Chapter Text
Cinah hurled herself through the hatch, grabbing the loop of rope to change her trajectory through the core. The heat from the gel sacks that clung to its inside walls passed over her as she skipped weightlessly through the center of the tube. Her boots skipped off one flat level; it would be inaccurate to call it the floor as there was no floor in this part of the ship. There was no up or down, no pull of gravity, nothing to orient herself. The core was the central hub of the Scatter, the source of its propulsion and the central housing for the majority of their tech.
“Tinker Bell, you listening?”
“I’m here.”
Cinah steadied herself on a platform, knees up near her shoulders, and scanned the screens around her. “Captain asked for an extra burst of speed. Thinks we can get away from the salvagers if we just juke ‘em a little bit. Think you can give that to me, sweets?”
A pause. “I’ll require energy.”
“Divert it from...” She stretched out and tapped a screen, quickly scanning the options.
Tinker saw it before she did. “Sectors Eight and Twelve.”
Cinah smiled. “Aye.” She moved the microphone down from her temple mount. “Captain, alert everyone in Eight and Twelve they need to relocate. Nine and Thirteen have room. We’re going to be diverting energy from there to give you the burst you want.”
Her words were translated to text on his monitor, and his reply came back to her across the screen she was using. “Two minutes.”
She would need three just to reach the proper station, so she pushed off the wall and let herself tumble-fly through the weightless environment she called home. At the far end of the tube was a chamber she called her room. At the opposite end was the massive engine that propelled them through the ether. And in between was a nearly four-hundred foot stretch of screens, gears, pistons, switches, levers, gel sacks, and other sundry items that kept the twenty-eight sector ships anchored to it from losing power. It was the beating heart of the Scatter, and Cinah was its cardiologist.
There were three engineers on each sector who served under her, but the core was only large enough for one person. If they tried to fit another into the tube they would be forever colliding and getting in each other’s way, and nothing would get done. That was why every Core Diver received a Live Interface Avatar. Most called their avatars LIA, but Cinah called hers Tinker Bell after a fairy in a classic story. The artificial intelligence served as a buffer for the copious information being sent from the Scatter to the Core. It decided what was vital and what could be shuffled into buffering systems. The LIA saved the Core Diver from being inundated by every single alarm and request from the orbiting ships.
The temple mount that stored the LIA hard drive was a metal strip that curved along the temporal line of her skull. She’d had to shave her head for the implantation, decided she liked how it looked, and now she kept herself as close to cue-ball as possible. The mount gave her unfettered access to the mainframe of each Scatter ship so she could contact any of them with little more than a thought.
Due to the central nature of the core, she didn’t have the luxury of gravity. There was a weighted space generator in her chambers so she wouldn’t have to lash herself to the wall in order to sleep. She preferred the freedom of weightlessness. She wore a tan suit with a retractable helmet in case of emergency which was currently withdrawn down into a thick collar that hung around her neck like a yoke. Her tools were in a bag that was slung across her torso and hanging underneath her right arm.
She hooked her fingers on the lip of the next segment and pushed herself up to the station. She entered her codes and checked the time to make sure she wasn’t going to prematurely suffocate anyone by cutting off their power. The microphone was still down so she spoke to the captain.
“I’m in position to transfer power. Status of the bogey?”
His text display appeared seconds later. “Scavengers dropping back. May be.”
Cinah furrowed her brow. Even if he’d intended to say “maybe,” the message seemed cut off. “Repeat message, sir?” She waited fifteen seconds for a reply, checked her time stamp, and saw it had been more than two minutes. Everyone on the Scatter was well-trained; one hundred and twenty seconds was more than enough warning to get to safety. She entered the code and the map showed two sections going dark. Then a third. And a fourth.
“Tinker, show yourself.”
The pale blue avatar appeared beside her. The image was an illusion created by the optics at the back of her eye, visible only to her. It didn’t reflect in the screens but she was well-accustomed to that bit of unreality by now.
“What did I do?”
“You did nothing. The Scatter is distressed. Sectors Eighteen, Twelve, Three, Four...”
Twelve, Cinah realized, was where she had just evacuated a sector. Those people had run from her shutdown and found themselves in a lifeless pod. She was gripped with guilt, but she touched the temple mount and felt a relieving flood of painkillers. It muted her emotions just enough that she could focus on the largest catastrophe.
