Angular Moment

by Louis Sollert

that.” Winters this time.

  “That is silly!” She was near panic. “Why did you not make me a Captain when you first discovered my status?” She was hoping to find a way out. She did not want to be forced into this role.

  “Because TSFHQ gave command to Ensign Parker,” Winters again. “As long as you didn’t relieve him we were free to continue our mission, excepting any overriding orders you gave. When Parker died, command of Kestrel fell to the senior military authority present.” Winters gestured in her direction. “That’s you, ma’am.”

  “I do not want it. I refuse.” The “no” line on her forehead was beginning to show.

  “Before I log that, you should read this.” Winters handed her a datapad. On it were summaries of the six cases he’d found in the protocol database of situations where command had been refused. All six had been court-martialed for dereliction of duty. Five had been convicted. Of them, three had been executed, one had been sold to a colony and had his brain extracted and hardwired into the environmental control system, and one had been sentenced to life at hard labor and was, at last report, part of a mining team working in three-g conditions deep in the atmosphere of a gas giant. The only one not convicted had escaped justice by hanging herself on the evening before the second day of her trial.

  Eyes wide in full panic now, “This is ridiculous! You invented this!”

  “No, ma’am.” Winters’ voice was flat. His face was calm, the hairlessness making him appear less than, or more than, human. “I did not.” He and Cathcart waited for her to collect herself.

  There came a long, almost poetic string of what could only have been obscenities in some foreign dialect. Neither ensign understood it. Neither wanted to. The last word she uttered, almost in resignation, they understood. “Paperwork!” Somehow she made that sound more obscene than the previous rant. “Okay. I am Captain.” She sulked a moment. “But I will not do paperwork! And I will not wear that ridiculous uniform!”

  “Aye aye, ma’am.” Cathcart looked as if he wished to say more.

  “What is it?” Captain Volonskaya snapped.

  “We’ll need a T.O., a Table of Organization.”

  “Can we not continue what you used under . . . your former commander?” She was hesitant to use Parker’s name again.

  “Aye, ma’am, if you want to take a turn standing watch. Captains junior grade are not normally watch-standing officers.”

  More curses were muttered. “You two handle the paperwork. When you have reached a consensus on all that must be done, bring it to me and I will endorse it.” She looked at the dinner in front of her. Squashed hot dogs, in thick red gravy with beans. Her stomach rebelled at the thought. “My first order: No hot dogs are to be served without my specific consent. Bring an apple or a pear to me in the sleeping quarters.” She spoke to no one in particular. “I am going to get some rest and hope that I wake up from this farce.” With that she crossed the wardroom, entered quarters, and shut the hatch, leaving Ensigns Cathcart and Winters to unravel the mess.

  “What do we do now?” Cathcart, previously overwhelmed by Natalia’s femininity, was now completely out of his depth reporting to her as the likely candidate for her executive officer.

  “Give her a little time,” Winters counseled. “She’s an academic, but a senior one. She’ll settle down once the shock leaves her.” Winters got two apples from ship’s stores and took them to his new Captain. On the way out of quarters, he retrieved his and Cathcart’s sleepsacks and they rigged them in a corner of the wardroom. He and Cathcart smoothed the way for an orderly change of command. Parker’s body hadn’t yet been recovered and interred, but his official presence as commanding officer of HIMS Kestrel was effaced from the records.

  Until the new watchlist was approved, Cathcart and Winters elected to put themselves on watch and watch. On an essentially idle ship this didn’t amount to much, especially in a vacant system. Low level maintenance alerts needed to be dealt with, mostly. The two young men kept the same hours. Life on small ships was difficult enough without the artificial isolation of different sleeping/waking cycles.

  Two hours into Winters’ watch, Captain Volonskaya found him at the command console using data from a couple of industrial supply catalogues to construct a 3-D computer model of Physics Research Station Howard. “Ensign.” Her voice was subdued.

  Winters came to attention, a position in zero-g that was defined, while sitting, as knees, ankles and feet together, eyes forward, hands flat on the console. “Ma’am.” Military indoctrination fairly thoroughly defined the behavior of young officers. That he and this woman had joked and flirted less than 24 hours ago didn’t matter.

  “Please, relax. Do not do that . . . whatever that is you are doing.”

