by David Drake
If it wasn ‘t bad enough being bumped from cruiser command to baby-sitting nonessentials, the usual snafu had seen that his personal effects were on the far side of the star system. The only kit that he had was the change of uniform he habitually carried any time he left ship, and the sword that had been in the family for more generations than he could remember.
Avoiding the eyes of the deck crew, Talley glanced at the sword he was now carrying. His ancestor had worn it pacing the decks of the square-rigger he commanded in 1804, as he chased pirates along the southern shore of the Mediterranean Sea. He had been a legendary figure, a real swashbuckler. Single-handed, he had captured a pirate barque, and with this very sword had lopped off the head of the pirate captain.
At least that was the family legend. So from one generation to the next, from father to son, the sword had been passed down as each new generation of Talleys took up an officer’s commission.
Things began to move again. Talley was in agony, and prayed that he’d be able to leave the deck before it happened again. His prayers were answered. Docking was completed, and Talley was able to leave the transfer deck without fanfare.
Trumpets didn’t herald his arrival on his new command station either. Rather, he was met by the solitary figure of the ship’s medical officer.
“Hi. Commander Talley? I’m Edna Purvis, your M.O.” Dr. Purvis stuck out her hand in greeting. “Went over your medical records soon as they arrived. Saw you’ve got, er, excessive methane levels.” She handed him a small bottle. “Just in case you’re in any distress.”
“Thanks,” growled Talley, looking at the label and the pills inside. “How many, how often, and how fast do they work?”
“Well, by the sound of your voice I’d say take three now, and then cut back to one every couple of hours. You should feel better in about twenty minutes.” Purvis smiled. “I can’t say that they’ll cure you, but at least they’ll make you more comfortable.”
Talley shook three of the small blue pills into the palm of his hand and gulped them down. They had no taste, and their dry coating liquefied almost as soon as he started to swallow. He was too glad for the almost-instant relief to wonder how an M.O. on an obsolescent freighter had access to such pills and the best physicians on Port did not. He grumped his thanks at her and shifted his small bag to his left hand.
“Point me at my cabin, Purvis, and then spread the word that I’ll want to see the officers in the wardroom in . . .”
Purvis interrupted him. “In about thirty minutes. Aye-aye, sir. Follow me.”
On the way to his cabin, Purvis pointed out the chow hall, ratings lounge, command bridge, and “Bear Country,” the officers’ wardroom. After leaving the commander at his cabin, Purvis went back to Bear Country.
“Well, chums, we’ve got a real winner.” Purvis took a sip of her coffee. “This guy’s seen lots of action, and my guess is he won’t stand up for any sloppiness. We can all kiss our pleasure cruise good-bye.”
“A real by-the-books type, huh?” It was Executive Officer Huntley, as usual peering out from under his tousled blond hair through a pair of red-framed glasses, their oversize lenses reflecting the sodium lights in the bulkhead.
“Yup.”
The cargo officer spoke up. “You don’t suppose that he’s going to want to inventory the ship, do you?”
“Ask him yourself.” Purvis set down her cup. “He wants all of us here in Bear Country in half an hour.”
“Does that include the galley slave?” someone asked.
“Sure, why not? He’s got to meet her eventually.” Purvis stood up and stretched. “See you in half an hour. I’m going for a soak.”
Talley still wasn’t in the best of moods as he stepped from the shower, but at least the pills that Dr. Purvis had given him seemed to be working. Still dripping, he looked around for a towel and, not finding one, dried off as best he could with the shirt he’d worn on the shuttle. Nearly dry, he padded out of his bathroom and started a random search through the drawers in his cabin.
There was an ample supply of socks and underwear, along with some personal items that had been overlooked when the late–what was his name? There was a name tag that said Ivanoff–skipper’s personal effects had been packed up and sent back to Port, but no towels. Well, thought Talley as he finished dressing and ran a comb through his hair, maybe the laundry just hasn’t come back yet.
Bear Country was nearly full when Commander Talley arrived. Executive Officer Huntley managed to sound almost military as he called the assembled officers to attention when their C.O. entered the room. Most of them managed to find their feet and stand nearly to attention until Talley gave them, “As you were,” and they collapsed back in their seats.
Talley looked around the room with a growing sense of distaste. He was used to commanding a small battlecruiser–nothing impressive: just three hundred or so men who took their orders from fifty or sixty officers, who thought of themselves as the pride of the Fleet, the best in the universe. Looking around him now, he saw that he had twenty-five officers, and none of them, not one, looked as if he or she was worthy of commanding troops, let alone the respect of each other. He could feel the familiar pain as his guts tightened.
Talley had two choices: he could play it hard, or friendly. Although it ran against the grain, he decided to try friendly first.
“You people look as if you just heard orders to abandon ship. You look, in fact, like you have already abandoned ship. Well, ladies and gentlemen, we aren’t abandoning this ship, so I expect to see all of you back in ten minutes, looking like Fleet officers. Atten-shun!” Talley turned to Huntley. “Dismiss these people.”
