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  “Thank you, Mr. Mallory,” I said. “I’ll be on the bridge running system checks and backups, probably until chow time. Mr. Burnside has retired to his stateroom. If you’d be so kind as to notify me of anything requiring the OOD’s attention?”

  “You have the watch. Mr. Burnside is in his stateroom. Aye, sar,” Mallory replied.

  “Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate your time.”

  I turned to head up to the bridge.

  As I walked away, I noticed Apones and Mallory carefully not saying anything. When I got to the first dogleg and disappeared from view, I heard Apones start to laugh. It wasn’t a happy sound.

  I sighed and kept going for the bridge.

  The bridge wasn’t deserted when I got there. I half expected it to be. According to the ship’s standing orders, the engineering watch was held in the after engineering space. There really was no need to keep a bridge watch with the ship moored. So it was with some surprise that I found Ms. Menas, the engineering chief, and an astrogation spec two with the name De Silva on her suit. They were each sitting at separate stations. Ms. Menas had a schematic of the ship up on her screens while I recognized the standard astrogation update screen running on De Silva’s.

  Ms. Menas smiled when she saw me step onto the bridge and De Silva looked up from her screen with a fearful look on her face. She seemed confused for a moment and looked over her shoulder to Ms. Menas.

  “Mr. Wang, what brings you to the bridge,” the engineer asked. “I figured that Mr. Burnside would have you reviewing standing orders until we got underway.”

  The grin on her face indicated that she was amused rather than being critical.

  “After last night, he’s behaving like I’m his best friend. He signed over the OOD watch to me and went to his stateroom.”

  I turned to De Silva and held out my hand. “I don’t believe we’ve met. I’m Ishmael Wang, the new third.”

  She stood at her station and took my hand briefly, looking at me with something akin to astonishment.

  “Binaca Consuela Garcia De Silva, specialist second, astrogation,” she announced smoothly.

  I smiled. “Nice to meet you, Ms. De Silva. Some of my best friends have been astrogators.” I nodded at her screen. “Running updates?”

  She seemed a bit surprised. “Yes, sar, tedious work but it needs to be done.”

  “You’re still copy and pasting?” I asked.

  She frowned. “I don’t understand.”

  “You’ve grabbed the downloads and now you’re copying and pasting the changes into the database?” I said.

  “Oh, yes, sar.”

  “Let me get myself settled, Ms. De Silva, and I think we can lighten your load on that score. In the meantime, I need to get backups running. Don’t let me interrupt.”

  She turned back to her station and settled into the chair.

  Ms. Menas watched the exchange and winked at me as she went back to studying the screen in front of her.

  I looked around and identified the main systems console through the expedience of a large label reading “Main Systems Console” on the cabinet. In a matter of ten ticks, I had the system backups cycling and went down to the systems vaults under the bridge to load a rack of removable media. Some ships just replicated the system onto a “hot backup,” that is, a separate computer that could be swapped quickly in case of data problems. The Tinker didn’t have that kind of system redundancy so it relied on backup drives and removable storage.

  When I was satisfied that the backups were spooling properly to the removable drives, I went back to the bridge to check on other systems. They all looked nominal. Communications channels seemed to be performing properly. The major electronic systems were largely off-line at the dock, but from what I saw, looked fine. I ran a quick scan of the environmental systems, propulsion systems, and on-board network status. By the time I finished with those, the backups had still only run about a third of the way. I sighed and went back to my system’s survey.

  After another half a stan, my console beeped to let me know the first set of backups were done, so I set about securing the logs and checking my own system updates. With less than a day before we headed out into the Deep Dark, I wanted to be sure I had all my chips in a row.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DIURNIA ORBITAL

  2358-JULY-7

  The afternoon sped by. Between the system checks and updates, brainstorming with Ms. “Call me Mel” Menas, and all the associated running up and down ladders from the bridge, to storage lockers, to data closets, I felt like I’d earned my pay. It felt good.

