First Officer. Hmm. That was new. The first officer had been a woman with very shady credentials.
Maybe these changes weren’t as bad as Gāo had feared.
“All right.” Gāo couldn’t do anything with Gerlik then. She couldn’t tell him how to do his job, and he certainly couldn’t do hers. “Just get the Renegat off the base as quickly as you can, and shut down this recruitment effort.”
“Will do, sir,” Gerlik said. “And I have just received word that Captain Preemas has arrived. I’ll have them send him in…?”
“Please do,” Gāo said. “But be advised that my communications with the captain must remain private. Is this particular node secure? Because I don’t want anyone listening in on our discussion.”
Particularly you, she wanted to add, but didn’t. If she could trust Preemas to contact her, she would have had Gerlik send him back to the Renegat for this communique. But she didn’t trust Preemas at all, not anymore.
“Um, yes,” Gerlik said. “Completely private, and I’ll switch you to a more secure node now.”
The image blacked out for a half second, then returned. A man stood beside Gerlik, and Gerlik was gesturing, the sound off.
Then Gerlik turned, reached forward, and pointed at something near Gāo with great force. It took her a moment to realize he had pressed something on a screen.
“I have secured the area, Vice Admiral,” Gerlik said. “No one will interrupt you or your captain.”
She thanked Gerlik, and he headed out of the range of her vision. She was about to call him back to tell him to take that other man with him, when the other man turned.
It was an almost unrecognizable Captain Ivan Preemas.
His long hair was cut shorter than regulation. His facial hair was gone. He wore a casual uniform, a lighter blue than the formal uniform. But his gold captain’s bars were on his shoulders, looking like he’d actually burnished them so that they reflected any available light around him.
His eyes, brighter green than she remembered, twinkled when they met hers across the distance.
The twinkle made her angry. He had expected this.
He bowed ever so slightly. “Vice Admiral.”
“Captain,” she snapped. “I understand you’ve been augmenting crew changes without my permission.”
His mouth rose in a half smile. “Do you want the honest answer or the one that will work with your coven of Admirals?”
The phrase, a coven of Admirals, revealed the kind of attitude problem she expected when she dealt with Preemas. Until that moment, she had been a little off balance.
She almost said, What do you think, Captain? but if she went the snide route, she would be playing his game. She did not want to do that.
She didn’t answer him at all. Instead, she gave him her most stern glare, one that usually sent her staff cowering.
He didn’t cower, but the twinkle slowly left his eyes and that half smile faded.
“You do realize that the crew you gave me was a complete and utter horror show, right?” he asked.
She wasn’t going to answer that either. She raised her chin slightly.
“Half of them can’t do the job they’re assigned to, although some of them are very good at the jobs they were trained for but had to abandon for behavioral reasons.” He spoke almost angrily now.
She didn’t care about all of the details of his assignment, nor did she care about the blame he was trying to apply to her.
“I’ll be honest,” he said, his tone even angrier, “it’s been a struggle. And some of the people you saddled me with are dead weight.”
That didn’t surprise her. But she kept her expression impassive. She didn’t want him to know she had expected that. Nor did she want to insult his intelligence by saying she had hoped he could inspire them.
She had picked the best she could find from the list d’Anano had given her. The fact that some did not work out was less surprising than the fact that some did.
“All I did,” he said into Gāo’s silence, “was give them an opportunity to leave before we headed on the longest and most dangerous part of the journey.”
Truth be told, she might have done the same thing. Better to run a ship with a small crew than run a ship with a crew that was trying to compensate for crewmembers who were not able to do the job.
Preemas’s eyes narrowed. There was no twinkle left in them at all. It was almost as if there had never been a twinkle. Ever.
“My mistake, apparently, was talking to my man Gerlik, wasn’t it? Enlisting his help, right?”
She didn’t answer that either. She would figure out later if she needed to deal with Gerlik in even more depth.
“I should’ve just recruited people on my own,” Preemas said, his tone filled with not-quite-suppressed fury. “Then you would have never known.”
Time to speak up.
“I thought you saw this trip as a way to rebuild your reputation, Captain,” Gāo said, her voice flat. Her expression still hadn’t changed.
“I did, and I do,” he said. “But you’re making that very difficult, you know.”
She knew that, and she wasn’t surprised that he did.
“If I wasn’t concerned about my damn reputation, I would have handled this on my own.” He crossed his arms. “But, I care, so I am following the rules as best I can. Because someone told me that the end result doesn’t matter if the method I use to get there isn’t something she approves of.”
Again, the blaming. She hadn’t liked Preemas from the beginning, and she liked him even less now. The man was even more passive-aggressive than she expected, and that wasn’t a good trait in a captain.
“If you were following the rules,” Gāo said, “you would have continued with your crew and not stopped on Sector Base Z.”
“Impossible,” he snapped. “Some of these people are dangerous dead weight. I didn’t tell them to leave, but they were figuring it out on their own. I did tell them they wouldn’t be penalized if they did. They would get to keep their rank. I hope that wasn’t out of line.”
She wasn’t going down the sidetrack.
