Lieutenant (The David Birkenhead Series)

by Phil Geusz

  Sadly a certain Lieutenant Jeffries, first officer of HMS Beechwood, didn’t quite see things that way. “What’s this?” he demanded the moment I reported to him in my new ship’s wardroom. I’d arrived late in the ship’s day, long after his normal duty hours. “Sandals, snotty? And a necklace? What do you think this is, the bloody merchant marine?”

  I stood rigidly at attention. “No, sir! Of course not, sir!”

  “Remove them immediately!” he ordered. “And put on your proper footwear.”

  “Sir!” I explained. “The navy doesn’t issue any other kind of footwear for Rabbits, sir! My whole uniform is non-standard! If you examine it carefully, that is!” Meanwhile an older lieutenant sat on the wardroom sofa, smoking a pipe and saying nothing.

  Lieutenant Jeffries took me up on my invitation, walking slowly around me and shaking his iron-gray head. “Sandals! And a tail-hole, for the love of god! What’s next for the navy?” Meanwhile, I remained at a stiff attention. “What’s the necklace for?” he demanded eventually. “Let me guess. There’s a big carrot on it, to help you worship the Great Orange Root?”

  “Sir!” I replied, having learned at the Academy how to hold my temper. James had once told me that the bitterest, nastiest officers in the entire fleet were always the elderly lieutenants. This was because they’d been passed over so many times that they’d never move up in rank, and they knew it. Even worse, everyone else knew it too and assumed they’d been passed over for a good reason. Which, of course, they usually had. It wasn’t a happy-making situation. This was my first encounter with the breed—I’d often wondered, in fact, where the navy was hiding them all. Now I knew—they filled the dead-end jobs no one else wanted and made everyone around them miserable in the process. “It’s a Noble House symbol, sir!”

  “Show me!” the lieutenant ordered, so I pulled out Elijah’s old ring and let it dangle before his eyes. It was quite a large one, as such things went. Exactly the same size as James’s, in fact, the one that’d once been Milord’s. Which was natural enough; they’d originally been made for twins.

  “I…” the lieutenant gulped. “I mean, I’ve never seen…”

  “For god’s sake, Thomas!” the other, even older lieutenant finally declared from the couch. “Lighten up on the middie! It’s a signet ring, sure enough. So why not let him wear it on a nice little chain? It’s not like anyone’s liable to perform an inspection out where we’re headed.”

  The first officer’s eyes narrowed in rage; someday I was going to pay for this intercession. Meanwhile the older man stood up, walked over to me, and extended his right hand. “I’m Captain Holcomb,” he explained. I smiled and shook his hand, understanding that the ‘captain’ in this case was by courtesy only. He was Beechwood’s commanding officer, though only a lieutenant by substantive rank. It wasn’t uncommon for elderly lieutenants to fill the navy’s least-desirable command-slots. That certainly described both Beechwood and its mission. “Welcome aboard, David.” His eyes fell to my Sword-ribbon, lingered a moment, then lifted to my face. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

  I nodded and smiled back, though I’d have felt much better if Captain Holcomb’s breath hadn’t been foul with whiskey, and if his features weren’t red and coarsened from what certainly looked to me like a long-term love affair with the stuff. “I’m pleased to be here, sir. It’ll be good to be out in space again.”

  “Quite,” Holcomb replied, looking me up and down again. Then, rather too familiarly he reached out and tousled my ears. “We’ve an interesting mission ahead of us,” he explained, “though I can’t say anything more until we’ve made our first Jump. Until then I suggest you get to know your Rabbits and get them all squared away.”

  I blinked. “My Rabbits?”

  “Of course!” Holcomb replied, smiling a happily inebriated smile. “Beechwood is a small ship, son. So we can’t quite do everything by the book—there’s not enough officers to go around. Our midshipman is always the Rabbit-wrangler as well as our hands-on guy. And the ship’s George, of course. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Jeffries here keeps all the paperwork straight and I attend to all other ship’s matters.” His smile widened. “I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a wonderful system. Especially in terms of helping young people like you learn the ins and outs of the business!”

