“Age before beauty,” Michael commed, pointing for Petty Officer Strezlecki to go first.
“Remember the rest of that aphorism, sir, and don’t tempt me into saying something that should stay belowdecks,” Strezlecki retorted as, without fuss or wasted effort, she pushed her boots into the air lock clear of the rungs of the ladder that dropped into the brightly lit space three meters below them. The ship’s gravity tugged at her feet and drew her in, gloves braking the fall to drop her neatly to the deck.
Michael laughed. “I didn’t want you to see what a screwup I’m going to make of this,” he said as he struggled to emulate Strezlecki’s effortless move into the air lock without a great degree of success. First he wasn’t dropping fast enough and then he was falling too fast, his boots thumping onto the deck, the weight of his suit almost forcing him to his knees. But finally he stood there as Strezlecki commed the close command to Mother and they waited as the outer hatch closed and the air lock pressure equalized. At last the flashing red light gave way to a steady green, and the inner door opened onto the drone hangar deck.
Ten minutes later, with suit turn-around completed, Michael stood there, his gray one-piece innersuit rumpled and sweat-stained. “That’s it,” he said to an equally disheveled Petty Officer Strezlecki. “Enjoy the party and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sir.”
As Michael turned to go below, the XO commed him. “Finished?” she asked.
“I have, sir, yes.”
“Okay. My cabin, now.”
“Sir.” Shit. That didn’t sound good. What now? Michael thought as he dived for the ladder down to 3 Deck.
Seconds later, Michael was at the XO’s cabin. Seeing him at the door, she waved him into the one and only chair in the cramped compartment where Lieutenant Jacqui Armitage both lived and worked. For a couple of seconds, the young woman just stared at him from brown eyes set wide in a ruddy, almost windburned face overshadowed by a shock of barely controlled brown hair, her face a set of flat planes that made it look as if she had been chiseled out of stone. Her mouth had a firm set to it that all of a sudden told Michael that he wasn’t there to be told what a good boy he was.
“Pretty good job you and your team did, Michael. You certainly look like you’ve been working hard.”
“Thank you, sir. We have. Though I need a lot more practice before I’m as good as they are.”
“That’s what I knew you would think, Michael, and that’s why I wanted to talk to you. Young officers are always over-impressed by space gymnastics.” Armitage paused for a second. And here it comes, Michael thought, at a loss to know what he had missed. “I had Mother analyze the whole operation end to end, and she agrees with me. While acceptable, your oversight of the safety aspects of the operation was close to being compromised on three occasions. Have a look.”
Armitage popped Mother’s analysis up on Michael’s neuronics. “See? Here you got so close in to the container that you missed Leong drifting off-station. A few more meters and he could have been in trouble. Now, he’s a good spacer and caught himself in time. But you should have seen it first just in case he didn’t. People with their heads down very often don’t. And here, Leong again. And here, Athenascu. Too close to that mass driver efflux for comfort. So Michael, the moral of the story is this: You are paid to command, so stand back and command. You are not paid to be just another cargo handler. And nothing will lose you respect faster than a damaged team member. So learn the lesson and do better next time, okay?”
“Sir.” There wasn’t much Michael could say. Armitage was right.
“Okay. That’s all. See you at supper tonight.”
Tired but reasonably content even after the moderately severe singeing he had received from the XO, Michael sat quietly in the wardroom on 3 Deck.
Supper over, the wardroom was filled with the give-and-take of team members who knew one another well. Sitting at the mess table, Armitage and Michael’s boss, Maria Hosani, were in the middle of a spirited debate on the relative merits of planetary life compared with life on orbital habitats. Michael suspected it was a debate months in the making and with many more to run. Sprawled in the two armchairs at the far end of the compartment in front of an impressive holovid of a large fireplace set into a stone wall, complete with a cheerfully blazing wood fire, were the navigator, Leon Holdorf, and John Kapoor, the proud commander of 387’s lander, Jessie’s Hope. Why Jessie’s Hope? Michael had had to ask. Because, Kapoor had explained patiently, probably for the hundredth time, the rest of the crew wouldn’t allow his first choice, Mom’s Hope, so he’d had to settle for her first name, “Jessie.” Yes, and the “Hope” bit, Michael had prompted. That he’d come home safely, Kapoor had said with a faint air of embarrassment and a shrug of the shoulders. Michael had laughed. He’d liked Kapoor from the moment they had met, and as the only other junior lieutenant onboard apart from Michael, he was a natural ally. Though not for long. Kapoor was about to pick up his second stripe.
Sitting next to them on one of the benches that ran down the length of the mess and as officer of the day the only person in uniform was 387’s chief engineer, Cosmo Reilly. With the aid of a firmly pointed forefinger, Reilly was at that moment making the point very emphatically that warfare branch officers paid too little attention to engineers when it came to the conduct of Space Fleet business. Michael had to smile as he watched Reilly’s impassioned diatribe. Long, long ago, Space Fleet had decided in its infinite wisdom that too much engineering was a bad thing for the officers responsible for fighting on the Federation’s ships and had split engineering and warfare officers into two specialized streams. The merits of that decision still were hotly argued, a never-ending debate and one that Michael was sure went on in every mess in the Fleet most nights of the week.
Kapoor just couldn’t resist. “I remember one time on the old Zube-”
“Don’t you mean the Zuben-el-Genubi?” Reilly interrupted indignantly. “You bloody warfare types can’t even get the names of your ships right.”
The rest of the officers broke out laughing. Michael just smiled. Clearly, teasing Reilly by shortening ship names was one of those long-running gags that made small ship life bearable. Michael reckoned that Reilly played up to the rest of them by putting on the personality of a cantankerous old space dog.
“Enough of this,” Reilly said, waving the debate to a halt as he climbed to his feet. “Time for a walk-around. Can’t let the masses think management isn’t paying attention.” Michael was beginning to suspect that Cosmo Reilly was only half joking; of all the officers onboard, he was the most old-fashioned and almost always had an authoritarian tone to his voice. Be interesting to see what the troops think of him, Michael mused as Reilly left the mess.
Kapoor’s voice interrupted his thoughts. “Michael, you’re far too quiet. Get your fat ass over here and tell us what you think so far. But before you do, refill these glasses.”
As instructed, Michael refilled the two port glasses at the little bar before sitting next to the fireplace, which, if it had been real, would have fried the lot of them long before.
Soon he was deeply involved in a debate about the merits or otherwise of the Honorable Valerie Burkhardt, the Fed Worlds’ current moderator, whether she and the New Liberals had any chance of being reelected to the government in the forthcoming elections, and whether Space Fleet would be better off with a new federal minister of defense given the view commonly held in the Fleet that the present incumbent was a party hack promoted not because she had any talent for the job but because she had a hold over Valerie Burkhardt. Soon the debate sucked in Armitage and Hosani, and by the time Reilly returned from his rounds, the wardroom was well into an appraisal of how the Space Fleet had had to put up with an endless succession of ambitious but not necessarily capable ministers and so on and so on.