“I’ll start with the worst one. If the answer’s bad, there won’t be any more. You folks are waiting for your food?”
Vanessa said, “Please don’t tell us that was the worst question.”
“No, I … Well, never mind.”
Chelle muttered, “Shut up, Mother.”
“Your firm saved us, Mr. Grison. Mick Tooley is a subordinate of yours? That’s what he says.”
“He’s a junior member of my firm. I’m a partner, the managing partner.”
“He came to save us. He enlisted mercenaries and volunteers, chartered a boat, and so on. The result was another battle. People died, and there was damage to the vessel. It’s conceivable that the line will sue your firm over his actions.”
“For saving you?” The white-bearded man sounded amused.
“Conceivable, I said. The lawyers aren’t seamen, and if they advise it…” The captain shrugged.
“They’d lose,” Skip told him. “I can’t guarantee it, but that’s my professional opinion. I wouldn’t take their case.”
“If they do,” the captain continued, “you’ll certainly counter-sue. Am I right?”
“Probably. I’d want to sleep on it and have my people research similar cases. But we probably would.”
The captain nodded, his long, sun-tanned face worried. “If you accuse me of negligence and make those accusations credible, my career will be effectively over. I hope you realize that.”
“I hadn’t thought that far,” Skip said.
“It will be. A ship’s officer has to get his master’s ticket to make decent money. I got mine six years ago.”
Vanessa said, “You’re contracted, aren’t you? Someone told me that. Children?”
The captain nodded, his face expressionless. “Three.”
“I envy you,” Skip said. “Shall I put this to rest? Now? I believe I can.”
The captain nodded again.
“If your company decides to sue us, you’ll be deposed. At some point, as the case proceeds, we will read your deposition. How hard we are on you will depend, largely though not entirely, on how hard you are on us.”
“I won’t be hard on you at all. I’ll say you saved us, which is the truth.”
“In which case, it’s your company you have to worry about, not us.”
The captain rose. “If they blame me, they can’t go on blaming you. Or not as much.”
“Correct. Furthermore, they will be blaming their own agent. The chance that they’ll do it is minute. They may threaten to fire you, however. Threaten, I said. If they are foolish enough to do it, you’ll have grounds for a suit of your own. Your attorneys would show that your professional reputation has been damaged beyond repair by your company’s negligence and subsequent actions. They would ask compensatory and punitive damages. Twenty or thirty million, I would think.”
Chelle murmured, “I smell blood in the water.”
Skip shook his head. “It probably won’t happen—they’d be fools to do it. If they do, however, almost any attorney would take your case on contingency. Do you know any good lawyers?”
“I know one very good one,” the captain told him, and left as the waiter’s assistant began collecting the salad plates.
“That was my boss,” Vanessa told the white-bearded man. “He’s a bit too straitlaced for his own good, but it’s terribly easy to do much, much worse.” Her tone was merely conversational.
As the waiter himself distributed their entrées, Skip waved to Mick Tooley. “Over here. Were you looking for us?”
“For your beautiful contracta, sir.” Tooley grinned. “For a few days she was giving me daily bulletins on your progress—on your lack of it, far too often. I’m going to miss her.”
Chelle smiled in return, an amazingly warm smile that Skip found he associated with swirling leaves—brown, red, and gold—and young men in sweaters throwing footballs. “I’m not gonna disappear into some dress designer’s salon forever, Mick. I bet there’s a company Christmas party.”
“Until then,” Tooley told her, “and if you’ll come, I’ll bring the doughnuts.”
Skip gestured toward the chair that the captain had vacated. “Sit down. We don’t want to lose you so soon.”
Vanessa said, “Really now! We can’t eat in front of him while he has nothing.”
“Please go right ahead,” Tooley told her.
Skip put a half his entrée on his bread plate and set it before Tooley. “I’m sure there must be other attorneys on the ship, but most will be corporate. Very probably you and I are the only ones with backgrounds in criminal law.”
Tooley nodded. “As far as I know.”
“The gentleman to your right shot and killed a cyborg called Rick Johnson. He was one of your volunteers, wasn’t he?”
“Rick? He was the best of them, my right-hand man.”
“He was also a spy. The gentleman next to you says for the Os.”
The white-bearded man said, “That was what I gathered from a remark of his. It’s not iron-clad.”
Tooley said, “Do you remember the remark? It could be important.”
“Not precisely.” The white-bearded man paused. “It was something about his superior not understanding humans.”
“When the captain was here,” Skip told the white-bearded man, “he got me thinking about the actions, and the failures to act, that might be brought up in court. One of them was his failure to confine you. He must know that you killed Rick Johnson; Chelle says she told him.”
Chelle said, “He does. He also knows that Rick had kidnapped me and killed the doctor and his nurse. Mick saved this ship and everybody on it, but it was my dad who saved me.”
“Your ex-dad,” the white-bearded man muttered.
“Yeah. I divorced you. Don’t rub it in.”
Tooley stood up. “I didn’t mean to interrupt your dinner. Skip and I will see each other in the office, but I wanted to say goodbye to you and now I have. You’ve got one hell of a woman there, Skip.”
He nodded and smiled. “I know.”
When Tooley had gone, Vanessa said, “There was something odd about that.”
“He’s a friend,” Chelle told her. “He just wanted to say goodbye.”
“He wanted something else, Chelle darling, and he got it. I’d love to know what it was.”
“He wasn’t even looking for us, Mother. Skip waved him over.”
“He was, but he hadn’t seen us. That was why Skip waved.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“We social directors know these things.” Vanessa smiled down from a height of years. “We must, and I do. I don’t suppose you’ve ever given a party. I’ve given … Oh, twenty.”
“Fifty,” the white-bearded man muttered.
“You’re counting small gatherings, Charles.”
Chelle’s good hand struck the table hard enough to make the plates jump. “Don’t look so damn smug!”
“I wasn’t, darling. Just because I’ve got my man and you’re losing yours? No indeed! I looked sympathetic.”
A handsome young man too informally dressed for Formal Night was approaching their table. Chelle turned, and as she did, her expression became one that Skip had never seen before. Her eyes were larger and seemed, somehow, darker; her mouth was tremulous. “D-Don? You’re Don, aren’t you?”
He nodded.
Chelle rose, taller than he. “You knew I was in here. How did you know, Don?”
“I loved you, sweet thing. You’re gone and I can’t see you again ’til it’s all over. I needed to tell you.”
Chelle made a soft little sound that might have meant anything or nothing.
Vanessa gasped.
And Chelle said, “Listen, we gotta keep in touch, all of us. You tell Joe and the sarge. Tell everybody.”
There was a soft sigh—perhaps from Don.
Chelle turned. “Hey, Skip, what’s our address?”