Alex was startled, as Davie’s comment was not merely about the flower display but with a gesture which encompassed the entire party.
‘It isn’t…’ Alex was about to deny that this was either art or subversion, but as he glanced around at them all there in their finest clothes, performing the role of guests at a VIP dinner, he was struck into silence. Then Simmy came back through the party at high speed with a ‘Scuse, sirs,’ as she executed a chassé around the same two guests she’d dodged round last time.
‘Isn’t it?’ Davie queried, accepting a fresh platter of nibbles with a bright smile and ‘Thanks,’ for Simmy that rather obviously made her go a bit weak at the knees.
‘Well,’ said Alex, ‘possibly.’ And with a hint of yearning in his tone, confessed, ‘I would just like, even just once, for people to really enjoy themselves at a dress rig event.’
He got his wish. Captain von Strada’s dinner on the Assegai would enter legendary status, and all those who’d been there would still be talking and laughing about it years from now.
It was, as Davie had spotted straight off, a kind of performance, subverting the form of the traditional, humourless dress dinner.
It took a while for everyone to catch on – there were a few sharp intakes of breath when they went into the dining room, and some uneasy looks as they took their places.
The dining room had been extended for the occasion, with the partition between it and Alex’s private lounge/diner removed, his furniture stripped out and additional dining table and chairs brought in. Flag officers normally had their own tableware – on the Heron, they used Buzz’s silver for special occasions. But Alex had not thought to bring anything beyond the plain stuff provided by the Fleet. And rather than borrow from Min or the Assegai’s wardroom, Alex had told his adjutant to buy something suitable on the station.
Miloris Forley, finding that the flag captain’s hospitality budget had a massive surplus, had gone to town, big time. He had found a shop on Karadon which sold dinner services and table decorations – there wasn’t much you couldn’t get at Karadon – and had put together what he considered to be a classy collection.
There was gold. There was a lot of gold. There was gold in ornate patterns around the edges of plates, dishes and cups, gold around the rims of fancy glasses, and five spectacular golden candelabra which ranged along the length of the table like pylons. He had hesitated a bit over the gold plated cutlery, wondering if it might be a bit much, but the sales assistant in the shop had assured him that the overall effect would be quite, quite stunning.
And so it was, with the holographic candles shining rosy light over the golden array. It looked rather like a well-bred pirate’s hoard.
Only, things had not stopped there. Simmy had taken delivery of the tableware and thought it was lovely. But it did, once she’d spread it out on the dining table, make the rest of the room look even more dull than usual… not at all what you’d want for a party, Simmy thought. So she had decorated the room just as her family might decorate their home or a hired function room for a special occasion, with a lot more creatively draped fairy lights and quantities of bunting. The Assegai’s senior steward had nearly passed out when he saw it, but Alex, casting an eye over preparations before his guests arrived, had told her it was perfect, thank you. And his opinion, after all, was all that mattered.
Dinner was served in five stately courses. The food could not be faulted – Miloris Forley had been responsible for choosing the menu, in consultation with the Assegai’s catering officer, and subject to Alex’s approval. It was entirely conventional, with guests indicating ahead of time whether they wished the Mandramian or Therikian menu. The Assegai’s home port was Mandram, of course, while Alex’s base was at Therik. No Novaterran menu was offered, since Alex had said that he wouldn’t inflict that on his guests. But both the Mandram and Therik cuisines were tasty. Mandramian food was rich with spice, the main course a tagine with a delicious layered spicing, while those on the Therikian menu enjoyed a mezze platter.
All the while they were eating, though, the mood in the dining room became increasingly hilarious. Much of that was down to Simmy, of course. She was waiting at top table, meaning that she served Alex himself, sitting at the head of the table as the host, and the four most important guests seated nearest to him. Beyond that, there were two more stewards attending to the rest of the guests, and a wine-steward who was serving drinks to all of them. Simmy, presiding over the event, was meant to signal instructions to the others so discreetly that none of the guests would even notice. Simmy being Simmy, the signals were more in the nature of semaphore, and when she wasn’t sure that they were being understood, accompanied by hissing whispers across the room. At one point one of the other stewards started to move towards clearing plates away, seeing that people had finished that course and thinking that Simmy had forgotten to give the signal.