“If that is the case,” she said, and she made sure he understood—both from her tone and her stern expression—that she didn’t entirely believe him, “then you did the right thing in giving them the opportunity to disembark on Sector Base Z. What you are not sanctioned to do is replace them. You will have to run with a minimal crew.”
“Too late,” he said. “I already hired replacements.”
“Let them go,” she said.
“No.”
Then he closed his eyes, as if he was disappointing himself. She watched him. She had given him an impossible task, without enough ships to do it and without the right kind of crew.
Even though she didn’t like him, he was the best of the choices she had had, and she did need to give him a small chance to succeed.
It was that feeling, that need to give him a chance, that was keeping her in this discussion.
He took an audible breath, and opened his eyes. “I request permission, Vice Admiral, to keep my new hires. We need them. I lost some key personnel—although ‘lost’ isn’t the right word, since the people in those positions could never have done the job. I want a good crew. We’re on a dangerous mission. I think I have everyone arranged so that we can make it to the Scrapheap and back. All I need is about two dozen more folks, and I should be able to run the ship to the best of my ability.”
She didn’t know how much of that he meant and how much of it was Preemas’s attempt at charming her, trying to get her to do what he wanted.
But he did have a good point.
“Send me all of the information you have on your new hires,” she said. “I will go through them within the next few hours. If I disagree with anyone you want to bring on board, they will not join the Renegat. If they do despite my orders, I will revoke your mission. If you do not return when I revoke your mission, I will send ships after you, as if you are a
n enemy of the Fleet. Is that clear?”
He actually leaned back as if she had struck him.
“You would pursue us as if we were your enemy?” he asked, sounding like a vulnerable child.
“If I have to revoke the mission, absolutely,” she said. “This trip to the Scrapheap is the last chance for your career, Captain. You have taxed my patience to its breaking point, and you aren’t even in the dangerous part of your mission. So, if you violate any procedure I set up from here on out, I will make sure you regret it until the end of your days. Is that clear?”
The color had left his face. She didn’t think someone with such pale skin could get even paler, but somehow he did.
“Yes, sir, it is,” he said. “I’ll send the information to you as soon as we end this conversation.”
“And one last thing, Captain,” she said. “These people that you bring on board, they can’t have family or close ties. Your mission is more likely to fail than to succeed. I don’t want you to take promising career Fleet material or people who are well loved by friends and family and destroying their lives.”
He pursed his lips, before he said anything. Then he managed, “Even if they want to come anyway? Even if they understand that they might never return?”
“Even if,” she said. “Are we clear?”
He sighed, a little dramatically. She half-expected him to put a hand over his forehead as if she had given him some kind of headache.
“I don’t like it,” he said. “You’re tying my hands.”
“You knew the terms of the mission when you took the assignment,” she said.
Not that it was a comfort to either of them. But she wasn’t going to tell him that either.
“You’ll get your list,” he said.
“Good,” she said, and severed the connection.
She stood still for a moment, wondering if she had been played or if she had played him. Then she wondered if playing was even the right term, given how many lives were on the line.
And now, after watching him, she had two responses to his command. His decision to improve his crew encouraged her. She understood it. It showed that he wanted to succeed. Just like his clothing, his haircut, and his demeanor did. He was acting like a captain, just like she had hoped he would.
Except, that passive-aggressive blaming behavior didn’t belong in any command structure. A captain had to be willing to take responsibility for everything on his ship, the good and the bad. If he had a bad crew on a long mission, he had to bend them to his will and make them the best possible crew they could be.
She ran a hand through her hair, tugging a little, then noting the movement, and smiled at herself. She had vowed not to do that after watching Gerlik. Preemas was slowly driving her crazy.
Or maybe this mission was.
Sector Base Z
Preemas slammed his fist against the wall. It didn’t vibrate the way that walls on the Renegat did, and he brought his hand back swiftly as if the action had hurt him.
To his credit, he didn’t cup his hand, though. That would have deliberately called attention to what he had done, and clearly, he didn’t want to do that.
Crowe knew better than to grin at Preemas’s obvious distress. Sometimes Preemas’s behavior was childish, and it was nice to see him actually pay a price for that childishness, however small.
Crowe had just brought Preemas a communique from Vice Admiral Gāo. Preemas had been in the “small” office, as Rufus Gerlik called it. The scale of everything on Sector Base Z was so much bigger than anything on the Renegat. The Renegat, like most starships, was efficient, built to maximize the available space.
Sector Base Z sprawled. Based on eyeballing the measurements of Gerlik’s office suite alone, Crowe figured the suite was one quarter the size of an entire deck on the Renegat. Much of the space was completely wasted, like this “small” office that was, as far as Crowe could tell, only used for secure communications inside the Fleet.
The built-in shelves even had a layer of dust. And now, there was a smudge on the wall where the side of Preemas’s fist had connected.
Of course, Crowe was probably being childish just thinking that way. But he didn’t really care. Working with Preemas was nothing, if not an adventure.
“She shut us down,” Preemas said. “I told her why we were doing this, and she shut us down.”
Crowe had looked at the communique. Gāo had shut down their recruitment efforts and that had not surprised Crowe at all. But there were some surprises in her communique, at least for Crowe.
