by Joe Pace
“Then why do you eat them?” Worth had no idea why he was telling her this story. For some reason, this familiarity was more unsettling than his surliness the night before.
“To remind me who and what I am.” He shrugged, and stared at her in a way that chilled her to the core. It was a look that saw not her rank but her body, stripped of its clothes, suddenly naked before the appraising gaze of a man who generally took the things he wanted. “And in case I ever get my hands on another real banana, I’ll be able to appreciate it proper.” He leaned in close to her, and she shied away, keeping her tray between them, but he just dropped the empty peel in the recycler behind her. Saying no more, Lamb turned and walked toward the exit, stretching his hands high above his head, the bones in his back and arms cracking with the morning. When he reached the door, the crewman turned around briefly.
“By the way, since it was late last night when you and the other lady came on board…”
“Hall,” she blurted. “Midshipman Charles Hall.” She tried to put an emphasis on his rank and his first name, but her voice cracked midway through.
“Hmph. Could have sworn you was both girls. My mistake. At any rate, it was late, so we put off the wetting ‘til Friday night.”
“Wetting?”
“Seems there’s some other things they left out at Greenwich. If it’s a surprise, well, then I won’t spoil it. Friday night. Sir.” And he was gone.
What was that about? Worth had lost her appetite for toast, for anything, but she ate it anyway, mechanically, dutifully. Others had begun to trickle into the galley, singly or in pairs, touching their foreheads with a knuckle in casual salute to the low-ranking officer in their mess. She recognized Quintal from the night before, and a few of the others Pott had pointed out during the orientation. Before long the room was almost full, with ten or so men and women sitting at the tables, eating oatmeal or sausage and eggs or simply having their coffee. None of them spoke to her, absorbed in their morning routines or speaking together in low voices. It was as though she did not exist at all, and it was the loneliest moment she had ever known.
“Hey.”
She hadn’t seen Charles Hall come in with the others, but there he was, next to her. Again, as on the viewing platform the night before, he had materialized seemingly out of nowhere, without so much as a sound. How does he do that? He was wearing the same duty uniform she was, though it seemed overlarge on his thin frame, as though he wore his older brother’s castoffs. In one hand he held an egg sandwich, and in the other a cup of what seemed to be –
“Milk,” he said, when he saw her looking at it. He took a sip, and shrugged. “What can I say, I like it. I know they’ll make fun of me for it. They sure did at Greenwich.”
“How is it I didn’t know you there?” she asked. Hall laughed, just a little.
“Don’t feel bad, Hope. Nobody did, not really. I sort of…kept to myself, is all. Not everybody can be Sam Worth’s daughter.” She felt the tips of her ears start to burn, and her face must have given away her annoyance, because Hall held up his milk defensively in front of him. “Come on, you can’t say you didn’t know you were sort of famous. Your father wasn’t just a starship captain, he was one of those captains. The ones we all read about, the ones who made us want to go to space ourselves. Baker, Li Ying, Ingram, Worth.”
“Maybe that’s why I was so popular,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. Was he crazy? She had barely had any friends at all during her time at Greenwich, not quite fitting in anywhere. Her grades were fine, but not strong enough to be one of the academic elite. She certainly was never one of the social butterflies, and could count her dates on one hand.
“We were intimidated.” Hall nibbled at his sandwich. “You never talked to anyone, so I think everyone just figured you were full of yourself because of your father.”
“Great.” Great. “So all that time I was being shy, everyone thought I was stuck up.” She sighed. Eager to change the subject, she said, “You know so much, what’s a wetting? That crewman, Lamb, was talking about it.”
“A wedding? Like with a bride and groom?”
“No, dummy. A wet-ting. TT, not DD.”
“I know, dummy, I was making fun of you.” He smiled, that same crooked-tooth smile from when they had first met. “From what I understand, it’s a kind of party, celebrating newly commissioned officers. I guess they can get pretty wild.”
