And it didn’t help one damned bit that he was such a good cook, either.
Maybe if I get Doc Massarelli involved? Yeah, that’s an idea! Get her to discuss things like caloric intake, high blood pressure, obesity, and things like that with him. It’ll sure be a hell of a lot easier than developing the willpower to just not eat the stuff when he puts it in front of me!
She chuckled at the thought, poured the dressing, and reached for her fork. She’d just taken the first bite when Pallavicini turned back up…with the inevitable plate of delicious, butter-saturated garlic bread. He set it on the table and turned to go, but her waving hand caught him before he could. She finished chewing her mouthful—which, of course, was just as delicious as it had looked, damn him—and swallowed, then cleared her throat.
“Do me a favor, Jared. Pass the word to Gareth that I need to talk to him.”
“Of course, Ma’am. The first thing after lunch.”
There might, Ginger reflected, have been a certain repressive emphasis on the word “after,” but she elected to let it pass in dignified silence.
“That should be fine,” she said instead.
* * *
“So, is that about everything, Ma’am?” Senior Chief Petty Officer Gareth Yamaguchi asked ninety-odd minutes later, running his eye back over the notes he’d jotted on his memo board.
SCPO Yamaguchi was Ginger’s yeoman…inherited, like her ship, from Captain Whitby. Unlike most of Charles Ward’s crew, Yamaguchi had been with Joanna Whitby for over five T-years. He’d been more than “just” her yeoman, as any good yeoman always was, and it still showed in his eyes, sometimes, when he and Ginger worked together. He was also ten years older than she was, and there were times she thought a part of him resented seeing someone so young take Whitby’s place. If that was true, though, he never let it affect his calm, professional attitude where his new captain was concerned.
“I think so,” she said, leaning back in the chair behind the desk in her day cabin. “The most immediate bit is tidying up and signing off on those supply list requests for Lieutenant Primikynos before we pull out for Spindle.” She smiled wryly. “I think he’s too efficient for my own good. I never quite seem to catch up with him. Or maybe what I really mean is he never has to catch up with me!”
“No, Ma’am,” Yamaguchi agreed. “The Lieutenant is good. Probably because of all those years he spent as a merchant spacer.” The yeoman smiled suddenly. It wasn’t often that Ginger saw one of his smiles, but when they came, they illuminated his entire face. “If you’d like me too, Ma’am,” he suggested, “I imagine I could come up with some…creative requests that would make the Lieutenant work for it for a change. Especially if I got Jared involved.” The smile turned positively wicked. “We haven’t requested anything at all esoteric for your cabin stores, you know. There’s got to be an opportunity there!”
“You, Gareth Yamaguchi, are a wicked man,” she told him with a chuckle. “However, I will admit that a certain ignoble part of me is highly in favor of the idea. Why don’t you and Jared put your heads together and come up with a potential ‘challenge list’ for me to look over?”
“Of course, Ma’am.” Yamaguchi’s smile faded, but the gleam stayed in his eye, and Ginger treasured it.
“In that case, I think we’re about done, and—”
“Excuse me, Captain,” Pallavicini interrupted respectfully, poking his head in through the day cabin door.
“Yes, Jared?”
“You have a com request, Ma’am. It’s Ms. Terekhov.”
“Ask her to hold five seconds while Gareth and I finish up, then put her through,” Ginger said with a smile.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
The steward’s head disappeared, and Ginger looked back at Yamaguchi.
“As I was saying, I think we’re about done. Please do make sure to get those notes typed up for me before the department head meeting, though.”
“Of course, Captain.”
Yamaguchi closed his memo board, gathered up his minicomp, and headed for his own cubbyhole of an office. Ginger watched him go, then punched the key which had begun flashing on her desk com.
“Good afternoon, Ginger,” Sinead Terekhov said from the display.
“Good afternoon, Sinead.”
