While the cruiser lay at the refitting dock, Sassinak explored her command, meeting and talking with every member of the crew. About half of them had leave; she met them as they returned. But the onboard crew, a dozen officers and fifty or so enlisted, she made a point of chatting up.
TheZaid-Dayan wore the outward shape of most heavy cruisers, a slightly flattened ovoid hull with clusters of drive pods both port and starboard, aft of the largest diameter. Sassinak never saw it from outside, of course; only the refitting crews did that. What she saw were the human-accessible spaces, - the “living decks” as they were called, and the crawl-ways that let a lean service tech into the bowels of the ship’s plumbing and electrical circuitry. For the most part, it was much the same as thePadalyan Reef, the cruiser she’d just left, with Environmental at the bottom, then Troop Deck, then Data, then Main, then the two Flight Decks atop. But not quite.
In this ship, the standard layouts in Environmental had been modified by the addition of the stealth equipment; Sassinak walked every inch of the system to be sure she understood what pipes now ran where. The crowding below had required rearranging some of the storage areas, so that only Data Deck was exactly the same as standard. Sassinak paid particular attention to the two levels of storage for the many pieces of heavy equipment theZaid-Dayan carried: the shuttles, the pinnace, the light fighter craft, the marines’ tracked assault vehicles. Again, she made certain that she knew exactly which craft was stowed in each location, knew without having to check the computers.
Her own quarters were just aft of the bridge, opening onto the port passage, a stateroom large enough for modest entertaining - a low table and several chairs, as well as workstation, sleeping area, and private facilities. Slightly aft and across the passage was the officers’ wardroom. Her position as cruiser captain required the capacity to entertain formal visitors, so she also had a large office, forward of the bridge and across the same passage. This she could decorate as she pleased - at least, within the limits of Fleet regulations and her own resources. She chose midnight-blue carpeting to show off the striking grain of her desk; the table was Fleet issue, but refinished to gleaming black. Guest seating, low couches along the walls, was in white synthi-leather. Against the pale-gray bulkheads, this produced a room of simple elegance that suited her perfectly.
Huron, she realized quickly, was an asset in more ways than one. Colony-bred himself, he had more than the usual interest in their safety. Too many Fleet officers considered the newer colonies more trouble than they were worth. As the days passed, she found that Huron’s assessment of the junior officers was both fair and leavened by humor. She began to wonder why his previous commander had had so little confidence in him.
That story came out over a game of sho, one evening some days into their patrol. Sassinak had begun delicately probing, to see if he had a grievance of any sort. After the second or third ambiguous question, Huron looked up from the playing board with a smile that sent a sudden jolt through her heart.
“You’re wondering if I know why Commander Kerif gave me such a lukewarm report last period?”
Sass, caught off guard as she rarely was, smiled back. “You’re quite right - and you don’t need to answer. But you’ve been too knowledgable and competent since I came to have given habitually poor performance.”
Huron’s smile widened. “Commander Sassinak, your predecessor was a fine officer and I admire him. However, he had very strong ideas about the dignity of some… ah… prominent, old-line, merchant families. He never felt that I had sufficient respect for them, and he attributed a bit of doggerel he heard to me.”
“Doggerel?”
Huron actually reddened. “A… uh… song. Sort of a song. About his son and that girl he’s marrying. I didn’t write it. Commander, although I did think it was funny when I heard it. But, you see, I’d quoted some verse in his presence before, and he was sure…”
Sassinak thought about it. “And do you have proper respect for wealthy merchants?”
Huron pursed his lips. “Proper? I think so. But I am a colony brat.”
Sassinak shook her head, smiling. “So am I, as you must already know. Poor Kerif… I suppose it was a very bad song.” She caught the look in Huron’s eye, and chuckled. “If that’s the worst you ever did, we’ll have no problems at all.”
“I don’t want any,” said Huron, in a tone that conveyed more than one meaning.
Years before, as a cadet, Sassinak had wondered how anyone could combine relationships both private and professional without being unfair to one or the other. Over the years, she had established her own ground rules, and had become a good judge of those likely to share her values and attitudes. Except for that one almost - disastrous (and, in retrospect, funny) engagement to a brilliant and handsome older diplomat, she had never risked anything she could not afford to lose. Now, secure in her own identity, she expected to go on enjoying life with those of her officers who were willing and stable enough not to be threatened - and honest enough not to take advantages she had no intention of releasing.
Huron, she thought to herself, was a distinct possibility. From the glint in his eyes, he thought the same way about her: the first prerequisite.
But her duty came first, and the present circumstances often drove any thought of pleasure from her mind. In the twenty years since her first voyage. Fleet had not been able to assure the safety of the younger and more remote colonies; as well, planets cleared for colonization by one group were too often found to have someone else - legally now the owners - in place when the colonists arrived. Although human slavery was technically illegal, colonies were being raided for slaves - and that meant a market somewhere. “Normal” humans blamed heavyworlders; heavyworlders blamed the “light- weights” as they called them, and the wealthy mercantile families of the inner worlds complained bitterly about the cost of supporting an ever-growing Fleet which didn’t seem to save either lives or property.
Their orders, which Sassinak discussed only in part with her officers, required them to make use of a new, supposedly secret, technology for identifying and trailing newer deep-space civilian vessels. It augmented, rather than replaced, the standard IFF devices which had been in use since before Sassinak joined the Fleet. A sealed beacon, installed in the ship’s architecture as it was built, could be triggered by Fleet surveillance scans. While passive to detectors in its normal mode, it nonetheless stored information on the ship’s movements. The original idea had been to strip these beacons whenever a ship came to port, and thus keep records on its actual travel - as opposed to the log records presented to the portmaster. But still newer technology allowed specially equipped Fleet cruisers to enable such beacons while still in deepspace, even FTL flight - and then to follow with much less chance of detection. Now the plan was for cruisers such as theZaid-Dayan to patrol slowly, in areas away from the normal corridors, and select suspicious “merchants” to follow.
So far as the junior officers were concerned, the cruiser patrolled in the old way; because of warnings from Fleet about security leaks, Sassinak told only four of her senior crew, who had to know to operate the scan. Other modifications to theZaid-Dayan, intended to give it limited stealth capability, were explained as being useful in normal operations.