“Let’s go everyone,” Sergio said while grabbing the Captain’s arm. As we left the warehouse Sergio put out the rally on me signal to all crewmen and Citizens. Within minutes our people begin gathering around us on our march back to the shuttles; and it’s a good thing they did.
The mob started forming before we were even halfway there.
“Run!” The Captain shouted. By now our group numbered around 30 and we all broke into a sprint. Most of our attackers were welding knives and were now close on our heels. I don’t know if you’ve ever had anybody chasing you with a knife, but that feeling of expecting to feel it in your back at any moment is truly horrid.
It was then that I got my first inkling of why the Captain had the crew he did. We had rounded a corner and found a group waiting in ambush. Instead of scattering to the wind and seeking their own safety, I was astonished that every crewmen stood up and fought with us.
It was a bloody mess.
There were energy blasts popping in the air around us, but most of the fighting seemed to be hand-to-hand. It was apparent that our Citizens combat training was superior, but our crew surprised me.
They lacked style, but were ruthless.
I personally had needed to fend off three attackers. It felt like I’d been fighting for an hour but in reality it couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes. The skirmish suddenly ended with our attackers fading from the streets.
We were in a bad way.
Our two shuttles were only a block away and the healthy among us could’ve sprinted to safety. We could have used the Captain’s safety as an excuse and left everybody else behind. Instead, the Captain took several quick headcounts. We had a number of casualties and a lot more injured but it wasn’t just the Citizen’s body he ordered us to carry back. Nobody was left behind.
As a group, we made our way to the shuttles and back to the ship.
ΔΔΔ
I had been sure that we would regroup and return to the planet in full force. After all, that’s what the Empire ships were built for, to enforce Imperial law. But the Captain seemed to have no desire to do that, and since nobody seemed surprised by the fact I went with the flow. I guess maybe I was getting tired of being looked at like a naïve newbie.
The Citizens and crew were surprisingly gathering together in the crew’s mess.
It wasn’t official; nobody had announced it. Because I had found the Citizen’s mess empty and the bridge on a skeleton crew I began following various crewmen that seemed to have a destination in mind.
I was very surprised to find the Citizens and crew mixing so freely. Fine liquor that must’ve come from the Citizen’s stock was flowing freely. The only thing I didn’t see was the Captain’s cognac, but then the Captain hadn’t arrived yet either.
It wasn’t a full-fledged party, but it wasn’t a somber memorial either. It was more like a good spirited wake.
One of our dead had been a Citizen, the three others crewmen. I was willing to bet money that on any other ship in the Empire the crewmen’s wake and the Citizen’s somber Memorial would’ve taken place separately.
I must have been wandering around with a worried look on my face because Citizen Jones came up to me, put a drink in my hand, and set me down and asked me what was wrong.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Everything I’ve experienced since joining the ship has been upside down. We were taught that this kind of behavior, this kind of flouting of the rules would get us a court-martial. Here, nobody’s batting an eye.”
Jones just sat there with a lopsided smile on his face and let me continue.
“And the crew! They stuck around to defend the Captain! Why in the world would they risk their lives like that? I know the Imperial denar is a big incentive to crew a ship, but crewmembers don’t take oaths of fealty! They’re not under obligation to defend the Imperial honor. I don’t get it.”
After a moment Jones asked me, “Did you know Citizen Tandy?”
“No, not really. I’d met her but we never talked much. She didn’t seem the talkative type.”
“Well, that’s true enough. But around here Nikolay, I think you will find that actions speak more loudly than words anyway.”
I gave him a questioning look and he just shrugged. As he was getting up out of his seat he said, “You’re the one that’s interested in stories. A lot of people will be sharing their stories about Tandy tonight. You might want to stop asking questions long enough to start listening. You might be amazed what you learn.”
He raised his glass to me and walked off into the crowd.
I wandered over to a table that had a number of crewmen and one Citizen. Again to my surprise it wasn’t the Citizen controlling the conversation. Instead he was reflective and quiet as we all listened to the crew tell their stories.
“It must’ve been four years ago now when Citizen Tandy pulled me out of that jail cell,” said a crewmen. I was new to the ship at the time and was overdue for the recall. I just knew they were going to leave me behind, and believe me, Tangent is a planet you don’t want to get left behind on.”
A number of people around the table chuckled.
“She wouldn’t leave me though. She said I was the worst maintenance engineer she’d ever had crew for her but she’d be draked if she was gonna sail on with her department undermanned. When she walked into that jail shouting orders at those Tangent constables I thought she’d been taken over by demon. I’d never seen her talk like that. Then once we got out of there she went back to being her normal quiet self.”
Everyone used the silence to catch up on their drinking until somebody else jumped in.
