"I'll keep an eye on you, sir, just the same," Barbousse said, voice raised to make himself heard in the crowd. "When you want me, just ask any of the ratings." Then he was gone, pushing his way confidently toward one of the large companionways as if he had been assigned to the mammoth starship all his life.
Brim smiled as the big man disappeared in the crowd. Prosperous was a large ship, with a lot of strangers on board—a likely place for feeling lonely. He laughed to himself—before Truculent, he hadn't really thought that much about loneliness; he'd been simply used to it. Now... It was nice to have Barbousse around. Someone from home, so to speak.
"You'll want to check in with the Flight Ops," a bucktoothed rating with narrow eyes and a long nose said as she handed him back his identification. Her perfume suggested crushed ca'omba cookies, somehow. "Fifth level, zone 75—catch the 16-E tram, Lieutenant. Concourse 3." She pointed vaguely across the room. "One comes by every few cycles during loading operations."
Brim nodded and started through the crowd, chuckling to himself. So far as he could remember, this would be one of his very first rides in a shipboard tram. All the really big ships had them, of course—even giant Carescrian ore carriers. The big difference was that presumably ones on Prosperous worked!
"Oh, you're welcome on the bridge anytime, old boy," said a youngish-looking lieutenant commander wearing prominent Ka'LoomKA signet rings (one of which gave his name as "C. A. Sandur"). With a bulbous nose, pursed lips, and enormous gray eyes, his round face wore a perpetual look of pleased astonishment. "But probably you'll never touch a control," he added uncomfortably. "Pity they dragged you along at all. You're clearly dressed as if you had better plans for the evening."
"I did, Commander," Brim answered, looking bleakly around the spacious cabin —everything was big on this ship. "I'm replacing someone suddenly ill, is that it?"
"That seems to be the drill," Sandur said.
"Just my luck," Brim grumped, thinking of a warm room in a warm tavern with a warm Margot. "All that trouble and now I've got nothing to do. Sir."
"The woman you are replacing had nothing to do, either, if it makes you feel any better," Sandur answered patiently. "She was just a temporary Helmsman like yourself. We always have full crews of IGL people to man this particular liner—same ones who fly her in peacetime. Like myself." He snorted humorlessly. "Yet the movers and shakers in your Admiralty I think we need Fleet types to help us run our own equipment now they've got a war." He shook his head in good-natured frustration. "It's not as if we hadn't been piloting this elegant rustbucket for close to seven years now." Then he laughed amiably.
"But that isn't your fault, is it, Brim? Any more than it is my fault you find yourself here. Is there anything I can I do to make your stay more, ah..."
"I'll say there is," Brim piped up. "Sir," he added quickly. "They called me out so quickly, nobody told me anything about the mission."
Sandur shook his head. "Oh, my," be said sympathetically. "They really did the job on you, didn't they, Brim?" He laughed. "Well, that seems about the very least I can do." He swept his Fleet Cloak from a nearby recliner and fastened it around his neck with an expensive-looking—and very nonstandard—collar clasp. "Why don't you follow me up to the bridge? We can I observe the takeoff from there, and then I shall tell you what I know."
Less than a metacycle later, Brim watched Gimmas Haefdon recede in the aft Hyperscreens from a disappointingly normal looking control bridge. He chuckled to himself—wondering why he'd expected anything special about Prosperous. Bridges were, after all, bridges—some larger than others, but in-most aspects alike as so many shells on a beach. Another study in relativity, he decided while he settled down to his first details of the mission code-named "Raid Prosperous."
As Sandur put things, the operation had been sorely needed for a long time now. A'zurn, a mild, lushly vegetated world on the edge of Galactic Sector 944-E had been violently seized by the League at the outset of the war. The solitary planet and the star that gave it sustenance lay directly astride one of the principal thoroughfares in Triannic's TimeWeed trade. Location itself made the illegal seizure one of military as well as social necessity—at least the way the Leaguers saw things. To provide a modicum of propriety in which to wrap this outright rape of a blameless republic (and longtime ally of the Empire), Triannic immediately constructed a network of sixteen research centers within the capital city of Magalla'ana. Then he broadcast far and wide that the new facilities would be dedicated to beneficial purposes—ridding primitive worlds of viral diseases that threatened their most promising life forms.
Of course, nobody believed a word—weapons testing is difficult to conceal anywhere. And all sixteen centers were successful from the outset: so much so that destruction of the network soon became an obsession with Imperial war planners everywhere. But the Leaguers stayed one step ahead. They cleverly used A'zurnian natives (a race of flighted humanoids) for on-site laborers and hostages—with the latter function more vital than the first. While big, starship-mounted disruptors could easily wipe out the whole research network without even coming into orbit around A'zurn, they could not do so without slaughtering the thousands of innocents imprisoned directly within each of the sixteen target areas. Only if the hostages could first be evacuated to safety could the Fleet destroyers accomplish their mission.
Essentially, that called for sixteen individual ground forays—closely followed by sixteen individual destroyer strikes. The necessity of coordinating all the diverse units necessary to field such a complex operation eventually led to Raid Prosperous, hosted by Imperial Fleet Operations and implemented as a joint effort by the tradition-steeped Imperial Avalonian Expeditionary Forces, units of the Nineteenth and Twenty-fifty Destroyer Flotillas, and His Majesty's Royal Transport Command, whose temporarily Blue-Caped IGL employees operated Prosperous in war as they did in peace.
During the last day out, Brim audited a series of briefings conducted by native A'zurnian officers: onetime diplomats and military attaches stationed in Avalon at the outbreak of war who found themselves unable to return home before their dazed government capitulated.
Even Carescrian children got to study pictures of A'zurnians—everyone in the Universe did, it seemed.
But Brim had never yet encountered one in real life. Close up, they were stunning. Men and women alike were tall, barrel-chested individuals who dressed in wonderfully old-fashioned regimentals: tight gray tunics with twelve golden frogs, crimson collars (elaborately embroidered), gold epaulets, and dark knee breeches with crimson side stripes, and light-weight, knee-high flying boots. The uniforms cast an odd but beguiling grandeur wherever they appeared.
From the front, A'zurnians were normal enough humanoids, resembling most all of the space-traveling sentients encountered so far. From the back, however, their wings—really a second, very specialized set of arms—set them apart from all the rest. Midway between the shoulders, their tunics opened to accommodate a down-covered, pillow-sized lump common to all adult A'zurnians known as a "tensil."
This protrusion (manifesting itself at puberty) covered an outgrowth of the reflexive nervous system which automatically coordinated the complex motions of feather and flesh necessary for flight. From each side of the tensil, great folded wings arched upward like golden cowls trailing long flight feathers in alabaster cascades that reached all the way to the floor. Brim found himself awe-struck.