by David Weber
“You can't kick them.” Claire whispered.
Lieutenant Loyd made an inquisitive noise but matched her volume.
“Look, it's—” Claire coughed and tried to return to a normal tone and keep the quaver out of her voice. “When someone does something like that,” she looked at Master Chief Wallens warily as she continued waiting for him to exclaim or interrupt or demand details or proof or something. The master chief didn't show any response at all, so Claire continued, “When, that is, if it was some stranger I suppose it might work, but you'd have to kick pretty hard and not miss, and it's not the kind of thing you can practice. But strangers don't really do that. It's people you know who you have to see day after day. A punch they might laugh off and get over without feeling the need to make it into some kind of power thing. Because, well, if it becomes a power thing that's when it really gets bad.” Claire clamped down before she spilled too much more. Those were Aunt Jezzy's secrets to tell anyway, not hers. She'd just been taught from it, was all.
Lieutenant Loyd shook his head. “Ensign Lecroix, we really need to work on your tactics.”
Claire planted her elbows on the table in front of her and folded her hands. “No.”
Lieutenant Loyd snorted and arched his eyebrows at her. “I wouldn't let you pull that shit normally. You should know that, but I'd like to think that this hasn't been a normal day for you. Would you say that was true?”
Claire swallowed unsure of what to do since he hadn't blown up at her defiance. The master chief feigned total absorption in his screen again. Turning back to Lieutenant Loyd, Claire said, “I apologize for what I said in the passageway.”
Lieutenant Loyd just raised his eyebrows and waited.
Claire just looked at him in confusion and then flushing added, “Sir.”
“Apology accepted,” he answered immediately. “And I still want you to work on tactics.”
Claire shook her head, “LT, I guess you mean well, but what's the point?”
“Oh, I don't know: the continuation of politics by other means, fighting and winning our star nation's wars, or maybe just because it happens to be your job and doing your job to the best of your ability is the right thing to do?”
Claire hunched again, swallowed, and closed her eyes. “When Lockhart reports me to Commander Greentree, and he's gonna, I'll be out. Maybe just off the ship, or maybe out of the whole GSN.”
She shivered. “There's no reason to do this tactics stuff, and look, Sir, there never was. The best I could do was last long enough to get some solid engineering experience to transfer to civie jobs. Tactics doesn't do that.”
“Wow, Saganami Island really failed you.” Lieutenant Loyd breathed.
He straightened and went on. “Now here's some free officer continuing education for you. There're two kinds of counseling right?”
Claire jerked a nod, stiffening to attention in her chair, “Yes, Sir.”
“So right now we've got informal counseling right here while I try to find a way to get through your thick steader skull that I like you and want you to be a good officer, and even if I didn't, it wouldn't matter because the captain has decided that you are going to be turned into a good officer. You may have noticed, he's a Greentree. There's a fair number of them in the service. They're generally pretty hardcore, and he's hardcore even for a Greentree.
“Maybe you noticed the maroon trousers? Yep. He got himself into the Protector's Own because he wanted to study warfare under the likes of Alfredo Yu, Harriet Benson-Dessouix, and oh yeah Honor Alexander-Harrington. And they took him. Which says even more, because the Protector's Own only takes the very best.
“Anyway, onward to the next kind: formal counseling. That's what you use for the hard cases that you need to build a record for in case you need to kick them entirely out of the service. Its generally bad practice to discuss the flaws of senior officers with subordinates, but I'm junior to him too. So we'll call this part a bitch session of the JOPA, okay?”
Claire glanced over at Master Chief Wallens. He was still pretending to do routine paperwork, or maybe he was really doing paperwork and got called in to play chaperone for sketchy informal counseling sessions all the time. “Um, that's the Junior Officer Protection Association, Sir?”
“Exactly. Generally a load of bunk that gets claimed when somebody did something idiotic and wants to use peer pressure to keep from having his ass properly handed to him. But from time to time, captains get crazy. It has its uses. Like now.
“So let's just say that I happen to know that there's already a file on Mr. Lockhart and that the XO has been looking for a final nail for that coffin. I just gave it to him. Or rather you did, and I reported it. I used to feel sorry for him since his marriage on Manticore fell apart, and he seemed to think that Grayson girls would be nearly a different species from the Mantie women he tried dating. I thought he was grieving, not hunting. If we're entirely unlucky, he'll be on-board for another couple weeks. But it's more likely we'll pull into the next available station and dump him.”
Claire felt a wave of relief . . . mingled with shock that she wasn't being punished for standing up for herself.
* * *
By Lieutenant Loyd's metric, the Manasseh was entirely lucky. The XO stopped by Claire's stateroom later that evening, after she'd spent a long session in the simulator being repeatedly killed by various adversaries. The lieutenant had replayed each session in detail pointing out why she had died.
The XO had a similar recording as evidence against Lockhart. Lieutenant Loyd had been working a tactical session of his own and recording it while waiting for her to arrive, and it included some visual through the open door and all of the audio of her encounter with the Mantie exchange officer. The XO blushed and couldn't meet Claire's eyes when the fast-forwarded display showed the Mantie grinning at her impact and caught the pinch in clear detail. The XO just needed her thumbprint and signature that she was the person shown. Then he provided the contact information for Legal Assistance if Claire wanted to press assault charges.
