by Jim Rudnick
He figured that a great lunch might lead to something more.
"Nancy, I do have to go as I've a meeting soon—but can I ask? Would it be okay to ask you out for a dinner? And I promise to like the peanuts if they're served, and by then I will have the names of those vid stars so we can both dis them too?" he said, very matter-of-factly. No pressure. Just a simple query.
She looked at him for a moment, then a moment more, and finally she nodded.
"I'd love to have dinner with you, Mr. Research Associate, anytime you ask," she said.
He smiled widely and then laid a soft hand back on her forearm.
"Then how about tomorrow. I can come and get you in your quarters or we can meet down in the lobby near the walkway ... or whatever is easiest for you," he said and then waited.
She looked like she was weighing her options—and then smiled one more time.
"Please come by my quarters—nothing fancy for a lieutenant, but it is my own bachelorette apartment up on Deck F at F-144. See you then, say at 1900 hours—would that be okay?" and she laid a hand down on top of his.
He nodded and they both smiled. Date asked for and accepted.
What a day, he thought, as he took the escalator down to the lobby, splurged on a big drink from the Juice Bar, and made his way back to the left and into the long corridor to go back to the Research Labs. Even the thought that work was so boring with the process of changing into the full spacesuit, a quick jump, and losing the spacesuit just to get to work didn't bother him.
Not now. He smiled and gripped that casino chip even tighter in his pocket as he ambled away.
####
Trying to get comfortable in the chair in the outpatient clinic in the Psychiatric Ward, Tanner was shifting his weight every few minutes from one cheek to another when he felt a soft touch on his left shoulder.
He looked up and smiled.
"Lieutenant Irving—what a nice surprise! How are you?" he said and then he remembered her hearing might not be good, and he turned away from the robo-doc on his right to face her as best he could.
She came to attention, snapped him a salute, and then grinned at her captain.
"Sir, I can hear you fine ... partial new ears, compliments of the best Barony surgeon they have here," she said and her smile was a mile wide.
He remembered the injury to her ears over on Ghayth had been a result of the Ansible attack and the poor luck she had of being on that station at the time. The Ansible load of incoming data had blown right through the Atlas's Ansible system—as well as through Lieutenant Irving's eardrums. That had only been a couple of months ago, so the news that she had surgery and had been fixed up was good news, and Tanner grinned back at her.
"Good to know—but tell me, any issues with the new ears or hearing," he said.
She shook her head negatively. "Not in the least, Captain. They told me that the new inner eardrums and all were grown here in the—er—well, in the research lab they have that's sort of a secret. The replacement tissues work perfectly—and only a couple more procedures, but I can hear pretty good right now and that's great!" she said, and they both smiled widely.
She came around to the front and pointed down at the robo-doc with its clear glass front showing his bare right arm lying inside on the appendage bed. Lights inside were a dull red in color, and a green line was slowly expanding on his arm starting at his wrist; it had grown now to halfway up to his elbow. After almost an hour, the process of healing his broken ulna was about halfway done, and he was about fed up with sitting here doing nothing.
"Broken bone, Sir?" the lieutenant asked.
"Aye, Lieutenant, one of the two in my forearm. Once it's healed, I'll be fine."
"Will you be returning back down to the Atlas, Sir?" she asked, and he could tell by her tone that she had no idea as to why he was on the Hospital Ship.
He looked down at his shoes, the new running shoes he'd never worn before, and noticed that although they had been white just an hour ago or so, now there were a couple of scuffs on the left toe that showed a stain. "So much for clean around here," he mumbled to himself.
"Lieutenant, it's a long, long story, but I would like to let you know why I'm here to be honest. It's not a nice story, but I'll be here for a few months. Could we make a time and place and say get together then to talk?" he asked, keeping his voice flat in tone.
She nodded and said yes, and they quickly worked out a date for a mid-morning meet-up in the big cafeteria over in the middle of the ship.
They parted and he looked down to see if the green area had grown any more on his forearm, and he couldn't tell as the green healed section moved so slowly. Looking around, he was the only one here in the small robo-doc area this late in the day, but from his seat, he saw a couple of caregivers in white standing around one of the full body robo-doc units over in the far corner.
He wondered what that was all about, but he couldn't get up to go and see.
For another hour almost, he sat there and the chimes from the robo-doc caught him by surprise.
From around a corner in the clinic, a nurse came to his side. At least he thought she might be a nurse, but as they all wore white scrubs with only name tags that were too small to read, he didn't know for sure.
She put down her tablet on the side of the robo-doc and then looked at him.
She smiled down at him as she hit a few buttons on the control panel of the robo-doc, and he watched as the red lights and the now big green areas of light turned off and the top slid to the right to allow him to move his arm. He slowly lifted up his right arm, flexed his fingers, and was happy to discover there was no residual pain.
Everything seemed to be okay, he thought. My arm is fixed ... wonder if my brain could be fixed so easily. He shook his head since he knew the answer to that was negative.
The nurse noticed his head shake and looked at him.
