"Paul, the Mike 's my first ship. I've spent three years dedicated to that demanding bitch, three years of almost constantly being aboard, three years of seeing her bulkheads and passageways and learning every little quirk of her equipment. Three years working with people like you, sharing our life on her twenty four hours a day for months on end sometimes. I can't just walk away from that. Ever."
Jen nodded, her face solemn. "She's in your blood, Carl. You'll never shake her, or the space she sails in."
Carl eyed her skeptically. "How'd you get so wise about this?"
"I've watched my dad go from ship to ship. The one he usually tells stories about is the first. And I split-toured to the Maury, so I felt the same thing already."
"Great." Carl drained his drink. "It's like some curse that's going to follow me the rest of my life. If I have to have a woman haunting my dreams, why'd she have to be the Merry Mike?"
"Hey, first kiss, first love, first ship. Sailors don't forget them, no matter how old they get."
Carl sighed, watching some ensigns a few tables over laugh among themselves. "Do you guys ever listen to old music? The classics? I was skimming the ship's library and I heard this really ancient song where this young guy was singing about how he hoped he'd die before he got old."
"Sounds inspiring."
"Yeah, really uplifting. But I don't think it was really about aging. It was about getting old inside. Do you ever worry that someday you'll wake and find out you've become a senior officer?"
Paul smiled quizzically. "I thought we all wanted to be promoted."
"I'm not talking about being promoted. I'm talking about becoming a senior officer."
"Oh. You mean one of those guys whose civilian clothes are twenty or thirty years out of date, and gets real nervous every time they have to leave a ship or a base and actually interact with people who aren't also senior officers?"
"Yeah. You know the type."
Jen shrugged. "I don't see it happening to me."
"I guess not. You're more likely to turn into another Herdez."
"Bite your tongue. What do you think you'll turn into, Carl?"
"Oh, I know what I'll turn into, assuming I get promoted that far. When I grow up I wanna be Commander Sykes. How about you, Paul? Who do you wanna be?"
"I don't know. I guess I haven't thought about it all that much." He looked over at Jen. "I guess it won't matter as long as Jen's with me."
Jen rolled her eyes. "Oh, barf."
Carl nodded. "My sentiments exactly. Remember the good old days? About a year ago? Cruising the bars for chicks — "
Jen's eyebrows shot up. "I don't recall cruising for chicks."
"Or studs, as the case may be. Playing darts and drinking beer until the sun came up — "
"The sun's always up in this orbital location."
"Then staggering back to the ship to get screamed at by our department heads while Commander Herdez plotted to get a standard day expanded to twenty-five hours so we could work that much longer. Ah, the good old days. Now, you two are practically domesticated. I bet Jen's starting to cook and knit and stuff."
"You lose. I get drinks sometimes, and I punch buttons on a microwave if we're at a self-service place."
Paul nodded. "But she does both of those real well. I always said there's nothing like a home-microwaved meal."
Jen eyed Paul suspiciously. "The ice you're skating on is getting thinner every moment. If you wanted to marry a cook, you had plenty of other choices."
Paul laughed. "I guess, but… did you say marry?"
Carl looked toward Jen. "I heard the word 'marry.'"
Jen shook her head. "Not from me, you didn't."
"Did the other Jen Shen say it?"
"No, and neither did this one. You're both victims of wishful thinking."
"I don't want to marry you. Paul does."
"I do?"
Jen glared at him. "You don't?"
"I didn't say that."
Carl laughed. "Okay. So far Jen and Paul have both not said they want to get married. Anybody else want to not say it?" He stopped laughing when he noticed their discomfort. "Hey, lighten up, you two. Somebody's tongue slipped. Big deal."
Paul looked back sourly. "This from the guy who's worried about being haunted by the Michaelson."
"Exactly. And I have a really snappy comeback to that. I just can't think of it at the moment." Carl glanced at his empty drink. "Well, there's the problem. Excuse me while I take on more fuel." He stood up, wobbled slightly, then grimaced with discomfort. "Maybe I ought to pump bilges, too. Pardon me while I use the head." Carl set off on a slightly weaving course toward the bar's restrooms.
