Laughing still, Commander Grady clapped him on the back. "Cheer up. It won't be so bad. You'll still mess forward and bunk aft. And a five-inch gun is a five-inch gun." He pointed to the sponson under that unbelievably long, unbelievably level deck. "You'll do your job, and the flyboys will do theirs, and everybody will be happy except the poor enemy bastards who bump into us."
"Yes, sir," Sam said dubiously. "What the devil did she start out to be, anyway? And why didn't she turn out to be whatever that was?"
"They started to build her as a fast, light-armored battle cruiser, to slide in close to the Confederate coast, blast hell out of it, and then scoot before the Rebs could do anything about it-a monitor with legs, you might say," Grady answered. "But that idea never went anywhere. Some bright boy got to thinking how handy it would be to take aeroplanes along wherever you needed them, and… there's the Remembrancer
"I thought of that myself, after the Dakota got bombed off Argentina," Carsten said, "but I never imagined-this." He wondered if he'd get into fights because sailors on ordinary, respectable vessels would call the Remembrance the ugliest ship in the Navy. Dammit, she was the ugliest ship in the Navy.
"Come on, let's go aboard," Grady said. "She won't look anywhere near so strange from the inside."
Even that didn't turn out to be true. The hangars that held nearly three dozen fighting scouts and the supply and maintenance areas that went with them took up an ungodly amount of space, leaving the bunkrooms cramped and feeling like afterthoughts. As a petty officer, Carsten did get a bottom bunk, but the middle one in the three-tier metal structure was only a few inches above him. He could stand it, but he didn't love it.