‘Oi, you!’ Simmy flapped a hand, pointed at him, waved him back from the table and attempted a note of stern rebuke, her whisper more penetrating than any normal voice, ‘Back off, Buddy!’
Several pairs of eyes swivelled in Alex’s direction, and he picked up his wineglass, apparently admiring the effect of the red wine and gold rim against the candlelight.
Somebody laughed – most people afterwards would say it was them, but whoever it was, it cracked the dam and let loose a deluge of hilarity.
And that did it. Conversation surged up from the polite hum of small talk into lively, laughing talk as between friends. The best part of the evening, arguably, when people were debating it afterwards, came when they were being served with the final course. There was some mixing of menus at this point – the Therikian menu finished with dishes of candies, miniature chocolates and after dinner mints, while the Mandramian was dishes of spiced nuts and tiny savouries. Alternating dishes of these were set along the table for guests to help themselves, with many people trying a little of both.
It was the Customs skipper who picked up what looked like an orange peanut from the dish in front of her, popping it into her mouth with unsuspecting heedlessness while listening to a far from diplomatic story Davie was telling. And then, as the chilli heat of it hit her like a culinary grenade, she carried out the classic chilli-panic routine. There was a moment when she almost spat it out before table manners kicked in, another moment when she was goggling as if steam might start coming out of her ears at any moment, a heroic gulp to get the thing out of her mouth, a gasp, grab for the nearest cold liquid and a choking, coughing shudder.
This, as always, was hugely entertaining for her fellow diners, but Simmy’s reaction was quite otherwise. Seeing the Customs officer turning purple, she called out to the steward nearest to her, ‘Slap her on the back!’ And as he looked at her blankly, mimed it, emphatically, ‘Slap her!’ And as the steward continued to just stand there looking thunderstruck, Simmy strode down the table herself, almost running. ‘She’s choking, you moron!’ she said, and thumped the coughing diner hard between the shoulder blades.
This, most of the guests agreed, was the finest moment of the evening. The skipper herself, once she could speak, assured Simmy that she really wasn’t choking, and did not need the plexus-jerk manoeuvre Simmy was preparing to administer, thank you.
‘But if I had been choking, that would have been excellent,’ she said, ‘Good crisis response and initiative, there.’
Simmy preened herself at that, but the nod and smile she got from Alex made her dance on air.
After toasts – Alex raising a glass to ‘Present and Absent Friends’ – they went back to the daycabin for coffee, with more chatting and a lot more laughter.
‘I don’t believe,’ said Min, coming to take her leave of Alex, ‘that I have ever enjoyed a dinner party more, sir.’ She shook hands with him. ‘Thank you.’
Alex smiled. Simmy had been told that the dinner party should finish before 2300 and it was past that, so she was gathering up coffee cups without offering refills, telling one of
the other stewards to stand by the door and hold it open, and other subtle hints that she considered it was time they left.
‘I will,’ Alex said, ‘convey your compliments to my staff.’
As the guests emerged from the flag suite, an honour guard assembled at the airlock to see them back aboard their shuttles…silent, impassive, the crew watched the noisy, slightly flushed, bright-eyed officers hailing one another goodbye and still laughing as they went through the airlock.
Only when they were walking away themselves did two of the crew exchange meaning glances.
‘Non-alcoholic drinks,’ said one, with heavy irony.
‘Right,’ said the other, and the two of them walked on, shaking their heads.
Eleven
Alex was told, next morning, that nobody knew what was going on with Skipper Eldovan. Enquiries had failed to turn up any clue as to why she had boarded a liner at Kavenko instead of the expected courier. It seemed as if, for reasons unknown, she had simply changed her mind.