  At 17:30 I secured my station on the bridge and made a tour of the ship. I pulled up the ship’s environmental sensor net and made the rounds as if I were on a sensor watch tour. The sensor net is uniformly distributed bow to stern. Only the inside of the big cargo pod lacked sensors. It was my first real opportunity to go from bow to stern and examine every area in the ship. There was almost nobody aboard. It was the last night in port on a four-day stay, and everybody who could go ashore had gone ashore.

  As I strolled through the various passageways and clambered up and down ladders, I found the same level of crud. It wasn’t that the ship was filled with trash or anything, but there were little things, like smudged light switches and built up dirt in the corners and crevices. Almost every hand rail on every ladder had some kind of deposit on it—oil, dirt, paint. It was disconcerting.

  The exception to the rule was engineering, where the spaces appeared to be maintained at a higher level. The fusactors, sail generators, and associated equipment were clean, and appeared to be in good order. I was no expert but it sure felt better in those areas.

  I ended my tour on the mess deck. Dinner had started at 18:00, and I found a couple of ratings dining aboard. The mess deck was a bit worse for wear. There were sticky spots and deposits on most of the tables. It looked like a lot more than just the normal build up from an afternoon’s in port activity. The deck was just short of gritty, and I saw dirt ground into the tiles. The tarnished coffee urns looked like they hadn’t been wiped down for a month and that was just the outside. I had a feeling I knew where the coffee problems started.

  Getting them solved might be harder.

  As on every other ship I’d ever been on, the in-port dinner mess consisted of a buffet with a hot dish, a soup, a salad, and lots of bread and cold cuts. The two ratings looked up—scowling at me—as I walked along the buffet. I smiled and nodded, ignoring the surly stares while becoming more and more disconsolate at the state of the ship. The food on the buffet was adequate. If the bread looked a little dried out, it was because it had been there for a while. The cheese didn’t look a lot better, and I didn’t want to think about the cold cuts. I refrained from lifting the lid on the soup or hot dish. The warmers didn’t appear to be all that warm, and I didn’t want to let any of the heat out.

  On my way back through the mess deck, I stopped at the table. The two ratings—an able spacer and a spec three from gravitation, both wore the signature dirty shipsuit. They stopped talking and looked up at me. “Hiya. I’m Ishmael Wang, the new third mate,” I said and held out my hand to the one with the deepest scowl.

  She eyed my hand dubiously. “Able Spacer Juliett Jaxton,” she said, taking the offered hand briefly and then added, “Sar.”

  I turned to her companion, an olive skinned man who looked like he’d been beaten recently. He didn’t quite flinch when I turned to him, but he didn’t look away either. “Xin Xhang,” he said, “And yes, I know I don’t look Chinese.”

  I kept my hand outstretched and, eventually, he shook it, although just briefly.

  “Nice to meet you both. You been aboard long?” I turned from one to the other waiting to see who’d respond first.

  Xin answered, but spoke into the tabletop. “Stanyer,” was all he said.

  “It’s in my jacket,” Jaxton said, with a confrontational tone.

  I nodded as if we were, indeed, having a polite con
versation. “Thank you, I’ll be sure to look it up.”

  If anything, her scowl deepened, but before she could reply, I breezed on. “Well, sorry to interrupt your dinner. Just wanted to say hi. It should be an interesting time in the Deep Dark.”

  I nodded in what I hoped was a genial manner and left the mess deck.

  As I rounded the corner into the passage and headed for the adjacent wardroom, I heard Xin say, “From Sissy to Isshy.”

  His chuckle sounded grim.

  Jaxton replied with a growled, “Gods, save me from boot thirds.”

  I kept on going. Either I had really good hearing, or these people wanted me to overhear. I was pretty sure my hearing wasn’t all that good.

  My timing was perfect, though, and I stepped into the wardroom at precisely 18:30. Mel Menas was there and smiled at me from the side board where she was pouring a glass of water. She raised it in a toast to my arrival and I smiled back.

  “Ms. DeGrut not joining us tonight?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No, she’s gone ashore for one more port side meal before we get underway.”

