Nimisha's Ship

by Anne McCaffrey

  She could hear something he wasn’t saying. “And . . .” she prompted him.

  He wiggled his long legs and squirmed.

  “They came along to be sure your daughter and body-heir was properly instructed during the long journey.”

  “Oh!” Nimisha smiled proudly over that achievement before regarding Jon again with some suspicion. “I could understand her wanting to accompany a mission with the goal of rescuing me, but how did they talk my dam into letting Cuiva go on a four-year-long trip?”

  “I didn’t think we’d fool you for long. According to Escorias, Lord Vestrin was trying to get possession of the Yard because you were lost, presumed dead.”

  “The pulse that was received should have dismissed that notion.”

  “I’m sure it did. The Five B carries mail for you, and there’s a rather large lockbox of letter packets awaiting your pleasure. Your mother used your family’s private code, so you should have no trouble opening it. Mail could only be slipped in, not removed.”

  “I still do not understand why my dam would allow Cuiva to take such a long journey. And you know why.” She gave his jaw a mock-punch.

  “Granted Escorias has friends in the First Family circles, so possibly his gossip is accurate. Certainly the fact that Cuiva was sent along substantiates it.”

  “Substantiates what? Tell me, Jon. It’s my right to know.” She felt anger surging within her. She didn’t want to be angry with Jonagren Svangel.

  “There were two very clumsy attempts to harm Cuiva.” His arms tightened to keep her from rearing up in outrage. “They failed because your friend Caleb had the sense to double surveillance as soon as the Mayday was received. Lord Vestrin had been loud in his complaints about how his father’s estate had been divvied up.”

  “More like Lady Vescuya disliked it,” Nimisha murmured angrily.

  “Her possible connivance was definitely rumored. Then there was the derelict freighter full of explosives approaching the Yard on a trajectory to crash into the Five B’s gantry!”

  “What!”

  “Ssssh, you’ll wake someone. The spare cabins have station personnel in them.” He waited until Nimisha relaxed. “By then the Fleet and the Yard had tripled security, so the missiles took out its engines and a tug netted it tightly before the explosives on it could detonate. That would have caused a real mess, flicking fragments all over. Both Fleet and APG were investigating all possible leads. Two other devices were discovered before they could be activated.”

  “And naturally Lord Vestrin was on a hunting party,” Nimisha muttered sourly, “and who knows what that virago of a mother of his came up with as an excuse.”

  “Precisely, so your dam sent Cuiva to safety.”

  “But, if she’s away from Rondymense . . .”

  “I think your dam solved that in her devious fashion. We know that Cuiva is on her way here, but a Cuiva has been seen in company of Lady Rezalla. At least until she should have been Necklaced.”

  Nimisha felt tears of relief and joy trickle down her cheeks. “I’m a leaky ula-ooli-la,” she said, burrowing her face into Jon’s bare shoulder.

  She could feel his chest shake with the chuckle. “My dear sweetheart, you are never a ula-ooli-la. Not that there is a Basic synonym for that particular Sh’im device.”

  He stroked her hair and very shortly, warm and infinitely relieved with that especial news, she slept again.

  When she finally met Captain Nesta Meterios three days later, Nimisha found it even more difficult than Jon to like the woman. She had had occasion to know many career Navy officers from the Yard’s proximity to the Vegan Fleet Headquarters. There were some, competent within their specialties, who were worthy folk and about as much fun to be around as a wet towel. They also never seemed to notice their lack of social graces, or even that they lacked the wit and competence that would put them in line for rapid promotion. Meterios was from a service family with several relatives who had had distinguished careers. Quite likely, her performance during the wormhole passage would receive a commendation. That was only because, as Jon said, the preprogrammed AI had kicked in with its femtosecond reflexes, removing Meterios from command—and from making any fatal error. Escorias did mention that the crew was certain that the Helm had saved all on board the Acclarke as well as Meterios’s butt.

  Jon and Doc had kept Nimisha quiet and in bed until they, and she, were certain her strength was sufficient.