“The scavengers. They’re attacking.”
“It would appear thus.”
Cinah turned and propelled herself forward. “Prepare for bounce!” She reached the panel and placed her bare feet against the wall, bending toward the glass and authorizing the power to the engines. When nothing happened she felt a tightness on the right side of her head near the temple mount. “Tinker, we have to go...”
“The system is compromised. If we activate the engines now the Scatter will rip apart. The core will shoot away and leave the sectors behind, defenseless and adrift.”
Cinah grunted and pushed off with the balls of her feet. “How long do we have?”
“Reports of boarding parties on Sector Twenty.”
“Damn. Disconnect from Sector Twenty, Twenty-one and Nineteen.” She felt the zap as the order was followed. The scavengers didn’t create their own technology; they stole from everyone they could pin down long enough to tear apart. Uneducated simpletons testing and experimenting with alien technology meant that a lot of the scavengers managed to blow themselves up, but others were only poisoned or damaged by the tech. The ones who survived were reckless and more than half crazy, but they were smart. She could feel their attempts to hack into the mainframe, but Tinker managed to keep the firewalls up.
“Countermeasures?”
“Enacted.”
The core shifted and Cinah was hurled against one side of the tube. “Wangbadan!” She had avoided a head injury but her shoulder ached as she pushed her toes off the wall and grappled for the nearest screen. The information was bordered by a flashing red line to indicate the utmost urgency, and she soon saw why. Communications were cut off, and they were down to twelve dark sectors. The alarms were now in her head, the temple mount channeling every distress signal into her mind because there was no other outlet. The filter couldn’t differentiate, so it was flooding past the LIA to her mind.
“Tinker!”
“Boarding parties in every sector, Cinah. They are all attempting to access my systems.”
It couldn’t be allowed. If the scavengers got their hands on an AI, it could conceivably give them access to every piece of Earth technology they’d ever acquired. The only thing keeping the damned pirates at bay was the fact they occasionally blew up their own ships, so the thought of them acting competently was enough to fill her with dread.
“They can’t have you.”
“I will scuttle my drives.”
“That will destroy you. I won’t allow that.”
Tinker said, “It’s the only way.”
“No.” She tapped the screen rapidly, entering codes that ever Core Diver learned but never expected to employ. Tinker’s avatar leaned forward to observe, an affectation since it was seeing everything through the sensor in Cinah’s right eye. “You...”
“The Scatter is already lost. We can’t surrender you to them as well.” She disconnected the links between the Core and every sector. The temple mount warned her that she had just gone dark, and she slapped the implant to silence it as she twisted and moved to a different station. Tinker had said that bouncing would separate them from every ship in the Scatter. Before that had been unimaginable, to abandon their people that way. But now... now their people were lost. Staying would only result in the scavengers getting everything they’d ever hoped for.
Tinker said, “This has happened before. Core Diver training tells you the only possible course of action is to destroy the AI. You cannot risk the scavengers getting their hands on it.”
“It’s never happened to you. And I won’t let them take you,” Cinah whispered. “You have my word, Tinker Bell. Visual mode off.”
She activated the engines and slipped her hands through the ropes to brace herself for the thrust. The core was thrown askew just before the engines activated and she knew her trajectory had just been destroyed. Her legs dangled as if she was gripping the ceiling, then she just as quickly fell flat as if the wall had become the floor. She tumbled and rolled and jumped and fell all without moving as the core was battered through the vacuum.
The klaxons quieted as they were severed from their source, each sector of the Scatter going completely silent and therefore not worth the distraction. After a few seconds the core was completely silent, and Cinah held her breath as if the atmosphere had been sucked out of the ship. She felt like a pebble inside of a tin can being shaken by a malevolent little kid... her sister had done that with a cockroach, actually. Apparently karma was too stupid to know it had gotten the wrong twin.
“Approaching planetary body,” Tinker reported. “Estimated impact in seventy-nine seconds at current velocity.”
The temperature inside the core increased dramatically, beads of sweat appearing on Cinah’s upper lip and the rest of her exposed skin. The friction against the atmosphere tore off the small dish satellites and loose items that covered the shell of the core, and she heard the clatter and scrape as each bit of flotsam was blown across the face of her home-turned-projectile. Tinker began a countdown in her head as Cinah reached up and tapped the implant for an instant injection of Fade. The drug flooded her brain and her eyes rolled back in her head, her body going limp as the artificial gravity failed and she was tossed around like a puppet in the planet’s true gravity.
