John Ringo - Cally's War

“Are there going to be Darhel on the shuttle flight up?” she asked the lieutenant.

“No. Why do you ask?” He looked over at her.

“Oh, I guess I’m just skinning my ignorance since it’s my first time off-planet. I saw the three Indowy in the back and thought if this was a mixed flight…” She trailed off.

“Oh. Well, there are a lot fewer Darhel than there are Indowy, ma’am. I’ve never seen them travel with humans. The Darhel, I mean. I’ve only seen one once, you know. And, well, with all the robes you couldn’t really see much,” he said.

If she expects the trip out to be one long parade of card games and movies, she’ll find out she’s mistaken. General James Stewart grinned at his reflection in the mirror of his shipboard quarters as he straightened the unfamiliar lieutenant’s insignia on his collar. Makepeace was definitely easy on the eyes. Probably had a problem with backaches, but it sure was in a good cause. Way too young — the only hardship working with her was going to be keeping his hands off. That shouldn’t be too tough, though. She was hardly going to be interested in a klutzy fuck-up lieutenant like Pryce.

Shit. Makepeace is easy on the eyes. And Beed is a slimy bastard. Pete would never have done this on purpose. If Vanderberg did have anything to do with this I’m gonna kill his ass. Nah. Pete wouldn’t do anything like that. He’d have been more likely to transfer her out if he’d known. Damn.

There were twenty-four hours of transmission time, along multiple frequencies, aboard ship — more than enough time for huge chunks of compressed and encrypted data to be transmitted, complete with error-checking, each day. Sure, there was a little over an hour of transmission lag, but that really only mattered with conversations, or their text equivalents.

What that meant in practice was that when they had reported aboard, the cube with the day’s work on it had made it to his quarters before his luggage.

The uniform of the day onboard ship was silks, and they didn’t wrinkle easily, so he didn’t actually need to change. He did want to give the captain long enough to get into a fresh set of silks, though. When he’d arrived in the departure lounge she’d needed a change of uniform, but a lieutenant wouldn’t have thought it was politic to ask why, or to even notice, so he hadn’t.

He spent what he thought would be an appropriate wait sorting through the morning’s files. Beed was not letting the grass grow under his feet, obviously. The past ten years of Titan’s criminal cases had been forwarded for “background material,” along with a large body of statistical data on the military and civilian personnel living on Titan and an annotated base map, including the carefully recorded observations of the CID personnel they were replacing — good parts of town, bad parts of town, the pimps, the pushers, where the working girls hung out, which gambling operations were where, which businesses were connected to which tong. The annotations read like an encyclopedia of general vice. It was so useful he had to doubt it was Beed’s idea.

He used the intercom to buzz through to her quarters.

“What can I do for you, Lieutenant Pryce?” she came back, voice only.

“Captain M-Makepeace? I was wondering if you could spare some time to meet with me? I’ve picked up the daily cube of our work for the general and I was wondering when we could get started. I know you haven’t actually reported in yet, but the general, he doesn’t believe in idle hands,” he offered apologetically.

“Well bless his heart, I was afraid I going to be stuck with old movies and monopoly. Is there someplace on this ship with a desk, or are we going to have to work here?” she asked.

He had to give her points for accepting the extra work gracefully. He thought about trying to work in the mess hall, but it would mean they couldn’t start until after the second shift of breakfast, and had to break for both shifts of lunch. Then he thought about trying to work with Captain Sinda Makepeace in her quarters, in a cube not much bigger than six feet on a side with no place to sit but her bunk, for a whole week. There were times when doing the right thing approached the painful.

“I think it’ll have to be the mess hall between mealtimes, ma’am,” he said.

“Fine by me. Are you headed over there now?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“All right, I’ll see you there in a few minutes.” She pressed the button to disconnect the call.

One of the improvements in modern Federation courier ships over earlier designs was that most areas of the ship were able to sense which species was passing through a given area and adjust the lighting accordingly. The walls reflected each version of the lighting in a shade that at least was acceptable to the inhabitants. For humans this amounted to a muddy brown that had no distressing overtones. Still, the drabness of the walls tended to make the gray silks look washed out, and the institutional pale green of the human-only mess hall walls was a bit of a relief. Except on Earth itself, of course, all eating areas for humans were human-only by common aesthetic decree of the other Galactic races.

She had beaten him here. Her quarters were closer. Stewart saw that she had already gotten halfway through a cup of coffee. He came to attention and saluted smartly, then ruined the effect by sideswiping a table with his thigh and bending over it, wincing slightly before straightening up.

Makepeace hesitated disbelievingly in the act of returning his salute. He offered an apologetic grin.

“Guess I haven’t gotten my space legs, yet, ma’am.”

“That’s all right, Lieutenant. Why don’t you get yourself a cup of coffee and we can start going over that cube the general sent us,” she said, smiling.

“Can I get you a refill, ma’am?” he asked.

Her eyes widened in alarm, doubtless envisioning a lapful of hot coffee.

“Uh, no! I mean, I’m just fine as I am, Lieutenant, thank you.”

You certainly are, Captain, you certainly are. Maybe could spare a bit off the thighs, but otherwise just fine. Stewart walked past her to the coffee machine, stifling a grin.

After he got his coffee, as he sat down and pulled out his PDA, he glanced at her eyes before looking away somewhere over her left shoulder.

“Permission to speak freely, ma’am?”

“What’s on your mind, Lieutenant?” She leaned forward, crossing her hands one over the other, and focused on him with an earnest, listening expression.

“Ma’am, how much did they tell you about this job?”

“Very little, Lieutenant. Any scuttlebutt you could offer would be very helpful, if you’ve got any.”

“Your background is clerking in personnel, right ma’am?” When she nodded, he went on, “Well, what kind of things does a clerk in personnel do?”

“Well, I’m not sure why you want to know, but mostly I matched square pegs to square holes. Checked position requirements to make sure they were correct and not tweaked to make someone’s buddy a fit for a job. Well, not very much, anyway,” she amended. “Mostly I ran searches for positions and optimization programs and then checked behind the computers to make sure their recommendations made sense. The human factor in the loop, you know?”

“Well, ma’am, this position may be a bit… different… from what you were expecting.”

“Well, I wasn’t expecting anything in particular. Different how, Lieutenant Pryce?”

His words would have triggered red flags in the minds of almost any experienced officer in Fleet Strike. If a red flag had gone up in Makepeace’s mind, the earnest and slightly puzzled blue eyes gave no sign of it. She leaned slightly farther forward, and, if anything, the impression of careful, attentive listening increased.