‘Oh well,’ said Alex, since there was nothing he could do about that. The Assegai would leave Karadon as scheduled, he would open his orders an hour later and he would have to decide then what to do about Eldovan. If it was possible, with whatever destination they’d been given, he might be able to pick her up from the liner. If not, she would find a message from him at Karadon informing her that she had missed them, and that they had been obliged to depart under sealed orders. She would have to go on to Chartsey, then, and make the best of it by working with the Samartians there.
All the same, he paused for a moment, looking at the report which was open on his desk, still wondering what could have made an officer like Eldovan ditch the courier provided for her and travel first class on a liner instead.
He found himself looking at her ID picture, as if there might be some clue in that.
It was not an engaging picture. Eldovan was Altarbian, by birth though not by genetics. Altarb was one of the most insular worlds in the League, with very little emigration either outward or inward, so Eldovan would have stood out there as an unusual physical type. The Altarbian genome was tall, slender, with a high rounded forehead and slightly elongated skull. The rounded forehead was considered beautiful in Altarbian culture and attention was drawn to it with upswept hair and sculpted eyebrows.
Eldovan had those. Her hair was clipped to Fleet regulation length but it was dressed up in a classic Altarbian style, a stiff cone rising about fifteen centimetres above her head. This was very modest by Altarbian standards. Alex had been to Altarb once and had seen many people with hair half a metre high or more, sometimes even having to duck to get through doorways. Her eyebrows were sculpted, too – pencil thin, in a strange flattened S shape at least two centimetres above where they should have been naturally. Makeup had flattened her skin tones to the kind of porcelain look considered smart on her homeworld.
Her skin, though, was not the deep blue-black which was normal for Altarbians, and nor did she have the rounded forehead or large, rounded eyes. Her forehead was flat, her eyes almond in shape and hazel in colour, her skin tone light bronze. Alex wondered what it had been like for her, growing up on a planet where anyone who looked different or even dressed differently was stared at as if they had two heads. Some people had even got off public transport when Alex had got on it, not hostile as such but so disturbed by his weirdness that they’d backed away. Had Eldovan had to deal with that kind of thing, Alex wondered, even as a child? If so, it would explain what had made her so self-reliant, apparently oblivious to what others thought of her. And it might be a factor, too, in her decision to join the Fleet and make a life in a rather less xenophobic community.
But none of that, of course, explained why she would set aside the arrangements made to race her to a highly prestigious exodiplomacy assignment and choose instead to travel at her leisure.
With a little inner sigh, Alex closed the file. He would find out what had happened in due time. For here and now he had more immediate priorities.
He was back aboard the station for most of the day, spending much of the morning in the security office again, watching as Jarlner and Bennet went to see the Freight decks. This half of the station was a completely different world from the glitz and glitter of the leisure decks above. Here, the décor was industrial, crate-handling robots trundling about, workshops, gantries, the clanging and clatter of busy machines. The Samartians were fascinated by the cargo – amazed by its sheer variety, coming from so many worlds and criss-crossing here to a hundred destinations. But they were even more enthralled by the Wall in the Freight Club.
The Wall was a feature of all spacer hangouts. It was, in fact, how you knew it was a spacer hangout and not just some bar that happened to be somewhere near a spaceport. The Wall, along with the large open standing space and the spot on the bar for someone to sit were characteristics of spacer hangouts right across the League. That, and the presence of spacers themselves, of course.
The Freight Club on Karadon was pretty typical. It was both a social club and a trading point, with cargoes being traded and crew hired in the usual spacer way, with a chat, a beer and a handshake.
The Wall was part of that. It was no more than a wall-sized holoscreen people could write on, with everything from little hand-scribbled notes to tech-detailed posters. Here, too, cargo was traded, posted for sale or anybody got? Tech parts, too, were listed, offered or desired. Ships wanting crew, crew looking for ships, all had their notes written up on the Wall. Information was there, too – lots of information, people sharing news on everything from an increase in port fees at Canelon to a liner running late.