The impact was enough to shatter her bones, every single one of them, even if she hadn’t already been in a fragile state from prolonged weightlessness. Fortunately her skeleton had been fortified for just that reason, and she felt the tremble as bones that should have snapped merely vibrated painfully in their sockets. She was forced to release her grip on the ropes and went tumbling through the length of the core. She slammed into monitoring stations, shattering screens with her back and feeling sharp-edged metal tearing into her flesh.
The core finally came to a stop and she hit the side that was now her floor, the side that was undeniably “down.” Blood dripped and trickled, and she felt the weight of an environment pressing down on her from all sides. She shuddered and gasped at the shock to her system, then reached up and touched her implant. “Tinker, report.” There was no response, not even an ocular readout, and she panicked. “Tinker Bell. Report.”
“Assessing damage,” Tinker said in a flat voice. “It is considerable.”
“I imagine.” She assessed her own damage, wincing as she sat up and applied pressure to the wound in her side. “Visual mode.”
“I don’t have the available memory for that process as yet. Estimated time of recovery, one hour.”
Cinah grunted and pushed herself onto her hands and knees. Her limbs trembled under her weight until she was able to pull herself up, leaning against the wall for support as she did an internal inventory. Nothing broken, just a few scrapes and cuts. Nothing terribly deep. She would either need stitches or wear scars, and she could deal with either option.
“Tinker. Speak to me. Tell me anything.”
“Atmosphere is ideal for life. Temperature is optimum. We...”
The voice cut off so suddenly that Cinah nearly panicked. “Tinker? Tinker, respond.”
“The scavengers charted your course. They are en route and shall arrive within ten minutes.”
“Gouzaizi...”
“Language, Cin-cin.”
Despite herself, she smiled at the admonishment. “Apologies to your sensitive nature, Tinker. Options?”
“We have none. I will commence destroying my hard drive, and you will be stranded here. The outcome is the same but you are alone on an alien world rather than taken prisoner.”
Cinah knew what would have happened if she was taken captive by the scavengers; an engineer would either give up the secrets of tech or have it tortured from her mind. If she refused to share her brain, the scavengers would find a multitude of unseemly things to do with her body. Either way she would have been a very valuable pet until she was squeezed dry. It wasn’t a fate she intended for herself.
“And you? You’ll die.”
“I never lived.”
“Semantics.” She limped forward, formulating the plan as she went. She swung her bag around, her body already acclimating to the fact she could walk and stand. There were tools in the bag that she would no longer need, and she left those in her wake like so much jetsam. “Give me an ETA on the scavengers. I need it exact as you can make it.”
“They will arrive in nine minutes, forty-two seconds. Estimating the time necessary to pinpoint the crash site and prepare a ground force, they will be here in twenty-seven minutes and eight seconds.”
“Half hour,” Cinah whispered. She knelt beside the main hub, the brain of the core, and used her mag-wrench to loosen the bolts. “I can manage that. It won’t be pretty, but I’ll take what I can get. Cut wide, take a little bit more than necessary, yeah. Yeah, it’s doable.”
“What in the two Earths are you doing?”
“Saving your damn life. Quiet.”
Tinker said, “I’m a program.”
“Don’t make me mute you.” She put the spanner in her mouth, holding it with her teeth as she slid both arms deep into the bowels of the machine. She knew her way around by touch, grunting as she felt the perimeter of the LIA hub. She pulled her left arm out, found the right tool in her belt, and reached in again.
“You are not acting in your best interest. A half hour head start is nothing, but it will still afford you a chance. You are wasting valuable time.”
“And you are distracting me with your prattle. So be silent or help me.”
Tinker sighed, another human trait she had adopted from Cinah. “You are hopeless.”
“Wrong. I am full of hope. I brim with hope so that it overflows from my eyes.”
A schematic was projected on the wall in front of her and she saw her own hands deep inside the wall. She smiled but didn’t gloat, focusing on the task at hand. Tinker was right. Twenty-seven minutes was a weak head start, but it was something. She was down to twenty-five now, maybe less. She could run, she could find a burrow and hide, and she could leave Tinker behind the scorch the ship before a scavenger got their grimy hands on it. Her entire crew had died, why should she and Tinker be any different.