  “I’ll warn you, hon, she thinks a Necklaced First Family female ought to restrict herself to a body-heir, end of sentence,” Jon told her, his eyes twinkling with amusement. “She’s hot on rules and regs, and is uptight because we donated a lot of what we stripped from the Poolbeg to the Sh’im. Gave me the old ‘misuse of naval property’ line until Syrona showed her that their home is furnished entirely by recycled ‘Navy property.’ Recycling is also very Nav. Frankly, Erehwon is beyond her. You destroyed her faith in you by having five children here and a grown one on her way. I can’t imagine why someone with her basic inflexibility was given command of the Acclarke.”

  “I can,” Syrona said later when she was visiting Nimisha. “I did my first tour under her uncle, Captain Georgius Meterios, and he was no joy either. He never got command of anything more than a light destroyer, usually assigned to convoy duty.”

  “Then posting her to the Acclarke is damned near an insult,” Jon said, irritated.

  “I’d consider it one,” Casper said with a snort. “Except that, with Helm to take over the moment an emergency occurred, she couldn’t mess up with indecision, could she? Dr. Qualta said that no astronomer or astrographer expected the bloody wormhole to reappear any time short of another ten years.”

  “So she was shunted to a minimal command like Uncle Georgius?” Nimisha gave a sniff, not sure she liked the implications. “Guess she got the biggest surprise of her life.”

  “And had nothing to do anyway,” Jon said with a snide grin. “Helm was programmed to take over the instant the wormhole opened.”

  “Oh, yes, so it was.” And Nimisha felt less like a lost parcel no one really wanted to find.

  “So it didn’t matter to the result of the rescue if she, or someone more ambitious and capable, was captain.”

  “Globan says most of his friends applied for the duty in the hope that they’d be lucky enough to be there when the hole opened. Pay was good and the tour short enough so no one died of boredom,” Casper added.

  “Boredom wouldn’t bother a Meterios,” Syrona said, giggling. “They thrive on it.”

  When Jon and Syrona escorted Captain Meterios for an official visit to Lady Nimisha Boynton-Rondymense, Nimisha took instant refuge by imitating her dam, deftly putting the captain in her place. The others had a difficult time restraining their amusement. Meterios was properly obsequious, appropriately apologetic for bothering a First Family scion, and during the refreshments offered, she sat bolt upright on the very edge of the chair as if she were still a first-year cadet. Syrona bustled about fussily as if this were her normal way of attending Lady Nimisha and only once lapsed into a less formal manner. Jon did his rendition of admiral-on-the-bridge, punctilious in his crisply pressed dress uniform, another of the items that had been brought back when the Poolbeg was stripped of any useful items and equipment.

  No matter what Captain Meterios privately thought of Nimisha’s fecundity, no mention was made of it. In fact, conversation flagged very quickly until Nimisha decided to fade away, pretending exhaustion. Meterios flushed unattractively at this tacit reference to her maternity. So the captain, bowing far more respectfully than Lady Nimisha’s rank required, finished her formal visit and that was, fortunately, the end of any social intercourse with her. And Nimisha returned to the task of reading five years of accumulated reports from her dam and from Jeska Mlan in her role as managing director, as well as notifications from Admiral Gollanch and other general notes that had been forwarded. One note from Lady Rezalla mentioned sending on the Necklace so that
Nimisha could officiate at that ceremony.

  “For the benefit of those who might think it odd if we didn’t do something on Cuiva’s minor major day, we shall conduct a very private affair, complete with a paste imitation of Coskanito’s Necklace. He is so discreet and understands the necessity for safety’s sake. No one has realized that it is not Cuiva living here with us. The child is a nice little thing and, although I have had to reprimand her several times for conduct unbecoming even her supposed place in our society, she does resemble your body-heir sufficiently to fool almost everyone. Certainly my dam is deluded. But then, Lady Astatine is half blind and almost completely deaf. Her rejuv treatment was one of the first, and she really ought to have waited until the procedure was thoroughly tested. But your grandam never took advice from anyone.” Nimisha chuckled over that remark.