“I wouldn’t be on the Halcyon if it wasn’t for her,” said a tough looking woman with what looked like burn scars covering her arms. Most of you remember I was on the pirate ship that attacked the Halcyon a couple of years back. Lords I don’t know what our captain was thinking, trying to stand up to this ship, but he paid for it with his life… as did almost everyone else. Y’all could have left us for dead, but you let us gather our survivors and took us to that tiny moonlet just past Stargent VII.”
“I don’t know what Citizen Tandy saw in me, but she pulled me from the pack and told me I worked for her now. Told me if I didn’t want the job she’d drop me off at the next planet but if I decided to stay I’d have to get my priorities straight damn quick. It didn’t take me long to figure that one out.”
I started to become outraged. All crew had to go through Imperial training, everyone knew that. To Shanghai crew from some other ship, let alone a pirate ship, was an unpardonable offense. Yes, I started to get upset but then I remembered what crewmen Jones had said. Listen before you make any judgments…
I wandered from table to table, there were a bunch of stories being told that night and not all of them were about Citizen Tandy. The three crewmen we lost had checkered pasts, for sure, but each apparently had redeeming qualities in their own right.
There was even a story about the Captain…
ΔΔΔ
It was obvious that Crazy Candace, as everyone seemed to be calling her, and our Captain knew each other, but apparently they had a history.
I never did figure out exactly how they met or how long they were together but they were still telling stories about how they broke up.
“… I was walking up the corridor when I heard this banshee-like scream. I barely had time to flatten myself against the wall when the Captain comes racing past, holding his junk, naked as a jaybird…”
He had to pause to let the laughter die down, and judging by how quickly it had started up I realized that this wasn’t the first time many of them had heard the story.
“Now it wasn’t the Captain yelling at the top of his lungs, mind you. He was totally focused on getting the hell out of there. But not more than 15 feet on his heels was a half-dressed Crazy Candace waving a sword and screaming curses like she’d been possessed by 21 succubi.”
There was more laughter and you could hear
people here and there saying things like, “Yep, that’s our Captain,” and, “She would’ve stuck him, too.”
Someone in the crowd asked the storyteller why the hell the Captain would date someone as crazy as that.
The crewmen continued, “It just so happens I was able to ask him that very thing. A couple of days later I was walking down that same corridor when I met the Captain going the other direction. I could tell by the look in his eye that he recognized me and I just couldn’t keep myself from asking, Captain, why in the world would you date a crazy woman like that?”
When his dramatic pause lasted too long someone prodded him, “And what did he say?”
“He said he had this theory. He said he figured that if a woman was good looking enough and crazy enough he just might be able to screw the craziness out of her!
“I asked him if it had ever worked and he said, No, but I’m keeping it as a working theory.”
The group erupted in laughter and I once again couldn’t help but be amazed by how fond the crew seemed to be of their Captain. He did things that went against everything I’d been taught at The Academy, everything the Empire supposedly held sacred, but he was making it work.
I ran across our quartermaster a little while later and asked her if she thought we would be going back down to the planet.
“Why would we,” she said. “We’ll find tax stamps on the merchandise in about four-fifths of their warehouses and the rest of it will be contraband.”
“Shouldn’t we confiscate it?” I said honestly trying to understand.
“Where are we going put all that stuff? We don’t have room for it.”
“Then shouldn’t we just destroy it? Isn’t that Imperial doctrine?” I couldn’t help but asking.
“And waste all that merchandise? A lot of good people might go hungry if those goods get destroyed. Nikolay, you need to understand that out here on the fringe people are living on narrow margins. We keep the graft and corruption down and we do our best to keep any one person from getting too abusive, but in case you haven’t noticed this isn’t a rich sector. Those people are doing everything they can to survive, so if we occasionally turn a blind eye it just means that somebody gets to eat tonight. Understand?”
No, I didn’t understand, but I really didn’t feel like saying so. I really didn’t want to admit there might be some method to all this madness.
ΔΔΔ
We were still in orbit two days later and were not scheduled to leave for another two.
Apparently there was communications traffic and other services the Halcyon could provide that didn’t require our presence groundside.
Once I’d cleaned up the Captain’s stateroom each morning I conducted my ritual tour of the ship. My next official function would be to prepare that same cabin for the evening’s festivities, so I spent my remaining time until then at the auxiliary station on the bridge.
If the Captain needed me for something he knew he could find me there, and if he did deign to show his face on the bridge these are the hours in which the blessing would occur.
As mixed as my feelings were for the Captain there was one benefit of standing an afternoon watch on the bridge…
It was pure coincidence that Monica also had a habit of taking the afternoon watch. Technically, the Captain and the First Officer didn’t have watches, but then on most ships they spent the majority of their time there anyway.