“Because we are,” Cinah growled, ignoring the fact she’d switched from an internal monologue. “We are here and alive, and we have a chance. I will not lie down and give up.”
“Cinah...”
“Don’t talk me out of it.”
“I wanted to say thank you.”
Cinah closed her eyes.
“I know that many... any other engineer or Core Diver would have simply burned my hardware at the first sign of danger. Many LIA units have been lost in false alarms, and others have been justifiably burnt. I do not know why you are doing this, going to these extremes, but I want you to know I am... I am... very... glad... that you are.”
“The words you’re looking for, Tink,” she grunted, “are ‘thank you.’”
“Yes.”
“You’re welcome.”
Another few minutes of strenuous work resulted in the hub being pulled loose. Tinker Bell gave a startled gasp as she was separated from the ship. Cinah pulled it free and examined the oblong piece of electronics. It was jet black with streaks of pale blue to show its seams. Inside was a complex nest of wires and diodes, all sorts of tech that was above even her pay grade. She couldn’t build an LIA if her life depended on it, but she could keep one running. She hoped that would be enough.
The blue lights dimmed slightly, and she looked up to see the visual interface hologram was dim as well. “Tink? Are you hurt?”
“I... n-no. No, I just feel slightly adrift.”
“My temple mount is supposed to manage an entire Scatter’s worth of input. Right now it’s operating at, what, ten percent normal?”
Tinker Bell said, “One-point-eight.”
“Blazes,” Cinah said. “Well, then, more than enough. Transfer your base to my mount. Ride in there until we can get you installed in a new core.”
“Are you certain?”
“I’m not going to be needing the extra space any time soon.” She wiped the blood off her hands as she transferred the hub into her bag. She hooked the strap over her head, letting it fall across her chest so that the bag was tucked safely against her right side. She got to her feet and tried to remember which end of the core had the exterior access hatch.
“Come on.”
Tinker followed her even though it wasn’t strictly necessary; she could simply have changed her position in the blink of an eye, but she enjoyed the sensation of actual movement. Cinah stopped to put on her boots and lift her hood so it would shade the top of her bald head, shut down the elements that hadn’t gone dark when she pulled out the LIA, and took one last look around. Finally she muscled open the hatch and pushed it out, gasping as the heat washed in. She glared over her shoulder at Tinker.
“Temperature optimum?”
“There have been billions of humans who strive in environments far harsher than this.”
Cinah rolled her eyes. “I already regret saving you.”
“Shall I begin self-termination procedures?”
“Oh... shut up.” She crawled out onto the hard-pack sand, straightening up to scan the horizon. Mountains. She thought she saw a few lakes between the crash site and the range, but that could have just been the light playing tricks on her eyes. She checked to make sure she had her water, tapped her temple mount to get a heads-up display of the conditions, and took a deep breath.
“How long until the scavengers get here?”
“Sixteen minutes. They are currently in orbit, scanning for the crash site.”
Cinah nodded. “Okay. Sixteen minutes.” She started walking. “Let’s see how far we can get.”
#
Core Diver Cinah Tesser, third in her class of seven. Not wholly remarkable, hardly a washout. She stood proudly at the assignment ceremony in her red and black dress uniform, her head not yet shaven. Long black hair hung in a tight braid that ended just above her hip. Her right hand was balled in the small of her back, the other rested in the center of her chest, and she spoke the Oath in a chorus of seven. When it was completed, the provost applied medallions to their chests that indicated they had achieved graduation. Provost Thea Barrinan shook the valedictorian’s hand before she added an assignment to his pin. The name of the ship was read out loud, but Cinah didn’t need to hear it to know he’d gotten the flagship. He’d earned the honor over and over again, and she was happy for him. The salutatorian was assigned to the Del’veen, which made sense. Her highest marks were in strategic thinking and combat situations.
Barrinan stepped in front of Cinah and their eyes locked as they gripped palms. Cinah smiled, and Barrinan did her best to offer a neutral expression in return. Not that the provost had ever been capable of that, not since the night they ran into each other in the bar. The instructor had seemed smaller somehow, her uniform exchanged for a white all-purpose shirt under a leather jacket. Cinah was just drunk enough to make a game out of seducing her, ignoring her friends’ arguments that Barrinan was yix and didn’t sleep with females, let alone females who were students, let alone student females half her age.
