Fisherman's Hope (The Seafort Saga Book 4)

by David Feintuch

  “I’m glad you called.” He sounded harried.

  “How is my wife?”

  “She’s, ah, progressing as expected.”

  I waited, but he didn’t continue. “You had something to tell me, Doctor?”

  “Not particularly. Why?”

  “You said you were glad I called.”

  “We’re always glad when relatives take an interest, Captain. In general the patient’s progress is more rapid—”

  “How is Annie, Dr. O’Neill? Do you know?”

  He lapsed into incomprehensible medical jargon, analyzing Annie’s blood tests for each of the seventeen hormones known to be responsible for mood and behavior.

  I listened, trying to filter truth through his statistics. At length I could stand it no longer. “But how is she?”

  “She continues to stabilize. Right now she’s responding to changes in her secondary meds. Taking more interest in surroundings, but her mood swings are greater.”

  I closed my eyes. Annie, I wish I knew how to help you. If only I hadn’t let you meet me at that gutted church, in the stricken Hope Nation city of Centraltown. But for my folly, you’d be whole, rather than languishing in a clinic undergoing hormone rebalance, to our mutual humiliation. I wondered if any of the Academy staff knew the nature of her illness. Rebalancing was seen as shameful, and discharged patients were patronized if not ostracized. I myself struggled with those very feelings.

  Tired, helpless, I grunted vague responses to Dr. O’Neill’s prattle until I could ring off. Though I hated the embattled city of New York, I yearned to chuck everything and jump on the next suborbital. Instead, I had to endure two more days of Final Cull. I supposed I could find some excuse for not attending, or tell Commandant Kearsey I didn’t care whom he selected, but such an attitude approached heresy. Better to delay my visit another few days, until after Handover.

  Still an hour to dinner, and the silent apartment was oppressive. I thrust on my jacket, left my quarters. The Admin Building’s brass door handles were polished and gleaming, the compound’s walkway meticulously edged. With a start I realized it was the same path on which I’d labored for hours with hand clippers and spade, while my bunkmates were enjoying their Sunday afternoon freedom. Well, I wasn’t the only one, and I hadn’t earned punishment detail often.

  I wandered past Officers’ Quarters to the wide parade ground. I kicked at the gravel track that surrounded the field where even now cadets exercised under the vigilant eye of their drill sergeants.

  Avoiding the squads of perspiring cadets I crossed to the classroom complex beyond. It was the first time I’d seen the classrooms since I’d returned. On impulse I entered a building, automatically smoothing my hair and tucking at my jacket. Old habits die hard.

  The walls held the same pictures of squads in immaculate uniforms standing at ease with their sergeant, looking directly into the camera. All so young, so innocent. As I’d been, once. All cadets were recruited young as a matter of necessity. The N-waves our Fusion drives produced could trigger melanoma-T, a deadly cancer, but exposure within five years of puberty lessened the risk.

  I perused the hopeful faces. Where had I turned wrong, from the eager lad in a picture lining the classroom halls?

  Footsteps. Two cadets turned the corner, talking softly. When they saw me their eyes widened and they snapped to rigid attention against the corridor wall. Had I been a sergeant they’d have saluted and gone about their business, though with brisker step. But an officer—not just an officer, but a full Captain—was something else again.

  I could have returned their salutes, growled, “As you were,” and gone on my way. Instead, embarrassed at having been discovered mooning over old pictures, I made a show of inspecting them. Even as I did so, I knew it was a mistake. By tradition, a Captain barely noticed a midshipman, to say nothing of a cadet.

  Like all our charges, these two were in their middle teens. The boy was taller, with short, curly black hair. The girl’s locks were somewhat longer, almost to her collar, as the regs permitted for females. Their gray uniforms were neat and clean, their shoes spit-polished to perfection. Their belt buckles shined, though the boy’s tie was slightly off-center. I scowled as I adjusted it. He bit his lip before remembering he was at attention.

  “Name and year?”

  “Omar Benghadi, sir. I’m second.” His voice came too loud; he flushed with embarrassment.

  “And you?”

  “Alicia Johns, sir. First.” Had it been earlier in the term I wouldn’t have had to ask; a plebe was easy to spot. But later, one couldn’t always tell by appearance or demeanor. Not if the drill sergeants were doing their job.