A chime rang, signaling the start of the first watch and the onset of the Harvest’s dockyard workday. Worth reported to Lieutenant Pott on the quarterdeck along with Hall, and was given her work schedule. It was daunting, even for graduates of Greenwich, with its famously rigorous standards. For ten hours a day they would supervise crews of starmen inspecting, repairing, cleaning, and upgrading the Harvest. Supervising, she swiftly discovered, was an extremely fluid term. By dinnertime each night her hands were black with grime, her clothes saturated with sweat, and her muscles sore with exertion.
“It’s not just the refit work,” Pott told them. “It’s the intimate knowledge you have to have of every task on board this vessel. You can’t order a jack to reef if you don’t know how to do it yourself. More importantly, they have to know you have some idea what the hell you’re talking about, or they’ll never respect you.” Worth was no stranger to labor. Hard work will never betray you had always been another of Captain Worth’s favorite little sayings, and even without that prod she would still have been industrious at Greenwich. She had needed to be, to keep up with the coursework, and there had been little enough in the way of social distraction to fill up her scant free time. Of course, the day’s efforts were only part of what Pott had in store. Each morning, after breakfast, he confronted the midshipmen with a battery of questions, an hour-long in-depth oral examination on some aspect of the ship’s functioning covering anything from the stress tolerances on the deep-space drives to the interstellar communication system to the sewage disposal process. Worth found herself immersed each night in technical manuals, sitting in the mess with Hall for hours at a time, a pot of coffee steaming between them, as they quizzed one another on topics Pott had hinted he might cover the next morning.
She spent so much time with Hall, seizing mealtimes and after hours to study, that it was widely assumed among the crew that they were a romantic item, though described in far less polite terms. The ables had taken to calling them Rita and Nex, after a popular kidvid. It wasn’t endearing, or a compliment. In the series, Rita was a young, vaguely feline, overtly sexual space explorer and Nex was the idiotic sidekick who drooled after her throughout the galaxy. Worth tried to ignore the jibes, pretending not to hear them. Keep your head down, keep working, she told herself. If they see that it doesn’t bother you, they’ll stop.
The regimen, and the juvenile taunts, were exhausting, especially in those first days on board, and Worth all but forgot about Friday night until Friday night came.
****
It would be good to be back in space.
Commander William Pearce sat in the center chair on the quarterdeck, imagining the day soon to come, when distant stars would slip past on the viewscreen, a concert of white waves. He had sat in the chair many times on duty in the Drake, but that had been Baker’s ship. Even limping home from Cygnus, under the command of a stunned Jasper Clark, it had been Baker’s ship, her ghost looming everywhere, especially the quarterdeck. Now, the Harvest was his ship.
Britannia had been his, too, but there was a parsec of difference between a private commercial ship and one flying the colors of His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Ugly and unlovable as she may be, the Harvest was his ship, and not only by virtue of his commission. In the month following the dinner at Lord Banks’ house, Pearce had virtually lived on board, only leaving for brief, infrequent visits home. There had been more refit work to do than time to do it in. Harvest came to him with a long history as a tender vessel, supplying materiel to the Kingdom’s military exploits in the Parnham cluste
r, and she showed both her age and hard use. She really could benefit from a complete overhaul, but there wasn’t that kind of time. So they had done the best they could do, and he had ordered the Royal Navy’s motto displayed prominently on the quarterdeck: Per Ardua Ad Astra – Through Adversity to the Stars. More than once he had thought the motto of the King’s Own Tactical Wing, the personal pilots to the Royal Family, might be more appropriate: Per Diem, Per Noctum – By Day and By Night. Pearce had scarcely slept in weeks.
He had not been alone, at least. Upon assuming command of the Harvest, Pearce had met Lieutenant John Pott, the man assigned by the Admiralty to serve as his third-in command. He had not known him then, except by vague reputation, but in the days since, he had gotten to know the garrulous officer better, and to like him better. Pott proved competent and experienced, seeming to share many of Pearce’s opinions about the management of a starship, and he steadily became the captain’s strong right hand in the long struggle to get the Harvest ready for the stars. He was a Navy lifer, one who had spent a long time as a midshipman before advancing to Lieutenant, and who had been a Lieutenant now for almost as long. The service was full of these sorts of officers, men and women without powerful friends or family name, who would never advance to that first epaulette and were destined to eventually serve under commanding officers younger than they were. Pearce was not without sympathy. It was what his career would have resembled, had he stayed in the service. It was only this one purest chance that catapulted him into the center chair.