Jen tapped Paul's hand. "Let's go talk."
"Jen, I didn't mean — "
"I know. But I need to walk around a bit, and I could use a break from the noise in here."
They left the bar, strolling out onto the wide passageway which served as the station's main street. It was late enough now that few people were about and all the benches along the walkway were empty. Paul and Jen picked one out of line of sight of the bar entrance, then sat silently for a little while.
"Are you okay?" Paul finally asked.
"Uh huh." She leaned against him, her head resting on his shoulder. "I'm going to miss Carl."
"Me, too. It's like you said. We'll always be tied to the Michaelson, but we'll really be tied to our Michaelson, with the people we knew and the places we went. Ten years from now, I'm sure if I visited her I'd feel like a stranger."
"You can't go home again. Who said that?"
"I don't remember." They were quiet again for a while. Paul felt Jen leaning against him, realizing how good it felt, not simply to be touching her but to be part of her life. What the hell am I waiting for? Do I really think anything else even half this good will ever come along for me? "Uh, Jen?"
"What?"
" Will you marry me?"
She raised her head from his shoulder, then turned slowly, eyeing him. "Just how drunk are you?"
"Not all that much. I mean it."
"Sure you do."
"Dammit, Jen — "
"Okay, okay. You mean it. And I'm just drunk enough to consider saying 'yes.'"
"Really?"
"I said 'consider,' Paul." Jen buried her face in her hands. "Aw, hell. It's not supposed to be like this. I'm sorry. But why now, Paul?"
"I've been thinking about it. Haven't you?"
"Of course I have. But my ship's heading out for three months underway in a few days. I'm not sure this is a good time. I'm not sure we wouldn't be rushing into something because we were afraid instead of because we were happy."
Paul took her shoulders so he could look straight into her eyes. "Jen, I know I want to be with you. The only thing I'm afraid of is losing you, of not knowing you'll be there, with me, always."
"That's what you say now. What about in five years or so, when we're maybe stationed on opposite ends of the solar system, so far apart we can't even carry on a conversation because of light-speed lag? When you're surrounded by sweet young ladies with sugary dispositions whose idea of heaven would be to spend the rest of their living days gazing adoringly at you? Are you still going to think abrasive, outspoken Jen Shen is the end-all and be-all at that point?"
"Jen, if I wanted a sweet young lady with a sugary disposition, I wouldn't have been attracted to you from the start." Jen tried to glower but ended up smiling. "We were friends long before we got serious, remember?"
"You were just desperate. You'd have been friends with a spiny-backed lobster if it'd been willing to spend time listening to you."
"Maybe, but you're nicer to look at than any spiny-backed lobster would have been."
"Not by much."
"Jen, you're beautiful."
"You're so delusional." Jen shook her head, looking away. "Paul, things have been going pretty well between us. But this isn't exactly a normal life. We see each other for brief stretches when both of our ships ha
ppen to be in port, and we always have stuff to talk about because we're living the same lives as crewmembers on warships. What about once that's over? When we've both got different jobs?"
Paul spread his hands. "Jen, I really think we'll always have plenty to talk about."
"And what if spending lots of time together makes us crazy? What if after six months of being there for each other every day we're ready to choke each other?"
"The only way we'll know the answer to that is to try. Maybe we will need extra space for ourselves, but that's not hard."
"Not hard? Have you seen the size of married living quarters on this station? We'll be bumping into each other every time we turn around."
"I like bumping into you."
"Stop it! We really need to think about this, Paul. Need to think about whether there's more to you and me together than just lust and someone convenient to talk to. Don't say it. I know some people get married for those reasons. I won't. I'd rather you left me than stay with me just because you were afraid you'd never find anyone else to share a bed with you."
