"And to those who follow us," he added. Witches, he thought to himself as he enjoyed his first sip of the grand old Logish Meem. Eve Cartier could weave a spell with the best of them....
After a long, relaxed supper of conversation about the war, excellently prepared fish from one of the local lakes, and most of the Medoc, Cartier extracted two slim camarge cigarettes fro somewhere inside her cape. "Ha' one?" she asked, leaning over a cleared dessert plate.
''Thanks, but I'll enjoy yours," Brim said. He meant it. He'd always loved the spiced smoke of the tiny cigarettes, but had a healthy regard for the daily runs that allowed him to eat nearly all he wanted without developing too much of a paunch.
Her camarge lit on the first puff, and she settled back to inhale deeply, suddenly staring at him so intently that she might be preparing to sketch his face. At length, she sat forward in her seat and looked him directly in the eye. "Wilf Brim, my handsome countryman," she began, "who in the name of Voot are you, anyway?"
Taken aback, Brim cocked his head and smiled. "Who am I?" he asked.
"Yes," Cartier replied. "That's what I want to know."
"Well... how about 'Wilf Brim'?"
"No," Cartier laughed. "Who are you, na what are you. An Imperial? A Carescrian? A Commander or a Helmsman? Did Margot Effer'wyck sell you out to the aristocracy? Who are you, Wilf Brim—or do you e'en know?"
Completely unprepared for her questions, Brim leaned away from her and crossed his arms, his mind whirling to grasp the questions she'd fired at him. "I—I d-don't know," he stammered after what seemed to be an eternity of largely disconnected thoughts. The crazy thing was that he'd given the answer truthfully, not simply to deflect the pressure she had suddenly placed on him. He didn't know.
"Hmm," Cartier mused. "You are a truthful ane, aren't you?"
Brim could only nod his head; her questions had landed like a sack of bricks. And he couldn't answer them because she was correct. He had no idea who he was, because after all these years, he could identify with no one but himself.
"I wondered if that might na' be the case, Wilf Brim," she said, placing a comforting hand on his arm. "Nobody could give up his own dawnin' as thoroughly as you have without throwin' away a ge'at deal mair into the bargain. Mair, perhaps, then he'd e'en planned."
After a long, thoughtful silence, Brim thrust out his chin, just a little irritated by the unexpected questions—especially since he couldn't answer them. "All right," he conceded, "I probably hove thrown a lot of personal baggage away. What's so wrong with that? What's wrong with being my own man? I've always been damned independent, and it's let me remain that way,"
"Wilf," she protested, putting a hand to her mouth. "I did na' mean to imply that anything was—or is— wrong. Voot knows you've done weel for yourself. I just wondered who you felt you were."
Brim shrugged mentally. It was nice to have such a lovely person concerned about him. "What else were you wondering about, Eve?" he asked, letting a smile break through in spite of everything.
Cartier, he imagined, could bring a smile to the visage of a stone asteroid.
She blushed. "Oh, nothin' important, Wilf Brim," she said, but her eyes told more truth than her words.
"I don't believe you," Brim chuckled. "And you aren't a very good liar."
"Are you certain you want to know what I think, Wilf?" she asked. "It might not make you happy."
Brim frowned again, and a strange feeling began in the pit of his stomach. "Tell me," he said theatrically, in an attempt to defuse a situation that was rapidly going out of control. "I'm ready for anything."
"All right, Wilf Brim," she said after a small hesitation. "But I think I'm going to forever regret bringin' the whole thing to the surface in the first place."
"Friends," Brim said seriously, "never regret what they say to each other, especially when they're telling the truth."
"Weel," she said at length, peering at him as if she could see all the way to his soul, "in my eyes, you're a lot more than simply independent. You're lonely, Wilf Brim," she said. "You're probably the loneliest man I think I have ever met."
"Lonely?" Brim asked with astonishment. "Eve. Great Universe! How could I be lonely? Why, most of the time, I've got so much company I'd give my right arm for a few moments with myself."
"Wilf," she said with a sad little smile, "that's not what I meant." But before she could go on, their rating appeared beside the table and bowed.
"My apologies for the interruption," he said, "but a Chief Barbousse is outside with an urgent message for Captain Brim."
Somehow thankful for the interruption, Brim took Cartier's hand for a moment. "Looks as if we'll have to continue this, Eve," he said. "I think Duty's just called again."
She smiled. "It ha' a way of doing that, Wilf," she replied, "especially in a war."
Then, in spite of his recent discomfiture, Brim heard himself saying, "Let's meet for supper again, Eve. Soon."
"I'd love that, Wilf," she replied, looking him directly in the eye, smoothing her long, straight hair, "... soon."
"Until then," he said, pushing back from the table. As he stood, she settled back in her chair and crossed tier legs again.
"Be careful, Wilf," she said.
"You, too...." Then he turned and made his way through the lavish old wardroom to where Barbousse waited in an anteroom with a dispatch case under his arm.
"Top secret from the Admiralty, Cap'm."
Within the metacycle, the two men were in a fast packet, bound for Avalon and another of the interminable staff meetings. Strangely, all the way in, Brim found he couldn't put Eve Carrier's words from his mind. Lonely? How could he be lonely in the midst of such chaos? And how had something so normally inconsequential become significant in the first place?
On the surface, Brim found himself with a group of Wing Commanders providing "front-line"
information to high-level staff meetings. In answer to growing demands in the High Command for more merchant-fleet protection, Calhoun was warning that the escort burden might become unbearable if the Leaguers also increased attacks on ground targets—or the FleetPort satellites.
The meetings broke up with no clear consensus (Brim disagreed). But throughout the remainder of that single week, 15 Imperial starships and most of their 12 crews were lost, for a total of more than 450 casualties. Nevertheless, if the constant struggle was beginning to wear the defending starship crews, Brim at least found himself thankful that many of his newer arrivals were receiving invaluable first tastes of space combat while the Leaguers' main intent was killing merchant ships and not defenders.
That same week, meem rationing began on the five Avalonian planets. Brim was pleased to learn that many bartenders actually blamed the CIGAs for this affront to civilized existence. It was little things like that, he observed with a chuckle, that eventually made people angry enough to win wars....
CHAPTER 5
One Last Torpedo
On the morning of Heptad third, Brim was aloft in Starfury D1923 with Moulding on his wing, orbiting five hundred c'lenyts off Melia, the planet of Commerce. Their job—along with thirty other Starfuries positioned along an arc stretching nearly half a light-year—was to protect a large supply convoy of HypoLight spaceships going from Melia to Proteus.
The Triad was just disappearing behind the planet when the two Imperials completed another spinward leg of their assigned patrol area. At the surface, the planet's whole boreal hemisphere soaked beneath a heavy layer of cloud that flashed malignantly here and there with wicked-looking bursts of lightning. Thousands of irals above, a flight of Defiants appeared to skid across the planet's multicolored disk making for FleetPort 28 in synchronous orbit above the opposite hemisphere.