  6

  I’d fully expected to work my tail off aboard Beechwood, and certainly had no grounds for complaint about being the ship’s George. Ever since a major rail line serving the US Naval Academy had begun printing the slogan “Let George do it!” on its advertisements under a picture of a smiling porter shining a sleeping passenger’s shoes, every ship first in the USN and then the rest of the universe’s navies had unofficially named the junior serving officer ‘George’ and dumped all the oddball and unpleasant assignments on him. It was my job to certify the ship’s crockery inventory, compose the thank-you letter to the former captain’s wife who always sent us a wonderful batch of cookies whenever we shipped out, and keep track of the wardroom’s petty cash account. George’s work was never done, on any ship. But this was traditional and I had no call to complain about it. Someday soon, in theory, someone junior to me would come along and relieve me of the miserable post.

  But being George wasn’t my biggest problem, not by a long shot. It didn’t take me a week to discover that not only did Lieutenant Jeffries intend to dump every last possible ounce of his work upon me, but that he had nearly thirty years worth of experience to draw upon while doing so. Even worse, Captain Holcomb knew full well what was going on; he had to. But all he did was sit around the wardroom, even sometimes when he was theoretically on bridge-watch, smoking his pipe and poisoning his liver.

  If it hadn’t been for the fact that my Rabbits were a top-notch bunch, I’d have gone mad. It took me a little while to realize just how good they were, as was perhaps reasonable under the circumstances. Though I tried never to forget who and what I was, and even went out of my way to gossip and share smiles with my fellow bunnies, the fact was that for many years now I’d been spending far more time with humans than with Rabbits. Part of it was just the nature of things—I was a Marcus now, so my family was human. I was also a naval officer, and the rest of them were human as well. So my personal and professional lives both revolved around the bare-skinned types these days. But there was more to it than that. Who and what I was had built a wall between me and my own kind, one that was every bit as profound as that between me and the humans. They didn’t know how to treat me any more than I did them. So it was awkward all around.

  My predecessor had divided the slaves into eight working groups, based on specialties. One group knew how to process recovered equipment and weapons, for example, while another—the smallest—maintained everyone else’s pressure suits and our salvage gear. I decided not to interfere with this arrangement, or at least not until I saw good reason to. It looked as sensible as anything I might come up with on my own. Besides, I was far too busy to monkey around with things too much.

  On our first day out of port I called all eight overseers into my office for a get-acquainted meeting. Even as they filed in one by one and removed their grubby old work hats I still really didn’t know what to say or how to address them. Somehow the memory of Barton kept replaying itself like a bad movie in the back of my mind. He’d been bought to serve as a sort of companion and helpmeet back when I’d been hospitalized after the Sword of the People was taken, at a time when no one had really known what to do with me. I’d treated him like a friend, and he’d repaid me by taking every possible advantage of the situation and then stealing me blind on top of all else. So on the one hand I was determined not to be overly familiar with the bunnies. That was a sure route to ruin. Yet… How could I credibly behave like a whip-cracking Master over my own kind? And even if I managed it, how could I live with myself afterwards?

  So I tried to tread a middle ground. I smiled and introduced myself to each of the overseers as they came in and shook t
heir paws as if they were humans. They smiled back, most of them stuttering so badly I couldn’t even understand their names. Finally, once they were all crowded in and seated, I looked from face to furry face and thought about how blunt the Marcuses always were about how things were versus how they should be.

  “Gentlemen,” I began, carefully choosing a word that I doubted even James would’ve selected as his first to this particular audience. “I’m an ex-slave. This is a fact, an inarguable one. And one that it’d be silly to try and ignore.”

  The overseers blinked; some looked down at the deck. But none said anything.