Before Huntley could react to Talley’s order, a commotion broke out in the back of the room as a large, almost heavyset, woman pushed her way into Bear Country. Talley could only stare, goggle-eyed, as six feet two inches and 210 pounds of flour-dusted femininity bulled her way through the assembled officers and came to a halt in front of him, standing at rigid attention. A stalk of broccoli jutted upward from a pocket that was filled from behind by the large cook’s obvious femininity. Talley hadn’t even liked broccoli as a child.
“What the . . .”
But Talley didn’t get a chance to finish. Dr. Purvis stepped up and said, “Commander Talley, this is Chief Commissary Officer Thelma Ruel.”
The galley slave saluted. Commander Talley blanched, and the methane level of the room rose by several points.
* * *
The second meeting in Bear Country went much smoother than the first, and Talley was glad that he had taken the “nice guy” approach with his command team. Huntley, his X.O., had sounded more military in calling the officers to attention, and Purvis had been persuaded to keep Chief Commissary Officer Ruel busy elsewhere. The cargo officer was busy preparing an onboard inventory, and in a few minutes he’d begin an inspection of the ship. In the meantime, two things bothered him: first, that he had forgotten to ask about towels; and second, he had the horrible feeling that he had met the galley slave before.
Executive Officer Huntley, clipboard tucked into the crook of his arm, knocked on Talley’s door before he could brood himself into gut-rumbling misery about where he and Thelma Ruel might have met in the past. Pulling on his cap, Talley started out on his inspection tour of the FCTV 621-J. As they walked down the gangway toward the forward crew quarters, he and Huntley fell into casual conversation.
“Tell me, Huntley,” Talley began, “how long have you been in Fleet?”
“Oh, about two years, sir. Joined up at the tail end of the last big war against the Khalia, although I didn’t see any action. I’ve been stuck in transport all along.” Huntley sighed, and Talley couldn’t tell if his exec really was disappointed with his career or was putting him on.
“Spent all your time with the 621-J?” Talley asked.
“The which, sir?–Oh, yeah. No, I was transferred to the Veg-o-matic a little over a year ago.”
Talley stopped and
turned to Huntley. “What do you mean ‘the Veg-o-matic’?”
”Well, sir”–Huntley’s face began to redden slightly–”that’s what the crew and everybody calls this ship. The Veg-o-matic, sir.”
“Huntley, why is this ship called the Veg-o-matic?” Talley could tell from the pained look on Huntley’s face that he wasn’t sure that it hadn’t been a mistake to let slip the ship’s nickname.
“Because, sir,” Huntley’s voice dropped, and he avoided the commander’s eyes, “it’s got Veg-o-matic drive.”
Instinctively Talley loosened his belt a notch to relieve the pressure on his lower regions.
“Mr. Huntley,” he began, “I’ve shipped out with Fleet for nearly two decades, and in all that time I’ve never once heard of ‘Veg-o-matic drive.’ So what I’m going to do”–he could feel the pressure in his stomach beginning to build–“is take one of these little blue pills, and ask you to tell me all about it. Okay?”
Huntley gulped as Talley swallowed the pill.
“Sir, I’m not totally conversant with the entire process. I think it might be better if you talked to Lieutenant Bermann. She knows all about veg-o–er, ah–this stuff.”
The agony in Talley’s lower abdomen was reaching critical mass, causing him to clench his teeth In an attempt to control himself.
“Fine,” he managed in a strained voice. “Let’s go see the lady.”
Flight Information Monitoring Officer Nancy Bermann had been on the FCTV 621-J since its launch at the peak of the Khalian offensive.
“It’s really simple, sir. During the Iast war we lost a lot of equipment to the Khalia. Supply ships were in especially short supply, as was almost everything else. The big holdup wasn’t in getting them built, it was getting them outfitted. Excuse me.” She turned to the computer screen in front of her, scanned it briefly, then tapped a short command into the system.
”Anyhow, I had a distant uncle in supply. Maybe you’ve heard of him–Admiral Abraham Meier? No? Well, he knew that the major delay in getting supply ships launched was in finding brains for the guidance/control systems. Those powerful enough to control a ship this size were needed in the combat ships. Oops, here we go again.” She returned to her keyboard for a few seconds.
“There. So six years ago, Uncle Abe–um, I mean then-Commodore Meier–looked around for another source of artificial intelligence to utilize in Fleet cargo vessels. And guess what? He found one. Not for nothing. my great-grandfather Isaac Meier, Admiral of the Red, had him assigned to Transport Logistics. Commodore Meier combined hydroponics with liquid computers, and voila! he had it: an organic think-tank.” Lieutenant Bermann beamed at her commanding officer.
“Excuse me if I seem a little dense, but I don’t quite understand,” Talley began. “He hooked up a bunch of plants to some sort of computer to run a ship?”
“That’s right.” Lieutenant Bermann smiled like a mother whose not-too-bright child had just learned to tell time. “Come with me, I’ll show you how it works.”
