Frenchy was at it again.

 

Legendary across the Company for his devilish pranks, our engineer never let a slight go unanswered. On our last trip, he'd been bested in a battle of wits by our new navigator, Jaz. The rest of us knew from hard experience what was coming, so we stayed clear and settled down to watch.

 

Warn her? Nah. That would spoil the fun.

 

* * *

 

His first prank was subtle, as always. He likes to let his prey slowly discover what's going on before he really lets loose. This time, it took the form of uniform modification.

 

See, there's no laundry in space; water is far too precious. Crew gets issued fresh jumpsuits every day from a dispenser in our quarters, and we put the soiled ones into another slot. The system uses hard vacuum and solar radiation to clean them before they're sent back to their owner. Well, Frenchy had accessed Jaz's supply, and her suits kept getting progressively smaller as the days passed.

 

Except, somehow, they didn't. She spent one shift with her ankles and wrists sticking out a little, and after that her jumpsuits went back to normal. Frenchy kept cutting them smaller and smaller, but you couldn't tell from what she wore. We were mystified, our engineer most of all.

 

For two weeks Frenchy waited to see what form her revenge would take, but nothing happened.

 

* * *

 

Meanwhile, life went on as usual, at least until it didn't.

 

The starboard plumbing had been acting up, but we had a tight turnaround at Luna Three and Frenchy figured the problem could wait. A day out, the starboard heads stopped. Overnight, it went from annoying to urgent.

 

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

 

The planetbound don't understand space. For them, human waste is a problem of disposal, and their first thought is that outer space is, conveniently, a big place to dump things. What they miss is that for us, waste is an invaluable commodity.

 

We reprocess water, for one thing; without an ecosystem, there's no such thing as fresh. For another, Waste, Human, Grade A Solid sells for hundreds of credits per kilo as fertilizer on Mars, where they've been terraforming for thirty years. Our end-of-trip bonus depends in large part on that sale. So what would be a mild nuisance in, say, a terrestrial RV, is for us a matter of deep anxiety.

 

Which got ten times worse the moment the portside heads stopped working too.

 

I was waiting in line to use the Captain's private facilities when he ambled by, and I stopped him long enough to get the... uh, poop on the situation.

 

He was a bit exasperated from having told everyone else the same thing. "Look, Bob, you know everything I do: We've got exactly as much capacity here as will fit in the three-inch line from the Command Deck down to the crew level. If it lasts twenty hours, we'll be lucky. Everyone's on food bars until we hit Elevator Station and can unload, yes it's a nine day trip and we're forty hours in, and no we're not turning around. For more you have to ask Frenchy."

 

Once my business was concluded, I went to do exactly that.

 

* * *

 

Even had the smell not given it away, I could tell from the flavor of the cursing that I was near Frenchy. He and his mates were in full EVA suits, and his was both covered and oozing. Never let it be said that Frenchy isn't a hands-on Chief Engineer.

 

"Problem's on your end, Bob," he greeted me, grinning through the muck.

 

"What do you mean, 'my end'?" I asked crossly. "I haven't got an... I mean, it's an Engineering system that's gone wrong. That makes it your job."

 

"Ah, but it's not. The system, he works fine. I have just been through it the whole way to the far side, and every baffle is clear, every pipe unobstructed. That only leaves storage, and storage," he grinned wickedly, "is the exclusive province of the Cargomaster."

 

It's amazing how good his English gets when he's quoting regs.

 

* * *

 

Technically, Frenchy was correct. There was a blockage, and it had impacted the grating with so much force that the whole bulkhead panel was now bulging out into the storage hold. And everything in that tank was my responsibility.

 

But our wily engineer would have had to have gotten up to the obstruction in order to know those details. He could easily have cleared it, saving me the trouble of opening the sewage chamber, popping the grating, and getting sprayed with forcibly ejected high-pressure sludge. Probably he wanted to spread the fun.

 

At least, that's what I'd thought until I fished the blockage out and got a look.

 

* * *

 

Frenchy breakfasts twice. He gets coffee and toast about four hours into midwatch, while everyone else is still fast asleep, and takes it aft to his meticulously organized workbench to plan out the day in peace. The next morning, though, he found me waiting at the hatch to his little den.

 

"Not funny, Frenchy," I snarled and stormed off.

 

Inside, I'd left a can of sewage-soaked grease rags dumped on the deck, ooze seeping between the plates. The kind of rags engineers use by the ton.

 

* * *

 

"So what do we do next?" I asked Jaz over coffee.

 

She grinned at me. "Nothing," she said. "The suspense will kill him."

 

The blockage hadn't really been rags. It had actually been caused by half a dozen of Jaz's shrunken shipsuits, the smallest reduced to a bikini and cutoffs. She'd deliberately knotted them together within the first set of filters as her revenge. Frenchy must have found them and planned to use them to drag me into the prank war against her, then sit back and watch the fireworks.

 

Tactical error. I really hadn't enjoyed that jet of sludge, and then figuring out he'd tried to use me?

 

We made him suffer for weeks.