Rustin was in the back of the stateroom engrossed in studying the approach for docking at the station. So Claire didn't hesitate to ask, “Sir, I hit a senior officer. Why aren't I the one being charged?”
The exec just shook his head. “I didn't hear that. What did you say?”
Claire said it again, and the exec again denied hearing her.
She started to repeat herself a third time and then stopped. Finally, she said, “What else is on the tape?”
The exec pushed a button and the rest played through. Lieutenant Loyd rose quickly and blocked the view before Lieutenant Commander Lockhart's muffled grunt and then very clearly audible solicitation. The exec shrugged. “He could try to file charges under the Articles of War, but no Grayson admiral would hear them, and no one else has jurisdiction. The commanding officer could make an issue of it, but he feels that you need all the time you can get in the tactical simulators and should not be distracted by petty charges any reasonable Admiralty Review Board would throw out.”
Claire blinked. “You have a witness . . .” She trailed off realizing Lieutenant Loyd had either left that out of his report or colluded with the exec.
The exec snorted as he walked away. He called over his shoulder, “Merchant-class Advanced Technician is a hack exam that you could have passed after your first year at Saganami. I'll approve your leave chits to go waste time prepping for a civilian career when you get competent in the tactics sims and stop signing yourself up for scams.” Then she remembered the certification course she had been trying to take leave to attend. It wasn't a scam! Unless . . . she tried to remember if any of the glossy advertising had actually mentioned who gave the certification or accredited the training program. The whole thing seemed less important now.
Claire mulled over whether she could just have said something weeks earlier instead of ducking Lockhart's advances. More than the master chief on this ship seemed trustworthy.
She spe
nt another afternoon and morning running sims while Manasseh prepared to dock at the poorly outfitted station orbiting Masada. A few days had passed since she'd had a chance to review maintenance logs or run spot checks. If being an officer meant ‘fighting the ship' as Lieutenant Loyd and the exec insisted, she had to depend on other officers to remember to schedule their maintenance smartly and ensure the crew had the time, tools, and training to keep the Manasseh from dissolving in hyper from radiation corrosions. The materials were pretty fantastic, so actual structural integrity would likely never be an issue on a modern warship, she reflected wryly.
Rustin took the bridge watch for the docking. Claire paused her sim when the ship got close to watch on the screen in CIC where Rustin's boss, Lieutenant Knutson, had duty and would be watching to keep an eye on his division officer. She was distracted from the initial calls to the station by the duty officer's selection and practice targeting of the station and the other ships in orbit. The whole ship drilled on killing things out of sheer habit. Captain Ayres would have strenuously objected to his crew running targeting solutions on allies, especially since one of the Mantie cruisers would be taking charge of Lieutenant Commander Lockhart and saving Manasseh an extra trip to Manticore, but Commander Greentree obviously felt differently.
Lieutenant Knutson paused the tracking session and turned up the speakers as Manasseh neared the station and Rustin's voice repeated the standard docking orders with no response from the station. A steady green indicator showed com channels were clear, and the duty officer's quick scroll back to the previous watch's logs showed even a voice confirmation from a few minutes before turnover to the current shift.
The duty officer's eyelids flared and he grabbed the sides of his console a moment before the ship's hull moaned with a muted grinding noise, accompanied by a long shiver. Claire hopped out of her vibrating chair and found the decks and bulkhead trembling too but not buzzing in the steady rhythm of equipment light off. The whole ship jerked with starts and stops. The duty officer flicked through screens and spoke softly to other stations through his headset. Claire spun about trying to identify what must be breaking and what watch station was utterly failing to shut down whatever machinery was in pain.
Knutson settled on a camera angle and whooped as he called several petty officers in the space to gather around a display. His targeting screen increased magnification on a streak of shiny bright metal along the station where arrays hung sideways from where the Manasseh's hull had scraped against it.
He grinned. “That's going to leave a mark.”
One of the petty officers shook his head. “I didn't hear a single response to our docking requests from the station.”
The duty officer snorted. “Oh they responded just fine before the watch turned over and Ensign Rustin took the conn for the approach. We'll hit them hard with that if they dare file a complaint. They try that silent treatment trick a lot when a woman's driving the ship and the station leaves a Masadan at their com instead of the Mantie supervisors. I hear Mantie skippers adjust their watches to have male officers do the approach here. After the last few days, though,” he shrugged, “I guess the Captain didn't feel like coddling them.”
The petty officer grinned in return and leaned over the duty officer to get a closer look at the damages to the station. “That'll teach the Masadans to listen to Momma.”
Lieutenant Knutson nodded in agreement and predicted the firing of the port officer in charge of coordinating the ship's approach using his docking arms.
A Joseph-class wasn't really built to dock without the arms. It was technically possible, the duty officer acknowledged grinning, but he hadn't heard of any other destroyer doing it outside of a sim.
Claire looked back at the damage to the station and wondered aloud about how bad the Manasseh had been hurt. No damage control alarms had sounded, so it couldn't be that bad.