It no longer felt quite so strange to address Aivars Terekhov’s wife by her first name. In fact, it was easy. Like her husband, Sinead had an innate ability to put people at ease, and in her case, the constraints of rank—and of the relationship between a junior officer and her superior—didn’t come into play. Although, when Ginger thought about it, the difference between their family backgrounds would probably have been a problem for some of Sinead’s social peers. The O’Daleys and the Longs had been around a long, long time, and Ginger really had very little idea how wealthy Sinead was…except that the proper adverb had to be “very.” Her own family, on the other hand, was solidly middle-class, and Ginger had begun her naval career as enlisted. She imagined there were quite a few people from Sinead’s background who would have been just a bit less genuinely warm to someone from hers.
In fact, I damned well know there are! I’ve met some of the bastards.
“What can I do for you?” she asked, and Sinead wrinkled her nose at her.
“Actually, I wanted to see if you’d be free to join me for dinner this evening, or possibly tomorrow night?”
“I’m afraid I couldn’t make it today. I’m having a working dinner with my senior officers. Tomorrow night would probably work.” Ginger thought, rubbing the tip of her nose with her left index finger. “Commander Lawson, Lieutenant Primikynos, and I have a meeting tomorrow with a rep from Logistics Command, but I should be clear of that no later than fifteen hundred. Call it sixteen hundred, to be on the safe side. That could put me in Landing by seventeen-thirty.”
“That would be more than early enough. Can I go ahead and pencil you in? It’s not anything formal. And in light of what you’ve said about Steward Pallavicini, I’ll promise to serve something light!”
“God!” Ginger laughed. “Thank you for that! I know he absolutely means well, but I’m going to get Dr. Massarelli to beat him about the head and ears.”
“You see? You are developing good tactical instincts!” Sinead smiled. “Screen when you leave the ship, and I’ll have the limo pick you up at the port.”
* * *
“So, overall, I’m completely satisfied with our people’s performance,” Ginger said from the head of the table.
Pallavicini and the stewards mates he’d enlisted for the evening had cleared away dinner. Now her senior officers sat back in their chairs, coffee cups and dessert dishes in front of them, and looked back up its length at her.
Fred Hairston sat at the table’s foot, flanked by Kumanosuke Lawson, Charles Ward’s engineering officer, and Lieutenant Commander Nakhimov. Raymundo Atkins sat to Lawson’s left, and Lieutenant Yolande Cornelisz, the ship’s electronic warfare officer, faced Nakhimov across the table. Lieutenant Traxton Sughavanam, Ginger’s communications officer, sat to Cornelisz’s right, facing Lieutenant Oliver Primikynos, and Lieutenant Benjamin Marsden, CO of HMLAC Nożownik and the senior member of Charles Ward’s LAC squadron, sat to Primikynos’ right, while Surgeon Lieutenant Sying-ni Massarelli sat directly to Ginger’s left.
“I know it’s been hard on all of them,” she continued now, cradling her own cup in both hands. “All of us—aside from Sying-ni and Dimitri—are new to them, and to be honest, I can’t really imagine, even now, what it must be like for a ship’s company to lose that many of its senior officers in a heartbeat.” She shook her head sadly. “In that respect, we’re all really looking in from the outside.”
“That’s true in one sense, Ma’am,” Massarelli said.
The surgeon lieutenant was, by any measure, the most visually striking person Ginger Lewis had ever seen. Her hair’s natural color was a vivid emerald green. Her eyes were a shade of amber Ginger had only seen once, in a German Sh
epherd, and their pupils were vertical slits, not round. Her fingernails were much stronger and narrower than those of any other human Ginger had ever met, and her ears were elongated and almost triangular in section, their tips pricking through that improbably green hair. When she moved, it was with an extraordinarily graceful, curiously sinuous carriage which only underscored her feline appearance.