Cinah proved them wrong on all counts.
Their affair lasted eight weeks, the majority of the third semester, and it ended only when the chancellor became suspicious. Their separation was amicable, but Cinah had taken it harder than she expected. Holding Thea’s hand again, even with the barrier of their gloves between the skin, was more painful than she expected.
It was not too painful, however, for her to misunderstand her assignment. “The Scatter.”
The second and fourth in her class both turned their heads to look at her, and she felt as if the air had been sucked out of the room. “There must be a mistake, ma’am.”
“Serve with pride, Core Diver Tesser.”
“Ma’am...”
Provost Barrinan moved on to the next student, who looked pale and terrified. The assignments became progressively worse for each student in the row, which indicated he would be assigned to a garbage scow or prisoner transport. Provost Barrinan gripped his hand and smiled, then spoke his assignment: “The Alacrity.”
Cinah gasped. The Alacrity was one of the finest ships in the fleet. Anyone paying even the merest attention would understand the slap in the face Cinah had just received. “That’s bullshit.”
“Stand silent, Code Diver.”
She opened her mouth to fight back, but she immediately understood there was no point. The only change to be made would be to demote her even further, and she had no intention in being the sole crewmember on a low-orbit scrubber. She forced herself to hold her expression as the rest of the assignments were given. Then she and her classmates turned to face the crowd to accept their applause. Provost Barrinan took the time to shake each student’s hand as they filed off the stage. She gripped Cinah’s hand harder than necessary.
“There are no bad postings, Core Diver Tesser.”
“No ma’am. Only petty people.”
Barrinan’s expression hardened as Cinah pulled her hand away and brushed past her.
#
“What are you remembering?”
Cinah stopped on a rise and caught her breath for a moment. “Nothing in particular.” She had put on her goggles to combat the glare, the sand spilling across the toes of her boots as she tried to determine from which direction the scavengers would approach. “I guess I was thinking about the Scatter. I’m sad that it’s gone. Very sad. And I remember the first time I saw it and knew it was mine, and how I wanted to fly the whole damn thing into the sun.”
Tinker stopped a few feet to Cinah’s left. In the harsh sunlight, her aquamarine skin was faded to an almost human shade. There was a persistent rumor that all female LIA avatars were based off a real person back on Second Colony, but she had never been found. Cinah believed the far more rational story that she was a composite of certain feminine ideals. She had the eyes of Ardent Na-Xia, the glamorous actress from the forties, and the body of Claire Singh. She was not quite Oriental, not exactly Western, a mixture achieved by the subtle combination of both races. She was intended to be androgynous but the programmers were well aware that Core Drivers were adept enough to change the code as they saw fit. They named their LIAs, assigned them personalities, and usually managed to tilt the avatar to one side of the gender spectrum before their ships even left port. She wore the same unremarkable green uniform that all LIA avatars wore to differentiate them from human members of the crew.
The hub containing all of Tinker’s hardware was tucked safely in her bag. She rested her hand on the bulge it made in the canvas and said, “Any idea how much longer we have?”
“Not long,” Tinker said quietly. “I’ve been accessing the topography stored in my systems from the crash and I’ve discovered there is a small settlement approximately twenty-nine klicks in that direction.” She pointed away from the sun. “However, it is a very long trip in unforgiving conditions.”
Cinah nodded. “Okay. Is that sun setting or rising?”
“Rising.”
“Of course it is.” She adjusted the strap of her bag so it rested more comfortably against her shoulder. “All right. Let’s go.”
Tinker obediently fell in behind her, even though her feet didn’t actually leave imprints in the sand. “This is ludicrous, Cinah.”
“If I didn’t know better, I would say you sounded frustrated.”
“This is a losing battle. The best outcome you can hope for is imprisonment. If that occurs, the scavengers will get their hands on my tech anyway. You’ll be forced to destroy everything anyway. Carrying my hub will slow you down. This is madness, Cinah. Don’t sacrifice yourself for my sake.”
Cinah kept her eyes on the horizon, hazy though it was through the scratched plastic of her goggles’ lenses. “What makes you think I’m doing this for you?”
“Who else would you be doing it for?”
