Turris pointed at the screen. Ranaldi knew he was referring to the fact the ship was already underway.
“You think we’re in that much danger?” Turris asked Ranaldi.
Ranaldi’s gaze met his.
“No,” Ranaldi said softly. “I think we’re in a lot more.”
Part Six
The Journey Backwards
100 Years Ago
The Renegat
Crowe sat beside Preemas in the captain’s dining room off the main mess. The captain’s dining room was designed for intimate gatherings of no more than six people. If the captain wanted to have a meal with a larger group, there was another formal mess on level six, where the officers’ quarters were. Those quarters were designed for officers with families or such high-ranking officers that they got two-bedroom suites, with a small living and kitchen area.
The captain’s living quarters were also there, as were the first officer’s living quarters. Crowe did not ask if Newark would lose those rooms, which were plush and well-apportioned. Crowe didn’t care if he got them; his own living quarters were large enough for his every need.
Unlike this dining area. It had no portholes, but did have drop-down screens that could show every section of the ship. There were controls on the wall beside the head of the table, so the captain could run the ship from this room, should something go seriously awry.
Preemas sat there now, with all of the screens shut down. Screens off seemed to be his default in every room he was in. Crowe’s default was the exact opposite. He liked information, the more the better. Sitting in this barren dining area, with a simple rectangular table, a built-in bench, and chairs that could be added to one side of the table, made Crowe distinctly uncomfortable. Only his self-control prevented him from fidgeting.
He didn’t want Preemas to think he was nervous about the changes when, in reality, Crowe thought most of them were a good idea. But, over the last few days, he had learned that Preemas jumped to his own conclusions about pretty much everything, often on very little information, so Crowe had already settled into the habit of monitoring his every movement so that Preemas wouldn’t misinterpret it.
The ship’s main chef—who was about to be demoted, even though he didn’t know it yet—had set the table with a variety of snacks. Crowe had tried the roasted watermelon seeds, and wondered how something that simple could be ruined. They tasted burned, even though they didn’t look burned.
The other snacks looked promising—beautifully sliced carrots, perfectly cut zucchini, orange wedges, and some glistening tahini with pita chips.
Preemas had sampled the pita chips, made a face, and shoved them away. Crowe was actually scared to try any of the “fresh” vegetables. He’d been to hydroponics. The gardeners there were as incompetent as the rest of the crew. The easy, quick-grow items were yellow and brown, unless they were supposed to be yellow and brown, and in that case, they were either green or black.
Even the coffee was awful. Crowe had a cup in front of him that he wasn’t going to drink. He had brought a bottle of water with him, and he was glad he had. Clutching it gave him something to do with his hands.
A pile of plates sat near the food, and only one had been used—still stacked with Preemas’s rejected pita chips. Still, it looked like a proper sit-down meeting, which Crowe and Preemas were only going to have with one crew member—Danika Newark.
The others would find out about their reassignments a few minutes later, in the large mess hall, where Preemas was going to make a speech. Initially, Crowe thought they should tell each person individually, but with 267 staff changes, telling each person individually would take too long.
Besides, Preemas was bound to screw up. He’d tell someone that she would be replacing someone else before informing that someone else that he was being demoted.
Everyone was concerned anyway. For the past three days, Crowe had shadowed Preemas, and no one knew why. Newark had even demanded to be told, and that was when Preemas told her she would learn everything this afternoon, just before the big meeting.
She had an inkling, because she’d been giving Crowe strange sideways looks for the past 24 hours, but she probably didn’t know how big the change was going to be.
“Ready?” Preemas asked Crowe.
Crowe nodded. He had been ready for two days. He didn’t like keeping his new position secret, and he didn’t like messing with people’s lives. That wasn’t his usual purpose. Usually he tried to keep them alive, not change how they lived.
But he said nothing. After he took the first officer position, he had decided to keep as quiet as possible about most things. He would reserve his bluntness for a true crisis.
And frankly, these staff changes were not a crisis at all. They were sensible. Preemas had done a lot of research all on his own. He had gone through each crew member’s records, finding what their initial interests were in school or the level of job at which they had performed the best. He figured out where many of them had gone sideways—usually because of ambition and the promise of promotion—and decided to move them back to the sweet spot for their career.
His hope, or so he said to Crowe over the past three days of work, was that the ship would become more efficient, not less.
Right on time, the door to the captain’s dining room chirruped, and slid open. Danika Newark entered, wearing her uniform, her hair pulled back. Her eyes widened when she saw Crowe. She opened her mouth as if she was going to say something, and then seemed to change her mind.
“Please sit,” Preemas said.
Newark slid into a nearby chair without any protest. Her gaze found Crowe’s again, but he kept his expression impassive. He didn’t want to give anything away.
“I am going to make changes on the Renegat,” Preemas said. “I wanted you to be the first to know.”
“Second,” Newark said, looking at Crowe.
His heartbeat increased slightly, not because she made him nervous, but because he couldn’t believe her audacity. He would never have challenged his captain like that so soon in a meeting.
