Elizabeth Moon - Hunting Party

He relaxed, and smiled, and seemed perfectly agreeable. Heris took the list of staff positions, and their listed specialties, and went back to her side of the ship, carefully not muttering.

The yacht’s database included, as law required, the complete text of the standard manuals of emergency procedures for crew and passengers. At this point, Heris considered the staff and guests equally passengers. She decided to print out a hard copy—it would be impressively thick, with the Transport Code seal on the cover, and perhaps that would convince Lady Cecelia that it wasn’t her own peculiarity.

The last access date for that file was—she stared, though she felt she should not have been surprised—the date the yacht left the builder’s. All those years . . . her stomach clenched, as she thought of the past possibilities. No, she could not expect Lady Cecelia, or her woefully ignorant staff, to go through disaster drills until they’d had some instruction. She wondered what the correct procedure was—if there was a correct procedure—for informing a wealthy yacht owner that her ship was, and had been, unsafe for years.

The hard copy thunked into the bin, and she picked it out. The Transport Code seal looked less impressive than she’d expected, but the thing was thick enough. She looked into it, wincing at the bureaucratic prose. It was as bad as Fleet directives. Everything unimportant specified in intricate detail, with requirements to document that it was done, and the important things buried in multisyllabic generality. How far above the deck warning signs must be, and how high the letters, and what color, but—she stopped suddenly. Warning signs? What warning signs?

She flipped to the back sections, headed REQUIRED ITEMS OF COMPLIANCE, and PENALTIES FOR NONCOMPLIANCE. Despite the current inspection stickers, the Sweet Delight was out of compliance on at least fifty items—on the first page alone. And the penalties, if subsequent inspection discovered those discrepancies . . . made an astonishing figure. For one thing, a hard copy of that manual—and the ship’s own customized emergency procedures manual—were supposed to be available to passengers. She knew no such hard copy existed.

“I knew,” she muttered, “that that stupid purple plush shouldn’t be there.”

“Captain?” Heris looked around guiltily. Gavin stood near the door, looking apologetic. “I did ask,” he said, “but you didn’t seem to hear.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Gavin,” she said, focusing again. “What is it?”

“It’s about those crew evaluations you wanted,” he said. “We never had anything like that when Captain Olin was here. . . . I’m not exactly sure what you want. . . .”

Your head on a platter, Heris felt like saying, but in fact he wasn’t the worst of them. “Mr. Gavin, I need to know how you feel each crew member is doing: do they know their jobs, are they doing their jobs?”

He looked as if he would be sulky if he had the courage. “They’ve always pleased Lady Cecelia before,” he said. “If she don’t have any complaint . . .”

“Mr. Gavin, Lady Cecelia is hardly qualified to judge the skills of a navigator or engineer, is she? That’s my job, but since I’m new, I’m asking you to help. That is your job.”

“But . . . well, you know, Captain, they all have to know I’m doing this.”

“They do?”

“An’ I don’t like saying things that, you know . . . an’ someone new like Sirkin, it’s different. But these others . . . we been together a long time, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, not that there’s anything they’ve done wrong, but you said to rank them. . . .”

Heris allowed herself to glare at him. “Mr. Gavin, you are an officer of this ship; you were second in command to Captain Olin, as you are to me. It is your duty to consider the ship’s welfare first and friendship second. No one need have hurt feelings to be ranked second. . . . There is no disgrace in it, as long as the overall performance is satisfactory. Now, if you don’t feel equal to the requirements of your position—”

“It’s not that,” he said.

“Very well. Then I’ll expect to find your evaluations on my desk within forty-eight hours. It is unfortunate that Captain Olin did not carry out regular evaluations, so that you and the rest would realize how necessary they are, but since he did not, you will simply have to cope.”

“Yes, Captain.” But he did not move away, and simply stood there looking glum.

“Do you have another problem?” Heris asked after a long pause.

“Well . . . it’s about those emergency drills you mentioned. I need to know when you’re planning one so that I can have things ready.”

Heris barely restrained herself from pounding her head on her desk. “Mr. Gavin, the whole point of an emergency drill is that it is not scheduled. Emergencies aren’t scheduled. Do you expect the universe to let you know when it plans to put a rock through the hull?”

“Well . . . no. But that’s not the same thing—”

“It is the same thing, if drills are to mean anything. If you knew when something was about to go wrong, of course you’d be prepared. So would I. So would everyone. Didn’t you see the report on the Flower of Sanity while we were in dock?” Gavin nodded. “Well—remember how the reports said that the crew’s training in emergency procedures was what let them save all those passengers? Even though it happened when most of the crew was off-shift? I’m sure those passengers—and even the crew—didn’t like unscheduled emergency drills, but that’s how they learned to cope with unscheduled emergencies.”

“I can see that, but—but that was a big ship, a commercial ship. This is only a little yacht. It can’t be that—”

Heris interrupted again. “An electrical fire just broke out in the number seventeen box: what is still functioning in this compartment—the captain’s office?”

He stared, eyes wide. “Well—I’d have to ask Finnie—but I think—”

“There’s no time to think, Mr. Gavin. There’s only time to react. Box seventeen supplies the blowers for alternate compartments on this passage, overhead lights for the compartments whose blowers are controlled by box eighteen, and the electrical outlets in the heads—the bathrooms—in all compartments on this passage. And since four boxes are clustered with box seventeen, an electrical fire in that is likely to knock out sixteen, eighteen, and nineteen as well. That means all the blowers in the crew quarters, all the overhead lights, wall sockets, passage lights, and com terminals, since all the compartment desktops take their power from box twenty. It’s dark in here, Mr. Gavin, and there’s a fire somewhere aboard—do you know if the door will unlock?”

“No . . . no, I didn’t . . . I don’t . . .”

“And that’s why we have emergency drills, Mr. Gavin. To find out, before we find that we’re locked in dark, airless boxes while a fire rages somewhere.” Before he could say more—and anything he said now would enrage her—she thrust the hard copy of the manual at him. “Here; start learning this. I’ll make additional hard copies, and I’ll expect you and your section chiefs to have marked necessary modifications within forty-eight hours.” He was too stunned to react; he took the manual and backed out. Heris watched the door slide close behind him, and then shook her head. It was much, much worse than she’d thought, to be the captain of a rich lady’s yacht.

Lady Cecelia had never thought of herself as an old lady. Age had nothing to do with it, nor the number of rejuvenation treatments. As long as she could ride to hounds, as long as she could go where she wanted, and do what she wanted, and cope with whatever life put on her plate, she was not old. True, she didn’t compete in some fields where once she had been at the top, but that she thought of as outgrowing old interests—as developing new ones—as a natural shift from one thing to another. Old people were those who had quit changing, quit growing. Some people quit growing at twenty, most by forty or fifty, and became old within a decade. They would live another thirty to fifty years—longer with rejuv—but they lived those years as old people. Others—her own grandmother Serafina for one—seemed to stay lively and interesting until the last year or so before their deaths.