"Still have pain, Captain?" she asked as she poised a finger over her tablet, which she'd just picked up.
"Sorry, not at all ... um ... nurse," he said and the question was there.
"You guessed correctly, Captain, yes, nurse is correct. Call me Nurse Sam—Samantha but everyone calls me just Sam. And good to hear that the arm is fine too, right?" she said, her tone questioning.
He simply nodded and she made a notation on her tablet.
"Then we're done here today. You may retire back to your quarters or go for dinner in the ship cafeteria if you'd prefer. Hungry, Captain?"
He nodded. "And will the food here be as much as I'd expect it to be ... pretty bland and tasteless?" he asked.
"It will absolutely be that—isn't that a hospital standard all over the galaxy? But if you'd prefer, up on Deck C—that's two up on the escalator—there is a small café. Walk counter-clockwise about a hundred yards or so and it's on your left—called the CPR Cafe—and the food there is superb!" Don't tell any of our cafeteria staff that I told you though!" she said and patted him on the shoulder.
He smiled, stood, and stretched his right arm out fully. "Thanks, Sam, muchly appreciated, Ma'am." He turned to his left to go out of the clinic, and he took the hallway down toward the center of the ship.
The line in the floor here was red, which meant he'd learned this was a clinic in the treatment wards, and he followed the red line of tiles all the way past wards, radiology, imaging, MRI/CT labs, and more. The list was long, and as he walked, he wondered if the few hundred beds in this area were enough. Of course, there had to be other areas. After all, this ship was the hospital for Neres, a planet with millions of inhabitants.
As he walked, he tried to fight off any kind of worries or anxiety. He knew, or rather, he had realized, the next few months were going to be difficult, but then that's the price he would have to pay for his obvious breakdown back at the OneTon. He didn't know if breakdown was the proper way to describe what had happened.
Remembering would be first.
####
The huge double doors to the RIM
Council chamber had been open for almost a half hour and still there were members missing. The DenKoss members had all been switched over from their own traveling tanks to the special water tanks within the room at their places. Each of them, their scales rippling every so often, was talking amongst themselves—at least that's what the Baroness thought as she looked across the table at where her old seat had been.
Seated there was the Caliph Sharia al Dotsa, the previous vice chairman of the RIM Confederacy, now just a regular member of the Council.
And sitting in his old chair, right up beside the Chairman of the Council, was the Baroness as the new Vice-Chair of the RIM Confederacy Council.
She turned her head away for a moment to bask in an idea that had come to fruition. Admittedly, it had taken almost three Juno years to get from the first inklings of wanting to be the vice chair to today. Her first meeting as the vice chair was today. And the chairman was still not here.
She smiled a bit more, checked the Agenda at her place, and noted the variety of items the Council would be looking at today. All were unimportant to her—the real one she knew was item number eight.
She looked around again and noted still some holes in the seating.
There were forty members of the RIM Confederacy, and each seat at the table was for their head of state. Some, like Eran, were realms of a single planet; others like the Chairman's realm held fifteen different planets. Only the head of state sat at the Council table with the second row behind the various members holding seats for their entourage, which often included individual planet head of states.
As the Barony now held ten realm planets, there were ten seats behind her, and only four of them held representatives. She half-turned and nodded to her group and noted the Ikarian representative, Ahanu, gave back their sign of respect, and she dipped her head slightly to acknowledge his respect. She realized she could have given back that same Ikarian sign, touching the back of her right hand to her forehead and holding it for a second or two, but that would set a precedent she didn't want to acknowledge. Keep them in their place, she thought. After all, they were in fact aliens, were they not?
That made her smile and she turned back to the Council room. Looking up, she saw the vaulted ceiling with sweeping buttresses that drifted down to become the side walls and the general limits of the room. On the far wall, she noted the artwork someone had donated to the Council hundreds of years ago, but the artist and whoever christened him as such escaped her. Pictures of Randi waterfalls were one thing that existed almost everywhere on the RIM as art but not here. The pictures she was looking at were of a nebula off some star system, and the use of the blues and oyster reds and ocher greens was interesting. Too bad, she thought, that the vice chair wasn't in charge of the chamber artworks; wait, maybe I could be. She made a quick note on her pad to ask the clerk about that at a later date. Today, the big game was number eight.
She turned back to look at the Council table.
Where is everybody? The whole Council meeting was being held up because the chairman was missing as were the Ttseens and the Quarans too. The Leudies were also missing.
Made no difference to me, she thought, as this was small potatoes to such an august body. That thought brought a smile to her face, and on a beautiful woman, that was a good thing.
She toyed with her PDA, asked for an update on the Agenda, and found nothing had been sent out since the original had been Ansible delivered to her almost a week ago.
As she grew a bit more frustrated, the Council chairman strode into the chamber and made his way to the head of the horseshoe-shaped table, his six arms carrying books, folders, and tablets. Being from Elbo, the home planet of the largest realm in the RIM Confederacy, the Alex'n hegemony, he always came alone. No staff, aides, or even security accompanied him, and he settled into the big chair at the head of the table.
