, what, about a hundred kilos? The beef’s gotta be another hundred, and the cheese and ‘kraut’s gonna be another. So that’s three hundred kilos of food, if we count in the weight of packaging and all.”

“Cargo hold’s got plenty of room,” Leonoard snarked.

“Shut the fuck up right now, rook.” Church added more figures to her calculations. “Force equals mass times acceleration, so if we want to maintain a comfortable cruising speed of half a G while adding three-oh-oh kilos to the load, we gotta increase force outputted by the engines by thirteen and a half hundred Newtons. Over a conservative journey of a million kilometers, that’s one point three five million megajoules of energy. And that’s only for about half the distance between Earth and Washington Station.”

Some hint of realization started to flicker in the Rook’s eyes. It was like the light at the end of the tunnel—far away, but promising.

“So,” continued Church as she squeezed several more figures into the last unused corner of her napkin, “Assuming an average ten percent fuel efficiency of a MaPCon fussion engine, you’re going to be spending nearly an entire extra kilo of fuel-grade deuterium just for Leonard White’s reuben night.”

Church grinned. The rhyme at the end had been unintentional, but certainly not unwelcome. Leonard stared blanky at the napkin. 

“Now I’m almost sure that even a dumbfuck like you knows how much a kilo of fuel costs.”

When the answer didn’t come fast enough, Church flicked Leonard’s nose.

“I asked you a fucking question, rook,” she said, even though she technically hadn’t.

“About a hundred thousand dollars,” Leonard answered, dejectedly.

“A hundred thousand dollars!” Church motioned skyward in a little lazy gesture. “Not including the actual cost of the fucking stuff. Just for Mister White’s Reuben Night.”

The rhyme was [i]entirely[/i] intentional this time.

Leonard buried his face in his hands. “But I can’t eat this fucking food anymore.”

“Look, Rook,” said Church as she slung an arm over Leo’s shoulder. “Do you honestly think you’re the only one on this ship who hates eating this pigshit? Donnelley from engineering wants steak. Jo from nav wants fresh fruit salad.” She counted off each crewmate on her fingers. “[i]I[/i] want nachos with guac. And call me a racist, but I’ll bet my left ass cheek that all Captain Zhang dreams about in his bunk is a bowl of fucking rice. We’re all dealing with it, rook.”

Leonard wore the face of a broken man. His gaze wandered between the floor and the gelatinous meatloaf on his plate.

“Look, I just want a—”

“Shut the fuck up, rook.”

[hr]