She grimaced at the thought, but there was at least some truth to it. Once upon a time, she'd thought the pressure a midshipwoman experienced on her snotty cruise was intense, and she supposed it was. She'd certainly felt more than sufficiently exhausted at the time, at any rate! But her present assignment had an intensity all its own.
Oh, stop whining, she told herself sternly."This, too, shall pass," as Master Tye was always so fond of telling you. You'll get your feet under yourself this time, too. After all, you've only beena flag lieutenant for four days! Scant comfort as she went scurrying about the passages of HMS Quentin Saint-James on Commodore Terekhov's missions.
When she thought about it, she rather suspected that the commodore was running her harder than he actually had to. For example, there was her present mission. There was absolutely no reason she could think of why the commodore couldn't have simply screened Commander Horace Lynch,Quentin Saint-James' tactical officer, for this particular message. In fact, it probably would have been more efficient. But, no; he'd decided Ensign Zilwicki should trot right on over to the TO's office and deliver it in person. Helen didn't mind the exercise, and the actual message was pretty interesting, but the fact remained that there had been other—and arguably much more efficient—ways for the commodore to deliver it.
But this one keeps me busy, she thought, watching the lift car's position indicator flicker across the display panel.And he's been doing a lot of that ever since we found out about that assassination attempt on Torch. Despite herself, she shivered at the thought of how close her sister had come to death. And she knew Berry entirely too well. She knew exactly how she must have taken the deaths of so many other people, especially as a consequence of an effort to murder her. And she could also understand why there'd been no message from her father about it. There probably was one chasing its way off towards Spindle, where he could expect it to be relayed toHexapuma, but she had no doubt that he—and probably that scary son-of-a-bitch Cachat, too, now that I think about it—were off . . . looking into who had truly been responsible for it.
Unlike most subjects of the Star Kingdom of Manticore, Helen was less than convinced that Haven had orchestrated the attack on Torch. Of course, she had the unfair advantage of her sister's and her father's letters, which was why she knew Victor Cachat, that otherwise apparently unfeeling juggernaut of a Havenite secret agent, was madly in love with one Thandi Palane, who happened to be Berry's "unofficial big sister," as well as the commander-in-chief of the Torch armed forces. Not only would Cachat have refused to have anything to do with an assassination attempt which might so readily have caught Palane in its path, but he had to know how she would have reacted to his complicity in any attempt to kill Berry or Princess Ruth. And if he hadn't had anything to do with it, then it was for damned sure no other Havenite agent had. Not the way Cachat, the Audobon Ballroom—and my own dear Daddy, of course—were wired into the intelligence community.
Unfortunately, Helen Zilwicki was only one of the Royal Manticoran Navy's newest ensigns. The fact that she was convinced someone else had pulled the trigger wasn't going to cut very much ice with the powers that were. For that matter, she felt quite confident that one Anton Zilwicki had already reached as high up the intelligence food chain as he could in an effort to convince Manticore of that glaringly self-evident (in her own modest opinion) fact. If he hadn't been able to get anyone to listen to him, then no one was going to be listening to her anytime soon.
And fair's fair, she admitted grudgingly. We Zilwickis have had just a bit more experience than most people with the sordid world of espionage and dirty tricks in general. And too much of that experience has been with the ladies and gentlemen of Manpower. I suppose we're as naturally predisposed to look for the Mesa connection as other people are to look for the Haven connection. But I do wish some of those people thinking "Haven done it!"would stop and think about the weapon they used. Sure, the People's Republic carried out plenty of assassinations, but so far as anyone on our side knows, they never used a sophisticated neurotoxin like that. They thought in terms of bombs and pulser darts and missiles. But Manpower, now . . . they think in bioscience terms.
But there wasn't very much she could do about it, especially considering the fact thatQuentin Saint-James (which had already come to be known asJimmy Boy by her crew, despite the fact that she was less than three T-months old) was headed in exactly the wrong direction. And, since that was the case, she did her best to put it out of her mind once more and, as the lift car stopped and the doors slid open, turned her attention to the other reason she suspected Commodore Terekhov was keeping her so enthusiastically on the run.
She hadn't really thought about it when the commodore offered her the flag lieutenant's slot, but there were several very good reasons—two of which had presented themselves strongly to her over the last few days—why that particular position was never offered to someone who wasn't at least a lieutenant.
First, the reason a flag officer needed a personal aide to help keep him, his schedule, and his workload organized was fairly glaringly apparent. And, generally speaking, it took someone with rather more experience than any ensign could have accrued to do all that organizing. Helen had never actually realized—not in any emotional way, at least—just how much time a flag lieutenant spent making certain her flag officer's time was spent as efficiently and productively as possible.
When she'd discovered just how thoroughly she was supposed to be tapped into all of the squadron's departments, even her naturally hardy soul had quailed. The responsibility for learning what went on in the administration and coordination of all those various departments—plus operations and logistics—and their respective duties had come as something of a shock to Helen. And the fact that they still didn't have an operations officer, a staff astrogator, a staff communications officer, or a staff intelligence officer didn't help any, either. At the moment, Commander Lynch was holding down the operations department for Commodore Terekhov, and Lieutenant Commander Barnabé Johansen and Lieutenant Commander Iona Török,Quentin Saint-James' astrogator and com officer, respectively, were filling in as his astrogator and communications officers, but the whole arrangement had an undeniably temporary, makeshift feeling do it.
Helen suspected that everyone felt as off-balance in that regard as she did herself, but at least all of them were the heads of their own departments aboard the squadron flagship. That meant they had a far better understanding of what they were supposed to be doing than she did. Despite the fact that a midshipwoman on her snotty cruise was given experience working in every ship's department, Helen's perspective during her time aboardHexapuma had always been that of a relative peon. Now she had to understand not simply what each department did, but how it did it in relationship to every other department, which was another kettle of fish entirely. Besides, even Lieutenant Ramón Morozov, Terekhov's logistics officer, was monumentally senior to her. Dealing with all of those other department heads on a "The-commodore-says-you-have-to-do-this-right-now!" basis could be . . . daunting, to say the least.