  Nimisha had wondered how her dam had dealt with such an auspicious day as Necklacing in First Family society, but Lady Rezalla had contrived admirably. Since Nimisha was definitely alive and able to send pulses back to Vega III, and her body-heir was residing in Acclarke, any spurious claim by Lord Vestrin Rondymense-Waleska to reclaim the disputed patrimony would be disregarded.

  Once Nimisha was genuinely physically fit enough to attend to such delayed tasks as erecting a new hoist for the iron mine in the hills above the town, and a second lift for the copper mine deeper in the eastern mountain range, she limited her encounters with the Acclarke’s captain to the minimum. Especially after she witnessed Meterios’s totally egregious attitude toward their alien allies.

  “She’s a xenophobe,” Nimisha said, voicing an opinion shared by everyone else. “One of those Humanity Supremacists, though the fact that she attained a commander’s stripes proves that there are gaps in the screening, Jon.”

  He agreed. “But then, while she was capable enough to command a ship with an AI program, aliens were not an obstacle she was likely to encounter.”

  The Sh’im would not understand a person disliking them because they were not human. Especially after they had been treated on such an equal footing with the ones they had already encountered—after the initial and short-lived misunderstanding. Before Meterios’s xenophobia was revealed, Ay and Bee—who had the best command of Basic, assisted though it was by the translator units they wore—had been assigned to guide the captain anywhere she wished to go. She didn’t wish to go anywhere after her first visit to Clifftown—La-ull-losss, in Sh’im. She said she hadn’t understood a word of the gabble she’d been subjected to. Unfortunately she saw enough of Clifftown to notice bits and pieces of recycled metal parts that could only have come from the wreck of the Poolbeg. She logged in a long and detailed report of such illegal use; Globan heard part of it and crept away. But since she had encrypted it, there was no way the entry could be altered, and she had forwarded it by pulse message. Eventually it would reach Vegan Fleet Headquarters, where it might be totally disregarded.

  “Let it stand,” Jon said, shrugging. “I doubt I’ll ever stand a court-martial over it. For that matter, I’ve racked up so much back pay, I could pay for twice as much as we recycled.”

  When Meterios did, reluctantly, have to venture outside, she had an armed escort. Whichever crewperson had that duty was patently unhappy about it. No one else of either her crew or the wormbusters was troubled with xenophobia. Some might not give the Sh’im as much credit for the intelligence they continued to display as others, but most took to them and their ingratiating ways.

  “On the one hand, xenophobia wouldn’t affect her commanding a ship,” Casper said, still the optimist. “It isn’t as if she’d be likely to encounter aliens on picket duty. Since we were FSP Explorers’ branch, we had very in-depth screening on attitudes toward ‘others.’ ” He bracketed the word with his index fingers. “How would anyone suspect she’d get her knickers in a twist meeting such amiable and kindly folk as the Sh’im?”

  The scientists, whatever had been their specialty, were quite willing to muck in with the Sh’im, learning as much as they could from the dark-coats and noticing how tools had been adapted for their three-fingered use. They had suggestions of their own to increase manageability for some tools. In her dash to her assigned escape pod, Dr. Qualta’s assistant, Valina Kelly, had grabbed two small telescopes, the most portable of the equipment to hand. She’d strapped them into the second shock pad in her pod. Dr. Qualta owed her injuries to the fact that she had been trying to secure her data disks and her scanner rather than herself. Being tightly netted in, the equipment had suffered no damage at all while she had nearly died of her injuries.

  Qualta, Globan, and Kelly, with the enthusiastic assistance of fascinated Sh’im, set up an observatory on the far side of the cliff above the town, in an area still protected by the repeller shields. They were busy mapping and evaluating the visible stars every evening, with the help of five ululating dark-coats.

  “Had we had more warning,” Dr. Qualta said, “we’d’ve brought along the sort of equipment to do an in-depth spectral analysis of such unexplored territory.”

  “Lordee, Qualta,” Valina replied, “we were lucky to escape with our lives. I couldn’t find even a small microscope, or the main computer. We’re lucky we can read what disks we managed to scoop up,” she added. “I’m very glad we could pilfer astrogation equipment from the Poolbeg.”