Thanks to her personnel file, Ginger knew the source of the obviously massive engineering in Massarelli’s genetic heritage. Like Paulo d’Arezzo, it had been provided courtesy of Manpower, Incorporated, although at least in Paulo’s case no non-human DNA had gone into the mix. Sying-ni Massarelli was the granddaughter of yet another liberated genetic slave who’d chosen to settle in the Star Kingdom of Manticore and take the surname of the captain whose cruiser had liberated him from a Mesan slave ship.
Ginger wondered if there’d been any temptation on her grandfather’s part to attempt to have his own genegineered appearance muted or even completely smoothed away in his children. She was quite certain Dr. Massarelli would have felt no inclination in that direction, however. She wore that green hair, those cat eyes, those pointed ears, as a conscious badge of pride, a proclamation of her refusal to hide her slave heritage…and her own personal declaration of war.
Interesting contrast there, between her and Paulo. Or at least between her and the old Paulo, Ginger thought. I wonder if they’ve discussed it?
“True in what sense, Sying-ni?” she asked out loud.
“In the sense that you’re all relative newcomers, and that our people took a really heavy psychological hit. But every man and woman in the Navy—for that matter, in the entire star system—has taken a hard hit. You and the XO and everyone else sitting around this table are no different in that respect.” Those amber, catlike eyes circled the other faces. “I know we’re all concentrating on pulling the rest of the crew up out of the depression, the posttraumatic shock of what happened, and to be honest, I think most of us are doing a pretty fair job of that. But it would be a mistake—a serious mistake—for us to underestimate or, even worse, deny the extent to which this has affected us.”
“Do you really think we’re doing that, Doctor?” Commander Lawson asked, and his voice was a little tight, a little hard around the edges.
Massarelli looked at him calmly for a moment, then nodded.
“Yes, Sir. I do.”
Lawson’s naturally dark complexion got a shade darker and his jaw tensed. For a moment, he seemed to hover on the brink of saying something sharp, but then his nostrils flared and he shoved himself back in his chair without speaking.
Ginger watched him with understanding and an edge of concern. As Charles Ward’s engineering officer, Lawson would be absolutely critical to the ship’s success, and she was worried about him. Like Nakhimov and Hairston, Lawson was a Sphinxian. But while Hairston had lost a cousin and her three children in Yawata Crossing, virtually Lawson’s entire family had lived in or around the small city of Tanners Port…which had been obliterated by the debris-spawned tsunamis.
It was abundantly clear that Hairston had taken the attack very personally, but the XO had focused that anger outwardly. He was looking for necks to break, and he spent a lot of time with Raymundo Atkins and his tactical section. Lawson seemed to be focusing his rage, his fury, internally, however, and that could be a very bad thing. Especially since he was four years older than Ginger and clearly felt his own engineering experience—he’d been a Hephaestus yard dog for three years and commanded a major shipbuilding module for his last year there—made him more qualified than her for the captain’s chair aboard a ship like Charles Ward.
Ginger was prepared to deal with that…resentment on his part if she had to, and as long as he kept it under control, she didn’t blame him for feeling it. She didn’t agree with him, but she didn’t blame him, either, and she understood it wasn’t necessarily something he’d chosen to feel. But if that internal anger of his locked up with a feeling of grievance, of having been passed over for something that was his just due…
Don’t borrow trouble, she told herself. So far, he’s done his job, and there hasn’t been a hint of his letting anything get in the way of that. I know why Sying-ni’s worried about him, though. I could see him eating a pulser dart one night. But until it looks like it may actually be reaching that point, I don’t have any basis—or any valid reason, for that matter—to think about requesting his relief. And if I did try to have him replaced, and if BuPers could actually come up with someone as a replacement, it’d probably finish him off once and for all. The man’s hanging onto his duty because right this minute, it’s all he has left.
“I think that’s a very valid point for all of us to bear in mind, Sying-ni,” she said after a moment, meeting the surgeon lieutenant’s eyes but watching Lawson from the corner of her vision. “I know I haven’t really dealt with my ‘survivor’s guilt’ yet.” She smiled with very little humor. “I imagine it’ll be a while before I can draw a deep enough breath for that, and I won’t pretend I’m not grateful it will. But you’re right. We do need to bear it in mind.”