“I don’t know if you had a chance to look at all of it,” Crowe said, trying to be as diplomatic as he could. He did know that Preemas had not had a chance to look through everything. It didn’t matter how brilliant the man was; no human could scan that much information that quickly. “But, you’ll see that she’s allowing us to keep most of the recruits.”
“Most.” Preemas spit the word. “She got rid of the good ones.”
She had cleared some of the more promising candidates. Crowe had noticed that. But he had had a chance to look at her reasoning.
She hadn’t taken their word for the fact that they were unattached. She had actually investigated, and most of them had close family in Z-City. She had been following the protocol she had set from the beginning for this mission.
But Crowe knew better than to say anything like that. Considering the mood Preemas was in, Crowe didn’t want to be in the position to defend Gāo for any reason.
Let her be the villain, as far as Preemas was concerned. He wasn’t going to have to deal with her much after they left Sector Base Z, so she would be a convenient scapegoat for a lot of things.
Crowe rocked back on his heels, noting how he was thinking. He was already trying to figure out ways to manage Preemas, ways that were counterintuitive to good command.
Crowe clutched the communications tablet tightly. Preemas was a difficult man, and there was no real evidence yet that he was a good commander. He was certainly a volatile one.
Over two dozen people were leaving the Renegat, and hoping their careers weren’t over. Crowe could join them.
“You’re staring at me, First Officer Crowe,” Preemas said.
Crowe blinked. He hadn’t realized he had been staring. He had been thinking too hard to process what he was seeing.
What he was seeing was a man who wore his uniform lightly, looking like the ideal of a captain, with his hair perfectly cut, his jaw smooth and square. Only the fury in his eyes revealed that he might not be as ideal as he looked.
And fury was sometimes an appropriate response for a captain, particularly when he had a lot of things to deal with.
“She didn’t get rid of all the good ones.” Crowe saw some names on the list that he had recruited, people who would be of great benefit on this trip, including Natalia Stephanos, who was an anacapa expert. Crowe had done some fast talking to get her on board.
“We should just tell the others that they can come with us anyway.” Preemas created a fist with that same hand, and then opened the fist again, as if closing it had hurt.
He had probably hit that wall with a lot of force, expecting the wall to absorb the impact, and instead, his hand had.
There were a lot of tiny details about life on land that living in gravity on board a ship did not prepare you for.
“If we’re going to do that,” Crowe said, “then let’s get rid of the last of the stragglers. For example, I saw that Kabac has chosen to remain on the ship. Let’s just get rid of him and all of his incompetent friends, hire a new group, and leave before the vice admiral knows what we’re about.”
Preemas gave Crowe a surprised look. “I thought you were about following regulations, First Officer Crowe.”
Crowe shrugged his right shoulder. “If you’re going to break one order, you might as well break another, especially if the orders are related.”
Preemas’s eyes narrowed, as if he were seeing Crowe for the first time. Then Preem
as smiled halfway, the kind of smile he had given before when he was amused and uncertain.
“Except,” he said slowly, “the orders are not related. Vice Admiral Gāo has given me several orders in the past few hours. She wants me to stop recruiting here at Sector Base Z, so I am doing that.”
Crowe felt his breath catch. He knew where some of this was going.
“She has now looked over everyone I have recruited here on the base, and has disallowed several of my recruits.” Preemas was speaking more to himself than to Crowe.
But Crowe was beginning to understand. Preemas hadn’t given her every name. Some of the people weren’t on the list because Preemas hadn’t put them there in the first place.
“She has expressly told me,” Preemas was saying, “that I may not get rid of anyone she brought on board. She made a face when I told her that some left on their own accord, but she did not tell me to rehire them.”
Crowe frowned. Did that mean Preemas was going to force more people off the ship?
“Frankly, First Officer Crowe,” Preemas said, his voice turning snide as it always did when he used Crowe’s new rank, “I wish I had come up with that plan before we stopped at Sector Base Z. I would have preferred to lose a few people at Sector Base A-2, and then lose the rest at Sector Base Z. I hadn’t planned well enough.”
And here Crowe had thought Preemas had planned the second sector base stop all along.
“She also didn’t tell me that I had to get rid of everyone we brought on board. She understood that we are going to have difficulties and a minimal crew would not help the situation.”
Preemas clasped his hands behind his back and started pacing. Then he let his hands drop to his sides.
“So, she’s not unsympathetic,” Preemas said. “But she is going to scrutinize us greatly.”
“What does it matter?” Crowe asked. “They’re sending us on a hell of a mission. If we survive, that’s a tribute to us.”
Preemas smiled slowly. It was a full smile.
“I love this mission, Crowe,” Preemas said. There was no First Officer Crowe this time. Just Crowe’s name. “It’s just perverse enough to appeal to me. I love the idea that my personal success—bringing the Renegat back in one piece with as much crew as possible, and with all of the things that we were sent to discover—will be seen as failure by the vice admiral and her cohorts. I love that. If we do this right, Crowe, we’ll have incredible power over them. We will prove them wrong. We will show them that we can do anything, against all odds. And, even better, we can do it with one hand tied behind our back.”
The Renegat Page 28