The three of them headed down a service corridor that led to the center of the ship. After passing through a security door, Lieutenant Bermann led them into a dimly lit room with a low, domed ceiling. In the center of the room, stretching nearly across the thirty meters of its width, lay an illuminated pool with islands of vegetation floating on its surface. Talley noticed several towels lying around the edge of the pool, made a mental note to check on his towels when he got back to his quarters, then took a closer look at what was in the pool–ten tons of green plants floated in a clear nutrient solution. The bubbling mass appeared to be a conglomeration of dozens of different plants, most of which the captain thought he recognized. The entire arrangement stretched nearly the length of the fifty-meter hold.
Talley let out a low whistle. “It’s big. How does it work?”
“Actually,” Lieutenant Bermann began, “it isn’t that complicated. Throughout the ship are small containers, each filled with a special hydroponic fluid. These containers are linked to the pool, here, by fiber optic cables. That accounts for the glowing light that emanates up from the bottom of the pool.
“Growing in each of the containers are plants that have been taken from the donors floating in the pool. These are called satellite plants, and their purpose is to send messages back to the donor plants here in the pool.”
“Wait a minute,” Huntley interrupted. “Plants can’t communicate.”
“Oh, they communicate all right, but in a different, more basic way than people. Let’s say that you took a cutting from that plant over there. If you placed it in another room, and then exposed it to heat, it would react in a specific way. Now, if you connect the satellite plant to the donor via fiber optics–I know, this is really ultra low tech–the donor will react in the same way.” She smiled at Huntley, who grinned back sheepishly.
“All you have to do is monitor the surface tension of the pool to know what each plant is, well, thinking, and then feed that into a computer to determine what action needs to be taken.”
“Question.” It was Talley’s turn. “With all those plants sending signals back and forth, how does the computer know what’s going on?”
“That’s easy. The plants are blind except to the signals from their individual satellites. It’s like the nervous-system feeding into the human brain, except in this instance we’re dealing with organic, rather than biological input.” She sounded like a fourth-grade teacher lecturing to a class of brighter-than-average children.
“But, can it think?” Huntley was still somewhere near the back of the class.
“No. But the computer can assemble the data input from the plants and reach a mathematically logical conclusion, which is as close to thinking as you can get, without having a human brain.”
“Well, obviously it works,” Talley said tentatively, “and it has to cost a whole lot less than a Fleet brainship, if we had the priority to get one–which we don’t. Why aren’t there more of them?”
Bermann was pleased with the captain’s question, because it gave her another opportunity to quietly brag about her family.
“Originally there were six of these ships built; three were lost by enemy action, two were retrofitted with ‘real’ brains, and this one has been used as an ongoing test lab to further refine and expand the techniques developed by my uncle.”
En route back to her office, after Talley had left them to return to Bear Country, Lieutenant Bermann was able to extract a promise from the executive officer to help her with some hydroponic experiments that same evening. Odd, how she had never really noticed him before. . .
Meanwhile, back in Bear Country, Talley collected a copy of the ship’s inventory from the cargo officer and headed down to his cabin to read it through. In the cabin he tossed his hat on his desk, kicked off his shoes, and settled back on his bunk with the cargo report. He felt his eyes getting heavy after a few routine pages, and just before he nodded off, he had the pleasant realization that, for the first time in weeks, he wasn’t experiencing what Dr. Purvis had, referred to as “some distress.”
It was graduation day at Fleet Academy, and Cadet Andrew Stewart Talley was about to receive his commission along with several hundred other cadets. For five years he had worked like a galley slave to earn his commission, and ...
Galley slave ... Suddenly, in his dream, Chief Commissary Officer Thelma Ruel came forward to pin on his lieutenant’s bars. But instead of pinning on his bars, she grabbed him in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his side and dragging him into some nearby bushes ... He struggled, but to no avail. He tried to resist, but ...
Talley awoke with a start, and the realization that the old feeling was back in his stomach–that, and the certain knowledge that Chief Commissary Officer Thelma Ruel, aka the galley slave, was a long-lost love from his past. He took one of Purvis’s little blue pills, which relieved the pain in his gut but did nothing for the strange feeling in his heart.
As he lay in his bunk, he took stock of his
situation. He was in command of a transporter that was run by a floating vegetable salad. His crew was undoubtedly one of the sloppiest he had ever come across, and his food, at this very minute, was being prepared by a demented Valkyrie who once had been his lover. Or more accurately, had had him as her paramour. On the positive side, the little blue pills seemed to be working wonders.
Someone knocked on the door to his cabin, then stuck her head in.
“Excuse me, sir, but the exec says you’re needed on the bridge right away.”
Oh, crud, thought Talley. What could it be now?
Tugging on his shoes and grabbing his cap from the desk, Talley double-timed his way to the command bridge. One look, around the command center told him the crew was on the edge of panic. Something big had to be up.
Ensign Simon Rooney rushed up to the commander and saluted.
“Signals officer reporting, sir. Urgent message from Fleet Flotilla Command.”
Talley returned the salute and quickly scanned the message that Rooney handed him.
To the Commanding Officer FCTV 621-J
Priority Reading: URGENT.
You are to immediately report to sector 87-WW-1350 rendezvous at Zulu
time 18:25:00. Disengagement priority 3. Acknowledge receipt of orders.
Robert Wright, Captain
Fleet Flotilla Command