Running Black

by J. M. Anjewierden

  Groaning inwardly, Morgan forced herself into the seat. She didn’t have time for any nonsense with seating.

  I can deal with him for a few minutes. If he gets out of line, I can always shoot him. Morgan imagined him with a neat little hole through his palm and smiled back.

  “I’d accuse you of stalking me – because of course you would – but I didn’t know I was going to be here myself until a few minutes ago.”

  The hostess looked between them.

  “If this won’t work, I can find you something else,” she said, her smile even more obviously fake than his had been, but at least she had an excuse.

  “No, this will be fine. I’m a hurry.”

  “Well then, the menu is here,” she handed the archaic plastic and paper physical menu to Morgan, “and the waiter will be around shortly. When you’re done, come back up front to pay.”

  “Odd place,” Morgan said, opening up the menu to look over the options.

  “The ‘Old-Earth’ style service is part of their gimmick. Is this your first time here? In that case, I recommend the Spacer’s Special. It has a lot of their better items,” Eck offered, flashing her another smile.

  “Does all the smiling work?” Morgan said, rolling her eyes… and looking at the item he’d suggested.

  “Usually,” he answered with a laugh. “What’s so wrong in being pleasant and nice to pretty girls?”

  “Because usually you expect something in return?” Morgan pointed out.

  This actually shut him up for more than a moment. When he spoke again his tone was more serious.

  “Sadly, that is true all too often. I could assure you that isn’t the case for me, that I simply like making pretty girls smile, but you have no reason to believe me.”

  Morgan just nodded and went back to looking at the menu.

  “You’re right, I don’t have any reason to believe you.”

  She finished reading the menu in blissful silence.

  “So, where are you from?” he asked, still in his more subdued tone.

  Morgan ignored him.

  “I’m from Itens, though I doubt you’ve ever even heard of it, much less been there.”

  Morgan ignored him.

  “Not much of a tourist attraction, anyway.”

  The waiter came over, and Morgan ordered, Spacer Special plus half a pot of hot chocolate. She did feel a momentary urge to pick something else, just to spite him, but it honestly did sound good.

  She half expected the merc to make a joke about it, but he seemed to have given up for the moment, just quietly and politely eating his own food.

  Just before they brought her food out, he finished, gave her one last smile, his most genuine-looking one yet, paid up front, and left.

  Putting him out of her mind just got Morgan worried about what the captain wanted, so it wasn’t much of an improvement for her mental state.

  The answer seemed clear.

  More cream for her hot chocolate.

  As much as she wanted to sit and enjoy her breakfast, Morgan was in a hurry. Finding a balance between enjoying the surprisingly good food and not wasting time was tricky, and to be honest with herself, she probably was too far on the enjoyment side. Still, within ten minutes of the merc leaving, she was heading out herself.

  “Thanks for coming, Hun. The other guy paid for your meal too,” the hostess said as she walked up.

  “Did he now?”

  “Yeah, he did. Didn’t say why though,” the hostess shrugged. “Usually that kind of thing is an attempt to impress, or for a date. Either way, you’re good with us. Hope you enjoyed your food and hope to see you again soon.”

  “Thank you,” Morgan said simply, then walked away at a brisk pace toward the offices.

  A few minutes later, she was outside Captain Rain’s office for the first time in far too long. The hatch was closed, so she took one of the seats situated next to it.

  Across from Morgan, a young woman seated behind a desk spoke up.

  “He’s still in a meeting with a bunch of the other captains. You’re Lieutenant Black, right? He was expecting you. If you’ll just wait there, he’ll get to you once that meeting finishes, I’m sure.”

  Morgan sat there quietly for a few minutes, unsure what to even do with herself. She was so unused to having nothing to do that it made her fidgety.

  Before she could become too uncomfortable with the uneasy silence, however, someone sat down and turned it into an uneasy noise.

