Short Story: "Lucky Thirteen" by Marko Kloos

I read blogger Marko Kloos on Mondays for his fun Monday Search Term Safari feature, in which he responds to unusual search strings used to find his blog. Kloos is a professional writer, and has a new science fiction short story. Go forth and read "Lucky Thirteen":

The Fleet has a tradition: the rookie drop ship commander in the unit always gets the ship nobody else wants anymore.

My hand-me-down was Lucky Thirteen. There was nothing wrong with her, technically speaking. She was an older model Wasp, not one of the new Dragonflies, but most of our wing was still on Wasps back then. But pilots are a superstitious bunch, and it had been decided that Lucky Thirteen was an unlucky ship. Before they gave her to me, she had lost two crews with all hands, one of them with the entire troop compartment loaded to the last seat. Both times, they recovered the ship, hosed her out, and patched her up again. A ship surviving an all-hands loss without being destroyed is very unusual—surviving two of them is so rare that I’ve never heard of such a thing before or since.