  “Sorry, ma’am. Habit.” He turned in the command chair to face her.

  “Explain to me what I would have to do to stand a watch.”

  Winters was silent for a moment, obviously uncomfortable. Natalia noticed and interrupted before he could answer. “There is something wrong with my request?”

  “Aye, ma’am.” He wasn’t going to say more unprompted, that was obvious.

  “Will you tell me what?”

  “Permission to speak freely?”

  “Da, please do.”

  “Ma’am, you can’t stand a watch.” She started to interrupt him. “No, listen, please.” He gathered his thoughts for a moment. “This isn’t a protocol issue. Cathcart and I just graduated from primary naval officer training a few months ago. We spent four years learning how to do little else besides stand watches. On this ship, in this mostly empty system, there is very little to do as a watch-standing officer, but when something does come up, there isn’t going to be time to ask questions about how to deal with it.”

  “But I do not want . . . you two cannot . . . all by yourselves. Can you?” Her words bordered on being gibberish, but her look was eloquent.

  “Don’t worry about it, ma’am.” Winters smiled, his broad, even teeth stark against the skin of his face. “Kestrel, even on watch and watch, is easy duty. We can handle it. Either one of us could handle it alone.” He handed her the draft watchlist he and Cathcart were working from. “This is what we’ve got planned.” She looked it over. “You’ll command, Cathcart and I will stand watches. Other duties as needed will be based on who is closest when you say ‘Jump.’”

  “You two can do this? Without resentment?”

  “Certainly. All you have to do is make decisions. We’ll handle the grunt work.” Another grin. “That’s what ensigns are for.”

  “Okay. What do I have to do to make this official?”

  “I’ll log it. Daily, or periodically, review the log and endorse or amend it—that’s your stamp of approval.”

  “I am not going to get away from paperwork, am I?”

  “No, ma’am. Not completely, but it’s pretty easy. I set you up with an ID within the command structure of the ship. Log on, mark the log as approved, log off. It couldn’t be easier.”

  “I suppose not.” Clearly she was suspicious of his promise, but she had nothing to say, no way to challenge him.

  “There is one thing we were going to bring to your attention.” He indicated a monitor to starboard. A small ship, a boat really, was drifting in from above Howard. “Look familiar?”

  “Ah. My little Bug, come home.”

  “We’ll need to intercept it. We can use Kestrel, but we did that once already and we were probably pushing our luck with that. Now we’d be doing it in space shared with the station.”

  “What else did you have in mind? I have my own reasons for wanting to preserve Bug Two.”

  “Is there a Bug One? We could use that with less risk.”

  “Da, yes. We keep our vehicles in . . . I do not know the word. A carriage house?”

  “Garage?”

  “Da, garage. You have charted a planetesimal nearby? About five thousand kilometers back along the path of Howard’s orbit around HR 2251 A?”

&
nbsp; “Aye, ma’am. A nickel-iron body, maybe ten kilometers at its widest point, perhaps two at its narrowest.”

  “The three remaining vehicles are anchored to that rock.”

  “Why? I mean, isn’t that a long EVA to get to a utility vehicle?”

  “No, we just have the pilot AI fetch them. Some of the experiments we do, we did, they do not tolerate power sources moving in the area.”

  “So how does that help us?”

  “The AI computer program is ROM based. We can pull the chip and plug it into Kestrel’s systems and fetch any or all of Howard’s craft any time we want them.”

  “Ah. Well, I’m heading back to Howard to clear the second hydroponics dome after breakfast. I can bring it back then.” He looked out the viewport at Howard for a moment. “You think they’re okay? Or did they end up like. . . .”

  “I am certain they are fine.” Winters looked at his new Captain and saw that he couldn’t demand an explanation for that certainty. Not yet, anyway. Captain Volonskaya turned to leave, but she stopped and said, “Ensign.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Just the hydroponics dome and the command module, nowhere else.”

  “Aye, ma’am.”

  “Wake me for the noon meal. Perhaps we can meet and I will tell you and Cathcart what I think we are facing.” She turned away again. “I should know for sure by then.”

  A few hours later, Natalia fairly bounded from quarters to the wardroom. Of no one in particular she asked, “What is that smell? It is wonderful!”