Abigail's temptation to giggle died abruptly. She couldn't quite put her finger on what it was about Arpad Grigovakis' tone, but what should have been another jab of friendly harassment came out with an unpleasant, cutting edge in his well modulated, upperclass Manticoran accent.
Father Church had always taught that God offered good things to offset the bad in any person's life, if she only remained open to recognizing them when they came along. Abigail was willing to take that on faith, but she'd come to suspect that the reverse was also true. And Grigovakis' presence aboard Gauntlet as a counterbalance for Shobhana's seemed further evidence that her suspicions were well founded.
Midshipman Grigovakis was tall, well built, so handsome she felt certain biosculpt had played a major part in his regularity of feature, and unreasonably wealthy even by Manticoran standards. He was also an excellent student, judging by his grades and where he'd stood in their final class standings. Which, unfortunately, did not make him a pleasant human being.
"I'm sure that if Saint-Just did look more honest than me," Karl said in a deliberately light tone, "it was purely the result of sophisticated imagery management by Public Information."
"Yeah, sure it was," Shobhana agreed, throwing her weight into the effort to keep the banter flowing.
"Do you think it was, Abigail?" Grigovakis asked, flashing improbably perfect teeth at Abigail in a smile which, as always, carried that overtone of patronization.
"I wouldn't know," she said as naturally as she could. "I'm sure PubIn could have done it, if they'd wanted to. On the other hand, I imagine looking innocent and virtuous would have been almost as much of an advantage for a secret policeman on his way up as for a middy who got caught where he wasn't supposed to be. So maybe it was all natural protective coloration he'd acquired early."
"I hadn't thought of that," Grigovakis said with a chuckle, and gave her a nod that seemed to say "My, how clever for a little neobarb girl like you!"
"I thought you probably hadn't," she responded easily, and it was her tone's turn to say "Because, of course, you weren't smart enough to." A flicker of anger showed somewhere at the backs of his brown eyes, and she smiled sweetly at him.
"Yeah, well," Karl said in the voice of someone searching diligently for a change of subject, "innocent and virtuous or not, I'm not sure I'm looking forward to dinner tonight!" He shook his head.
"At least you won't have to face the Captain alone," Shobhana pointed out. "You'll have Abigail along. Just do what you always did at Duchess Harrington's dinners."
"Like what?" Karl asked suspiciously.
"Hide behind her," Shobhana said dryly.
"I did not!" Karl swelled with theatrical indignation. "She just happened to be sitting between me and Her Grace!"
"Three different times?" Shobhana asked skeptically.
"You were invited to Harrington House three times?" Grigovakis asked, looking at Aitschuler in obvious surprise leavened by something suspiciously like respect.
"Well, yes," Karl acknowledged with insufferable modesty.
"I'm impressed," Grigovakis admitted, then shrugged. "Of course, I wasn't in any of her sections, so nobody in my Tactical classes got invited. I hear the food was always good, though."
"Oh, it was a lot better than just good," Karl assured him. "In fact, Mistress Thorne, her cook, makes a triple-fudge cake to die for!" He rolled his eyes in the epicurean bliss of memory.
"Yeah, but then she worked your ass off in the simulators," Shobhana told Grigovakis with considerably less relish. "She usually took the Op Force command herself and proceeded to systematically kick our uppity butts."
"I don't doubt it." Grigovakis shook his head with an expression of unusual sincerity. One of the very few points upon which Abigail found herself in agreement with him was his respect for "the Salamander."
"I tried to get into one of her classes when I found out she was going to be teaching at the Island," he added. "I was too late, though." He leaned back in his chair and considered his cabin mates. "So, all three of you had her for Intro to Tactics? I hadn't realized that."
"I almost didn't make it either," Shobhana said. "As a matter of fact, I didn't quite make the initial cut. I was number two on the waiting list, and I only got in because two of the people in front of me had family emergencies that made them miss a semester."
"And how many times did you get invited to dinner?" Grigovakis was working his way back to normal, unfortunately, and his tone clearly implied that he didn't expect to hear that Shobhana had ever received an invitation.
"Only twice," Shobhana admitted calmly. "Of course, everyone got invited at least once. To get invited more often than that, you had to earn it, and, frankly, Tactics wasn't my best subject." She smiled sweetly at Grigovakis' expression. Having even a single "earned" invitation to one of Duchess Harrington's dinners on her record was a mark of high distinction for any Tactics student at the Academy.
"But you had three invitations, did you?" he said, turning back to Aitschuler, who nodded. "And Abigail did, too?" That cutting edge of astonishment was back at the mere possibility that Abigail might have achieved such a distinction.
"Oh, no," Karl said, shaking his head sadly, then paused, waiting with perfect timing for the flicker of satisfaction to show in Grigovakis' eyes. "Abigail was invited ten times... that I know of," he said innocently.
"What is his problem?" Shobhana muttered later that ship's evening as she and Abigail shared the shower. It was the midshipwomen's turn to have it first today; tomorrow, it would be their turn to wait while the midshipmen had first dibs.
"Whose?" Abigail worked shampoo into her almost waist length hair. There had been more times than she could count that she'd been tempted to cut it as short as Shobhana wore her own. Indeed, once or twice she'd been tempted to cut it as short as Lady Harrington's hair had been on her first visit to Grayson. Just finding the time to care for and groom it properly had seemed an impossible task more often than not, and its length was scarcely convenient in zero-gee conditions, or under vac helmets, or during phys-ed class. She supposed her inability to actually bring herself to cut it was one of her few unbreakable concessions to the standards of her birth world, where no respectable young woman would ever dream of cutting her hair short.
Now she finished working in the lather and stuck her head under the shower and rinsed vigorously.
"You know perfectly well whose," Shobhana said just a bit crossly. "That asshole Grigovakis, of course! Every once in a while you'd almost swear there was a worthwhile human being inside there somewhere. Then he reverts to normal."
"Well," Abigail said a bit damply from inside the cone of spray, "I always figured he just thought he was so much better than anyone else that we were being obtuse and rude not to acknowledge it spontaneously." She withdrew her head from under the shower, slicked her hair back into a thick rope, and began squeezing water out of it. "So since we aren't going to extend proper obeisance to him on our own, it's clearly his duty to extract it from us any way he can, instead."
Shobhana turned under the other showerhead to look at her in surprise, and Abigail bit her tongue. She knew the caustic bite she'd let into her voice had twanged her friend's mental radar.
"I wasn't exactly thinking about all of us," Shobhana said after a moment. "I was thinking about the way he seems to have a problem specifically with you. And unless my finely honed instincts are deceiving me, I think maybe you have a problem with him, too. No?"