Only to stare up in dismay at a ladder that loomed above like the East Col of the Matterhorn. He was about to turn back when one of the fire-control petty officers stepped out of the equipment room, ran a gaze up and down him, and held out an arm. Dan gripped the handrail, half-supported by the petty officer, and managed to make the top. He squinted into the light. “Captain’s on the bridge,” Nuckols yelled, making him flinch.
“Too loud, Boatswain, way too damn loud.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Dan tried to get up into his chair. Nearly fell, but made it, and sank back with a deep sigh that turned into a wrenching coughing fit that left his ears ringing. He rubbed his face, trying to regenerate the Big Picture. Headed south… en route to join up with the battle group for Malabar. Behind them, the Chinese. Up north, the Paks and the Indians gearing up for another go at each other.
One of the worst things about a deployment was how distant the rest of the world began to feel. It wasn’t quite as bad these days, with satellite e-mail, chat, but he still had to guess at and try to reconstruct what was going on over the horizon. If there still was a world out there. If Savo, like one of Heinlein’s generational starships, wasn’t all the universe that still existed. He simply had to infer, from the crumbs of information that reached them out here… but why was he worrying?
Hey, if you needed to know, your bosses would tell you, right?
Yeah, like they’d explained what was supposed to be in the freighter’s holds, and why they’d suddenly decided to call him off, when he’d all but had his hands on it.
He coughed, levered upright, and took a fresh grip on the clipboard. He should be studying the exercise op order. But even the thought was laughable. He had barely enough energy to bite off another breath.
“Captain. Heard you were under the weather.”
He screwed his head around to meet Amarpeet Singhe’s dark-lashed gaze. As usual, a hint of cleavage peeped at the neck of tailored coveralls, and gold glinted deep within. But he didn’t even care to squint for a better view. Just sighed. “Amy.”
“Thought you might want to know how we’re doing on the investigation.”
“Uh, right. Yeah… very interested,” he lied. Tried to struggle upright again, to at least pretend a modicum of interest. “You’re working this with Chief Toan, right? Where is he?”
“Actually I’ve been doing most of the interviewing. The chief’s been concentrating on the physical evidence.”
“There’s physical evidence? I thought…”
“I didn’t mean that. Just, following up on the disconnection of the light switch in the darken ship trunk.”
“Oh. Right. You followed up on that? I mean, he followed up?”
Singhe came close, as if sharing something intimate. “Sure you’re in shape to take this aboard, Captain? XO said you were down hard.”
“I’m listening, God damn it.”
“Well, it turns out the switch was disconnected, yes. But anybody could have done it — it was just a piece of cardboard slipped between the contacts.”
“So that’s a dead end?”
“So far. But I’ve been interviewing the girls, about who’s been paying particular attention to Terranova, so forth and so on. There’s a significant amount of fraternizing going on aboard, Captain. That the command either doesn’t know about, or doesn’t care to acknowledge.”
He cleared his throat. “Um, I wonder if you could… the coffee urn…”
Dark eyebrows crept up. “You want me to get you coffee?”
“Um, no, I didn’t mean that. Ask Nuckols to bring it over.” As he coughed into his fist, then couldn’t seem to stop, lights strobed behind his eyelids. Maybe he should be in his rack. “You said, um, significant fraternizing. Is this something we want to ackowledge?”
“Everybody knows. And I’m afraid it runs deeper than I expected, frankly. We need to raise consciousness about this issue. Maybe a command-wide time-out—”
Dan suppressed a sigh and fitted his fingertips together. He’d always felt there was little point in cramming healthy twenty-something men and woman cheek by jowl in a six-hundred-foot hull for months at a time, and expecting saintlike chastity. As long as it didn’t impact readiness, he was willing to look the other way… to a certain extent, anyway. “I’m not happy to hear that, Amy. We’ll have to think about how to address it. But isn’t a limited amount of, um, interaction between consenting adults a different issue than assault with a knife?”
“The environment generates the crime, Captain. If you stop panhandling, your murder rate goes down too. They proved that in New York.”
“Uh-huh, but can we focus on one thing at a time, Lieutenant? You were going to look into Peeples, right? He had the attitude.” Something else occurred then, and he added, “Also, Petty Officer Scharner, the one he had the set-to with—”
“She’s dead. Yes sir. But the chief corpsman swears that was the crud.”
“He’s absolutely sure? She couldn’t have been smothered?”
“No sir. Neat as that would tie it up, I don’t think we have to go there yet. And as far as Peeples, the CMAA searched his locker and bunk area—”
“What?” Dan hitched himself upright. “I didn’t sign off on that.”
“He consented to a voluntary search. No knife, no stained coveralls, nothing incriminating.” Singhe inspected the overhead. “So we’re at a dead end. Except for one thing Terror remembered at the re-interview: the smell of limes.”
“Limes, huh? She didn’t mention that.”
“Remember, she was pretty shaken up. Once she had time to think about it, she remembered. He smelled like limes.”
“Okay, maybe that’s valuable, maybe not. Do we have anything lime-scented in the ship’s store?”
“Not for two years, Captain. Hermelinda remembered stocking a lime aftershave back then. But nothing recently. So it might mean, whoever our guy is, he’s not a recent accession.”
Behind her, Bart Danenhower lounged against the nav console. Obviously, next in line to talk. “Okay, good.” Dan hitched himself once more; he kept slipping down on the slick leather. “Keep at it, Lieutenant. Sooner or later, he’ll try it again. I’d rather nail him before that happens.”
The chief engineer had nothing much new, just needed permission to tear down one of the gas turbine generators to replace seals. The message traffic came up, which Dan usually read on his desktop, but apparently word had gotten around that he was installed on the bridge. He ate a couple more ibuprofen. Forced himself to turn pages and initial routing boxes, skimming most, but stopping to read one.
Staurulakis had mentioned sub activity off Singapore the night before. This morning’s message gave more detail. Chinese nuclear submarines had been detected approaching the Malacca Strait. To join an already robust presence in the IO? He rubbed his forehead, contemplating what that might mean for force numbers and threat level, the delicate balance of red line and boundary testing, that prevailed in the Darwinian, Mahanian world of the Indian Ocean. But generating thought felt like squeezing molasses through a strainer.
One by one, his department heads came up through the forenoon hours, and he tried his best to give appropriate responses. But he could feel his attention wandering, his responses disjointed and partial. His arms ached as if he’d spent the morning shoveling coal, and his head spun whenever he made the slightest effort. Was this how half his crew felt? Grissett had mentioned lingering effects. Longley brought up another tray, but Dan winced and waved it away.