And then, and not least, there was Post. Data-mail was handled by the station, carried by liners or sometimes on couriers. Physical mail, though, was another matter. Shipping parcels was expensive, so spacers tended to carry small items for one another, much to the annoyance of Customs. Typically, a box might only be labelled with the name of the person and the ship they were on, which with tramp freighters might mean they were anywhere. So at transit points like this someone would put the post on the wall. And sooner or later someone would come in who knew where that ship was, or at least where it had been, or where it might be heading, and they’d scribble a note underneath it. Then someone else would come in from a ship that was heading that way and take the parcel with them. If the ship wasn’t there the other end then it would be left at the spacer hangout at the main spaceport, till someone else came in with an idea of where the ship might be. In this way, parcels could sometimes follow people around for years before they caught up with them, so it wasn’t a way you could send anything urgent. But you could, say, hand a souvenir t-shirt from a sports event over at a spacer hangout and be confident that it would reach its recipient, eventually.
Jarlner and Bennet found that amazing, not least because there was no kind of organisation or regulation about it, nothing to stop people just taking the post items and keeping them, no records kept, just spacers helping one another out on a basis of trust. The Samartians had not seen many examples of honourable conduct in the League – at least, not what they considered to be honourable conduct – but they were impressed by that. Spacers, they concluded, were generally a lot more honest and community-minded than ground-dwelling citizens, and they got no argument from Alex on that.
Having seen them safely back to the Assegai, though, Alex went back to Karadon to keep his promise and have lunch at the Temple with Quill.
They were, at least, able to get there without going through the tourist concourse. There was a private link between the station’s VIP suites and a separate part of the restaurant known as Chef’s Table, where VIPs visiting the station could enjoy Marto’s cooking without being subjected to other diners staring or taking covert holos of them. The Temple itself came as something of a surprise to Alex. He’d imagined that it would be, like Marto himself, totally over the top. Flamboyant, however, it was not. If this really was a temple then the only object of w
orship here was the food. Décor, furniture, lighting and ambience were all about the food taking centre stage, perfectly lit and without any distractions.
‘This is nice,’ said Alex, as they were seated at the plain square table in the plain square room with its beige décor and pure white table linen. Then he flinched, just a little, at the sound of Marto’s cry of delight dopplering towards the doors leading into the kitchen.
And, sure enough, Marto erupted into the room moments later, waving his arms and shouting with delight. He did not, however, launch himself at Alex. There were no kisses this time, not even an embrace. There was not even any dramatic declaration of his admiration for the captain.
‘Welcome, welcome!’ he hailed them, beaming. ‘You are very welcome to my Temple – and you have brought good appetites, yes?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I will cook for you, wonders and delights! I will cook for you, as I cooked for Silvie.’ His face was alight with adoration as he said her name, and he kissed his fingers to the air as if in benediction. ‘Isn’t she the most precious?’ he enthused. ‘Just adorable, to be adored by all. I will cook for you as I cooked for her.’ He was already retreating to the kitchen at speed, and flung an imperative command at them as he went through the door. ‘Wait!’
Alex and Quill looked at one another in silence for some seconds after he had gone.
‘You,’ Quill observed, ‘have been replaced.’
It was obvious that there was, indeed, a new idol in Marto’s life, and one who had extinguished his previous passion for Alex the Hero.
‘I didn’t know he’d cooked for Silvie,’ Alex observed. He knew that she’d been in Karadon’s exclusive ‘shareholder’ suite, on and off. He knew, too, that she’d made a dash round the shops in the early hours of the morning, when only the most determined tourists were still up there pursuing a bargain. Silvie, dressed in a dark hooded top and huge sunglasses, had been about as inconspicuous as a burglar in striped jumper and a bag marked Swag, but the few shoppers around had been so sleep deprived and bargain obsessed that they hadn’t registered her as anything more than ‘somebody famous’ going incognito.
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