Before he did anything, he partly turned to her first.
"Welcome to the Baroness St. August and her new position as the vice chair of the RIM Confederacy Council. Nicely done, Ma'am!" he said, and she knew he recognized how hard she had worked to gain that traction.
She dipped her head and tried to hide the slight smile on her face.
Looking up at him, she nodded and said, "So nice to take on a new role here at the Council—you will find me a supportive member, Mr. Chairman," and she meant every word.
Until I can get the Barony up to sixteen realm planets and take over the whole Council, she thought as she dipped her head and they both smiled.
The chairman turned back to face the large horseshoe table of the Council members and begin the meeting.
While one hand seemed to be sorting various folders, another stacked up his books, a third was pressing buttons on a tablet, and a fourth grabbed a gavel and smacked the small wooden plate in front of his place at the table.
"Come to order, please, members ... come to order, please," he said and looked up at the council clerk sitting at her station in the middle of the large horseshoe-shaped table.
"Clerk, proceed, please," he said and his eyes never even looked at her as he was studying the tablet in front of him.
Rising, the clerk began the meeting with the reading of the usual first motion of all council meetings, the passing of the minutes of the last, which received no further questions or queries and it was quickly voted to accept same.
She snorted to herself as she remembered it taking almost four hours to get through that one when the trade wars between Faraway and the Leudies had come to a head and the compromise accepted was palatable to neither side with any degree of satisfaction. Too bad, she thought, when you run your realms based on trade, instead of production and advanced manufacturing, you were at the needs of the marketplace.
The clerk went on with the Regrets which explained that the missing council members had been slow to get to Juno and that they'd not bothered to take faster transport.
When your fastest ships go only one light-year a day, it was easy to see you had to leave in enough time to get to the monthly meetings. Or you used a destroyer that could handle two lights a day ... or—she smiled to herself—you could also use a Supra destroyer like her new Atlas that could do three lights a day, but then no one else here on the RIM had such a ship.
She remembered the Seenra ship that had shown up to collect payment for the Atlas, the Vegaw, captained by builder Spleesog, could do five lights a day. That was fast, and she wondered what such a ship might cost in the future and what the Barony might have to trade. That too, was on number eight today.
As the clerk got to the first item on the Agenda list for this meeting, it was apparent that the actual work to be done today would be "Council Light." Her attention wandered as the Council went through new talks on duties for new pharmaceuticals coming from inward as per the Leudi request for increases. That was tabled for later after staff could do a workup on cost comparisons, and she drifted off again for a while.
Tax increases on Eran were discussed, voted on, and passed.
Duos had asked for tactical nuke use in their civil war, which received laughs at first and then unanimous nays. She was careful during the discussion to admit she knew far too little about the whole civil war—and that in this case, she would need to abstain from any such vote until the Barony was brought up to speed on these new factors.
On Tillion, the much-closeted aliens were seeking the right to limit all ship landings to male only—which again was tabled. They also notified the Council that they were in the process of adding a new EL—a new space elevator, which they had tabled only as a point of information. However, as it was her part of the deal with Tillion, she broached the idea of the initial EL costs. She suggested the Council could consider this as one of the Confederacy initiatives that could come out of the huge fund the Council controlled.
As expected, that received a huge number of speaker requests on her console in front of her and she smiled.
The cost of an EL space elevator was huge; it req
uired so much upfront planning that the feasibility study usually was the item that choked the project, but that didn't mean that some were still made. The successful ones were the ones the Confederacy funded hence her start of the whole process to gain some traction in the funding of the Tillion EL space elevator project.
She smiled a half hour later when the Council member from Roor supported the amendment from Skogg that the whole project have a start date within the next year or the Council Initiative fund be closed off to the Tillion EL.
As expected, she thought and didn't smile this time at all. Another one bites the dust.
Then Carnarvon offered up the notice there would soon be new technology they would be offering up for any planet using their volcano power stations, which received an enthusiastic round of applause as almost every planet on the RIM used volcano power. The Council supported almost anything Carnarvon did—she would have to check on them and she made a mental note.
KappaD reported new climatic changes that meant they would soon be facing some drought and famine issues due to lack of rainfall, which was highly unusual, and that received nods and even comments from the Master Adept, the woman who spoke for the Eons planet.
Eventually, the Agenda got around to the few items for discussion and votes. After two that mattered not a whit to the Baroness, the one she had come to the meeting for was the topic of discussion.
The clerk rose again. "Item eight today. The annexation of Ghayth by the Barony. Speaking for same is the Baroness St. August," she said and the light on the mic in front of the Baroness turned green.
She gathered herself together and spoke slowly and succinctly.
"As many of you know, we are looking to expand—as I'm sure many of you are too. Ghayth is a planet, number three in the Valissian system at the edge of the RIM Confederacy, and it is our intent to annex the planet, as it presently has no sentient life. No settlements, no inhabitants, no humans or aliens of any kind at all. It is a somewhat dreary place—much rain I am told, but it will suit our needs, and we ask that the annexation of Ghayth be confirmed," she said.