Monica seemed to have fit nicely into the somewhat relaxed command style of the Halcyon. She didn’t throw her weight around and seemed to know when to bullshit with the Citizens and crew and when to get serious. Oddly enough, they seemed to also know when she was serious and when she wasn’t. This amazed me, because I couldn’t tell the difference.
“Sleep late?” she said as the Captain walked onto the bridge late one afternoon.
“Actually, I slept like a baby,” he replied. “Although I’m told your snoring kept half the ship up. You really should go see the doctor.”
“I think I’ll wait until after you finish your treatments for that embarrassing skin rash. I don’t have any desire to be in the same room where they’ve been scraping your scabs.”
The crewman manning the secondary sensor station snickered out loud, and the Captain and First Officer both looked askance at him. He quickly shut up and bent back to his work.
ΔΔΔ
I was in my cabin trying to relax before I turned in for the night.
I ordered my desk monitor on and connected to the ship’s computer. I wanted to do more research on the Halcyon’s record…
She was a brand new ship seven years ago when Captain Acamar had taken command of her. He officially took his command on the day she left the space dock for her shakedown cruise but… that was odd. I scrolled back through a number of photographs documenting her construction… There, that was the Captain in a picture showing the aft railgun being installed. Here he was again discussing some detail or another with an engineer in what was obviously the engineering space before the Gravimetric Lens had been installed. There was even a photo of an unofficial ceremony with him in a space suit painting a portion of the Halcyon’s name on her hull.
I’d never heard of any Captain being assigned to his ship as early as the laying of the keel, to borrow an archaic phrase. I knew the date he took command and that was usually the same day as assignment, or close enough, but where could I find the day he was actually… now that really was strange. He wasn’t assigned to the Halcyon until the same day he took command – then what was he doing with her years earlier?
When I dug deeper I discovered that for the two years prior to the C.E.S. Halcyon being commissioned our Captain was assigned to attend the Emperor’s Court.
Apparently his father didn’t mind him playing hooky.
Another thing, the Halcyon was constructed at the Imperial space docks above Sentinel Prime – one of the most closely guarded research planets in the Empire. The entire planet was a military base; there were no pleasure houses there, no fine dining or luxurious accommodations. I wasn’t even sure if you could find a bar anywhere in the system, let alone the cognac he was so fond of.
It seems our Captain was full of mystery.
ΔΔΔ
The next afternoon I caught myself staring at Monica’s three-quarter profile. From my angle I could finally observe what was so captivating about her eyes – she had impossibly long lashes.
When the Captain entered the bridge he said, “Good morning” to everyone, even though it was already 1700 hours.
Monica smiled sweetly and said, “I’ve just been filling the bridge in on some stories about you that I learned from your brother,” even though she’d been doing no such thing.
“Oh,” he replied distractedly. He was inspecting one of the science stations. “What did dear Eri say about me this time?”
“He said you were an incredibly cute baby. I was just getting to the part about your diapers and baby bottles.”
I had never seen the Captain blush before.
A couple of hours later I was sitting down with my evening meal in the Citizen’s mess, wondering what could possibly be embarrassing about baby bottles and diapers when all hell broke loose.
Alarms started sounding. The intercom blared, “All hands, alert! D Watch man your stations, repeat, D Watch man your stations, and hurry up about it!” The anonymous voice added.
Instantly everything around me was chaos. Or maybe I should say for me it was chaos, because everybody else looked like they knew where they were going; they were just moving faster than I had ever seen them move before. And come to think of it, why were they calling D Watch to the bridge? A Watch was supposed to be your emergency personnel, your best and brightest. That’s the way the Empire set up all Imperial ships. Of course, this wasn’t turning out to be just any Imperial ship…
I double timed it to the bridge but was still the last one to arrive. The Captain was in his chair and Monica watched me walk in. I could feel the blush
rising through my cheeks and hoped she couldn’t see it.
I set down at my auxiliary control and tried to focus in on the situation.
“Two ships are vectoring in with a high rate of deceleration, Captain. They’ll be at zero velocity relative to the planet within five minutes.”
“Break orbit,” said the Captain. “I want us 2 million miles away from the planet and at zero velocity relative in the same time frame as the bogeys.”
“Aye aye,” said the helmsman.
“Citizen Durand,” said the Captain again. “I need to know more about those ships.”
As I set back watching the Captain take command of the situation I realized that this was yet another face of him I’d never seen. Right now he was as calm and as in command as I’d ever imagined any commander of the fleet. And the Citizens on the bridge were taking his commands without the usual backtalk or snide innuendo.
My Friend the Emperor Page 13