David Weber - The Shadow of Saganami

"Do I pass muster?" he asked, and her smile reappeared, broader.

"Oh, I suppose so, Sir."

He was still getting used to her Sphinxian accent. Dennis Frampton, his previous personal steward, had been born and raised in the Duchy of Madison on the planet Manticore, and his accent had been smooth, with rounded vowels quite unlike the sharp crispness of Sphinxians like Agnelli. Dennis had been with him for over five T-years, long enough for him and Terekhov to have become thoroughly comfortable with one another. And it had been Dennis who'd convinced him that appearing in proper uniform at all times, and especially when it looked as if something… interesting might be going to happen, was one of a captain's most valuable techniques for exuding a proper sense of control and confidence. He'd always insisted on inspecting his Captain's appearance minutely before letting him out in public.

Just as he had at Hyacinth.

A shadow of memory and sharp-edged loss flickered in the ice-blue eyes looking back at him from the mirror. But it was only a shadow, he told himself firmly, and smiled back at Agnelli.

"My wife always said I should never be allowed out without a keeper," he said.

"Which, begging the Captain's pardon, shows she's a very smart lady," Agnelli replied tartly. She came from the old school, with an astringent personality and a firm sense of her responsibility to badger and pester her captain into taking proper care of himself. And she was also the only person aboard Hexapuma whose cabin intercom was left keyed open at night in case that same captain needed her.

Which meant she was the only person aboard the cruiser who knew about the gasping, sweating nightmares which still woke him from time to time.

"I've taken the liberty of putting on a fresh pot of coffee," she continued. "It should be ready shortly. With the Captain's permission, I'll bring it to the bridge in… fifteen minutes."

Her tone was rather pointed, and Terekhov nodded meekly.

"That will be fine, Joanna," he said.

"Very good, Sir," Chief Steward Agnelli said, without even a trace of triumph, and stepped back to let him go out and play.

"Captain on the bridge!"

"As you were," Terekhov said as he strode briskly through the bridge hatch, before any of the seated watchstanders could rise to acknowledge his arrival. He crossed directly to FitzGerald, who stood looking over Abigail Hearns' shoulder at her display.

The exec turned to greet him, warned by the quartermaster's announcement, and felt a brief flicker of surprise. He knew he'd personally awakened the captain less than ten minutes ago, yet Terekhov was perfectly uniformed, bright-eyed and alert, without so much as a single hair out of place.

"What do we have here, Ansten?"

"It was Ms. Hearns who actually spotted it, Skipper," FitzGerald said, and squeezed the young Grayson lieutenant's shoulder. "Show him, Abigail."

"Yes, Sir," she replied, and indicated the display.

It took her only a very few sentences to lay out the situation, and Terekhov nodded. He also noticed that the remote arrays must have been right up against the extreme limit of their assigned deployment envelopes to have picked up the two lead bogeys before they closed down their impellers, and he knew he hadn't authorized the change. He scratched one eyebrow, then shrugged mentally. He felt confident that the XO had already attended to any reaming which had been required. After all, taking care of that sort of thing so his captain didn't have to was one of an executive officer's more important functions.

"Good work, Lieutenant Hearns," he said instead. "Very good. Now we only have to figure out what to do about them."

He smiled, radiating confidence, and folded his hands behind him as he walked slowly towards the chair at the center of the bridge. He seated himself and studied the deployed repeater plots, thinking hard.

FitzGerald watched the Captain cross his legs and lean comfortably back in the chair and wondered what was going on behind that thoughtful expression. It was impossible to tell, and the exec found that moderately maddening. Terekhov couldn't really be as calm as he looked, not with that freighter tagging along behind.

Terekhov sat for perhaps five minutes, stroking his left eyebrow with his left index finger, lips slightly pursed as he swung the command chair from side to side in a gentle arc. Then he nodded once, crisply, and pushed himself back up.

"Ms. Hearns, you have the watch," he said.

"Aye, aye, Sir. I have the watch," she acknowledged, but she remained where she was, and he gave a mental nod of approval. Technically, she should have moved to the command chair, but she could monitor the entire bridge from where she was, and she recognized that it was more important not to leave Tactical uncovered at the moment.

"Be so good as to contact Commander Kaplan and Lieutenant Bagwell, if you please," he continued. "My compliments, and I'd like them to join the Exec and me. We'll be in Briefing One; inform them that it will be acceptable for them to attend electronically."

"Yes, Sir."

"Very good." He twitched his head at FitzGerald, and then flipped his left hand towards the briefing room hatch.

"XO?" he invited.

"So that's about the size of it, Guns."

Aivars Terekhov gestured at the plot imagery relayed to the briefing room table's holo display, and FitzGerald wondered if he was aware he was addressing Naomi Kaplan with the traditional informal title for the first time since coming aboard. For that matter, FitzGerald had been just a bit surprised to hear himself calling Terekhov "Skipper" for the first time. Despite that, it felt surprisingly natural, and the executive officer wondered just when that had happened. He pondered the thought for a few seconds, then shook it off and refocused on the matter at hand.

Despite the late hour, Lieutenant Bagwell had opted to join his captain and the executive officer in the briefing room. From his appearance, it was obvious he'd been up anyway-probably working on another simulation for his EW section, FitzGerald suspected.

Kaplan, on the other hand, wasn't physically present, but she had the com terminal in her quarters configured for holographic mode. FitzGerald could see her in the corner of the briefing room's two-dimensional display, gazing intently at the same light sculpture that hovered above the conference table. She hadn't wasted time climbing into her uniform, since Terekhov had given her permission to attend electronically, and she wore an extremely attractive silk kimono which must have put her back a pretty penny.

"That freighter's going to be a stone bitch, Sir," the tac officer said after a moment. "Right off the top of my head, I don't see any way to retake her. Even if we let the shooters have free run of the inner system, she'd probably see us coming and slip away across the hyper wall before we ever got close enough to retake her."

She didn't point out that simply destroying the freighter would have been no challenge at all.

Unless the ship was sitting there with both its impeller nodes and its hyper generator carrying full loads- not a good idea for civilian-grade components-it was going to take a minimum of half an hour, by any realistic estimate, for the crew to fire up and make their escape. If Bogey Three's impeller nodes were hot, she could get under way in normal-space in as little as fifteen minutes, but it would take a good forty-five minutes to bring her nodes up if they weren't at standby. And bringing her hyper generator on-line in a cold start would require an absolute minimum of thirty minutes. Actually, the time requirement would more probably be forty or fifty minutes, given that they were talking about a merchant crew. And if they weren't, the understrength engineering crew the pirates had probably put on board would be hard-pressed to get the job done even that rapidly.