  “Very wel—”

  “May I help you, Lieutenant?” The voice was cool; not impolite, but with perhaps a touch of impatience.

  I turned.

  His eyes flickered to my insignia. “Oh, please excuse me, sir. Staff Sergeant Ramon Ibarez.” He came to attention.

  “As you were,” I said immediately. One didn’t harass the Marine staff in front of their Naval charges.

  “Sorry, Captain Seafort. I didn’t recognize you.” He hesitated. “Is there a problem with these two?” His tone implied that if there were he’d eliminate it, perhaps along with the cadets. His manner wasn’t lost on the blond boy, who gulped. The girl waited impassively.

  “No, Sarge. I was just, ah ... I found myself searching for an excuse to explain my presence. I managed to avoid licking my lips in nervous tension. He was only a sergeant, for heaven’s sake. I was long since graduated, and far outranked him. “Just an inspection,” I said more firmly. “Carry on, you two.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” The cadets scurried off.

  The sergeant repeated, “May I help you, sir?” His manner seemed to enquire, what were you doing in my building?

  So barracks scuttlebutt had it right: drill sergeants were afraid of nothing, even the prospective Commandant. No wonder we’d feared them. “No thanks, Sarge.” It seemed too bald a dismissal, so I added lamely, “Getting them ready for exams?”

  “No, sir. Not really. Just makework, mostly, and giving the plebes a head start on next semester’s work, though they don’t know that.” He smiled; the grin went to his eyes and transformed them. “I missed you by a couple of years, sir. I got here in ’94.”

  “I left in ’92.”

  “I know.”

  I blurted, “You do?”

  “Of course. You berthed in Valdez Hall, in bunk three, when you came down from Farside your second year. We give that bed as a reward to joeys who’ve done well.”

  “Good Lord!” Was he pulling my leg? Not even a drill sergeant would try that on a full Captain. Would he?

  “Everyone who was here claims to remember you. Even if they can’t, they say they do.”

  It was absurd. I cast about to change the subject. “You’re a classroom instructor?”

  “Yes, sir, but my kids are dispersed to Training Station and the Fusers, so I’m taking a shift at gunnery and physical defense while waiting for my incoming plebes. I was just conferring with Sergeant Vost about one of my kids. We’re trying to pull him through Elementary Nav.”

  Suddenly I liked him. “Join me for a cup of coffee, Sarge?”

  “I, uh... His composure was momentarily gone. “If you’re sure you don’t mind, sir.”

  “Not at all.” I hesitated. When last I’d bustled through these halls, an afternoon cup was the farthest thing from my mind. “Where can we go?”

  “Staff lounge is at the end of the corridor, sir.”

  I took a seat in a comfortable battered leather chair and let him pour me a cup.

  “Twelve days to go.”

  I looked up. “Pardon?”

  “To Handover. Then the place is yours.” He paused, said cautiously, “Excuse me if I’m out of line.”

  He was, but we weren’t shipboard, and his forthrightness came as a relief. “No, not at all.” I gestured at the coffee table. “Will they mind our
making ourselves at home?”

  “Mind?” He gaped. “Mind that Captain Nicholas Seafort relaxed in their lounge?”

  I felt a fool. “I suppose not.”

  He studied me, started to say something, looked away. The silence stretched. I fidgeted, anxious to finish my coffee and be gone. Sergeant Ibarez blurted, “You’re not comfortable with fame.”

  How dare he? My jaw dropped. “I beg your pardon?”

  He flushed. “I suppose I’ve just thrown away my career. I apologize, sir.”

  I began indignantly, “Certain matters are—” I ground to a halt. I’d sought companionship with the man and I was about to blast him for offering it. Swallowing my wrath, I stood, walked to the window, watched the perspiring cadets exercising on the parade ground. “No, Sarge, I’m not. In fact I hate it.”

  This time our silence had a different flavor. At length he said, “Odd, isn’t it? Most of us would give anything to be like you.”

  “You don’t want to be like me,” I said with finality.

  “Everyone thought you’d take another ship. Until the announcement, no one believed the rumor you’d be assigned here.” In the corridor, a bell rang. In a few minutes cadet classes would be dismissed. None of the youngsters would close their books or snap off their puters until the instructors gave them leave. Doing so was an invitation to demerits.