Paul shook his head. "That's not what I'm thinking, and I hope you aren't, either. What are you saying? That you're not happy? That if your ship gets back and I'm not waiting on the pier, and instead you get a note from me saying that I've found someone else and it's over between us, that you'd be fine with that, Jen?"
"No, I wouldn't be fine with that. I love you. So I'd hunt you down and rip your lungs out. But wouldn't you prefer getting that kind of treatment from an ex-girlfriend instead of an ex-fiancee?"
"I'll have think about that."
"You've got three months to think about it. And so do I."
Paul felt his jaw tightening as he stared at the deck. "This wasn't how I expected things to happen, either."
"You mean just now or in general? I'm sorry, Paul. I know you're this big-time romantic who deep-down believes in true love and dreams of happily-ever-afters, but that doesn't really happen. You haven't got Cinderella. You've got me."
"I'm not exactly Prince Charming, either."
"No, but you'll do." Jen giggled as Paul gave her a sour look. "Sorry. And I do love you for who you are. Really. But tell me something honestly. If you're afraid to wait three months for an answer, or maybe longer, doesn't that mean you're really not all that sure of things? What's the rush?"
"We've been dating for about a year, now."
"Not in real time, Paul. Add up the times my ship's been out and your ship's been out or we've been on duty and couldn't see each other and you probably have only a couple of months of actually being together."
"Jen, I don't want to lose you."
"No, you don't want to risk losing me. Right?" She came close to him, looking straight into his eyes. "Be the guy I fell for and I won't go anywhere. Okay, I'll go wherever my ship goes, but I'll always come back."
"So will I."
"Then what's the problem? Don't answer. I know. We're both not absolutely sure if that's always going to be true. Probably we never will be. But this isn't a decision I have to make tonight. That's Jen speaking, not Cinderella. If you love me, you'll respect my reasons."
"How could I respect and love you and not respect your reasons?" Paul threw up his hands. "Very well, Lieutenant Shen. I will stand-by for further instructions."
"You will not. You will live and think and take time to decide something important to both of us. Just like me. Problem?"
"No problem." He kissed her, the gesture lingering. "What have I gotten myself into?"
"You knew who I was when you volunteered for this relationship, sailor. Come on. Let's get back inside before somebody notices we're both missing and thinks we're, like, involved or something."
They went back inside Fogarty's and had a few more drinks. Then Carl got maudlin again and they all had a few more drinks. Then Carl cheered up and they all had a few more drinks. Eventually, closing time came around, Fogarty's staff threw them out, and the ragged remnants of Carl Meadows' farewell party staggered back to the Michaelson, pausing only to drop Jen off at the quarterdeck of the Maury.
The next morning, the strung-out survivors of the farewell discovered to their horror that a no-notice "fast cruise" had been scheduled so that Captain Hayes could evaluate how well the crew handled a variety of situations. A fast cruise involved pretending the ship was underway instead of actually getting underway, but otherwise involved plenty of stress, plenty of demanding work, and plenty of alarms sounding to simulate emergencies.
Paul, like the other members of the farewell, was still sobering up when the emergency drills began. His hangover building rapidly, Paul gripped his command console in the Combat Information Center so hard his hands turned white under the pressure as the strident clamor of the general quarters alarm pounded repeatedly into his brain. He imagined his face looked just as pale as his hands at the moment. The alarm finally halted, replaced by an amplified voice booming details of the "emergency" they were to practice dealing with.
"Paul?" The voice over the comm circuit was a pained whisper.
"Yeah. Kris?"
"I think so. I'm in incredible pain."
"Me, too."
"I'm going to kill Carl."
"He didn't know they'd have all these drills today."
"I don't care. When I feel this bad, someone has to die. And I can't very well threaten to kill the captain."
"No. That always looks bad. How's Mike Bristol?"
"Last I saw, he was pretending to be alive. He wasn't too convincing, though."
"How about Carl?"
