“Excuse me,” Doctor Sorenson interrupted, refusing to be put off by Nathan’s intrusion. “We weren’t finished…”
“…Oh, where are my manners,” Vladimir apologized mockingly. “Nathan, this is Doctor Sorenson, the irritating woman I told you about. Doctor Sorenson, this is Lieutenant Scott. He is the pilot, you know.”
Nathan started to offer his hand in greeting, but thought twice about it when she started in on Vladimir again.
“Listen, don’t think that you can just brush me off like this…”
“…Please, Doctor,” Vladimir objected, having finally had enough. “Will you stop talking for just one minute? I’m trying to congratulate my friend on his promotion. Do you have no manners?”
“Are you going to give me that power or not,” she demanded.
“Not,” he answered calmly, knowing full well that the calmer he got the madder it made her.
“You leave me no choice but to go over your head,” she threatened.
Vladimir wasn’t affected by her threats. “Be my guest.”
“Fine! I’m going straight to Commander Patel.” she announced, as she stormed off in a huff.
“He is not commander!” Vladimir yelled as she walked away, not wanting to let her get the last word. “He is lieutenant commander!” Vladimir watched her go, hoping to get one more reaction from her, but got nothing. “Bah.” He turned to Nathan, “Do you see what I have to put up with?”
“Vlad, do you really think you should piss her off that way? I mean, she seemed really mad.”
“Not to worry,” Vladimir assured him.
“Yeah, but she’s going to your chief.”
“She will not find him. He hates her more than I do. So then she will go to XO, who will tell her that such decision must be made by the chief. Eventually she will come back to me. But by this time, she will be more reasonable.”
“And then you’ll give her what she wants?”
“Of course.”
“Then why not just give her what she wants in the first place?”
“It is not so simple.”
“You mean what she wants is not simple?” Nathan was getting more confused by the moment.
“That? No, it is easy! One day, at most.” Vladimir could see that Nathan was not following him. “If I always run when she calls, then I am running, running, running, all the time. This way, we fight, she gets mad and leaves me alone for at least an hour, maybe two. This way I get work done. And she thinks twice before asking me for something else.” Vladimir smiled, sure that he was making perfect sense.
“Okay.” Nathan was still confused, but he was pretty sure that Vladimir had things well in hand. “You were right about one thing, though,” Nathan agreed. “She is hot.”
“Yes! I told you this!” he exclaimed as they started walking down the corridor towards engineering. “You know, I was not kidding before, I will not salute you.”
“Calculating new course,” Cameron said. “Transferring course to helm.”
Nathan watched as the new plot drew itself out on his navigation display. He was about to change course when he realized she wasn’t sending him in the direction he asked. “Wait, that’ll take us around the debris field. I wanted to go through it.”
“It’s safer to go around,” she argued, confident she was correct.
Nathan couldn’t believe she was doing this to him again. Ever since the captain had made him the helmsman, she had taken every opportunity to get in his way. “We don’t have the time to go around. Besides, the sensors show most of them are no bigger than a meter. And the shields can handle that.”
“If we go around, or more precisely up and over, we can skim through the less dense edge of the field, thereby reducing the risk to the ship. Once we come out above the field, we can punch it up to twice light and then drop out again a few minutes later on the far side of the gas giant. At the most, we’ll lose five minutes.”
“But that’ll put us in the wrong tactical position,” he insisted. “If we plow straight through, the debris will scatter their sensors and they’ll never see us coming. And when we come out the star will mask our sensor signature and obscure a visual track. We’ll have a clear shot!” Nathan was beginning to lose patience with her.
“Don’t you think that’s a bit obvious?”
“It’s obvious 'cause it works, Cam!” Now plot the course I asked for!”
“Fine, if you want to take unnecessary risks, just remember I’m on record as being against it.”
“The course?” he pleaded.
“It’s coming.” Cameron began plotting the course, but in no particular hurry.
But it was too late, as the ship was already entering the debris field. And with the radioactivity from the debris scattering their sensors, Cameron wouldn’t be able to plot a course with any degree of accuracy.
“Well, great,” Nathan exclaimed in frustration. “Forget it, Cam. You’re too late.”
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked as she realized they had already entered the debris field. “I didn’t get the course plotted yet!”
“No kidding,” Nathan said. It was the third time today he had been forced to ‘wing it’ because Cameron was too busy arguing with him to do her job in a timely fashion. And each time the scenario had ended poorly. It had been much the same way for the last few days. Every time he asked for a course, she objected. Every time he tried to deviate the slightest bit from flight protocols, she would quote the manual, chapter and verse. A few times she had been right, and Nathan had been the first to admit it. Even if it had been after the fact on a few occasions. But most of the time, he had good reason to stray from protocol. And to make matters worse, he knew damned well that she was aware of it despite her usual objections.
“You’re too far below your proposed route,” she insisted.
“How do you know?”
“We’ve been on this course for two minutes. You changed your angle slightly on the way in to avoid that large piece of debris in our path, and you didn’t compensate with a course correction afterward.”
“Probably because my navigator didn’t give me a course to begin with,” Nathan mumbled.
“You still need to come up at least two degrees.”
Nathan was getting tired of her games. “You know what? Thanks, but no thanks. If I’m gonna screw up, I’d rather do it on my own.”
Cameron said nothing. And a few minutes later they exited the debris field, out of position, the sensors immediately triggering a contact alarm. Nathan could feel his heart sink as the inevitable downward spiral that had recently ended so many of their simulations was about to begin.
“I’ve got four Jung ships, closing fast dead ahead,” Cameron announced, satisfaction evident in her voice.
“Like we didn’t see that coming.”
“They’re firing missiles. Tracking twelve inbound. Impact in three seconds.”
For a split second, Nathan contemplated maneuvering to avoid the incoming ordnance. But with the missiles only three seconds away, there wasn’t much use. And the simulation ended poorly, yet again.
Cameron felt a slight bit of guilt as Nathan resigned to inevitable failure. But as far as she was concerned, it his own fault for not listening to her in the first place.
The lights came up, and the screens again switched back to pale blue as the back half of the room swung slowly open.
“Scott and Taylor, you’re ordered to take a fifteen minute break, and then report to the captain’s ready room,” the sim controller announced over the comms. It had been entertaining to the sim technicians at first. They all knew there was going to be friction between the two of them after the captain had promoted Nathan. But after three days of the same old arguments, it was beginning to look like they were never going to get past their differences. And apparently, the captain had grown tired of it.
“You know, if you’re gonna keep sabotaging me at every opportunity, we’re never going to get out of this simulator and onto the bridge,” Nathan said.