  “Well, I guess I understand what brought you to that particular diner then, Cutie,” Eck said as he settled into a chair two down from hers. “I’d ask you why you’re here, but, well, the shoulder patches give it away. What’s STEVE like? I’ve heard all the stories, of course, but I haven’t been on board her myself.”

  “Persistent, I see,” Morgan said, rolling her eyes – and making sure he saw her doing it.

  “I suppose I am. Not that you asked, but I am here for a reason that doesn’t involve you. Looks like with all the hubbub from yesterday’s excitement, I’m getting shuffled around — a lot of people are — and I’ll be working on STEVE for a bit. Not sure what exactly, just yet.”

  “Great,” Morgan said, keeping her voice level only by calling on hard-earned experiences in hiding her feelings from the ‘Tinnys’ – the tin-badged tyrants that acted as overseers in the mines.

  “Ship that big, we’ll probably not run into each other much,” he said, and when Morgan looked over at him, she could see his smile was a bit sad. “Not sure why I’ve rubbed you the wrong way, but I wish I could change it.”

  Morgan’s wasn’t sure how to reply to that, but in the end, she didn’t have to, as the hatch opened, and Captain Rain stepped out.

  “Black, good. Get in here.” Rain turned to look at Eck, visibly reading his nameplate. “I’ll get to you in a bit, Sergeant Eck. You hang tight.”

  Morgan followed Rain into the office, the hatch closing itself behind them.

  “Sit, sit,” Rain said, gesturing to the chairs arrayed before his desk as he settled into his own far more comfortable looking chair.

  Morgan had only seen the captain a few times, but he looked a good deal more frazzled than he had on those occasions. His wispy bits of hair were standing up more than they had, and the bags under his eyes were more pronounced, and now that she was paying closer attention, she noticed that his uniform coveralls looked like he’d been wearing them since the previous day.

  “Morgan,” he said, running a hand over his bald dome and grimacing, “I don’t have time for pleasantries, and I don’t have time for politeness. Are you okay to come back to work?”

  “Of course I am,” Morgan quickly answered, resisting the urge to rise to her feet as she said it. “I want to get back to work; I need to get back to work.”

  “That isn’t what I asked. Are you ready? You’ve been through a lot in a short period of time. If the answer is no, that’s okay. If the answer is no, and you pretend it isn’t, even to yourself, that could get people killed.”

  “I’ve been through a lot my whole life, sir,” Morgan said, sinking back against the seat. “And yes, the recent stuff hit me hard. But I’ve been getting help, and I am ready.”

  “Okay. So, tell me about yesterday.”

  Morgan thought for a second how best to respond. That he was asking at all meant he already knew what had happened; he had to, so why ask?

  “There isn’t that much to say, sir. I was lucky. I saw the accident happen and saw the crewman get knocked off his ship. I was also in a position to do something about it before anyone else possibly could.”

  “And you just threw on thrusters and dove out the airlock?”

  “Not quite like that, but I suppose so, yes.”

  “I’ve looked over your records quite thoroughly, Morgan. I had to, to get the training schedule ready for our next deployment. Do you know what isn’t in there?”

  “I’d imagine a lot of things, sir,” Morgan said.

  �
��Cut the evasions. There is no record of you having anything but basic training on working outside the ship, and certainly nothing like the extensive training we’d require for anyone trying to retrieve a fellow crewmember who’d gone Dutchman. Now, which was it? Recklessness, Stupidity, or Arrogance?”

  “That’s not fair, sir,” Morgan said. “He needed help, and I was there to give it.”

  “Which?”

  “I couldn’t stand there and watch helplessly,” Morgan said, her voice raising. “I’ve seen too many people get hurt, and couldn’t do anything about it. I could this time.”

  “Guilt then, with a side of arrogance?”

  “I saved him.”

  “Yes, you did. As you said, you got lucky.”

  “What should I have done? Should I have left him out there, drifting, with no power and a leaking suit?”

  Rain leaned back, frowning as he rubbed his chin with one hand.

  “No. I’m saying that anything you do should be done in a measured and thought-out way. So, tell me, why was your choice better than just calling it in and waiting? Don’t think about it, just answer.”