Her answer was forestalled by another urgent announcement. "This is a drill! All hands brace for collision!" A moment later, the piercing squeal of the collision alarm drove daggers into Paul's head. The alarm finally halted, leaving Paul staring cross-eyed at his console as a follow-on announcement heralded the next phase of the drill. "This is a drill. Collision has resulted in decompression of all compartments on 01 level. I say again, collision has resulted in decompression of all compartments on 01 level. All personnel on 01 level assessed dead from decompression. Damage control parties prepare to reenter 01 level and reestablish air-tight boundaries."
Paul glanced up as Chief Imari tossed aside her headset. "You heard the announcement, folks. We're all dead."
I'm dead? "Really?"
Chief Imari looked at Paul, failed to conceal her reaction at his appearance, then shook her head. "No, sir. It's just part of the drill."
"Okay."
"Do you need some aspirin, sir?"
"How many have you got?"
Paul and the rest of the sailors in CIC spent the next hour lying on the deck pretending to be dead as survival-suited investigators, and then damage control teams, picked their way across the compartment. An occasional snore testified to some of the sailors taking advantage of the opportunity. Chief Imari's aspirin slowly brought Paul's pain level down to a tolerable level, and he managed to catch a few minutes of sleep himself.
All good things, of course, come to an end. "All hands secure from collision drill. Stand by for next event."
Chief Imari stood, stretched and roared at the sailors sprawled around CIC. "You heard the word! On your feet, you useless gaggle of neutrons."
Paul replaced his own headset, then called up the chief on a private circuit. "Neutrons, Chief?"
"Yes, sir, Mr. Sinclair. Neutrons got practically no mass."
It took Paul's still-hungover brain a moment to get it. "They're lightweights."
"Yes, sir."
"Thanks for the aspirin. I notice they've run drills in engineering, weapons and damage control so far. I bet we're next."
"I wouldn't be surprised, sir."
General quarters sounded once more, the bongs somehow penetrating the calming aspirin to hammer at Paul's head again. "This is a drill! Multiple contacts inbound."
Paul's console lit up with close to a hundred unknown contact markers, each on a different path and each radiating different information w
hich had to be evaluated in order to guess at its identity. Oh, this is going to be ugly. "All right, everybody. I want a threat evaluation for all contacts based on current trajectories, then threat IDs for all contacts, then a threat hierarchy based on trajectory and probable ID. Don't depend on the targeting and tracking systems to get all that automatically. They're sure to have thrown in some curves that'll confuse the automated systems."
"You heard the lieutenant!" Chief Imari added, then she quickly divided up the tasks among the operations specialists.
The next fifteen minutes passed in a blur of activity. Paul tried to monitor everything his sailors were doing without trying to do their jobs for them. With all the information at his fingertips, it was entirely too easy to focus on the details of one small part of the job instead of keeping an eye on the big picture.
A majority of the contacts had been assigned identification when Operations Specialist Second Class Kaji called in. "Chief? I've got something funny here."
"Show me. Give the lieutenant a copy, too."
Paul frowned as his display focused on a small segment of the incoming contacts. "What's up, Kaji?"
"Sir, right here." Kaji highlighted an almost invisible contact. "It's very faint."
"What do you think, Chief?"
"I'd call it a system echo off the stronger contacts, sir. Except this is a simulation and they don't show echoes because the sims assume the systems work perfectly."
"Then what is it?"
Petty Officer Kaji spoke up. "It could be a warship, sir. With all masking systems operational."
Something clicked in Paul's memory. "It's a Pile On Maneuver."
Chief Imari sounded puzzled. "A what?"
"A Pile On Maneuver. It's a theoretical plan I got briefed on in one of my classes at the Academy. You shove a lot of debris toward your objective, then hide your own approach inside the apparently natural shower of space objects."
"Sir, how the hell would you get so much junk flying on the trajectories you need? That sounds cool in theory, but it doesn't sound very practical."
"That's why it's still a theoretical plan, Chief. But simulations don't have to worry about real-world practical considerations. I think Kaji's spotted the joker in this deck. Good job."
Burden of Proof ps-2 Page 8