Perhaps she knew exactly where this was going and thought she had nothing to lose.
Preemas stared at her for a moment. Crowe glanced at the side of Preemas’s face. His jaw worked, as if he was grinding his teeth together.
“Vice Admiral Gāo gave me the crew compliment and their positions before we left,” Preemas said, apparently deciding to ignore Newark’s comment. “I was unable to bring in other crew members, some I’ve worked with for years. Crowe here had made the same request for engineering and had been denied.”
Newark swiveled her head toward Crowe, her eyes filled with contempt. Crowe actually had to work to keep his expression neutral.
She turned back to Preemas.
“You’ve looked at the crew,” Preemas said. “You know that some of them are ill-suited to the tasks they’ve been assigned.”
“Some of them are ill-suited to the Fleet,” she said.
Crowe folded his hands together on top of the table, so that he wouldn’t fiddle with his bottle of water or the horrible food.
“That remains to be seen,” Preemas said. “I think everyone on this crew has been ill-served by the Fleet.”
That was part of his upcoming speech. Crowe had heard parts of it already, and he agreed with some of it. He wasn’t sure he agreed that everyone on this vessel had been ill-served by the Fleet. In some cases, Crowe believed that the Fleet had been too lenient.
His case, for example.
“You’re being awfully charitable to a shipload of idiots and incompetents,” Newark said.
Crowe wanted to caution her. She was part of that shipload. But he didn’t move.
“I’m going to experiment,” Preemas said. “I’m going to reassign much of the crew into positions that they haven’t served in, sometimes for years. But these reassignments seem better suited to the crew’s experience than the positions they’re now in.”
Newark’s cheeks grew
dark, and she glanced yet again at Crowe. “Your idea, huh?”
He started to answer but Preemas held out a hand, a single index finger up.
“You and I are talking, Danika,” Preemas said, using the disrespectful first name.
Crowe had been unable to break Preemas of that habit, except with Crowe himself. For the last few days, either Preemas hadn’t referred to him by name at all or had referred to him as Two-Assignment Crowe, which seemed just too blatant for Crowe. But no one else seemed to have caught on.
Newark’s lower lip curled just a little, and she begrudgingly turned in her chair so that she faced Preemas directly, almost blocking Crowe’s view of her face.
“The changes you’ll hear about today are my idea and mine only,” Preemas said, even though that wasn’t true. Crowe had recommended some of the staff changes and Preemas had taken him up on those recommendations. “You’re here as a courtesy.”
Newark glanced at Crowe one more time, as if she couldn’t stop looking at him.
She clearly knew he was going to replace her. She might have known for a couple of days now. And she clearly resented it.
“The courtesy is this, Danika,” Preemas said. “You are nominally my first officer—”
“Nominally?” she asked.
Her gaze was now directly on Crowe’s and remained there. He met her stare with one of his own.
She looked away first.
Preemas waited until her eyes returned to his before continuing.
“You never really warmed up to the job,” Preemas said. “I asked you to go through crew files the day you were assigned to this vessel. To date, you haven’t opened a single file.”
“We were putting a ship together from scratch,” Newark said. “I didn’t have time for that kind of work.”
Crowe knew that, on some Fleet vessels, officers had latitude to do what they thought was best. He usually got that latitude for engineering, simply because most captains didn’t have the experience to micromanage that department.
But first officers were generally different. Unless they had the full trust of their captain, they were often glued to the captain’s side, learning the job one tiny detail at a time.
“‘That kind of work’ is essential to putting together a new ship,” Preemas said.
“Well,” Newark said, her tone vicious, “I see that you found someone who was willing to do your scut work.”
She glared at Crowe. He met her gaze impassively, still not moving.
“It’s not scut work, Danika,” Preemas said. “In fact, I spent much of the early weeks going through every file, making notes, and making decisions.”
“Because you want to have control of your ship, not Gāo,” Newark said.
“If you’ll recall,” Preemas said, his words clipped, “this mission is a very dangerous one. I haven’t told you all of the details, because I wanted to work with you for a while before I trusted you fully. But you did know that the mission was going to be hard and long and risky. It’s essential that we have the right crew in place before we get to the difficult part of the mission.”
Her eyes glittered with anger. “You just don’t want me as first officer,” she said.
“That is correct,” Preemas said. “I don’t. You are not up to the job.”
Her nostrils flared, and her lips pursed. “So what are you going to do? Leave me on a starbase somewhere?”
Preemas let out a grunt of surprise. “That’s not a bad idea.” He looked at Crowe as if Newark wasn’t even there. “We need to schedule a stop at Sector Base Z.”
“Technically, we are supposed to go into foldspace before that,” Crowe said.
“Yeah, have you looked at those plans?” Preemas asked. The question was unnecessary. It was clear from Crowe’s comment that he had. “I don’t like them. We have to refigure some of it. That’s our next task.”