With another chuckle, the duty officer called for damage reports but the gleam in his eye implied that he already knew what they'd be. The reports came in quickly; a purely cosmetic scratch ran half the length of Manasseh's hull. Low bidder station construction subcontracted with Masadan workmen was no match for Grayson battlesteel.
Back in the stateroom, Claire tried her best to explain to a mortified Cecelie Rustin that Commander Greentree had decided to make a statement. Claire hugged her roommate trying to convince her it wasn't about her at all.
Cecelie just kept muttering, “But I scratched up the ship. My first time driving and I scratched it all up.”
The Masadan station was about as dirty as one would expect from a group that felt cleaning was something that should be done for free but then mostly kept the women who might have pitched in to do it off the station. Cecelie returned to the ship just hours into her shore leave irate about food vendors refusing to sell to women. Claire shrugged it off when it happened to her, too. That happened in Burdette, from time to time. Some places just didn't want to serve women, but there were other places. Cecelie seemed to take it personally, the poor girl.
The Manasseh detached from the station without incident with Claire driving this time. Thankfully her roommate wasn't the jealous type. The docking officer was very exquisitely polite and immediately responsive. Claire wondered a bit if a less connected officer than Commander Greentree would have been able to browbeat the station commander for that incident instead of being cashiered himself for continuing to dock without appropriate communications with docking control. True the idiot who had been their docking officer for the connection had never gotten back on the com to tell the Manasseh to break off the approach, but . . . She didn't think she would have tried it, even if it was delightful to hear her orders to the arms repeated back and see them followed with precision.
The next day, the rotation gave her a glorious full day between watches, and after her sim time she used it to review the logs for the noncritical systems typically lumped together as auxiliaries.
Her scan revealed the ship's medic had missed the routine maintenance on the nanotech customizer. She flagged it reminding him to reschedule the job and get it done. Her fingers hesitated over the keyboard as she considered telling him the exact day to do the work, but sure it would irritate the generally competent spacer, she deleted the accompanying note.
Afterwards, as she hunted the logistics network for the fastest way to get the replacement parts, Claire reminded herself that equipment does not always break when it gets cleaned. It just did this time.
She tried to get an appointment with the exec through Lieutenant Loyd to apologize for the poor maintenance schedule, but her department head just rolled his eyes.
“Equipment breaks, Ensign.”
“But, Sir, that's it exactly! I should have scheduled the maintenance to plan for that so we'd be right next to a parts depot when we did it.”
“And should we avoid battles unless we are right next to depots, too?” Lieutenant Loyd rubbed a hand over his mouth hiding a smile. “It's a warship, Ensign. It's supposed to get broken from time to time. If we're running it a bit harder than a commercial liner, that's a good thing.”
He distracted her with a few suggestions on how to improve her survivable rate in the battle simulations.
Within the week, a stomach virus from station crud swept through the ship's crew.
Lieutenant Loyd called her from his bed to groaningly tell her that next time she was to micromanage the medic to within an inch of his life.
Fortunately, the parts came in quickly, and Claire fixed the nanite customizer with the medic watching nervously over her shoulder. A line of patients waited outside medical, and he hurried out to treat them as soon as the unit disgorged the first lot of medication.
The XO filled the rest of the morning with announcements for sections of the crew to report to medical for treatment.
The medic came to find her in CIC later that afternoon and Claire's stomach dropped. “Please, please tell me the customizer didn't break down again.”
“No, Ma'am. No, Ma'am.” He glanced around with a slight flush and measured the distance to the petty officers at their watch stations. Claire judged them within earshot but the medic relaxed his shoulders, perhaps deciding they were too busy to pay attention. “It's about Ensign Rustin, Ma'am.”
Claire took off her headset to listen.
“At the sick call,” he gestured towards medical, “I was asking everyone in line about the symptoms and,” he lowered his voice to a whisper drawing the attention of several nearby petty officers, “she couldn't say if they were from the crud or the woman thing.”
The tips of his ears moved from pink to red as Claire puzzled out that he meant menstruation. “Okay.” She waited for some hint of why he was telling her this.
One of the closer petty officers was in Cecelie's gunnery division, and while he remained focused on his console, Claire noticed him push one side of his headset entirely off his ear.
The medic gnawed at his lip. “But she's in pain all the time.”
“No way—a week a month, maybe a week and a half.”
“You don't understand.” He pleaded with his eyes. “She asked for me to stock menstrual nanites when she reported, and I said, ‘No.'”
Claire blinked at him. “Why would you do that?”
“Well, I didn't think they were important. My sisters never mentioned needing any special pain meds. And you didn't ask for anything when you came onboard.”
“What?” She processed the accusation, realizing that the medic was wanting her to somehow confirm or deny Rustin's medical history. “Doc, Get her the drugs.”
“Oh, um, I did, Ma'am, and I'll keep them stocked.” His ears returned to red. “Miss Lecroix, Ma'am, do you need any?”
She held back a giggle at the look of fear mingled with embarrassment in his expression. “No, I'm fine thank you.” She smiled at him.
“But why?”
Claire shook her head at him. “People are different, Doc. “