  “That’s not enough,” Qualta said scornfully. “That system is so obsolete we’re better off using what we managed to save. But,” she added with a sigh, “it’s better than nothing. Is Globan absolutely sure that there’s nothing left of the space station that could be salvaged? The Sh’im are such clever metalworkers.”

  She had admired the mining operations and the repeller-protected farm crops—which she sampled, raw and cooked—and watched with keen interest when young Sh’im started training boks. Luthen Drayus and Tezza Ashke of the Acclarke, her radial completely knitted, happily accompanied hunts with Casper, Tim, and his Sh’im cronies.

  About the only thing Meterios did right was use the Acclarke’s missiles during an avian raid. It had the fringe benefit of scaring the captain out of much of her disgruntlement with the unauthorized use of Poolbeg weaponry. She had been standing outside when the raid began and the sight of the immense raptors had sent her scurrying inside the Acclarke. She had the gall to boast that she had saved the settlement.

  Globan had another side to relate with a grin. “I took the liberty of programming defensive action into Helm after you told me what those avian monsters could do,” he said. “So it was Helm who bagged the nineteen beasts in that raid, not Nesta Meterios.”

  “It’s probably too much to ask that she’ll start believing us when we tell her other minor victories,” Jon said with a weary sigh. He’d suspected as much from the excellent marksmanship the Acclarke had displayed in destroying so many of the attackers—though he and Nimisha had accounted for almost as many, and the Sh’im manning the cliff batteries had taken out those that had come in too low for the ships’ guns to bear on.

  Globan grimaced. “I don’t think she realized just how much the AI can do without her direct commands. I think we should keep it that way.”

  “Wasn’t she briefed on its capabilities?” Nimisha asked with justifiable rancor. “I mean, even if I didn’t consider the Four up to my expectations, she makes a grand courier ship as she is.”

  “I did study the specs, Nimisha,” Globan said. “Gave me something to do on my tours. Not all the captains assigned to the Acclarke have been as narrow-minded as Captain Meterios,” he added to cheer Nimisha.

  “That’s reassuring,” she replied.

  “How often do those attacks happen?” Globan asked casually.

  “I’m sorry to say, less often, Globan,” Jon said, rightly assuming the young officer would have liked to man the Acclarke’s gunner station. “But they do come in more numbers as if they could overpower us with sheer mass, so you may still get a chance.”

  “One more thing, Jon: I think she’s trying
to turn Helm down. I saw her under the main control board, but I don’t think she saw me. She’s a control freak, you know.”

  “Control freak or not,” Nimisha said with some heat, “she can’t dismantle Helm without losing all control of ship function. Stupid git of a woman. However, I can fix that.” She rubbed her hands together with anticipation. “Just get her out of the Four for half an hour so I can add a certain little chip and she can fiddle with the program as much as she likes but she won’t disconnect him. D’you remember where I put my tools, Jon?” she asked.

  “I stashed them in the garage locker under your private code.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Of course, the problem will be getting her out of the Acclarke,” Globan said, not at all optimistic.

  The addition of ‘a certain little chip’ was accomplished just before Captain Meterios took it in her head that Svangel had exceeded his authority in allowing the Poolbeg to be dismantled for the benefit of the Sh’im. Or “them,” as she insisted on referring to the Sh’im, a habit that irritated even the equably tempered Dr. Qualta.

  “They have a name for themselves, Captain,” Dr. Qualta said, “and you will be good enough to use it. Sh’im. Sh’im. Sh’im. Very easy to say. Very nice folks when you get to know them.”

  Meterios was visibly shocked at such vehemence from Dr. Qualta and kept out of her way. Since she was already avoiding Lady Nimisha whenever possible, Qualta and Nimisha had some relief from the woman’s company.

  Jon, Casper, and Syrona were not as lucky, since they were, after all, naval officers. Jon cited his seniority in both command and length of service and was punctilious in all his dealings with her. Casper and Syrona were not as lucky, but fell back on the fact that they were Jon’s crew, not hers.

  With calculated reluctance, Jon finally gave permission for her to visit the hulk of the Poolbeg.

  “Once she sees the gouges in the hull, she should be able to realize that the ship could never have been repaired this side of the main Mars Yard,” Jon said.