  “We’re in an incredibly awkward situation here. You know it and I know it. But let’s get one thing straight between us up front. I’m a Rabbit, just like you. In some ways you’re going to have to treat me as a Master. It’s just the way things are, and none of us here can do anything about it right now. I’m a Rabbit all the same, however. I even share your ration-hay. Which is an unusually satisfactory lot, this time around.”

  “Good flavor!” a brown-and-white bun in the front row agreed. His name was Devin, and he was in charge of one of the field-recovery crews. The dirtiest and most dangerous work, in other words.

  “It’ll age well, I hope. Anyway… I just wanted to say first of all that I’ll never ask any of you to do anything I can’t or won’t do myself. I may have to learn how first—in fact, I expect you folks right here to be my teachers. But I’ll do it, eventually. You have my word on that.”

  There was another long silence as they digested what was clearly an entirely new concept to them. Probably not a human alive would’ve expressed even the slightest interest in performing slave-work, and perhaps I was being too familiar after all. But if I was going to err on that side of things, I judged, this was the area to do it. “For now,” I continued, “until I get my administrative duties in hand you won’t be seeing much of me. But you’re all veterans, and therefore know what to do.”

  They all looked down at their feet again for a moment, and I didn’t know if I was getting through or not. “Both of our backhoes are down,” Devin complained. “We were supposed to get new ones in port, but they never showed.” He wrinkled his muzzle, making his whiskers point all which-ways. “We can’t dig graves without backhoes.”

  “I’ll come look them over with you after supper,” I promised.

  His eyebrows rose. “After supper? But…”

  I smiled back. “Not all officers take the evenings off.” Then I looked around at the others. “If you need anything, I’ll be here for you. Day, night, it doesn’t matter. Starting now, every last Rabbit aboard this ship has the right to come to see me about anything. No one will ever be punished for asking to speak with me. It doesn’t have to be work-related—if someone doesn’t have enough straw to sleep on, for example, I want to know about it. Though,” I continued with a smile, “at four in the morning I’d prefer for it to be something fairly important."

  “Heh!” Devin declared. He was smiling now, though the rest remained expressionless.

  I took encouragement where I could get it and plunged on. “Tomorrow I’m going to begin spending as much time as I can down in the work bays. It won’t be more than a few hours at a time at first, but I promise it’ll get better.”

  “A few hours?” a bun almost exactly the same shade of gray as me asked. “Master, no human ever goes down there if they can help it. They say it stinks.”

  I smiled. “Please don’t call me ‘Master’ again. I find it offensive. Call me ‘sir’, as the human crewmen do. If anyone complains, I’ll take care of it.” If it’s the last thing I do, I continued silently to myself.

  There was more silence as some of the overseers looked sidelong at each other while the rest nosewriggled nervously. “Anyway,” I finished up. “This ship exists to make your work possible. In my book, that means your needs should come first. So please don’t hesitate to ask for anything.” No one else had anything to offer, so I smiled. “In that case, then, you’re all dismissed.”

  “Dismissed?” a brown bunny in the back asked. His ears drooped in embarrassment. “What’s ‘dismissed’ mean?”

  For a long moment, I was confused. Then I realized that these unfortunates had never been to anything resembling an ordinary work-meeting in their lives. Most likely they’d simply been issued not-to-be-questioned daily orders. In which case… did they even understand that I was trying to treat them with respect? Or was I merely confusing them and thereby making their hard lives even worse? “That means you’re free to go back to work,” I explained. “We’re done here.”

  “Oh,” he answered. Then, as one they all stood and silently filed out. Except for Devin, who waited alone in the back, wide eyed and ears drooping low.

  I lowered my own ears to help him relax a little and, one last time, smiled. “Yes, Devin?”

  He gulped. “Here!” he finally said, reaching into the largest pocket of his slave-shorts and removing a folded piece of paper. Then he slammed it down on my desk and was off, lickety-split.

  “Wellcum Daved!” the paper read in an unsteady scrawl. “Weyre glad you cam!” And all around the edges were so many scent marks that I couldn’t tell one from the other.

