“Yes, sir.”
“Do you have any last questions?”
“Just one. Who are ‘the Lieutenant’s Brown?”
“Right, you haven’t met Bill. Lieutenant Jacob Brown you’ll remember from the last time you were on our crew; he was the one who brought you to me if you’ll recall.”
Jacob had been the first person to whom she’d talked when she’d arrived on station, besides the woman manning the shuttle dock, so the captain was right, there. Quiet, gruff-looking, and with an even gruffer voice thanks to it being artificial, accompanied by a huge mass of scars on his throat. For all that he’d been polite, kind, and very helpful.
“He’s the second lieutenant, right?” Morgan asked.
“Yes. Bill is First, and he’ll be in charge of at least some of your training. Both are very competent, but quite dissimilar in personality — but you’ll see that for yourself soon enough. Any other questions?”
Morgan just shook her head.
“Good. Check in with Maria on your way out; she’ll have your schedule and the materials you’ll need. As you can imagine, I have plenty of other things to handle just now, including prying a few engineering officers loose from my fellow captains.”
Morgan nodded, and stood up to leave.
“And Morgan?” Good work yesterday.” His smile disappeared into a small frown. “And I’m sorry about everything that happened, not just on Albion, but on the Fate as well. This isn’t the safest career out there, but that kind of thing shouldn’t happen to any of us.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Chapter 04
‘Happiness’ is a funny thing. What makes you happy? What makes me happy? Is it having things, having leisure time? I suppose, for some people. Is it being stress-free? Not in my experience. Stress-free for me means boring, and boring stresses me out right quick. Is it being surrounded by people you like? Sure, for some. For others even the people they like can be a smothering blanket. My point is, ‘happy’ isn’t one thing, and perceptions are necessarily unique. Just as I have no way of knowing if how you perceive blue is the same way I perceive blue – even when we can identify the same object as being blue – I can’t really know what anyone else means by ‘happy’. Best I can do is figure it out for myself. Super helpful advice, I know.
- Harold Quinn, opening speech, seminar on living a fulfilling life.
THE WEEK positively flew by. Morgan was so busy she barely had time to breathe, let alone dwell on any negatives in her life or worry about what was coming next. She certainly didn’t have time to worry about Sergeant Eck and his grating optimism, enthusiasm, and ever-present attempts to charm her. Best of all, she was so tired by the end of the day she didn’t have any energy left for the nightmares that still dogged her more nights than not.
She at least made time to help plan and prep for Haruhi’s birthday party, which had been a lot of fun.
Fitting ten of Haruhi’s friends in their quarters was a challenge, and the noise level was staggering at times, but it had been worth it. Morgan recognized most of Haruhi’s friends; apparently the little girl socialized with the kids at church much more than at school. Recognized, yes, knew, no. Morgan went with Haruhi to church each week while Gertrude had been away, but she’d not really paid much attention to any of it.
Once the boundless energy of youth had finally waned, and the little girl crashed into bed, Morgan found herself just sitting on the couch, thinking of nothing much at all.
Gertrude came over, plopping down next to her, putting her feet up on the nearby chair and tucking the sides of her skirt under her legs.
“It’s amazing how quickly I forget just how loud and shrill little girls can be,” she said with a groan.
“You had fun, too,” Morgan answered with a chuckle.
“Both of those can be simultaneously true.”
“Well, either way, it’s quiet now,” Morgan pointed out.
“The quiet is nice. At least when she’s asleep. Quiet when she’s awake…”
“…That’s suspicious,” Morgan finished for Gertrude.
They just sat there for a minute or two, Morgan with her eyes closed, just enjoying the silent companionship.
“That dress looks good on you. Is it a new one?” Gertrude asked.
“Yes, it is. I picked it up during one of the trips Emily made me take away from the estate.”
“I wish I could have stayed.”
Morgan shrugged, then opened her eyes to look over at the older woman.
“Haruhi needed to get back to school, and you needed to get back to work. There wasn’t much you could have done even if you had been there.”
“I could have helped with the nightmares,” Gertrude whispered. “I could have been there for you.”
“You are here for me, G. I know you always will be.”
Gertrude chuckled, with only a slight bitter tinge to the sound.
“Way to go, Gertrude. I turn complimenting you on a pretty dress into dredging up all that nastiness. Let’s talk about something else. How goes it with that tall fellow, the merc?”
Morgan rolled her eyes.
“Sometimes I think he’s going to shake himself apart from just how earnest he is, or at least tries to appear. Seems I can’t get rid of him, though.”
“Are they really that tight on manpower? They seriously couldn’t get any officer assigned to the job? I mean, isn’t it supposed to be an officer’s billet?”
She just shook her head. She’d wondered the same thing, and had quietly looked into it.
“They always have most of their contingent out on the ships to begin with, and between runs of the ships on opposite rotation is when they get their leave. They had just as many injured on the Herald as we did and, on the Fate, well, on the Fate they took more casualties than we did. A lot more.”
Gertrude shuddered.
