Unless, of course, she paid the penalty instead, the way Ava had paid for the sins of her man.
She had to start looking out for herself, she thought, before it was too late.
When Gredel left Lamey, he gave her two hundred zeniths in cash. “I can’t buy you things right now, Earthgirl,” he explained. “But buy yourself something nice for me, all right?”
She remembered Antony’s claim that she whored for money. It was no longer an accusation she could deny.
One of Lamey’s boys drove Gredel from the rendezvous to her mother’s building. She took the stairs instead of the elevator because it gave her time to think. By the time she got to her mother’s door, she had the beginnings of an idea.
But first she had to tell her mother about Lamey, and why she had to move in with Caro. “Of course, honey,” Ava said. She took Gredel’s hands and pressed them. “Of course you’ve got to go.”
Loyalty to her man was what Ava knew, Gredel thought. She had been arrested and sentenced to years in the country for a man she’d hardly ever seen again. She’d spent her life sitting alone and waiting for one man or another to show up. She was beautiful, but in the bright summer light, Gredel could see the first cracks in her mother’s facade, the faint lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth that the years would only broaden. When the beauty faded, the men would fade too.
Ava had cast her lot with beauty and with men, neither of which were reliable in the long term. And Gredel knew if she remained with Lamey, or with some other linkboy, she would be following Ava’s path.
The next morning she took a pair of bags to Caro’s place and let herself in. Caro was asleep, so far gone in torpor that she didn’t wake when Gredel padded into the bedroom and took her wallet with its identification. Gredel slipped out again and went to a bank, where she opened an account in the name of Caroline, Lady Sula, and deposited three-quarters of what Lamey had given her.
When asked for a thumbprint, she gave her own.
NINE
“My lord?” said Cadet Seisho. “I’m looking at a transmission, and Recruit Levoisier says something about the captain that I’m not sure about…”
Martinez glanced at his sleeve display, which showed the cadet’s smooth-cheeked face. “Does she say that she’s going to kill the captain, maim him, assault him, or disobey the captain’s orders?”
Seisho blinked. “No, my lord. It’s…more personal than that.”
Morepersonal? Martinez wondered. Then he decided it was better not to know. “If it’s not assault, death, disobedience, or sabotage, it’s not treason,” he said. “Pass it.”
Seisho nodded. “Very good, my lord.”
“Anything else?”
“No, my lord.”
“Then good-bye.”
The sleeve returned to its normal mourning pallor. Martinez turned back to his own work-or rather, Koslowski’s. The senior lieutenant was off with the team practicing, and Martinez was standing Koslowski’s watch as well as his own.
Pulling together with the team involved more than just standing watches. Martinez had been put on a hellish number of boards and other collateral duty assignments. He was the Library and Entertainment Officer, the Military Constable Officer, and the Cryptography Security Officer-at least cryptography was more in his line of specialty. He was on the Wardroom Advisory Board and the Enlisted Mess Advisory Board. He audited the accounts for the officers’ and general mess, which called for accounting skills he didn’t possess. He was on the Hull Board and the Weapons Safety Board, as well as the Cadet Examination Board, the Enlisted Examining Board, and the Cryptography Board.
He was on the Relief Board, intended to help people in distress, which meant that enlisted personnel were constantly hounding him with their hard-luck stories in hopes of getting money.
And lastly, he was also officer in charge of censoring the ship’s mail, a job he was happy to shovel onto Seisho and a couple other cadets.
In fact the cadets and some of the more reliable warrant officers were getting as much of his work as he could safely unload, though he kept anything involving equipment or money in his own hands.
At the moment he was puzzling over wardroom funds. The three lieutenants were required to contribute sums to their mess, intended for the most part to be spent on liquor and delicacies, though some money vanished as under-the-table payoffs to maintain the style of the wardroom steward-in civilian life a professional chef-and large sums seemed to be employed for the purposes of gambling on football games. SinceCorona had a successful season, and most of the bets were winners, this didn’t appear to be a problem.
What disturbed Martinez most was inventory. The wardroom mess had paid for a good many items that were no longer in stock. It was possible that enlisted personnel were somehow pilfering, though it seemed unlikely, given that wardroom supplies were kept separately under lock and key. It was likewise possible that the wardroom steward, who had a key, was skimming. But since most of the items seemed to have vanished sinceCorona had been docked at Magaria’s ring station, Martinez suspected that the officers themselves were taking the stuff away, perhaps to give as presents to woman friends in Magaria’s ring station or skyhook towns.
But in that case, why didn’t the officers simply sign for the items? They’d paid for them, after all.
Martinez had verified with his own eyes that the items had existed. He had signed for them. And now they were gone.
He drummed his fingers on the edge of the display. This might be another good moment to schedule a talk with Alikhan.
His left cuff button chirped again, and Martinez, assuming another query from Seisho, glared as he told the display to answer the call.
“Martinez. What is it?”
The face that appeared on his sleeve answered his glare with an apologetic look. “This is Dietrich at the airlock, my lord. The military constables are here with three of our liberty people.”
Dietrich was one of the two guards on duty at the port to the ring station. “Are they drunk?” Martinez asked.
Dietrich’s eyes cut away, outside the frame of the camera, then back to Martinez. “Not at the moment, my lord.”
Martinez restrained the impulse to sigh. “I’ll be there in a minute and sign for them.”
Such were the joys of the designated Military Constabulary officer.
He put the wardroom accounts back in their sealed password file and rose from his chair.Corona was moored nose-on to the ring station, which meant the forward airlock was “up” from Command, where Martinez was standing watch. In dock, a continuous belt elevator-essentially a mobile stepladder-was rigged in a central tunnel, and Martinez stepped onto this for the ride toCorona’s forward airlock.
Rigger/First Dietrich was waiting just inside the airlock, his sidearm, stun baton, and handcuffs on his wide scarlet waist belt, and the red elastic Military Constabulary band on his arm. “Zhou, Ahmet, and Knadjian drunk and disorderly. Busted up a bar in the course of getting themselves thrashed by a gang from theStorm Fury. ”
Zhou, Ahmet, and Knadjian. Martinez hadn’t been on the ship long, but he already knew better than to feel sympathy for these three.
He went up the long umbilical to the station and found the three handcuffed recruits with their torn clothing, blackened eyes, and cut lips. Knadjian seemed to have had a fistful of hair torn from his scalp. AfterStorm Fury ‘s recruits finished with them, the Naxid constables who had broken up the fight had probably got in a few licks as well. The miscreants had spent the night in the local lockup, and they smelled about as good as they looked.
The Fleet’s enlisted personnel were known with varying degrees of affection as hardshells, holejumpers, or-from the hard gees they pulled-crouchbacks, pulpies, or pancakes. Whatever they were called, they tended to fall into certain well-defined areas on the military spectrum. Zhou, Ahmet, and Knadjian were in the part of the spectrum that involved brawls, floating dice games, drunkenness, the plunder of military supplies, and intrigues with women of low character. If their roles hadn’t been so well-defined and traditional, Martinez would have been more annoyed at the three than he was. Instead he was aloof and amused.