  “Because of the time. It would have taken time for anyone else to get there, and the signal from his suit was already weak. If I had waited, we might have lost tracking, and in any case, it would have meant longer before he received medical care.”

  “And it wasn’t at all driven by survivor’s guilt?”

  “That’s not fair,” Morgan repeated.

  “Was it?”

  Morgan stared at him, looking into his normally very friendly eyes, trying to figure out what he was doing. Not finding any answers there, she gave up and answered the question.

  “Probably, at least a little. But I won’t apologize for trying to save lives.”

  “Good,” Captain Rain said, suddenly relaxing and standing up. He walked over to the cabinet behind his desk and grabbed something out of the top drawer.

  As he sat back down, she could see it was a chip, one that could interface with standard uplinks.

  “Welcome to the STEVE, officially, Lieutenant Black,” he said, pushing the chip across the desk where she could reach it.

  Morgan just looked at it, more than a little confused, and he motioned for her to take it.

  “That will update your uplink with all the passcodes and keys for STEVE. Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, we can get back to work, and, unfortunately, there is far too much work to go around.”

  “Were you… were you testing me, sir?”

  “Call it… probing rather than testing. Would you want to entrust command, however temporary, of a twenty-eight-million-ton vessel, one that is in fact armed, to someone you couldn’t be sure of? Given what I’ve seen, I expect great things from you, Morgan, but trauma can bring down even the best of us.”

  “Wait, STEVE is still armed?” Morgan had known, before she’d laid eyes on the vessel, that he was originally a military ship, and therefore armed. In fact, seeing STEVE’s weapon hatches as she looked out at it across the void of the station was how she’d recognized the ship in the first place, but she’d always assumed the weapons had been removed when Earth’s military had sold the ship to the Takiyama Merchant House.

  Her assumption just caused Rain to chuckle.

  “Yes, he’s still armed. Takiyama not only insisted on it when he bought STEVE, but he paid extra for it. Not that we advertise the fact much, of course.”

  Rain stretched a bit in his chair, the movement accompanied by several loud popping noises from his back.

  “Actually, those weapons are part of what we need to talk about. However, I’m getting ahead of myself. The short of it is, we will be launching within the week, and you’re going to need to shoulder a lot more responsibility than we had originally intended.”

  Morgan could feel her eyebrows rising involuntarily, but there didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, or do, besides wait for him to continue.

  “As you are intimately familiar, the Herald of Spring was severely damaged. Her crew were in the middle of the final checks before shipping out on their regular asteroid belt run, a run that includes critical supplies and food for the industries of the belt, industries that represent a large chunk of the system’s total economy. We cannot wait until the Herald is repaired to send a ship, and the only other ship even capable of going is STEVE. So, we’re it. True, our normal route was due to start in a month’s time, but other ships can cover there, especially if they pull a few ships out of maintenance early and split up the route between them. They’d have to anyway, given STEVE’s much larger cargo capacity than anything else the House has.”

  “And my part in this?” Morgan ventured to ask.

  “Because we’ll be leaving early, we’re understaffed. A lot of the crew is still out on approved leave, and many of those are out-system and won’t even hear about this until after we’ve left. This includes our third lieutenant and two of our engineering lieutenants. We’re pulling from other crews, but the Fate of Dawn lost a full third of their crew during that pirate attack, more retired or quit since, and now many of the Herald’s crew are injured. Frankly, it is a miracle none of them died.”

  He paused for a moment, chuckling to himself and shaking his head.

  “The last serious accident we had in this company was a few months before I joined as a wide-eyed youth, scrubbing conduits and spreading fertilizer on plants.”

  “I can’t really see you as wide-eyed, sir,” Morgan said.

  “Yes, well, I had more hair then, too. But whatever else is going on, your intervention saved a lot of people. I just hope you won’t have any more opportunities any time soon.