  David stepped into the wardroom at that point and added, “Can’t blame her for that. Hope she finds something with some substance to it. Put some meat on those bones.”

  He smiled but I got the sense that he wasn’t really concerned with Ms. DeGrut’s frailness.

  Mel drank from her glass and frowned slightly rather than respond.

  “So, I guess we’re it for dinner tonight,” David continued. “May as well get going.”

  He took a plate, rummaged through the buffet, plunked himself down, and began eating. Mel and I exchanged a glance and took our own turns at the buffet. As senior officer, she went before me, but waited until I joined the table before beginning her meal. David, for his part, just smirked and continued to eat.

  The hot dish was some kind of pork and noodles in what should have been a savory sauce. Even with my limited exposure to the culinary arts, I could tell this was a simple dish. The flavor in the sauce owed itself more to the pork and a heavy grind of black pepper than any subtlety of the chef’s skill. At the end of my second day aboard, I couldn’t decide if the food was just bad or if my sensitivity to the ship’s odor has caused my taste buds to rebel. Whichever it was, I thought I saw a contributing factor for the turnover rate.

  “So how was the afternoon’s watch, Ishmael?” David asked. “Run into anything unusual?”

  “Operations normal,” I replied, keeping my tone carefully neutral.

  Mel shot me a glance across the table but didn’t say anything.

  “How did you spend the time?” he asked.

  “I went up to the bridge to run the backups and install the system and comm updates. After that, I took a tour of the ship and met some more of the crew just before dinner.”

  He made an exaggerated “I’m very impressed” face which did little to actually convey the idea that he might have been impressed.

  “And did you find anything interesting?” he asked.

  I considered my answer carefully. “I’m new here,” I finally said. “It’s not my place to judge. I can’t tell what might be interesting or not. I’m still working on the context.”

  “Context?” he asked curiously. “You’re working on the context?”

  Mel looked interested but didn’t give me any hint that I’d overstepped my bounds.

  “Yes,” I said. “Every ship has a context. The ship, the crew, the officers, the cargo, the way it’s run. All of those things combine to create a unique context—almost a culture—wherein everybody understands their roles and positions—their responsibilities and benefits.”

  David’s eyes had glazed over, but I saw Mel trying not to grin.

  “And your assessment of our…context…so far?” David asked.

  “I’m still working that out. I’m in no position to make any real summary assessment yet. I’m a boot third mate in his second day aboard. What I know about this context wouldn’t fill a teaspoon.”

  Mel arched an eyebrow in my direction and a small smile hid behind her glass.

  I shrugged very slightly and turned my attention to the pork and noodles.

  David looked truly amused at my turn of phrase and finished clearing his plate, chuckling periodically, and wiping the china clear with a bit of bread which he tucked neatly into his mouth. Chewing thoughtfully, he pulled his coffee cup nearer and scanned the table looking for the absent coffee.

  “Davies!” he called. “Coffee is customary with the evening meal!”

  In less than a tick, a young woman burst through the door with the silver coffee pot in hand. “Sorry, Mr. Burnside,” she said.

  He scowled at her and pushed his cup to where she could fill it.

  She had to step up close to him to reach it, but she took the hint and leaned over to pour. She frowned a little in concentration, making sure not to spill it.

  As she was pouring I saw Mel stiffen in her chair. I glanced over at her and she was studying her plate as if looking for a new subatomic particle. Her neck had reddened up behind her ears but she sat very still. If I’d had to guess, I’d have said she was angry.

  I found that curious and I glanced back to the steward pouring the coffee. Yes, she poured from the wrong side, but what caught my eye was a flicker of movement lower down. From my angle, I saw David Burnside’s hand caressing the back of Davies’ thigh all the way up to her butt. He wasn’t looking at Davies or even me. He was staring at Mel while he did it, and it was obvious from the angles that he’d intended for her to see.

  Davies, for her part, didn’t react at all. She finished pouring the cup, placed the pot on the table, and stepped back.