It was a chance he did not intend to squander.
So, they had worked through the weeks, bullying the tired old ship into a semblance of health. The gravity sails had to be completely replaced, tattered and useless as they were. When fully deployed, the sails covered more than 250,000 square kilometers, more than the entire surface area of the old British Isles, and yet none of it was more than ten centimeters thick. A polymer of crystalline aluminum, it contained over five hundred trillion microscopic absorbent particles that soaked up gravitic energy and conducted it along a network of slender conduits to the masts, and thence to the main drives. It had been a triumphant technology when first unveiled decades before, reliable for deep-space travel, able to manipulate the gravity fields between star systems to propel the craft faster than light. The problem with the sails was their complexity and internal systemic reliance. If one segment failed or sustained damage, the entire network could break down. And with the size of the sails, it was not unlikely for them to frequently encounter debris in space – asteroids, small comets – that could cause damage. Consequently, a great deal of time was spent on maintenance and repairs during long voyages.That, and gravity, posed some of the greatest challenges.
While everywhere in the cosmos, gravity was not everywhere in equal strength. Pockets existed of near-zero-grav, whole empty parsecs all but devoid of the pull of faraway stars, where a ship reliant on gravity drives could be becalmed. Many of these were marked on the star-charts, especially on the more travelled tracks Pearce intended to use, but the galaxy had a way of changing, of making fools of even the most painstaking star-mariners.
In the case of the sails, Lord Exeter was as good as his word, and somehow the Admiralty found new sheets for the Harvest, as well as top-line conversion engines to replace the aging ones already on board. The gathering of a crew was less simple. Pott was a godsend, and Peckover, the boatswain, came highly recommended. Pearce also managed to recruit Arash el-Barzin, the crewman who had saved his life on Cygnus all those years before, as well as another seasoned jack, Gordan Rowland. The midshipmen, Worth and Hall, straight out of Greenwich, were young and untried, but willing. Beyond that, the ranks of petty officers and able starmen were filled from the shore roster, and though most seemed competent enough, too many were discipline cases left behind by captains with the time and seniority to be more selective.
We’re saving the world, Pearce thought as he repeatedly exercised a crew of grumpy starmen too slow in setting and furling the shrouds. And we’re doing it with the dregs of the service. “Again,” he shouted, ignoring the dark looks from the sweaty ables. “Faster!”
“Come on, lads,” cried el-Barzin. “Captain wants it under five minutes, he gets it under five minutes!”
“The sheets deploy automatic-like,” growled Isaac Pratt, monstrous in both size and temperament, leaning on the long steel-shafted mast. “Why break us on it when they can do it just as easy with a button, from up top?”
“Shut your mouth, Pratt,” yelled Rowland from a few feet away.
“You going to shut it for me?” Pratt asked. “Not alone, you ain’t.”
“You think I’m the only one here wants it shut?” Rowland retorted, and several of the other ables laughed, though not the ones nearest Pratt. Rowland was funny, and the others liked him, but most of them were less amused by him than afraid of Pratt.
“Enough,” bellowed Pearce. “You think this is mindless exercise? You think I would do this for no reason?” The captain moved closer to Pratt. He was easily a third of a meter shorter than the crewman, but he walked straight at him, his jaw working side to side in a building rage. Pearce was no stranger to the sometime brutality of the belowdecks. As a young midshipman, he had messed with the ables, and knew that there were fine men and women among them in mixture with thugs and bullies. Pearce himself was not gently born, but there were degrees of common, and Pratt was the commonest creature he had yet encountered. Savage, cruel, brimming with some rage that he nursed with twisted pride.
“Yes, the sails deploy automatically,” he went on. “Unless the systems fail. Unless something breaks or jams or catches. And if, during this voyage, our lives ever depend on getting those sails in or out fast, without the help of the computer, I’ll be damned if I die out there because your lazy ass isn’t up to it!” He was yelling now, scant inches away from Pratt, his nose below the able’s chin, but the larger man still shrank back a bit from his commander. There was a pounding in Pearce’s head, a red throb between his temples. It was utterly quiet in the sailroom, every eye locked on the captain and Pratt.