  “I didn’t want a ship.” I didn’t want to be Commandant either, but I’d finally let them persuade me.

  “You’re needed, sir.”

  He sounded like Senator Boland, and my resentment was kindled. “Not really.” I braced myself for another lecture about the Navy’s need for heroes now that we were at war.

  “The place has ... stagnated.”

  I turned; his eyes were on the carpet. I asked quietly, “How do you mean?” It was somewhere between an invitation and a command.

  “Just ... Sergeant Ibarez looked up, paused. “I don’t mean to talk out of school, sir.” He put down his cup. “I believe in tradition. It’s a glue that binds together the elements of the Service,” He crossed to the window, looked out at the field and the helipad. “And I also believe the Commandant should be a remote figure of authority. But sometimes tradition can be carried too far. The Commandant can be too remote.” He studied the transplex. “Commandant Kearsey believes strongly in tradition, sir.”

  I knew better than to press. “I’ll keep it in mind.” I looked at the clock. “Time to get ready for dinner.” I offered my hand, and we shook.

  Four hundred twenty folders still littered the conference table. Perhaps that was what Sergeant Ibarez meant by tradition. It would be far easier to sort personnel files on puter, but the Navy had always handled admissions with hardcopy files.

  “Any other changes?” The Commandant looked around the table.

  “We have a pretty fair balance,” said Lieutenant Sleak, his tone diffident. “Both ethnic and regional.” Beside me, Edgar Tolliver doodled on a pad. “The age mix is about right, though we’re leaning a bit heavily toward fourteens this year.”

  “Mr. Seafort?” The Commandant glanced my way.

  I shook my head in frustration. How could I guess which youngsters to admit? Beside me Lieutenant Tolliver played with his pad, refusing to meet my eye. Why hadn’t I rid myself of him when I had the chance? Even when we’d been cadets at Academy, I’d abhorred him.

  “I don’t—” I paused as Tolliver slid his pad to his right. I pushed it away, but not before noticing the sentence underlined twice. “What about Theroux?” I realized I’d spoken it aloud.

  Kearsey wrinkled his brow. “Who’s that? The Parisian?”

  “Yes, sir.” Tolliver’s voice startled me.

  “I suppose we could revise once more,” the Commandant said. I looked up; this time Kearsey’s eye held the stern disapproval I’d feared as a cadet.

  All I wanted was to be gone from here, but Kearsey’s annoyance triggered something in me. “I’d like to see Theroux on the list.”

  Kearsey shrugged. “Very well. I won’t deny you your selections. You’ll have to live with them. Darwin, put the Theroux boy back, and drop the three hundred eightieth name.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” Sleak made a note.

  After the meeting broke up I strode briskly back to my apartment; I’d be leaving within the hour for New York and Annie. Tolliver hurried alongside. He’d see me to my suborbital, and then he’d be on his own for a week. “Why Theroux?” I demanded. Absentmindedly I returned the salutes of passing cadets.

  Tolliver panted, “Why not, sir? It makes as much sense as any other name.” We turned into the Officers’ Quadrangle.

  I stopped; he continued a couple of paces before he realized I wasn’t following. He turned and waited.

  “Tell me the truth.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know why. Because he was on the list originally, and got bumped for someone else. Because his test scores and grades were fifteenth percentile, and the Russian boy’s were lower.”

  I raised my eyebrow. “You, an idealist?”

  Tolliver stood his ground. “Call it what you want, sir. I thought it wasn’t fair. If you disagreed, why did you go along?”

  I had no response to that. “Mind your manners,” I growled.

  “Aye aye, sir. As always.” Damn it, the man was hopeless.

  A few minutes later he watched my heli lift off for London Shuttleport.

  Chapter 2

  THE CLINIC HAD BEEN built atop the abandoned Yankee Stadium parking lot, after New York Military Command had decreed that public team sports were ipso-facto incitements to riot. It stood by itself on a huge lot long gone to weeds, not far from the crumbling stadium walls that were New York’s answer to Rome’s Coliseum.