She glanced away from Massarelli, letting her eyes circle the table. Lawson’s face might have clenched a little tighter, but he looked back levelly enough when it was his turn to meet her gaze, and she nodded in satisfaction. Then she took a sip of coffee, set the cup down, and squared her shoulders.
“However,” she said more briskly, “that’s probably enough reflecting on gloom and doom for the evening. In fact, I think we’ve covered everything that needed covering as a group…and I understand from my spies that we have several fair to middling spades players in our senior command crew.”
Several people chuckled, and Commander Hairston’s hazel eyes gleamed. Calling the XO a hard-core spades player was rather like calling the Tannerman Ocean damp, and Oliver Primikynos wasn’t far behind.
“I have a few other points I’d like to discuss with some of you,” she continued, “but I don’t see any reason to do it in a stuffy, formal setting. So if Jared”—she looked over Hairston’s head to where Pallavicini had poked his head back out of his pantry—“would be good enough to find the cards, I think we’ve earned a little bit of relaxation.”
Chapter Forty-Two
“I have to say, Mister President, that I was a little surprised by the menu,” Michelle Henke said.
“Really?” President Warren Suttles looked back at her with a smile. The President was on the short side of medium height—for a Montanan, anyway—with dark hair going white at the temples. He was a small-framed man, with well-manicured hands, and Henke couldn’t shake the feeling that he looked more like a professor at a small college somewhere than the president of an entire star system. “I hope it was a pleasant surprise?” he continued.
“Oh, it was delicious!” she assured him. “It was just that given the way the beef you produce here is Montana’s hallmark, I’d rather assumed it was also a staple of any state dinner.”
“Figured that might be the case.” Suttles’ smile turned into something much closer to a grin. “It’s a good idea to cut against the grain, every so often, though. And sage hen’s something else we do pretty well on Montana. ’Course I understand it’s not quite the same as the original sage hen.”
“Not hardly.” The new speaker was a considerably taller, fair-haired man standing with them in the Musselshell Ballroom, the biggest one in the Beaverhead Hotel, the tallest luxury hotel in Estelle, the capital of the Montana System. “Spent three of the worst years of my life on Old Terra,” Chester Lopez, the Montanan Attorney General continued. “Didn’t want to go, but Dad insisted DeVry was the only place to get a real law degree.” He snorted harshly and waved the whiskey tumbler in his hand in a disgusted arc. “Never really understood that, since they don’t pay any damned attention to their own laws. Anyway, I tried the ‘original’ sage hen while I was there, and I don’t believe I’ve ever been quite as disappointed in something in my life.”
He shook his head gravely, but amusement gleamed in his dark eyes.
“That bad, was it, Chester?” Suttles asked with the air of a man obediently offering an opening.
“Wasn’t rightly bad,” Lopez replied in the tone of a man trying to be fair. “Sure was on the scrawny side, though. I told the cook I’d expected a grown-up bird, and he told me that was what it was. Seems like the ‘original’ variety never gets to more ’n about three kilos.”
“Three?”
“That’s right, Mister President,” Lopez assured him, and returned his gaze to Henke. “Now, the Montana sage hen’s not considered even moderately well grown till it hits nine, maybe ten kilos, Countess Gold Peak. And the one we had to table tonight was probably closer to twelve.”
“Well, it was certainly delicious,” Henke said with a chuckle. She’d discovered on her first, brief visit to Montana that nothing on Montana wasn’t bigger—and, of course, better—than anything any other planet might boast. And, to be fair, looking at something like the Sapphire Mountains’ New Missouri Gorge tended to substantiate a lot of that. “I’m not at all disappointed in missing the beef—especially since I’m sure I’ll see plenty of it while we’re here.”