But gratifying as his rate was, he'd taken the better part of two years to earn it. He knew a modern navy needed trained personnel, not unskilled cannon fodder, yet acquiring that training seemed to have taken forever, and he'd felt vaguely guilty as combat reports from Nightingale and Trevor's Star filtered back to Manticore. He'd been looking forward to shipboard duty, not without fear, for he didn't consider himself a particularly brave person, but with a sort of frightened eagerness, and he'd actually been slated for assignment to a ship of the wall. He knew he had, for Chief Garner had let him have a peek at the initial paperwork.
Only now he wasn't. In fact, he wasn't assigned to any proper warship. Instead, he'd been yanked out of the regular personnel pipeline and assigned to an armed merchant ship.
The disappointment was crushing. Everyone knew merchant "cruisers" were jokes. They spent their time on long, boring, useless patrols too unimportant to waste real warships on, or trudged from system to system playing convoy escort in sectors where real escorts weren't needed while other people got on with the war. Aubrey Wanderman hadn't put his civilian life on hold and joined the Queens Navy just to be shuffled off to oblivion!
But one thing Aubrey had learned was that when the Navy gave an order, it expected to be obeyed. He felt a wistful envy for the old sweats who'd been around long enough to figure out how to bend the system subtly to their wills, but he was still too wet behind the ears for that. Chief Garner had been sympathetic, but he hadn't offered any encouragement to Aubrey's half-hearted hints that there must be some way to change his orders, and he'd known he had no choice but to accept his disappointment.
He'd gone through the next two days of endless bureaucratic processing in a state of resigned depression, and his sense of betrayal had grown with every hour. He'd busted his butt to graduate number two in his class, surely that should have bought him some consideration! But it hadn't, and he'd packed his locker with glum, mechanical neatness and joined the rest of the school draft detailed to the same duty.
And that was when he'd begun to hope that perhaps, just perhaps, it wasn't a banishment to total obscurity after all. He'd been sitting in the school concourse, contemplating his unappetizing assignment while he waited for his shuttle, when Ginger Lewis plunked herself down on the bench beside him.
Ginger was a gravitics specialist like Aubrey. The trim redhead had graduated nineteenth in their class of a hundred to his second-place spot, but she was twelve years older than he was, and he'd always secretly felt a little in awe of her. She wasn't anywhere near as strong as he on theory, yet she had an uncanny instinct for troubleshooting, as if she could actually feel where the problem lay. She also had the added maturity of her age, and the fact that she was extremely attractive hadn't been designed to put Aubrey any more at ease with her. Nor did the nickname she'd pegged him with, "Wonder Boy", help. He thought she a meant it only as a play on his last name and higher scores, but it made him feel even more callow beside her.
"Hey there, Wonder Boy!" she said cheerfully. "You assigned to Draft Sixty, too?"
"Yeah," he agreed glumly, and she raised her fox-red eyebrows at him.
"Well, don't let me keep you from your funeral or anything!" He had to grin at her tone, but her gibe hadn't been that far off the mark.
"Sorry," he muttered, and looked away. "I had an assignment to Bellerophon," he sighed. "Chief Garner showed me the paperwork. Then they pulled me for a merchant cruiser."
His lip curled with the last two words, and he was totally unprepared for Ginger's reaction. She didn't sympathize. She didn't even commiserate with him as any properly sensitive fellow sufferer should have done. She laughed.
His head snapped back around, and she laughed again, harder, at his expression. She shook her head and patted him on the shoulder the same way his mother had done when a ten-year-old Aubrey had piled up his grav-scooter. "Wonder Boy, I see you are far behind on the scuttlebutt. Sure, they're sending you off to a merchant cruiser, but aren't you just a little curious about whose merchant cruiser it is?"
"Why should I be?" he snorted. "It's either some doddering old reservist or a total ass they can't trust a real warship to!"
"Oh, my. You are out of the loop, aren't you? Listen, Wonder Boy, your 'doddering old reservist' is Honor Harrington."
"Harrington?" She nodded, and he stared at her, jaw hanging, for almost fifteen seconds before he could make his voice work again. "You mean the Harrington? Lady Harrington?"
"The one and only."
"But... but she's still in Yeltsin!"
"You really ought to read the 'faxes occasionally," Ginger replied. "She's been back for over a week. And a certain well-placed informant of mine who's always been reliable, for obvious reasons," she batted her eyes sexily at him, "informs me that she's been tapped for senior officer of our new little squadron."
"My God," Aubrey murmured. He warned himself not to get too excited. After all, Lady Harrington had been all but forcibly banished after her scandalous duels. It was entirely possible she was being shuffled off to exactly the sort of oblivion Aubrey had assumed this assignment must be, but he couldn't believe it. The woman the newbies had dubbed "the Salamander" from her habit of always being where the fire was hottest was too good a combat commander for that. And it hadn't exactly been the Navy's idea to put her on half-pay to begin with. If the Fleet had her back again, surely they'd want to make the best use they could of her!
"Thought that might cheer you up a bit, Wonder Boy," Ginger said. "You always did want a shot at the glory, didn't you?" He blushed fiery red, but she only chuckled and patted him on the shoulder again. "I'm sure that as soon as Lady Harrington realizes what a sterling soul you are, she'll put you to work on her own command deck."
"Oh, give me a break, Ginger!" he said, laughing almost against his will, and she grinned.
"That's better! And..." she paused and cocked her head "...I do believe they're announcing our shuttle."
That had been fourteen hours ago, and now Aubrey sighed gratefully as he towed his locker into his assigned temporary berthing bay on its counter-grav. He'd seen entirely too many berthing bays since joining the Navy, but at least he shouldn't have to put up with this one for long. The second-class petty officer who'd rounded up his draft on Vulcan's concourse had warned them they'd be moving aboard ship in no more than six days, and despite his earlier despondency, Aubrey realized he was actually looking forward to it.
The bay assignments had been made on an alphabetical basis, and Aubrey had been the lone overflow from the rest of his draft. He was used to finding himself at the end of any Navy list of names, but aside from himself, the bay was empty at the moment, and he missed his fellow students as he peered around the compartment. He towed his locker across to check the bulkhead chart, and his eyes brightened. There were still two bottom bunks left, and he shoved his ID chip into the slot and painted one of them for his own use. He heard feet behind him as a small knot of uniforms entered the bay, and he plucked his chip free and stepped back to clear the chart for the newcomers. He towed his locker across to his freshly assigned bunk, shoved it into the space under it, and sat on the bunk, grateful to get off his weary feet.