“Can we have a conversation without hitting any of those verbal mines? What do you want to talk about?”
That was thankfully an easy question for Morgan to answer.
“STEVE is amazing. I mean, I knew that more than a year ago, but now? Having actually seen its, hers, his, whatever, having seen the ship, seen all the things they leave out of the manuals? I’m in love.”
Gertrude took a moment to laugh before continuing the conversation.
“Of course, you focus on the machines. A gearhead born if I ever met one. I’ve been on STEVE too, you know, more than you have even, and I don’t know if I get what you see in… him.”
Morgan chuckled. The pronouns of ships were still something that gave her pause a time or two. She’d finally gotten used to calling ships by female pronouns when she’d been transferred back to STEVE, and his crew’s tradition of referring to him as a he, partly from the abbreviation of his name but also because he was such an ‘old crochety bastard’, was still tripping her up. It also didn’t help that most other people still called him a her.
“Well, for one thing, the fact that he’s still in basically perfect working condition is amazing. G, he’s more than two hundred years old, and his original purpose wasn’t easy on the components at all.”
“After that long, how many of those components are actually still original installations? Hull plating, I suppose?” Gertrude paused for a moment. “Wait, he wasn’t always a freighter? He doesn’t strike me as a warship, armed or not, and with that much cargo space I don’t see what else he could have been used for.”
“Yes, well, don’t go telling anyone else, but STEVE was originally a gate-builder.”
“Seriously?” Gertrude sounded impressed, and she was right to be.
The gate-builders were probably the rarest type of ship ever built, equipped with an internal planetary-grade gate so they could hop around within uncharted or uninhabited star systems, scout things out, and then build a new system gate to link the system back to the rest of the settled galaxy. They weren’t terribly in demand any more, what with the almost complete halt to new colony
projects in the decades since contact with Sol had been lost, but the remaining ships of his type had to be nearly beyond price.
“Yeah. From what Lieutenant Brown said – Bill that is, not Jacob – the manufacturing capability is just moth-balled, not removed. That’s why STEVE has so much cargo capacity, he’s supposed to keep the crew supplied for years at a time and have enough room for the materials to build a system gate.”
“How in the galaxy did Takiyama just buy a ship like that from the Earth military, however old and obsolete?”
Morgan shook her head again.
“That wasn’t in the tour, and I wouldn’t have the first clue to even try and guess. However he did it, he did, and STEVE isn’t the envy of every other shipping company only because they don’t seem to realize what he is. It does help that he hasn’t been used to build a gate in at least a hundred years, and, near as I can tell, STEVE’s weapons have never been used except in training exercises, though the fact that he is armed is uncommon knowledge, at least in some sectors.”
“Still, sounds like a fascinating ship to serve on.”
“I’m certainly looking forward to it.”
Gertrude blew out a breath in a contracted sigh, and suddenly she seemed much more serious.
“Speaking of that, there is something I haven’t told you yet.”
“What, is something wrong?”
“No, nothing like that,” Gertrude hastily reassured Morgan. “It’s just… you know STEVE is just as shorthanded as the mercs are. They’re trying to scrape up crew from all over to cover for the chunk of STEVE’s crew that is out-system.”
Suddenly guessing what Gertrude was about to say, Morgan cut in.
“They want you to fill a crew chief spot?”
“No, M, they want me to fill an Engineering Lieutenant’s spot. Reading between the lines, the captains are least likely to give up any of their officers, and since I haven’t even technically started working on the Beacon of Twilight yet, and I’ve been helping out on STEVE, they really want me.”
“Enough to promote you? Would it be permanent though?”
“That and more. I’ll keep the rank and they’re offering triple pay for this run, since they know about our situation with Haruhi.”
“What are you going to do with Haruhi?”
“Well, she’s a bit older now. She could handle a few months without us okay, and from what I’ve seen, STEVE’s care facility is much better than the Daystar Fading’s, not that it’s hard to do better than that joyless stuck-up witch. Something you just said also helped me make sense of something else.”
“Oh?”
“They’d talked about it only being for six months, which I took to mean six months each way, so twelve in total. That’s longer than I’d want to be away from her, by quite a bit, especially without you here. That we’ll still be in system and can send messages back and forth daily will help, but not nearly enough, not for twelve months. But I didn’t know STEVE has his own gate.”
“So, it is only six months out after all,” Morgan said, nodding.
“Right, once they get everything unloaded, the ship can just jump straight back to Zion orbit, cutting the return trip into almost nothing. Frankly, when you look at it that way, I wonder why they don’t just use STEVE for that route all the time.”
“That… I actually know the answer to,” Morgan said, feeling a bit uncomfortable about where the conversation had taken them.
“Oh?” Gertrude said, mirroring Morgan’s earlier question.
“Yeah. They, uh, they give STEVE the most dangerous routes, the ones that are the least secure politically or in terms of pirates or whatever. That’s what I meant when I said some sectors know he’s armed. The company carefully leaked reports about the weapons in those more dangerous areas, to discourage any pirates – or local navies – from trying anything.”