They don’t know the stakes, Pearce thought. And most of them are too dumb to understand even if they did know. He knew he had been right to dress down Pratt, but now he needed to reel it back in. Chastisement and praise, a captain’s tools for a working ship.
“Come on, then,” he said, in as close to a normal voice as he could manage. “Strong lad like you, afraid of a little sweat? Show these boys how you heave. Get it under five minutes twice in a row and there’re extra drink rations in the galley tonight. Again!” A cheer went up from the crew, even Pratt, and Pearce silently hoped that he was effectively walking that thin line between martinet and patsy. A captain had to be strong and respected, even feared a little, but not hated. Nor could he be a friend and confidant. That was why he had recruited Christine Fletcher, with her magic touch. Not only was she a hell of a pilot and a resourceful flight engineer, she was to be his go-between, his conduit to the hearts and minds of the crew. But where the hell was she? The Harvest was due to sail in less than a week, and she hadn’t yet reported. She will, he thought. She has to.
****
She had ridden these ferries countless times, and never thought much of it. A quick adjustment to her neuro-mix, and she would barely notice the long minutes slipping past. This time, the mélange of images and sounds tailored to the unique pleasure centers in her brain failed to entertain, sedate, or even distract her. For the first time she could recall in her young life, Christine Fletcher was nervous. Even in her days as a sprinter, the jitters at the starting line had been thrilling, not frightening.
Not nervous, excited, she tried to convince herself, without much success. Face against the thick viewplate in the elderly shuttle’s hull, she tried to catch a glimpse of the docked Harvest, but the angle of approach was wrong, and all she could see through the tiny rectangular window was the bulky infrastructure of the Spithead y
ards, and stars beyond. It hardly mattered that she couldn’t see the ship. Bill had told her it was very like their old Britannia, so she could readily imagine it, fat and jolly and comfortable.
Not Bill, she chided herself. Captain Pearce. Though she had called him that for years during their commercial voyages, there was something different and peculiar in the word now. It wasn’t even his formal title; he was a commander, a step below a full post-captain, but while in command of one of His Majesty’s ships, he warranted the honorific of Captain. The uniform she wore, seemingly designed for maximum discomfort, was strange, too. The white shirt was crisp and stiff and itched, and the blue jacket hung heavy and hot, with a collar so high it scratched her neck. The yellow Lieutenant’s stripes on the sleeves stared at her, reminding her of the choice she’d made, and even now, after weeks of indecision, she couldn’t say whether she had made it out of loyalty, friendship, curiosity, or boredom.
After an interminable wait, the ferry finally docked at the orbital station, and Fletcher gathered up her shoulder duffel and officer’s hat. Naval tradition had long ago settled that starships were indoors and hats were not to be worn, and orbital platforms and dockyards were likewise to be considered indoors for protocol purposes. Fletcher was grateful. When she wore it, she felt like nothing so much as a little girl playing at dress-up, or a partygoer at a masquerade.
This was a side of Spithead Fletcher didn’t know. Merchant traffic came and went on the other side of the dockyards, Piers 21 through 40. The corridors followed the same rough layout over here, though it was hard not to notice that some doors were closed and obviously secured, emblazoned with red security warnings. As men and women in gray worksuits passed by, they touched their foreheads in a deferential salute.
I outrank them, she realized. Half their lives in the Royal Navy, some of them, and she was their superior officer even as she took her first steps into their world. It wasn’t that she was unaccustomed to superiority; she had grown up as a child of nobility. A lower rung of nobility, to be sure, her grandfather’s baronetcy a far cry from an earl like Banks or a duke, yet even a middling aristocrat might as well be a god to any commoner. But she had been raised to treat everyone, if not as equals, at least as human beings. She knew plenty of others who didn’t share that sentiment, neighbors and relatives and friends of the family who regarded the teeming commons as either unthinking and unfeeling automata to be ignored, or else wild, unrestrained animals to be avoided.
