"Fine." Prope obviously felt she ought to say something more, but couldn't think of anything. She remembered her coffee and took a deep grateful swallow. Judging by the resulting expression on her face, the coffee was too hot.
Yarrun asked, "Do you know why the admiral is coming?"
"He'll tell us when he arrives. All I know is that it's not an inspection." She gave another standardized laugh, but this time it was strained with nervousness. "My orders say that if I give the slightest hint I'm waiting for inspection — if I sharpen up discipline, hold drills, even swab the decks — I'll be put on report."
She drummed her fingers on the table. None of us said anything for a count of ten.
"It certainly sounds like an inspection," I finally said. Prope nodded. "Damned right."
My First Admiral
Back in my cabin, I debated staying awake for three more hours (in which case I would be tired when the admiral arrived) or going to sleep for a while (in which case I would be groggy). I decided to lie on my Luxuriator bed and see what happened.
Staring at the asbestos white of my ceiling, I thought about the first admiral I had met, Admiral Seele. She was not the first admiral I had seen in person — more than a dozen admirals attended graduation exercises for my class at the Academy. The Admiralty always made a show of being interested in Explorers. The school administrators even said the admirals would be available afterwards to shake hands and make small talk.
I don't know if any of the class took advantage of the opportunity. I didn't.
Admiral Seele arrived on the Jacaranda in my first year with the ship. No one could say why she had come. She inspected the engine room, but made no comments or suggestions. She spent an hour alone with every officer, but reportedly spoke only of trivialities and glanced frequently at her watch. She passed one entire day secluded in her cabin, supposedly examining our ship's log on the computer… but when I walked by her door late in the afternoon, I heard her singing a bawdy song I recognized from Academy days. I hurried on, though I had intended to knock.
The admiral spent most of her time with me. It made me uncomfortable, even as I told myself I had nothing to fear. Mostly, we talked about the Academy and my missions. I had made only two Landings at the time, neither one eventful, but she seemed interested. Her questions showed she knew what was important to an Explorer… unlike most Vacuum-oriented officers, who had no idea what to pay attention to when they had solid ground under their feet. I guessed that part of being an admiral was knowing more than the rest of the pack.
On the last night of her stay, she asked how well I got on with the crew. Were they cooperative? I said I had no complaints. Did I have many friends? No. Any lovers? No. Was I lonely? No, I filled my time. Did I never want to reach out to another human being? No, I was fine.
She started to cry then. She tried to take hold of my hand, but I drew back quickly. She said I mustn't close myself to the world; I would be miserable if I didn't let other people into my life.
I walked out of the room without waiting to be dismissed.
The next morning, Admiral Seele left us at Starbase Iris. As she left, she saluted the captain and first officer, but shook my hand. She looked like she wanted to kiss me. Perhaps she couldn't decide where: on my lips, on my good cheek, or on my bad one.
I concluded then that my first admiral was a maladjusted woman who yearned for me. The Academy had taught us about people who are drawn to Explorers by our ugliness. The attraction has something to do with self-hatred.
Self-Care
The message buzzer hummed and I found I had been sleeping. My neck was stiff and my clothing rumpled. I rolled gracelessly to my feet and thudded over to the desk. "Ramos here."
Marque's face appeared on the screen. Wearing his dress gold uniform, he looked annoyingly fresh and knew it. "Admiral Chee is arriving."
"Thank you. I'm on my way."
"If I were you, I'd do something with my hair first." The screen went blank too quickly for me to reply. Clever retorts seldom come easily to me. I stomped angrily to the bathroom and fumbled a while with a comb. Stupid people flustered me so effortlessly. I wished I had a quick mind.
Years of conditioning would not let me leave my room until my part was straight. That irked me too. What fastidious programmer forced this obsession on me?
To smooth my feathers, I thought of childish ways to get even with Harque. Some scandalous story about him passed to the admiral? No, I was too smart to lie to an admiral, and too ill-informed to know any dirt that was really true. Some night Harque would pull down the sheets of his bed and find a smashed egg there. The Sevro lizards of Malabar IV laid eggs whose yolks were more corrosive than industrial acids.
Wearing a smile and taking great pride in my personal appearance, I stepped confidently out my door.
Part II
MISSION
Worm, Sperm
WORM: The colloquial name for the envelope of spacetime distortion that surrounds each starship, allowing the ship to circumvent relativistic and inertial effects that would otherwise make space travel impracticable.
– Excerpt from Practice and Procedures of Space Traveclass="underline" An Overview for Explorers, textbook published by the Admiralty
Only the Admiralty would have the nerve to claim that the colloquial name for our envelope was "the Worm." To everyone else (except in the presence of admirals), it was "the Sperm."
REASON 1: When a ship was at rest, the region of interface between its envelope and normal space glowed milky white due to spontaneous creation of particles in the envelope's ergosphere. The glow shifted to the blue end of the spectrum when the ship moved forward and to the red when the ship reversed, but the color we saw most, the color at anchor, was that suggestive semen white.
REASON 2: The envelope bulged like the head of a spermatozoon where it surrounded the ship itself, then tapered off into a thin tail that stretched some 15,000 kilometers to our stern. In flight, random fluctuations of magnetic fields in space made the tail whip wildly like the tail of a swimming sperm.
REASON 3: Given time, a ship's crew will attach sexual innuendo to anything. It makes their jobs more exciting.
Waiting in the Transport Room
When I reached the Transport Room, Lieutenant Harque was grimacing at the tracking holo and gingerly twisting dials. Captain Prope leaned over his shoulder and blocked his light. Each time the lieutenant ducked to one side to see more clearly, the captain moved with him like a shadow. I'd seen the routine many times before, and Harque had never asked the captain to step back.
Vile little toady.
In the rare moments that he had a clear view of the holo, Harque was manipulating our aft electromagnets in order to wag the tail of our Sperm. Somewhere far behind us, the Golden Cedar was doing the same thing, with the goal of snagging one tail on the other and forcing the two to fuse into a single continuous tube. It was a ticklish business at the best of times, and worse with a captain breathing down your neck. The best operators in the Fleet sometimes spent more than twenty minutes at the job. Harque was not one of the best operators in the Fleet.
Yarrun sat against the far wall of the room, well out of everyone's way. He looked more alert now; either he had managed to get some sleep or had forced himself awake with a cold shower, caffeine, something. From the depths of his closet, he had rummaged up his dress blacks, as wrinkled as raisins. Every stitch of clothing Yarrun owned was rumpled and worn; he came from a splinter culture on Novolith with a religious stricture against vanity in one's attire.