“Morgan! That’s terrible. I don’t want you getting into more danger. You’ve already had more than your share.”
Morgan just shrugged.
“It isn’t that dangerous, though. Remember, I said that STEVE hasn’t fired a shot except in practice ever, because he hasn’t needed to. All the bad guys leave us alone.”
“Something being not ‘that dangerous’ takes on a new meaning when you’re involved. Not a fan,” Gertrude said with a sigh, poking Morgan in the shoulder with one long finger.
“I’m not really either, but it isn’t like I’m choosing all of this,” Morgan replied with a shrug.
Gertrude shook her head.
“On to happier things, I think.” She reached over to the side of the couch, pulling a small package off the floor. “Happy birthday, Morgan.”
“What’s this? You didn’t have to.”
“Of course I did, Morgan,” Gertrude reached over to pat one of her cheeks. “Turning eighteen, becoming an adult, has been a big deal for more than a thousand years. Longer, if you fudge the eighteen part when they used a different age to mark ‘adulthood’. I know we couldn’t make a big deal about it, what with you lying about your age so you can work, but I couldn’t just let it go by with nothing. Especially since I couldn’t be there on the actual day.”
Morgan just shrugged again.
“I don’t know when the actual day is anyway, thanks to there not really being calendars on Hillman.”
“Not the point, M,” Gertrude said, holding out the package again. “Go on then, open it.”
Morgan did, revealing two objects in short order. One was a fairly typical data storage device, one that could have held a single image or every book ever written, or at least the ones that had been preserved. The other though, that was something special indeed.
Carefully Morgan pulled the gilt-edged sheet of crystal out of the wrappings, turning it over in her hands.
“Where did you find this?” she asked, tilting it to get a better look at the image carved into it. I wouldn’t have believed anyone off Hillman would known about the train system Daddy designed, much less cared.
It was, as far as Morgan could remember, a precise rendition of the train and its specialized anti-gravity track that Morgan’s father had designed, possible only because he’d overcome the difficulties of using anti-gravity and mag-lev on a planet with twice Earth’s gravitational pull.
Gertrude smiled broadly.
“Ah well, that’s rather boring. This was gathering dust in a curio market, on a small cargo station above Jiltan IV. Apparently, this was a product of a propaganda effort from the leaders of Hillman to show the galaxy they aren’t backwards barbarians. It was only for sale because so little comes from Hillman besides raw materials, and because in this case, the materials are somewhat rare.”
“The leaders of Hillman, barbarians? Something of an insult to barbarians, isn’t it?”
Looking closer, she saw there was a small section on the back with a list of names. She wasn’t expecting to see her daddy’s name there – he’d been exiled to the small mining town she was born in for crossing the leaders, after all – but after a moment she came across a name that caused her to freeze. Samuel Thakkar. It was right near the top, after the leaders of the party.
Daddy?
It might not be him. You don’t know what his last name was, and Samuel isn’t that uncommon a name…
It wasn’t until Morgan’s vision began to blur that she realized she was about to burst into tears, and she flung her arms around Gertrude, crying and squeezing and just a general happy mess.
“Do you like it?” Gertrude said with a little laugh once Morgan had quieted down a bit. Gertrude reached up a hand and stroked Morgan’s short hair.
“Thank you. I can’t tell you how much this means to me.”
“It’s a link to your father. I know something of what that feels like.”
Sniffing, Morgan broke the hug at last.
“It’s more than just that.” She handed Gertrude the crystal, pointing to the names.
“Is that his name? But I thought you didn�
��t have a last name, just numbers? We went through all that nonsense right after we first met with the hospital practically kidnapping you because you didn’t have a last name.”
“The workers don’t, but the party members? The ‘essential workers’ and so forth? They still have their family names.”
“They took his name away when they exiled him?”
“He didn’t talk about it directly, but it makes sense.”
“Wow. I’d like to take credit for it, but I didn’t know about that when I bought it.”
“Thank you, G, it’s wonderful,” Morgan said, hugging Gertrude again.
As they broke apart, Gertrude yawned.
“I’d better get to bed. Early start in the morning to get Haruhi off to school before reporting over to STEVE. You?”
Morgan shook her head.
“I don’t have any training scheduled until noon, because of availability. I’ll be at it until after dinner to make up for the late start, though.”
“Well, don’t stay up too late.”
“I think I’ll just head over to the gym for a bit first, see if I can get a quiet corner where I can crank up the gravity for a bit.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” Gertrude said, shaking her head.
“Fun? No, but without it I’ll end up as soft as the rest of you,” Morgan said with a smile and chuckle.
“All right then, you go get all sweaty. Just don’t forget to shower before you go to bed.”
“I skipped it once. Once! And yet you still bring it up.”
“It took a week to get the smell out of the alcove. I’d think you’d remember that even more than I do, given that you had to sleep in it.”
Morgan just laughed, and hugged Gertrude again.
The exercise will do me good. Also, might give me a chance to think things over, she thought, running a finger along her father’s name. A last name. What do I even do with that?
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