  Incongruously, the clinic was bordered by a pleasant, manicured lawn. The only concession to its hostile environment was the high barbed-wire fence surrounding the complex. Outside the fence, squatter shacks had sprung up on all sides, but for whatever reason none stood within a stone’s throw of the clinic grounds.

  The clinic’s security arrangements were low-key but omnipresent. Closed gates, cameras, doorways with bomb sniffers concealed behind their painted trim. The usual adjuncts of urban life, not only in New York, but in all sophisticated cities. In London, just a year before, Lord Mayor Rajnee Sivat had barely escaped assassination, thanks to the bomb sniffers.

  My appointment with Dr. O’Neill was for two P.M., but he wasn’t yet on the hospital grounds. They told me he’d be “indefinitely detained.” I conferred instead with Mrs. Talbot, his nurse, who made a show of having all calls held while she escorted me to a private office. I noticed that our indirect route managed to take us past many of her co-workers. For Annie’s sake I held my peace.

  “Of course you may see her, Captain Seafort. Doctor says visits will do her good as long as you both want them.”

  “Tell me again about the mood swings.”

  She waved away my concern. “They’re to be expected at this stage. Your wife is undergoing a complicated course of hormone rebalancing.” I tried not to flinch at the bald phrase; the fact of Annie’s treatment was something we would have to live with. “She’s settling into new glandular patterns, and Doctor is constantly fine-tuning, as it were, based on her blood tests.”

  I twisted my cap in my hands. Oh, Annie.

  Mrs. Talbot lowered her voice. “And of course your wife had some terribly traumatic experiences, quite apart from the rebalancing.”

  I looked up. Was there a hint of reproach? I couldn’t be sure. Well, I had no right to object. Before the rape that had devastated her, Annie had endured the bombing of Centraltown and its accompanying chaos. To say nothing of abandonment and starvation on Challenger.

  Mrs. Talbot’s tone was gentler. “She’s among strangers, too. That doesn’t help, especially with her background.”

  I searched her eyes for the slur that must be there, found none.

  For many decades Lower New York had been aband
oned to bands of ruthless transpops who roamed its broken streets. Savage gangs comprised the city’s transient population, many of Asian, Hispanic, or black origins. They preyed ruthlessly on each other and on the homeless. Above, in luxurious aeries, the civilized, cultured denizens of Upper New York shielded themselves from the harsh reality below with well-armed guards and their heavily fortified buildings. The Uppies referred to the transpops below as “trannies,” an insult that could cost a life, if overheard.

  Annie had come from those brutal streets. So had Seaman Eddie Boss, whom I’d inducted into the Navy. I’d banished him to U.N.S. Waterloo, the first ship sailing out-system, after I’d found him lying with Annie one awful Hope Nation afternoon.

  “You’ve been through terrible times, both of you. It must have been ghastly, Captain.”

  I stiffened, brought myself under control only with effort. “It’s past.”

  “You look ever so much better without—now that you’ve recovered.”

  Without my scar, she’d meant. Unnoticed, my hand crept to my cheek, where the plastic surgeons had done their work. I shifted uncomfortably. “I’d like to see my wife, if I may.”

  “Of course.” She stood, and we went out to the corridor. “Doctor says Mrs. Seafort may go anywhere on the grounds. Shall I take you to her room?”

  “I know the way,” I said hastily. Mrs. Talbot’s disappointment was obvious. “Thank you. Oh, and, uh ... I forced down my revulsion, groped for a way. “Do you perchance have any children?”

  “Yes, two. Kathy and Jon.”

  “You have their pictures?”

  “On my desk. Would you like to see?”

  “Very much.” I followed her back to her tiny office outside Dr. O’Neill’s larger one. They were antique-style photos, not ordinary holos. I took out a pen. “May I?”

  Her eyes widened in pleasure. “Oh, yes. Of course.”

  I wrote, “To Kathy and Jon, with gratitude for all the help their mother has provided. Nicholas E. Seafort, Captain, U.N.N.S.”

  Mrs. Talbot was breathless. She clutched the photo to her bosom. “Thank you, Captain. Thanks ever so much.”

  I took my leave, trying to force a calm while my stomach churned with disgust. People like Mrs. Talbot would bend backward for someone whose face was blazoned across the holos. But any humiliation was to be borne, if Annie received better care.