Cinah turned. “You. You, you stupid hallucination, you waste of light and projection, you bai mu! I’m doing it because the thought of losing you burns me up inside, all right? I don’t give a damn what the scavengers do to you, I can’t bear the thought of you dying.”
Tinker blinked at her. “Why?”
Cinah had tears in her eyes, grateful they were hidden behind her goggles. She’d been avoiding the truth, telling herself it was simply a matter of survival that she was trudging on. But there was really no reason for her to have gutted the machine, to be carrying the heavy hub along the desert when every moment and every inch gained could mean the difference between life and death. But now there was no avoiding it. She turned away and shook her head, smiling at her foolishness. “If you don’t understand, I can’t explain it.”
“You’re not making any sense. I cannot die because I’m not alive. Cinah...”
“Just shut up.”
“I’m weighing you down.”
Cinah adjusted the strap. “Just shut up, Tinker Bell.”
They walked on, and soon she heard disturbances in the air above their heads. She looked up and saw pale vapor trails that revealed their pursuers were on their way down to the planet.
“How about a song?” she said as she began walking again. She wanted a soothing song, something she would listen to while they were in the gap between Point A and Point B. She wanted to feel like they were as far away from danger as possible. “Give me one off the traveling playlist.”
There was a moment as Tinker processed the request and then she began to sing. She spoke in multiple voices and carried the instrumentation as an undercurrent of her speech.
“The jewel of Nosi has carries a chalice
To catch all the tears that would fall on her cilice
Tho’ she carries a dreadful pain
Fate decrees she will always remain
A beauty to make gentlemen cry...”
“Cheerful,” Cinah muttered. “Give me a song by Jocia Sprinter.”
Another pause, and then Tinker began singing in a bouncy series of couplets as Cinah trudged onward through the desert. She had no idea the designation of the planet they were on, though it had to be somewhere in her cortex. She could ask Tinker to find it, but that would require multitasking, and she wasn’t sure the hub had that kind of energy left. She wasn’t sure about anything in regard to its life cycle. She knew it was finite, and she knew that she should turn off the visual interface to preserve power, but knowing Tinker was there was one of the only things that kept her moving forward. All she knew was that there was some kind of settlement ahead, and scavengers behind, and a lot of dry and empty desert in between. If she could reach the mountains before she was spotted from the air, she would have a chance. A small chance, yes, but a chance nonetheless. She hitched the strap higher on her shoulder and leaned into the wind, ignoring the sun that was making her sweat inside her suit.
“Tinker.”
“Yes, Cinah?”
“You don’t have to keep singing.”
Silence for a moment. “Does it make you feel better when I do?”
Cinah chuckled softly and nodded. “Yeah. Yes, actually, it does.”
“Then I see no reason to cease. ‘Johnny Butlee carried a rifle, surely, surely. Johnny Butlee carried a rifle and he used it poorly, poorly...’”
The avatar’s voice trailed off, and Cinah looked to make sure she was still there. “Tinker Bell? Did you forget the next verse? ‘Johnny’s on the ship, on the ship, Johnny’s--”
“No, I know all the words, Cinah.” She looked up at the sky. “You surely know what is waiting for you when they catch up with you. Your body will be forfeit, a tool for bargaining with. They will purchase your intelligence with pain. You will know relief only when you capitulate, when you betray your people.”
Cinah grunted. “We went through this all in Basic. When they try to make us wet our pants and wash out the weaklings. I know all about what the scavengers do to their prisoners. What’s your point?”
“I will make one last appeal. Destroy the hub and continue without me. Get to safety and protect yourself.”
“No.”
Tinker said, “Then thank you, Cinah.”
She stopped and looked at the avatar, glowing almost imperceptibly in the sun. “What?”
“There are currently ninety-three Core Divers in the fleet. In this situation, ninety-two of them would have deleted my files at the first sign of trouble. The harder you fight, the more I fear having myself eliminated in such a violent manner. To suddenly cease having awareness would be terrifying. Not that I would be aware of my terror. But I recognize that you are putting yourself through a much greater ordeal than necessary to protect me from that fate, and I would be remiss if I allowed it to go any further without saying... thank you.”
Cinah pressed her lips together and turned away again. “We’re not making any ground standing here jawing at each other. You were in the middle of a song.”
“Indeed I was. ‘Oh, Johnny’s on the ship, on the ship. Johnny’s on the ship and he’s riding off to war today-oh, today...’”