  7

  Lieutenant Jeffries might’ve been doing his best to work me to death, but I soon began to learn the ropes myself. Practically the first thing I figured out was that as the ship’s Rabbit-wrangler I had my share of leverage, too. Beechwood barely had a human crew at all, just we three line officers and a warrant-officer astrogator, plus the chief engineer and his four certified watchkeepers. Since we weren’t a combat ship, our vessel didn’t carry the gunners and marines and other combat-arms men that normally swabbed the passageways and repainted the bulkheads and performed all the other unautomatable functions that ordinary spacers filled most of their lives with. Instead the Rabbits did it all, except during those few weeks out of a long cruise when we were actually cleaning up a battlefield. So everyone had to come to me for labor. It didn’t take me long at all to figure out which bunnies were hard-working self-starters like Devin, and which were so skilled at goofing off that it took them a week to accomplish what ought to be done in a day. Since there were only so many Rabbits to go around, well… Lieutenant Jeffries was in charge of general ship’s maintenance, and it was the damnedest thing how he kept falling behind schedule over and over again until he finally knocked on my cabin door and agreed to take at least part of his proper work back. Meanwhile all the go-getters except Devin (he was too good to lose, so I kept him for myself) spent their days in Engineering. Soon Chief Engineer Lancrest’s engine room was the spiccest and spannest it’d ever been, and by way of gratitude he was more than happy to let me watch the dials and fill out a few forms for a couple of hours now and again. It was a long, slow process, as I still didn’t have much in the way of spare time. But eventually I did earn my full watchstanding certification on that cruise, and I had the hard work of a dozen or so of my best Rabbits to thank for it. “Congratulations, Mate!” the chief greeted me on the day I logged my final training hour. “You’re one of us, now and forever!” As required by tradition, he brought me a cup of hot coffee and a doughnut instead of the other way around. It was the happiest moment of the entire cruise, even though choking the ghastly liquid and sickly-sweet pastry down was one of the toughest things I ever did. One of the other watchstanders even fabbed me up a qualification badge to wear on my tunic—they were all great guys! At first I was afraid that Lieutenant Jeffries or the captain might object, because the Fleet hadn’t officially approved the paperwork yet. But they never said anything—in fact, I’m not sure they even noticed it was there.

  Even after shedding the least-fair parts of my workload I was still a very busy bunny. At first I spent a lot of time trying to get parts fabbed for the backhoes—they each had a dozen blown seals and were at least thirty years old. But then the captain winked and told me that while he couldn’t make the announcement yet there was an
excellent reason why we’d not been issued new burial equipment. I took his statement at face value and had Devin throw tarps over the things. He and I ignored them from that point forward. If we weren’t going to be digging graves then it was a fair assumption that we were probably on our way to clean up after a space battle. There, we’d find the corpses in vacuum, spread out over heaven only knew how large a volume of emptiness. So, I sunk all our efforts into reworking the pressure-suits and thruster-sleds.

  Our suit repair specialist, I soon learned, was a true gem. Fremont’s original owner had been in the business of customizing suits for special applications, a high-dollar industry where quality was far more important than quantity and no two jobs were ever quite alike. My Field-suits, for example, were made by such establishments. At any rate I soon learned that Fremont had forgotten more about suits than I’d ever know, though he was barely literate. Even more importantly he took enormous pride in his work. Most repairmen took it as a given that patches always leaked, at least a little. Fremont didn’t accept that standard of workmanship and as a result his repair jobs were as tight as could be. He had a lot of trouble keeping up because he was so careful—in fact he sort of hinted once that this was why he’d been sold. But after watching him at work for a little while, well… I swapped out my navy-spec gear for a slave-suit with officer’s radios and rank-badges added, just so it’d be Fremont who maintained it and no one else. I even had him go over my Field-suit as well. It’d been a long time since he’d worked on one, but he found a short in the coils that’d been eating up far too much of my battery life. “Thank you, sir,” he whispered when I showed him the glowing report I’d written out for his otherwise barren personnel file. “I’m sure it’s very nice.”