  “Sorry to be late, Mr. Burnside,” she said quietly, and turned to leave.

  David picked up the coffee and took a sip. “So what else did you do this afternoon, Ishmael?” he asked.

  “I spoke to a number of the crew. Apones finds me humorous, and doesn’t seem to have a firm grasp on the duties as a messenger,” I said lightly.

  Mel looked at me sharply but David just stared blandly.

  “Really? I’ve had no problems with his performance. Could you be more specific?” he said.

  Mel shook her head just slightly.

  I took the hint.

  “I asked him if there were any issues I needed to be aware of before I went to the bridge to work. He didn’t seem to understand the question. Mr. Mallory provided an excellent synopsis of the situation, however, so it was fine.”

  David nodded as if he actually had heard and understood what I’d just said.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Well, I’ll leave you to get on with the watch. I’ll be in my stateroom if you need anything,” he said with a smile.

  With that, he pushed his plate back from the edge of the table, took another sip of coffee, and stood to leave.

  “Amelia,” he nodded his farewell and she nodded back without speaking.

  We ate in silence for a tick or two after he left. Then Mel shot me a glance out of the corner of her eye.

  “Context?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I replied. “Context. It’s important to understand the context if one wants to effect a change.”

  “And you want to effect a change in the William Tinker?” she asked, her voice barely audible across the room.

  “Don’t you?” I asked back with a pointed look at David’s empty chair.

  She shrugged a reluctant agreement before looking back at me. “What do you want to change?” she asked, a speculative gleam in her eye.

  “Well, as I said before, I’m new. At the moment there’s a lot I don’t understand.”

  “Such as?”

  “Why the duty crew is almost universally in dirty shipsuits, for example. Why almost every deck on the ship is cruddy, for another. Your engineering spaces are not that way, by the way. I noticed.”

  She smiled. “They better not be.” After a few heartbeats, she asked, “What
else?”

  “Why the food is so bad. I understand cooking on a budget, and I sure know that in-port meals aren’t generally high on the list, but this stuff is only marginally edible. And the coffee, gods, the coffee is disgusting.”

  A short laugh exploded from her in a gust of breath. “Well, you don’t pull any punches. How do you intend to deal with these issues?” she asked after a few moments.

  “I don’t know,” I confessed. “I haven’t even met the captain yet. It may be that he likes it this way, and I’d be an idiot to go against the captain.”

  “As long as you recognize that much, you should be okay,” she said with another smile.

  “I’m green, Mel,” I said with an answering grin of my own. “But I’m not totally stupid.”

  She chuckled. “I’m glad to hear it, Ishmael. Very glad to hear it.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DIURNIA ORBITAL

  2358-JULY-8

  We were scheduled to go to navigation detail at 13:30, which would give us all a chance to get a meal before the long process of undocking and pull back began. Accordingly, Captain Rossett called an officer’s meeting at 10:00 in the wardroom. I needed to start the required backups four stans prior to undocking, according to the standing orders, so I was in the main systems closet loading removable media when the captain returned to the ship. I kicked the backup at exactly 09:30 and figured there would be time to get it to DST’s home office after the meeting and before we went to navigation detail. I skinned into the wardroom at 09:50 while everybody stood around waiting for the captain to be seated, which would call the meeting to order.

  He didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

  When I slipped into the wardroom, he was standing at the far end of the room, a mug of coffee in one hand and a big smile pasted on his face. He was chatting with the first mate, and I had to look twice to make sure it was the captain.

  One of the things that I’d always maintained was that I could tell a clipper captain just by their bearing and attitude. It’s not the uniform that makes a person a captain. I always thought a clipper captain would be recognizable as such if wearing a towel. Crossing to the side board to collect my own cup of bad coffee, I thought I might need to reconsider that assessment. He wasn’t short, tall, thin, or fat. He didn’t look particularly young or old. He had all the aura of an accountant, which probably did a disservice to accountants. I had to admit, that if he hadn’t been wearing the uniform, I probably would not have pegged him as the captain of a solar clipper.