It was Kreskhallar’s passenger liaison officer, Larragh-Yal, an obviously overworked or perhaps just overwrought Nidian, who welcomed him aboard, wished him a pleasant voyage, and gave him directions to his cabin in a voice which, even through the translator, suggested that its mind was on other things. Probably, he thought wryly, the shipload of Kelgians. He was given a locator that would tell him how to get to the dining and recreation rooms, the observation deck, and the other passenger services, and asked if he had any special requirements.
“Only peace and quiet? said O’Mara. “I’ll be staying in my cabin most of the time.”
“With this bunch of furry sword-and-sorcery fanatics we have on board? it said, sounding relieved that he might turn out to be one of that rare breed, a minimum-maintenance passenger, “I don’t blame you, Lieutenant. But if you should need anything, the locator card will find me. I, ah, expect you already know th~t the Monitor Corps will reimburse our company for your travel fare, basic cabin accommodation, food, and a moderate quantity of liquid refreshment. Anything else you will have to pay for yourself.”
O’Mara nodded. “There will be nothing else.”
“I don’t want to sound mean, Lieutenant,” the other went on, nor do I have to stick too closely to the regulations in your case. After all, you’re the only Monitor Corps officer on the ship. Your presence would raise the morale of our security people as well as having a steadying influence on some of the passengers.
“Larragh-Yal? said O’Mara firmly, “I’m on leave.”
“Of course, sir? said the other. “But a sheathed weapon is still a deterrent.”
His cabin was about half the size of his quarters at the hospital, but comfortable if one only wanted to sleep rather than stay there most of the time. There were a viewscreen and a menu of multi-species entertainment tapes that looked old and tired even by Sector General standards, but the amenities did not include a food dispenser. If he wanted to eat alone he would have to order cabin service. The extra cost didn’t worry him, but the type of person he had once been did not feel happy with the idea of another intelligent entity becoming his servant for however short a time, nor did he know how an officer was expected to behave in that situation. He would feel awkward and embarrassed by the whole business.
The alternative was to use the ship’s dining room and meet people, some of whom, Larragh-Yal had implied, might not be too happy to meet him.
The whole idea was ridiculous. He had been working so long with Monitor Corps specialists-and he had even become one himself-that he had almost forgotten that the force’s primary function was the maintenance of the Pax Galactica, a duty it had performed so well over the past century since its formation that it had been given other jobs to do. Its vast, Emperor-class capital ships, each one capable of wrecking a planet although none of them ever had, were on standby for disaster-relief or ~-~olonizationsupport operations, because a vessel that could level a whole country could clear and till an awful lot of fallow land for settlers. The thousands of lesser ships, the light and heavy cruisers, transports and small communications vessels, while still retaining their weaponry and their highly trained and disciplined multi-species crews, practiced the arts of peace rather than war-although, on the rare occasions when widespread violence occurred which posed a threat to Federation stability, no matter how many ships and land forces had to be deployed or how much firepower was required to regulate the situation, it was always referred to as a police action. But usually the violence and the lawbreakers were stopped before it got that far, by infiltration, subversion, and other nonviolent dirty tricks. O’Mara had heard that the specialist Corps psychologists who now handled the first-contact situations had been nasty, devious, and quite brilliant in that form of activity, and he wondered if the polished and urbane Major Craythorne had ever had a hand in stopping a war or, he corrected himself, a riot that required police action on a planetary scale.
As the Galactic Federation’s executive and law-enforcement arm, the Monitor Corps had rendered redundant the large, national armies that once had fought each other on the member worlds, and taken over as the galaxy’s peacekeeper. In essence, regardless of the wide range of specialist duties the Corpsmen now performed, each and every one was regarded as a policeman, a form of life that was never supposed to be off-duty even when on leave. If, as Larragh-Yal had said, there were a few potential troublemakers among the passengers, they were people he could not help meeting when he went to the dining room or anywhere else on the ship, and they might not be happy with the idea of what they thought was a policeman mixing with them and trying to spoil their fun. O’Mara sighed and began to unpack.
He was finished by the time the launch warning and thirtysecond countdown was relayed over the ships’s PA sys_m, and he watched through the cabin’s direct-vision port as Retlin Complex dropped away and the city proper and then more and more of the surrounding countryside crawled into his field of view. There had been no sensation of motion in spite of the high takeoff acceleration; the old vessel’s gravity compensators, at least, were working. He had been taken to space construction sites on ships where they hadn’t been, and traveling with a bunch of spacesick and regurgitating other-species workmates was not an experience he wanted to repeat. The planetary surface shrank until Nidia filled the viewport. He continued to watch it, telling himself that the ship was simply a scaled-down Sector General without doctors and he shouldn’t worry about it, until they were at jump distance and suddenly there was nothing to see but the flickering grey fog of hyperspace.
Shortly afterward the PA cleared its throat and said, “For the information of passengers who have come aboard at Nidia, the first Meal of Welcome for the next leg of our tour will be served in the dining room in three standard hours’ time. As you probably already know, it has become a tradition that all passengers, except for members of those species who do not customarily use body coverings or decorations, should wear formal dress for this occasion. Thank you for your attention.”
O’Mara was feeling hungry again. In three hours’ time he would be starving.
He dressed in full uniform, the first time he had done so since Sergeant Wenalont had fitted him with it, and feeling safe in the knowledge that as the only Monitor on board he would have to neither give nor return salutes, but to be doubly sure he folded his beret under the shoulder tab. As he stared at himself in the cabin mirror he thought that he looked well, very well, and remembered some of the other things the technical sergeant and tailor had said to him. He wondered if the passenger list included any young, unattached Earth-human females, then sadly put the tls<ought out of his mind. For him a shipboard romance was not an option.
He was a Corps psychologist, O’Mara reminded himself as he stared at his image, but he had to admit that he looked like everybody’s idea of a hefty, scowling policeman.
CHAPTER 16
The room had provision for seating three hundred diners, he saw from the entrance, and even though there were only about two hundred and fifty passengers present, there were no single or empty tables. Instead there were rows of long, twenty-place tables with species-suitable furniture that could be moved around if different physiological classifications wanted to eat and talk together, which many of them were doing. The Orligian headwaiter-or, since it was fully dressed, possibly headwaitress-came forward to lead him to an unoccupied space at a table.