“He’s your first officer now?” Newark asked. “Do you know what kind of person he is? Do you know what they say about him?”
Preemas looked at her as if he had forgotten she was there. Crowe expected Preemas to either defend him or to say that what she knew was irrelevant.
Instead, Preemas said, “What do they say about him?”
“That he’s so careless he murdered kids,” she said.
“Is that in his file?” Preemas asked.
She closed her mouth, suddenly aware of the mistake she had made.
“Because I investigated his file,” Preemas said. “I even know what’s in the sealed section. And I can tell you categorically that he did not kill kids.”
“If the file’s sealed, you can’t see it,” she said.
“I have a higher clearance than you’d think,” Preemas said, even though that wasn’t how he knew what Crowe had done.
Crowe felt ridiculously grateful for that, and grateful, too, that Preemas hadn’t corrected her facts. He was also aware that gratitude was a dangerous emotion, and Preemas had made Crowe feel it twice now, concerning that sealed file.
“This is why you’re not suited for the job,” Preemas said. “You don’t want to do the hard work of dealing with the crew. I need someone at my side who can handle the crew and any crisis that may come up.”
“I can do that,” Newark said.
“No.” His voice softened. “Your file is pretty clear on that point, Danika. You don’t know who to turn to when things get rough.”
She put her hands on the table, looking like a woman who was about to push her chair back so she could stand.
“Are we done?”
“No,” Preemas said, surprising Crowe. “We’re not. As I said, Danika. I read your file.”
She raised her chin.
Preemas shoved the tahini at her. “Try this.”
“I’m not hungry.” She sounded deeply offended.
“I know that,” Preemas said. “That’s not why I’m telling you to try this.”
She gave him an angry look, almost like a child who was being scolded by an adult, and then she dragged the plate toward her. She grabbed one of the pita chips and dipped it into the tahini.
The tahini should have been a blond-brown, but it was darker than that, and it didn’t have any consistency at all. It dripped like a sauce. She grabbed a plate, held it under the dripping chip as she brought it to her mouth.
Then she took a really tiny bite, and grimaced.
“Terrible, right?” Preemas asked. “I could use the computer program to give me a better tahini, but we have customs on Fleet ships. We actually have a chef to make specialty dishes.”
Newark set the chip onto the plate and put the plate down.
“What’s wrong with the tahini?” Preemas asked.
“It’s awful, like you said.” She sounded furious.
“No,” he said. “What did the chef do wrong?”
“He burned the sesame seeds,” she said. “They’re supposed to be toasted. Then he added some kind of oil, probably olive oil that was processed, not made here, and lemon juice, as well as some salt. I prefer tahini made only from toasted seeds, nothing else added. You can add other things if you’re using the tahini in hummus or halva.”
Her very specific answer surprised Crowe. He had no idea tahini was made out of seeds or that there was more than one way to make it. He also didn’t know it was in hummus or halva. He didn’t know anything about food, either having it prepared for him in the mess or using the computer processor in his room.
“You just made my point, Danika,” Preemas said softly. He didn’t sound like an angry captain now. He sounded like someone who actually liked Newark. “You didn’t initially go into officer training, did you?”
She looked down. “No.”
“You spent years in culinary classes, and were going to be a chef, weren’t you?”
She nodded once, still not looking up.
“Your mother objected, didn’t she? And then she died…?”
“She captained the Lume,” Newark said, with both defia
nce and pride.
Crowe let out a breath. The captain of the Lume was famous for sacrificing her ship in the middle of a battle to save dozens of ships around her. She received some kind of posthumous medal.
“She wanted you to follow in her footsteps,” Preemas said.
Newark nodded.
“And after she died, someone convinced you that was what you wanted too—”
“No one convinced me,” Newark said. “I knew that was what she wanted. And I…”
She shook her head.
“Being a chef isn’t as important,” she said quietly, almost to herself.
In fact, Crowe suspected she had been saying that to herself for years.
“You want to have another bite of that tahini?” Preemas asked. “It’s worse without the chips, which are pretty awful all by themselves.”
“We don’t have to have a chef,” Newark said. “We can live on prepared meals.”
“For months?” Preemas asked. “That won’t help morale.”
Newark raised her head. “What are you saying?”
Preemas leaned toward her. “I’m going to run this ship without demoting anyone. Which is going to make rank confusing. But I think rank has been misused by the Fleet anyway.”
She frowned. She didn’t understand this any more than Crowe had when he first heard it.
“I’m going to move you to the chef’s position,” Preemas said to Newark. “You’re going to work with the kitchen staff that’s in place, but if you need to move them around, please do. I’m replacing almost everyone in hydroponics—they can’t grow anything anyway—so your ingredients will eventually be better than the ones we currently have. But you will run the entire mess system. You’ll be in charge of every bite we eat.”
Newark’s eyes brightened for a brief moment, and then the joy in them faded.
“I never completed the training,” she said.
“I’ve eaten your meals,” Preemas said.
The Renegat Page 20