  “You will have plenty of opportunity to learn on the job, though. There isn’t anyone available to fill the Third Lieutenant slot, especially not when on paper we have four. The Lieutenants Brown and occasionally myself will be standing watches with you for the first month or so, but sooner than you’d probably like, you’ll be in charge of a shift on your own. Do you have any questions so far?”

  There was just one that had occurred to Morgan, less about her own situation than how they were going to be able to leave in a week’s time.

  “I don’t know how close to ready the ship is, but can we even get that much cargo moved from Herald to STEVE in time? From what I saw of the damage, a lot of the cargo bay doors must have been damaged.”

  “That’s a good question, the kind of things officers need to be thinking about. It will be tight, but it won’t just be STEVE’s crew doing the work. It will also help that STEVE has more than a dozen massive cargo shuttles. They’re far larger than normal because they were originally designed to act as lifeboats in case of disaster.”

  “Lifeboats that large?”

  The captain shrugged.

  “Each is meant to keep a hundred or so crewmen alive for more than six months in an emergency, but all the supplies are stored beneath the deck in the access spaces and crawlways. The interior is also modular, so except for the cockpit, all of the interior space is open under normal circumstances.”

  “Just how large are these shuttles?”

  “Large enough they’d count as a starship in their own right under other circumstances. But we’re getting off track. As for the work of getting STEVE ready to leave, you won’t be doing any of it. Your next week will be spent cramming in every bit of training we can manage without overloading you. Oh, and you will also be taking over the secondary duties of Third Lieutenant, which are a bit more important on STEVE than most ships.” Rain paused, pushing a button on his desk, probably a dedicated comm line with his assistant, as she answered after barely a moment. “Maria, send the Sergeant in.”

  Morgan was still trying to figure out what he meant by ‘the Lieutenants Brown’ and missed the significance of what he’d asked of the assistant, until Eck walked into the room, nodding politely at Rain before standing at attention next to Morgan’s chair.

  “Sergeant Eck, reporting as
ordered.”

  “Good, sit.”

  Rain waited until Eck had complied before continuing.

  “Sergeant Eck, as I am sure you are aware, but Lieutenant Black is not, your troops will be among those of Aegis that will transfer onto my ship to fill out our Marine complement for this journey. As you also know, STEVE is the only ship of our merchant fleet that is armed, and as such needs more Marines to crew said weapons. What you do not know is that Lieutenant Black is new to the ship, and her duties, duties which will include being the liaison between my crew and Aegis. I asked Aegis to assign someone to teach her what that entails, and teach her everything she needs to know about the weapon systems onboard STEVE.”

  “And I got voluntold for the task, sir?” Eck asked, glancing over at Morgan and throwing her a smile.

  “Yes, you did. Apparently, your superiors think you’re the best teacher available. I’d have preferred an officer act as liaison, rather than a Sergeant, but it is what it is.

  “Today will be occupied by other things, but we have scheduled to give both of you a full tour of the vessel tomorrow at eight in the morning.”

  “Oh-eight hundred, got it, sir,” Eck said with a nod. “Will there be anything else?”

  Rain shook his head, so Eck moved to the hatch.

  “Oh, I must say, I do genuinely look forward to working with you, Lieutenant Black,” he said as he walked out, the hatch shutting promptly behind him.

  Morgan must have let some of her feelings show on her face, as Rain’s next question was directed at her.

  “Problem, Morgan?”

  “I don’t want to speak ill of anyone.”

  “You don’t like him? Please, speak your mind.”

  “He’s rather… annoying. And a bit pushy.”

  “Good,” Rain promptly said. This time Morgan knew he could read her expression – it was impossible for her to hide her confusion and annoyance – and he continued with an explanation. “You’ve worked hard your whole life, but you’ve never led before. One of the most important lessons of being a leader is working with people you don’t like. Liking someone is certainly preferable to not, but you don’t need to like someone to work with them. Having a handy subject to practice on, particularly one who isn’t actually someone you supervise, will be useful.” He paused to snort. “Besides, I’m only asking you to learn from him, not marry him.”