“Fine, sir,” Esmay said. She hoped it was fine. She knew she needed to learn about other systems, but was he just determined to keep her away from scan, because scan was political?
“Good.” He smiled again, and nodded. “I expect most of you juniors think DSR is a bad assignment, but you’ll discover that there’s no better way to learn what really keeps ships operational. No ordinary ship deals with as many problems as we do, from hull to electronics. If you take advantage of it, this tour can teach you a lot.”
Esmay relaxed. She recognized someone happily astride his favorite hobby horse. “Yes, sir,” she said, and wondered if he would go on.
“Personally, I think every officer should have a tour on a DSR. Then we wouldn’t have people coming up with bright ideas—even installing bright ideas—that they should know wouldn’t work.” He reined himself in with a visible effort. “Well. I’m going to assign you to H&A first—Hull and Architecture, that is. You’ll find it a lot more complicated than your basic course at the academy.”
“I expect so, sir,” Esmay said.
“You’ll be working with Major Pitak; she’s on Deck Eight, portside main, aft third of T-4 . . . you can ask someone from there. Had time to stow your gear yet?”
“No, sir.”
“Mmm. Well, technically you’re not on duty until tomorrow, but—”
“I’ll go see Major Pitak, sir.”
“Good. Now, the admiral will want to meet you, but he’s tied up right now in a meeting, and I don’t expect he’ll be free until tomorrow or the next day. Check back with me, and I’ll set it up. You might want to take a look at the command structure here—it’s more complex than you’d find in most assignments.”
“Yes, sir.”
Not only the command structure was complex, Esmay discovered. She headed clockwise from T-3, where the 14th Heavy Maintenance had its administrative offices, to T-4, sure that she had now caught on to the Koskiusko’s peculiar structure. At the hub end of T-4, she found an array of personnel and cargo transport tubes, and took the personnel lift down to the eighth deck. There she faced an axial passage wide enough for three horsemen abreast, and plunged into it, looking for the third crosswise passage. She passed one administrative office after another, each occupied by busy clerks: Communications Systems, Weapons Systems, Remote Imaging Systems . . . but nothing labeled Hull and Architecture. Finally she stopped and asked.
“Hull and Architecture? That’s on the portside main passage, sir. You’ll have to go back to hub and clockwise to it—”
Esmay suspected a joke at her expense. “Surely there are cross-passages?”
A quickly-suppressed laugh. “No, sir . . . T-4 has one of the main repair bays . . . nothing goes straight across at this level, from Deck Three up to Deck Fifteen.”
She had forgotten the repair bays. She felt annoyed with herself and the clerk both. “Oh yes. Sorry.”
“No problem, sir. It takes awhile for anyone to get used to this place. Just take this passage back, turn left—” The civilian term seemed right for something this size, Esmay realized. “Then look for the P- designations on the bulkheads. That’s portside main—if you keep going, you’ll get to portside secondary, which you don’t want. Hull and Architecture is about as far down portside main as we are down starboard, so . . .”
So she had given herself a lot more walk than she wanted. “Thank you,” she said, with what courtesy she could muster past her annoyance. This ship shouldn’t need any fitness equipment, if everyone got lost occasionally.
Although she felt the length of the hike in her legs, she had no more trouble finding Pitak’s office. The portside main passage was easy enough, and at the third passage aft she found a pivot who directed her the rest of the way.
Major Pitak wasn’t in that office. The pivot had said something about “the major’s on a bit about something” but Esmay didn’t know what that meant. She glanced up and down the passage. Crewmen moving along as if they knew what they were doing, and no major. She thought of going to look, and decided not to play that game. She would simply park here until Pitak came back.
She glanced around. On the bulkhead facing the entrance was a display of metal pieces. Esmay wondered what it was, and moved closer to read the label below. Common Welding Errors it said. Esmay could see the big lopsided blob at the one joint, and the failure of another blob to cover the joint . . . but what was wrong with the rest of them?
“So you’re my new assistant,” someone said behind her. Esmay turned around. Major Pitak looked like her name sounded: a short, angular woman with a narrow face that reminded Esmay uneasily of a mule.
“Sir,” Esmay said. Pitak scowled at her.
“And no background at all in naval architecture or heavy engineering, I notice.”
“No, sir.”
“Do you at least have some background in construction of anything? Even a chicken house?” It was clear that Pitak was furious about something; Esmay hoped it wasn’t her own presence.
“Not unless helping put a roof back on a stable after a windstorm counts,” Esmay said.
Pitak glared a moment longer, then softened. “No . . . it doesn’t. Someone must be mad at both of us, Lieutenant. Sector HQ stole three of my best H&A specialists, promoted my assistant off this ship, and left me short . . . and now they’ve sent you, whatever your background is.”
“Scan, mostly,” Esmay said.
“If I were religious, I would consign their sorry tails to some strenuous afterlife,” Major Pitak said. The corner of her mouth twitched. “Blast it. I never can stay mad long enough to singe them properly, and they know it. All right, Lieutenant, let’s see what you do know. Whatever it is, it’s not enough, but at least you haven’t done anything stupid yet.”
“I’ve hardly had time, sir,” Esmay said. She was beginning to like the major, against all expectation.
“There’s a naive statement,” Pitak said. She had moved to her desk, where she yanked at a drawer without effect. “I’ve been sent idiots who managed to screw up before I’d met them.” Another yank, this one hard enough to shift the desk itself. “For instance, this drawer . . . it never has worked right since your predecessor times two thought it would be clever to rekey the lock. We still don’t know what he did, but none of the command wands work on it, nor does anything else but brute force and profanity.” Without changing expression, Pitak launched a blistering stream of the latter at the drawer, which finally yielded with a squawk.
Esmay wanted to ask why anyone would use such a pesky drawer—why not clean it out and leave it empty?—but this was not the time. She watched Pitak rummage through the contents, coming up with a couple of data cubes.
“You probably wonder why I put anything in here,” Pitak said. “Frankly so do I, but there’s little enough secured storage down here—not with all the specialists we have aboard, people who know all the tricks of every security device since the latch. They sent some background on you, but I haven’t looked at it yet, which I hope you won’t hold against me.”
“No, sir.”
“For pity’s sake, Lieutenant, loosen up. Find a seat somewhere. Let’s see here . . .” She inserted the cube in a cube reader as Esmay looked around for something to sit on. Every horizontal surface was crusted in clutter; the two chairs had piles of hardcopy that looked like inventory lists. Pitak glanced up. “Just shove some of that onto the floor. Danton was supposed to clean it up yesterday, but he’s in sickbay with some crud he caught . . . I think we’d do better to let them brew their nasty chemicals on board; they always get sick ashore.”
Esmay set a pile of paper carefully on the floor, and sat down. Pitak was scowling at the cube reader’s display.